max1461 - Tumblr blog

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I like to think about all the people who joined tumblr for steven universe or whatever and followed me because of one of my silly posts and now have spent the last several years involuntarily learning mongolia facts

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The small boat would be the Sukhbaatar III, the only vessel in Mongolia's navy, crewed by seven men, before the navy was privatized in 1997.

Kahn — surname of German origin meaning "small boat"; also the Germanized form of the Jewish surname Cohen < Hebrew kohen, "priest".

Khan — title and surname of Turko-Mongol origin, from Middle Mongol or Old Turkic qaɣan, possibly from Yeniseian.

Don't get them confused.

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pretty cool

Biden('s FTC) outlawing all non-competes, including making 99%+ of existing non-compete clauses unenforceable going forward. Pretty crazy

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mr-fistsalad said:

Read dril tweets like an old-timey radio announcer.

brings the whole family together

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Kahn — surname of German origin meaning "small boat"; also the Germanized form of the Jewish surname Cohen < Hebrew kohen, "priest".

Khan — title and surname of Turko-Mongol origin, from Middle Mongol or Old Turkic qaɣan, possibly from Yeniseian.

Don't get them confused.

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It would be nice if when you say something (well not you. me.) there is a little tag associated with the information in those words, and you (me) have the power to revoke that tag and obliterate the information from wherever it now resides. would be cool if I could put drm in the things that I say. not you though just me.

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i think sometimes people conflate autoeroticism with homoeroticism. Some autoeroticism is really heterosexual!

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how is any of this considered blogging indeed

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I don't really wish that I had never posted. What I wish, I think, is that each post of mine which was meant for a specific audience, in conversation with a specific set of discourses and so on, had been private to that audience rather than apparently public facing. Some of my posts are suited for viewing by the world but most are (by construction) suited only for viewing by this-or-that friend or acquaintance for whom they were intended. But they are here in view of the world anyway. Bad. I should have been more careful.

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Isn't the punctuated equilibrium model now regarded as dubious? I believe I've heard that the data doesn't actually support it, but I'm not sure.

Selected recurrent patterns or "laws" of evolution, of potential use for speculative biology. List compiled by Neocene's Pavel Volkov, who in turn credits its content to Nikolay Rejmers (original presumably in Russian). These are guidelines, and not necessarily scientifically rigorous.

Dollo's Law, or irreversibility of evolution: organisms do not evolve back into their own ancestors. When mammals returned to the sea, they did not develop gills and dermal scales and change back into fish: they became whales or seals or manatees, who retain mammalian traits and show marks of land-dwelling ancestry.

Roulliet's law, or increase of complexity: both organisms and ecosystems tend to become more complex over time, with subparts that are increasingly differentiated and integrated. This one is dodgier: there are many examples of simplification over time when it is selected for, for example in parasites. At least, over very large time scales, the maximum achievable complexity seems to increase.

Law of unlimited change: there is no point at which a species or system is complete and has finished evolving. Stasis only occurs when there is strong selective pressure in favor of it, and organism can always adapt to chaging conditions if they are not beyond the limits of survival.

Law of pre-adaptation or exaptation: new structures do not appear ex novo. When a new organ or behavior is developed, it is a modification or a re-purposing of something that already existed. Bone tissue probably evolved as reserves of energy before it was suitable to build an internal skeleton from, and feathers most likely evolved for thermal isolation and display before they were refined enough for flight.

Law of increasing variety: diversity at all levels tends to increase over time. While some forms originate from hybridization, most importantly the Eukaryotic cells, generally one ancestor species tends to leave many descendants, if it has any at all.

Law of Severtsov or of Eldredge-Gould or of punctuated equilibrium: while evolution is always slow from the human standpoint, there are moments of relatively rapid change and diversification when some especily fertile innovation appears (e.g. eyes and shells in the Cambrian), or new environments become inhabitable (e.g. continental surface in the Devonian), or disaster clears out space (e.g. at the end of the Permian or Cretaceous), followed by relative stability once all low-hanging fruit has been picked.

Law of environmental conformity: changes in the structure and functions of organisms follow the features or their environment, but the specifics of those changes depend on the structural and developmental constraints of the organisms. Squids and dolphins both have spindle-shaped bodies because physics make it necessary to move quickly through water, but water is broken by the anterior end of the skull in dolphins and by the posterior end of the mantle in squids. Superficial similarity is due to shared environment, deep structural similarity to shared ancestry.

Cope's and Marsh's laws: the most highly specialized members of a group (which often includes the physically largest) tend to go extinct first when conditions change. It is the generalist, least specialized members that usually survive and give rise to the next generations of specialists.

