When will we get the emetic icon?
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The Harvard online course catalog has a search box. Type in “decolonize.” That word — though surely not the only lens through which to view the current relationship between Europe and the rest of the world — is in the titles of seven courses and the descriptions of 18 more.
Try “oppression” and “liberation.” Each is in the descriptions of more than 80 courses. “Social justice” is in over 100. “White supremacy” and “Enlightenment” are neck and neck, both ahead of “scientific revolution” but behind “intersectionality.”
Though word frequency is an imperfect measure and the precise counts are muddied by duplicate numberings and courses at MIT, this experiment supports the suspicion that the Harvard curriculum has become heavily slanted toward recent fashions of the progressive left.
For example, “intersectionality” was almost unattested before the year 2000, while published uses of “decolonize” have more than tripled since then.
Merchants of hate are repurposing these intellectual goods that universities are producing.
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And Steve Sailer.
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I guess royalty really are different from you and me! On 2024-01-07, Prince Felix and Princess Claire of Luxembourg announced the birth of their third child.
Here is the birth announcement.
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If you live in the English speaking world, you probably take it for granted that you separate decimals from whole numbers using a point. However, you may be surprised to learn that many countries use commas or other decimal marks to separate decimals from whole numbers instead.
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Perfect crime:
The case followed a typical pattern for cyber kidnapping, in which “kidnappers” tell a victim to isolate and provide pictures of oneself as if being held captive – photos that are then sent to the victim’s family to extort a payment.
The victims comply under the belief their family will otherwise be harmed.
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The Brilliant Maps page in which the illustration appears says:
And the following use both:
- Canada (period when using English, comma when using French)
- Croatia (comma used officially, but both forms are in use)
- Hungary (comma is official but both are used)
- Luxembourg (uses both marks officially)
- Macau (full stop in Chinese and English text and comma in Portuguese text)
- Switzerland
But since the announcement was in English, it would make the most sense to use a period, since that is the most common in anglophone countries. In Switzerland, French speakers tend to use period and German speakers comma, but when banks, etc. issue documents in English, they universally use period as the decimal separator, and for thousands separator either an apostrophe or a thin space.
The Hacker’s Diet Online allows users to configure either period or comma as the decimal separator and, regardless of the selection, accepts either in data input.
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This grant, made originally on 2021-07-30 for US$ 1,000,000 was then revised on 2022-08-27 to add another half million. This is under something called the “Middle East Partnership Initiative” (that’s odd, the last time I looked Egypt was in Africa), whose objectives are:
The U.S.-Middle East Partnership Initiative supports organizations and individuals in their efforts to promote political, economic, and social engagement in the Middle East and North Africa.
Funding under the grant runs until 2024-09-30. An additional US$ 36,349 in “Non-Federal Funding” has been kicked in by somebody else.
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Ugh. And I work with some of the staff, albeit not in DIE.
Maybe I really don’t need to return to work in Cairo.
And, please, when will we get the emetic/barfing icon?
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Well, Discourse, in their wisdom, have decided “all you need is love”, and hence the clickable heart suffices.
To express disdain within a post or comment, Unicode offers a variety of options, including the classics (code within colons is how you specify them as text):
:face_vomiting:
(U+1F92E FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH VOMITING):poop:
(U+1F4A9 PILE OF POO):-1:
(U+1F44E THUMBS DOWN SIGN)
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Thank you! I knew there’d be a workaround!
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LG washer using nearly 4gb of data per day:
https://twitter.com/Johnie/status/1744556503183585471
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Abolish the White Race
The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists. Of course we expected bewilderment from people who still think of race as biology. We frequently get letters accusing us of being “racists,” just like the KKK, and have even been called a “hate group.” …
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A pole-dancer and fellow anti-Israel activist who glued themselves to Sixth Avenue during Manhattan’s iconic Thanksgiving Day Parade dodged criminal charges Tuesday — with one of them defiantly saying he would get arrested again if necessary.
Jay Waxse was initially charged with obstructing government administration, resisting arrest and trespass. The second defendant, who was identified in court papers as Natalia Scollo but identified himself as Ezra, was facing obstructing governmental administration and resisting arrest.
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In early 2021, BuzzFeed’s CEO, Jonah Peretti, had a problem. He wanted to take the digital media company — one of the defining players of the internet’s past 15 years — public through a Special Purpose Acquisition Company, or SPAC. At the time, there was a SPAC craze on Wall Street, and the BuzzFeed deal was, at one point, slated to value the company at $1.5 billion while raising around $290 million in cash from investors. Bankers were hustling companies through these IPO-like mergers — a quick and relatively easy way to get billion-dollar-plus valuations (at least temporarily), all with less scrutiny from regulators or skeptical investors. (If this sounds to you like it would make for some bad outcomes, you’d be right.)
