Ahmed FASIH @22@octodon.social

List of tool sets from the 2018 Data Visualization Survey (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSft5kH866hkyVbxqe8Cl7mJDBLbpy5aWIHmYP5ztdO8RDattg/viewform)

ArcGIS
Cytoscape
D3
Angular
Excel
ggplot
Gephi
Highcharts
Illustrator
Java
Leaflet
Mapbox
Microstrategy
Plotly
Power BI
Processing
Python
QGIS
Qlik
R
React
Semiotic
Tableau
Vega
Vue
Web Components
WebGL

Looks like I have a lot of DuckDuckGoing to do.

@clew I think historians are a rascally bunch: they’ve trained us to want big picture stories about the past and the future—“how does it all turn out?” That’s not a clairvoyance-complete question of course, and it’s hopelessly mired in hindsight bias.

I want to instead start seeing the past and the future through clairvoyant-complete questions—exactly prescribe the set of possibilities I can grok (and change that set as time passes), and do a lot of research into what was and is knowable.

@clew So I wanted to make sure I appreciated some of the various possible futures a “post-CPC” “China” could experience before trying to concoct clairvoyant-complete questions to ask people to forecast. Even questions like “how many National Congresses will be held” are tricky: something called a “National Congress” might continue to exist in a democratic China—OR the party may decide to halt Congresses long before its collapse. It’s hard to know what to ask!!!

@clew and that’s hard!!! Clairvoyance-test-passing questions are tricky, and I’m reminded of how the early Lisp papers published in the 1950s are riddled with programming bugs because the authors lacked computers to run the code on.

But suppose we want to know when the CPC will fall. What do you mean by “fall”? Interregna come in a dizzying variety of shapes, including total or partial collapse of the central government, warlordism, shrinking of the government, etc.

@clew I’ve been reading Phil Tetlock's book Superforecasting and his 5-part masterclass on Edge.org and he talks about the importance of good questions as a key prerequisite to good forecasts, specifically questions that pass the clairvoyance test:

https://www.edge.org/conversation/philip_tetlock-edge-master-class-2015-a-short-course-in-superforecasting-class-i

Which means questions can be handed off to an oracle who can answer yes/no without having to ask you what you mean by “is” or other words 😛. I’m interested in finding clairvoyant-ok questions about Chinese political futures.

So Day One (the journaling app I use) stopped syncing between devices a couple of days ago:

http://help.dayoneapp.com/day-one-sync/sync-status

It's surprising how inconvenienced I am by that—notes I've created since Monday are distributed on three devices and I'm surprisingly annoyed I can't find notes 2/3rd of the time when I reach for a given device.

P2P/decentralized lesson: even if data is stored locally on devices (like Day One does), let devices sync by themselves (ScuttleButt takes this idea to the extreme).

@clew Oh my goodness, you are a veritable gold mine of awesome multi-modal material, thank you! I love this Low Tech Magazine piece, it's a great antidote to linear thinking about the technological innovation and progress. Some tech spreads really fast (like eyeglasses), but others doesn't, leaving visitors in the early 1900s astonished by it! Super!

Um of course I should clarify that cooking isn’t by any means the limit of gender roles in these societies nor that equality in the kitchen translates to equality everywhere else, just that, I’m happy to see the gender roles assigned by society subverted in any way that invites people to live their lives and treat each other independent of socially received wisdom.

Ah, she also was screenwriter for *Toradora!*, another show I liked a lot, in no small part because the 🐉 guy (regularly!) prepares breakfast for the 🐅 girl 😍. Subverting gender roles is always something I can get behind.

She's worked with Nagai Tatsuyuki as director more than once too, to great effect. Awesome.

@clew Wow thank you!!! I hadn’t heard about the graphic novels and have requested them from the library as well! And I will give the podcast another try—a few years ago it was a hard medium for me to follow but I should try again for Three Kingdoms. Thank you, can’t wait for this stuff to arrive 😁!

“To know, deep in your bones, how everything you experience is fleeting, poignant, and unreliable undermines the rationale for trying to grasp hold of, possess, and control it. To fully know suffering begins to affect how you relate to the world, how you respond to others, how you manage your own life. For how can I seek lasting solace in something that I know is incapable of providing it?” —Stephen Batchelor, *Confessions of a #Buddhist atheist*, is a superb modernizer and explainer.

Helpful.

https://www.mapbox.com/labs/twitter-gnip/locals/#12/35.0140/-224.2356

Map of tweets by locals versus tourists, #Kyoto. How frustrating—no dates, no basemaps!

But I think the big blob of red is Kyoto Station, and the cluster of red/blue northeast of that is Kawaramachi/Gion/Nishiki/etc. I can also pick out Arashiyama to the west.

Meanwhile. https://www.mapbox.com/labs/twitter-gnip/brands/#8/35.299/-223.102 has a much cooler way to give geographic context.

@wim_v12e I read, years ago, about how naming projects is important, and hard. This open-source author I was reading said how he'd only name a project after a main character in a novel if it was truly a huge and awesome project. I'm guilty of breaking this—I named a project "Ebisu" without realizing what all that entailed 😱 now I feel blasphemous 😵 because it's probably not ALL that. By naming it "Pleroma", lain has taken on a huge responsiblity to make it incredibly awesome, otherwise 🤥. 😝

@wim_v12e Thanks for mentioning that! I read about all this in a book by Bart Ehrman, who didn't mention the gnosticism connection at all: I learned about that only in Wikipedia. But, after only thinking about it for only a few minutes, the connection seems anachronistic—Marcion seems to have simply taken Paul's ideas about Law vs Gospel to the natural logical conclusion. I wouldn't invoke anything mystical or secret about Marcion's views, just, a wackiness, and mayyybe political naivete :)

2/2

"In Marcionite belief, Christ was not a Jewish Messiah, but a spiritual entity that was sent by [the True Christian God] to reveal the truth about existence, thus allowing humanity to escape the earthly trap of [the terrible Jewish creator God]. Marcion called [the True] God, the Stranger God, or the Alien God, in some translations, as this deity had not had any previous interactions with the world, and was wholly unknown." —https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcionism#Teachings

What a delightful, well-wrought idea!

#TIL about Marcion, a Christian thinker circa 140 AD, who had a deliciously Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman worldview: Wikipedia will suffice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcionism#Teachings

"Marcionites held that the God of the Hebrew Bible [who created the world] was inconsistent, jealous, wrathful and genocidal, and that the material world he created was defective, a place of suffering; the God who made such a world is a bungling or malicious demiurge."

In contrast…
1/2

"As I cried my eyes out, some part of me wondered if sad tears and happy tears tasted differently. I tried licking my tears, and they really did taste differently from usual."

(https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2018-05-04/excerpt-mari-okada-from-truant-to-anime-screenwriter/.131191)