Ahmed FASIH @22@octodon.social
I like languages (spoken & programming) and live in the Midwestern US but enjoy all places and cultures. Favorite genre: slice of life. https://fasiha.github.io
"I thought the outside world would be more extravagant than this, I found myself thinking."
How delightful: a chapter excerpt from #anime screenwriter Okada Mari's autobiography, translated into English. And $7 on Kindle? Bought! Of course I love the cover—Anohana and Anthem of the Heart mashup, I think?
It blows my mind that when we drive from Dayton to Columbus (in Ohio, USA), we drive from bedrock from
- Upper Ordovician, 461 to 444 million years ago, to
- Middle and Upper Silurian, roughly 428 to 416 mya, to
- Middle and Upper Devonian epochs, roughly 397 to 359 mya. FYI, Devonian is when land animals appeared!
We see this Paleozoic rock at places like Clifton Gorge and John Bryan State Park, where half-an-eon-old bedrock is exposed by ten thousand year old river.
#Geology FTW. 🤯
pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/70136641
I took this amazing "Geologic map of the United States (exclusive of Alaska and Hawaii)" by Philip Burke King, Helen M. Beikman, and Gertrude J. Edmonston, published 1974, showing the age of rocks (Cenozoic, Mesozoic, Pre-Cambrian!) in the US, found its projection coordinates, and reprojected it to equirectangular so anyone can clip out interesting tidbits from it.
https://github.com/fasiha/steppe-map for the cartographic goodness.
@clew thank you!!! I requested it through the library 📚!
Any other books you love and recommend? 😇
A detailed in-depth study of Chinese interregna could be really interesting. There are so many ways for a government or state to collapse, and so many interesting things that happen through and after the collapse. I'd love to read it. #BooksThatHaventBeenWrittenYet
Two neat maps I found in *Les Animaux*, volume 5, *Animaux des déserts, des steppes et des villes* (Hachette, 1968), texte: Robert Frédérick, direction artistique: Maurice Fleurent, mise en pages: Bernard Duvivier, illustrations: C. Hemeret, P. Bentegeat, R.B. Kock, P. Leroy, H. Mercier, M. Baruel, C. Broutin.
Asian steppes and deserts. Reminded me of my work recovering projection parameters from images of maps: https://github.com/fasiha/steppe-map
https://octodon.social/media/NfCVCxOB8ibacPh-Ng4 https://octodon.social/media/RDoY7727eqPK-4fqfKM
Full-res crop of the hypothesized "moss flower", and with a thumb for scale.
I love the structure around the tip of the capsule, like the Statue of Liberty's crown.
https://octodon.social/media/_43-_r1FIUeVnoKQ0TI https://octodon.social/media/84oxJR2s7DoAhb9Exd4
I think these are the spore capsules of what appears to be moss growing on this tree. The—dare I say—"moss flowers" are very tiny, sub-millimeter. I'll post a full-res crop in the reply because the structure of the rosette is 🤯.
f/2.4, 8.8mm (equivalent to 24mm on a film camera), so the depth of field is razor thin. The side of the lens is resting on the tree, leaving the middle of the lens maybe two centimeters away from the subject.
(Yes that's a Brian Jacques nod.)
@nolan I liked the note at the bottom about the p2p distributed social network everyone owns: the contacts list on your phone, because Signal exactly describes itself that way—see "Social software needs a social graph" section at https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
There are so many possibilities to social media beyond Facebook's approach that we haven't explored… Mastodon and the broader ActivityPub ecosystem are quickly exploring that space, but alas, lock-in probably means that the best won't win…
I forgot that what I was primarily interested in this (and Jay's subsequent work like https://blog.koto.ai/2018/03/12/tenure-track-china-in-comparative-perspective/) was concrete quantitative ways of describing a country's government as autocratic, or how to objectively say when a government "falls".
An art project that someone could do is, a crowdsource app letting visitors vote how long each country that currently "exists" (including Taiwan, Palestine, etc.) will last, for some criterion or 3rd party analysis like http://oefresearch.org/datasets/reign
"Onsets and Terminations of Democracy, 1955-2010.xls" by Jay Ulfelder:
https://dataverse.harvard.edu/file.xhtml?fileId=2420019&version=RELEASED&version=.0
A nearly 300-row spreadsheet showing the flipflops of democracy↔︎autocracy, from Albania, Argentina, Armenia to Yugoslavia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, including numerous notes about what happened and who did it.
Chilling.
(https://gist.github.com/fasiha/cab949bc04da155d1671c16634eae7c6 is my readable browseable version for the convenience of the spreadsheet-challenged, like me.)
“now that we know that war casualties actually do have a fat-tailed distribution, we should not be astonished when military historians tell us that World War II could have claimed far more than sixty million lives if Hitler had launched the invasion of the Soviet Union earlier in 1941 or had intuited the destructive power of the atomic bomb. The possibilities were once real—and numerous.” —Tetlock and Gardner.
Taleb. Kahneman. Anders Ericsson. Duncan Watts. Tetlock is a synthesizer and doer.
“I see Kahneman’s and Taleb’s critiques as the strongest challenges to the notion of superforecasting.” —Tetlock and Gardner, *Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction*
Specifically, Kahneman’s doubt that cognitive biases can be reliably-enough overcome, and Taleb’s that only inconsequential predictions can be made with any accuracy.
If that’s it, superforecasting is in good shape, enough to make money :)
“Kamangar: Are superforecasters better at predicting how well they’re going to do?
“Mellers: No, they are terrible. That’s amazing.”
Jacquet: But is that just an opt-in bias? They’re on their computer all day & then they’re willing to click a bunch of questions.
Tetlock: Yes, I think that’s right. They also find it very interesting, this question here about the limits of probability. What are the limits of quantification? They find that an engaging question. They like to compete. They’re competitive. They’re curious about what the limits of quantification are…it becomes a kind of existential mission for some of them.
“Tetlock: It is interesting how many of the superforecasters were quite public-spirited software engineers. Software engineers are quite overrepresented among superforecasters.”
Interesting indeed!
Pinafore dev Show more
Pinafore dev Show more
Of course all cultures all have ways of indicating honorable protagonists, and just by themselves, these just establish Hiyori and Bishamon as good people worth emulating.
But it's one of those things that, after it's pointed out to you (as Buruma's hard-to-find but 1000% *completely* worthwhile book does, showing how the pattern is older than Edo kabuki), it's hard to unsee. He also has awesome chapters on father figures (oyabun/daimyo/emperors), and much more.
One thing I don't super-appreciate about #Noragami is it's classic Japanese media representation of "good women" being "good mothers".
The high schooler Hiyori, a badass astral fighter, spends most her time as a caregiver—including sitting with the Yukine (the Yato god's weapon) as he does his homework: about as 母もの ("mother thing") as you can get.
Even the supreme war deity Bishamon has a huge spirit family because she cannot abandon a lost soul.
See Ian Buruma's *Behind the Mask* for 🤯.