To get that kind of valuation though, the company needed to be bigger, reaching more eyeballs and offering a larger scale to advertisers. Or as Peretti told the New York Times in 2018, “A bigger digital media company” would “would probably be able to get paid more money.” In late 2020, BuzzFeed bought HuffPost. In June of 2021, Peretti made an even bigger move by announcing the acquisition of Complex, a site for rap nerds and sneakerheads, for $300 million. He said that the Complex audience “skews more male and more diverse than BuzzFeed,” and “will make our company stronger.” But to complete the deal, Buzzfeed needed to borrow money — about $150 million altogether. A handful of hedge funds provided the credit as part of an arrangement that essentially gave Peretti more than three years to figure out a way to make it all work. The bill would come due in late 2024.
“I’ve got it! Let’s borrow US$ 150 million from a bunch of Wall Street sharks so we can spend US$ 300 million buying a ‘media property’ aimed at gutter culture, then wrap the whole thing up as a SPAC and sell it to the rubes for US$ 290 million.” What could possibly go wrong?
Lots.
BuzzFeed — once a media-industry success story, a shining example of the social internet in action — now faces a very uncertain future. As a public company, almost nothing has gone to plan: The SPAC cash dwindled from almost $290 million to about $16 million; the social-media networks that BuzzFeed relied on for a large share of its traffic pivoted to different kinds of content; investors fled, driving down the company’s stock price by 98 percent and its overall market value to a tiny $37 million.
⋮
The bonds are what’s known as convertible, which means that, if the company’s stock is trading above a given price — $12.50 in this case — at the time the bonds mature, they can be converted into shares with no repayment of the principal required. Unfortunately for Buzzfeed, with shares now trading at 26 cents, that scenario is functionally out of play. The bonds also pay the holders 8.5 percent a year and are redeemable for slightly more than the original loans — pushing the whole outstanding debt from the Complex deal up to roughly $200 million. This amount, as it stands, is due December 3.
Good luck with that, BuzzFeed.
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I expect programming platforms nowadays to provide number and date format support that is locale-sensitive. Thus, a programmer would pass the numeric value and a locale identifier (“English, US” or “Portugese, Brazil”) to an API and take whatever string is returned, with its decimal mark, thousands (other grouping) mark, etc.
Given that, the computer-printed Swiss check with a “decimal point” (period) in an “English” context makes a lot of sense. It also makes sense that a human composition would lack that consistency.
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What’s the cause behind the extraordinary longevity of people living in so-called “blue zones” around the world? Could it be genetics, diet, lifestyle, or perhaps something else?
A paper posted on bioRχiv in May 2020, “Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud” suggests an alternative explanation. Here is the abstract.
The observation of individuals attaining remarkable ages, and their concentration into geographic sub-regions or ‘blue zones’, has generated considerable scientific interest. Proposed drivers of remarkable longevity include high vegetable intake, strong social connections, and genetic markers. Here, we reveal new predictors of remarkable longevity and ‘supercentenarian’ status. In the United States supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. In the UK, Italy, Japan, and France remarkable longevity is instead predicted by regional poverty, old-age poverty, material deprivation, low incomes, high crime rates, a remote region of birth, worse health, and fewer 90+ year old people. In addition, supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on the first of the month and days divisible by five: patterns indicative of widespread fraud and error. As such, relative poverty and missing vital documents constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status, and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.
From the introduction.
These data reveal that remarkable age attainment is predicted by regional indicators of error and fraud including greater poverty, higher illiteracy, higher crime rates, worse population health, greater levels of material deprivation, shorter average lifespans, fewer old people, and the absence of birth certificates. In addition, French and Italian historical data indicate that supercentenarians are not likely to be born into longer-lived cohorts, but are born into undifferentiated or shorter-lived populations relative to their contemporary national averages. Supercentenarian birthdates also exhibit ‘age heaping’ distributional patterns that are strongly indicative of manufactured birth data. Finally, fewer than 15% of exhaustively validated supercentenarians are associated with either a birth certificate or a death certificate, even in populations with over 95% death certificate coverage.
As such, these findings suggest that extreme age data are largely a result of vital statistics errors and patterns of fraud, raising serious questions about the validity of an extensive body of research based on the remarkable reported ages of populations and individuals.
Walker’s Law
Absent evidence to the contrary, assume everything is a scam.
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