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Yet another grandma was right
Every fucking thing we learned in school was criminally false and wrong. Our “science” books mercilessly mocked Schiaparelli’s canals, Lysenko’s acquired characteristics, the old wives tales about stress influencing genes, and phrenology. Now, unsurprisingly, we have proof that the phrenologists were right. The shape of a face and skull does tell you a lot about…
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Trash puzzle
If a fictional detective encountered this oddity, he’d pursue it and find a complex crime at the base. I doubt that there’s anything complex, but it doesn’t make sense. Like most ‘environmentally conscious’ cities, we have a brown bin for regular trash and a blue bin for recyclables. My simple lifestyle doesn’t fill the bins…
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I don’t see the cede
I can’t quibble with this Kirn oracle, but I can’t call it realistic either. Beneath the hard dry crust of the establishment, a powerful dynamic reservoir of turbulent independent energy is starting to exert real counter pressure. It does not have a name yet, this force or movement, but it is developing as a real…
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More fake outrage
We have more fake outrage based on an intentionally inverted concept of reality. The latest fake whistleblower is accusing Twitter of “failing to protect user data.” The sole purpose of social media is to gather user data and sell it to the government or anyone else who wants to buy it. That’s all. That’s the…
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New record?
Social media and blockchain and DeFi and NFT and DAO enable super-fast and super-efficient swindles. I wonder if this one sets a new record for Greater Fools Per Second. (GF/s, or GFs-1 in proper metric format.) An NFT exchange called SudoRare set up its website, grabbed $820k in real money from Greater Fools, and then…
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Not much charge in the disc
Took a peek at the latest “revelations” on UFOs. BlackVault has a solid website and a well-organized Youtube channel with good clear careful narration. I like the way they’re handling things, and I think Frank Edwards would have been pleased. There’s not much beef in this burger. These FOIAs are a lot like the older…
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When Foy worked
Still thinking about the Foy solution for automation, I looked up some 1960 government studies on automation. At that time business and labor were mostly working together to protect skills and workers. Businesses understood that labor would strike hard if they fired workers unnecessarily, so businesses behaved decently. The study predicted correctly that file clerks and…
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Strong stuff, weak history
Strong stuff from Kirn: So much imagination, eccentricity, dreaminess, and creativity went into the creation of the tech we use now. Yet it is becoming the instrument of our species’ most simplistic and brutal instincts for raw power, deception and coercion. Damn it, I want that Renaissance they promised! First part is wrong. The true…
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Who isn’t Kuhnian?
Thinking today about those two huge debunks of pill-pusher theories: Depression is chemical, and Alzheimers is chemical. Those theories lasted for decades and NEVER DID ANY FUCKING GOOD AT ALL. The drugs for depression did massive harm. At least the Alzheimer plaque theory was only useless. Both conditions are best controlled by two little words:…
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Opportunity cost
Recently the long-standing and richly funded theory of Alzheimers plaques was decisively debunked. It should have been debunked and defunded earlier. It wasn’t logical in the first place, and it consumed all the resources for twenty years with zero results. A much more logical and obvious hypothesis is starting to yield logical and obvious RESULTS.…
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Age reversal
This morning I took a peek at Renderosity, my old graphics stomping grounds. Is there a new version of Poser that I can continue to reject? Apparently not. The first discussion I saw was this discovery of AI. Almost everyone seemed to be completely gobsmacked by text-to-art AI websites. One of the older guys was…
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We need a Foy Rebellion
Yesterday I was discussing the cultural IMPERATIVE to re-employ ordinary men after WW2. France implemented a similar IMPERATIVE after it recovered from the 1789 revolution, which turned its demonic vision of “science” into a god of war and torture. France returned to a strictly practical and concrete way of life, with careful regard for the…
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Great line
As the Web3 metaverse continues to collapse, some jaded observers are turning out great lines. The specific story is yet another weirdly complex trading of nothing: The problem is brewing at BendDAO, a peer-to-peer lending service that lets users borrow ether (ETH) against their NFTs. Customers can typically take out a loan equal to 30%…
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Rifts all the way down
Yesterday I did a grouchy political take on the latest URGENT BREAKING NEWS PANIC EXISTENTIAL EMERGENCY: The continents are drifting! Here’s a somewhat calmer thought on the subject, maybe trite, maybe entertaining. This week I’m putting together an animation illustrating how the larynx develops through embryonic stages. The latest edition of the textbook will have…
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If it’s a trend…
The folks at TheFederalist are still trying to claim a trend toward genuine populism on the R side. They claim that the defeat of Liz Cheney marks a pulling away from Bush/Cheney neocons. I doubt it. A much simpler explanation is the Trump personality cult, which is pretty much the only thing in Repooflican minds…
Polistra's Mill
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Polistra's Mill 