Deperet's law of increasing specialization: once a lineage has started to specialize for a particular niche, lifestyle, or resource, it will keep specializing in the same direction, as any deviation would be outcompeted by the rest. In contrast, their generalist ancestors can survive with a marginal presence in multiple niches.

Osborn's law, or adaptive radiation: as the previous takes place, different lines of descent from a common ancestor become increasingly different in form and specializations.

Shmalhausen's law, or increasing integration: over time, complex systems also tend to become increasingly integrated, with components (e.g. organs of an organism, or species in a symbiotic relationship) being increasingly indispensable to the whole, and increasingly tightly controlled.

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I really hope it wasn’t a dream bc I still have yet to find it since the years ago that I witnessed it but every day I think about this nature documentary of these super deadly ants mercilessly tearing everything to shreds until this special slug enters the frame sauntering on through the forest floor like the bad bitch that she is, and at first you think the diva will be cut down like everything else but she just excretes what seems like gallons of mucus that drowns every single ant piling on top of her until they give up, leaving a trail of death behind her at her own pace. She didn’t skip a beat bc she was ready. I channel her power and uniqueness daily

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They're making pig tunnels vast underground networks of pig tunnels barely fit the beast in pig tunnels tubes of dirt and sand and stone ten to twenty feet down pig tunnels huffing puffing snorting pig tunnels right under all of us pig tunnels pigs weaving in and out of pig tunnels clambering frightened through the darkness for hours pig tunnels and where are the entrances and exits to pig tunnels where do they get the pigs for this pig tunnels

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if they keep building solar and wind without transmission or storage, the fun part is gonna be retarded energy-wasting industrial processes. There could be a special moment in history where you can make money by desalinating with heat or something. Needs to be cheap equipment because you're only gonna run it for a few hours a day, and something you can turn on and off easily.

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In my new report, I provide the first ever look inside of a US military program known as the Secretary of Defense Executive Fellows (SDEF) program, which gives major government contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing a way to influence senior military policymakers.

The program sends US military officers to work at major corporations for nearly a year; when they return, the fellows submit recommendations for reform of the Pentagon based on their observations of the private sector. 

We document numerous examples of companies using this program to pass along self-interested policy recommendations to US military leaders, including: more outsourcing, corporate subsidies, deregulation, less oversight, more political power to contractors, looser arms export rules, and more. We also analyzed a sample of former SDEF fellows and found that 43% of them go through the revolving door and work for military contractors after leaving the program. As such, the SDEF program uses government money to help subsidize the military-industrial complex, placing corporate interests above the public interest.

You can read my summary of the report here, along with coverage by The Lever here.

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instead of philosophers they should start calling themselves sophophiliacs

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I actually think the linguist-lect is pretty different from the philosopher-lect, except that there's overlap in semantics. Most of the philosophy words I know I either know from reading a lot of SEP as a teenager or from my (limited but very fun) excursions into formal semantics. Linguists have a lot more words for talking about the form and function of language whereas philosophers seem to have more for talking about the structure of ideas. Cf. my favorite Wikipedia article of all time, much beloved to me when I was a newbie conlanger, list of glossing abbreviations.

Actually, there are a number of fun linguist-lect/philosopher-lect false friends. We also have an "analytic vs. synthetic" distinction, but it's totally unrelated—to be analytic is to have the property of conveying a grammatical information through syntax, and to be synthetic is to have the property of conveying grammatical information through morphology, i.e. prefixes, suffixes and so on. Math also has "analytic vs. synthetic" but it means yet a third unrelated thing. And we have "subjects" and "objects" but these are just syntactic roles.

Ok I think I've just started rambling. Oh, one more thing (for you and the tumblr masses): two words that I have regarded as kind of linguist shibboleths are markedness and disprefer. We are wont to say that something has "high markedness" therefore might be "disprefered" or so on. So if you see someone saying these things you should bet they are a linguist.

Hey tsnidaria anemone, can you teach me more philosophy words? I don't mean crazy ones from an ancient wizard, I mean regular type ones that I might use to say stuff in an annoyingly pedantic way to people in real life. I somehow didn't know "truth-apt" before you said it to me on here (I knew some other words for the same type of thing, like "proposition", but that's at least a little ambiguous because some people use "proposition" for "truth-apt thing" and some people use it for "function from possible worlds to truth values").

Anyway, can you please tell me more words that a stuffy tweed-wearing anglo-american might say in his post 1945 office?

i think you probably have most of it if you're a linguist. you just have to forget that you actually know what it all means and start pretending you do

but actually i think non-philosophers are confused by the way we use the word "normativity"