Leave the field to the censors, create an alternative, and hope that they will not pursue you? Or stand your ground and fight them wherever they are? That is the question.
Readit NewsSagelyGuru commented on Freenet: A decentralized alternative to world wide web freenet.org/... · Posted by u/udev4096
A note from the author: go to line 126
Finds all items partially equal (not necessarily literally equal) to val. In a generic slice in ascending or descending order. Returns the Range of the matching items. When the range is empty (n..n), then n is the sort order of where the missing val could be inserted.
Assigns a comparator closure `pcomp` just once, depending on whether the order is ascending or descending.
SagelyGuru commented on Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language slovio.com/... · Posted by u/vector_spaces
It is worth mentioning Jan Hus: Orthographia Bohemica, 1406 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographia_bohemica which introduced diacritical marks to facilitate expressing all the sounds of Slavic languages in Latin alphabet by single symbols. They have logical phonetic meanings, for example háček (the hook) indicating the placing of the tip of the tongue on the palate. Though, admittedly, they are somewhat inconvenient on modern keyboards, usually relegated to the top row.
Jan Hus was later burned at the stake for his 'heresies', which probably slowed down the uptake of his eminently useful invention in the rest of the world.
It is my opinion that even English more than 600 years later could benefit from it, as in: 'caš ček' instead of 'cash cheque', thus also finally attaining much simpler, logical and phonetic spelling.
SagelyGuru commented on How to design a house to last 1000 years constructionphysics.subst... · Posted by u/ddubski
Granite blocks that slot together.
SagelyGuru commented on Adult Literacy in the United States (2019) nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019... · Posted by u/dredmorbius
One of the most-cited stats regarding literacy is: a student who is not reading at grade level by the end of 3rd grade is 300% as likely to flunk out of school before finishing 12th grade.
As someone who works in literacy, I have seen this cited many times and referenced it several times myself. It was only this year, when I was reading Scout Mindset [1] that I realized this statistic doesn't say what so many people think it does.
People cite this stat to prove how important literacy is. After all, if a student can't read, then he is not going to be able to pass classes in a wide variety of subjects. This notion of causality is captured in the similarly-common saying "first you learn to read, then you read to learn".
But the stat doesn't prove causality at all. And when you step back and think about it, there is likely to be a very large overlap between people who have low reading ability and people who are more likely to drop out of school. This is perhaps obvious to people who do not work in literacy, where we tend to overestimate its importance.
For me, this was a perfect example of confirmation bias, where people — even people who are generally smart and well-meaning — credulously accept (or even tout) statistics without first analyzing them. Had we seen a stat that indicated that reading ability didn't affect educational outcomes, we surely would have dug in and tried to figure out what was wrong with the calculation. But this one sounded right, so now it's part of the accepted wisdom in the world of literacy. This statistic is cited wherever someone is asking for more money to be poured into early literacy programs, as if solving literacy will have this 300% multiplier effect.
I thought about posting about this on LinkedIn, and urging others to try to think about what beliefs are common in their industry, but have not been thoroughly examined. It would be great if we could call out some of these common-but-untrue beliefs, which may lead to misallocation of resources.
1: https://www.amazon.com/Scout-Mindset-Perils-Defensive-Thinki...
This is unfortunately just one of many examples of generally widespread malaise of conflating correlation with causality.
It is especially common in certain "sciences" which typically involve a lot of data collection. Followed by attempts to crunch it up into some kind of popular and far reaching conclusions, intended to fool the examiners into awarding a PhD.
SagelyGuru commented on The Antikythera Mechanism world-archaeology.com/fea... · Posted by u/jonnydubowsky
How so chemistry?
The orbits of the electrons very much follow the pythagorean (natural numbers) laws.
SagelyGuru commented on The Antikythera Mechanism world-archaeology.com/fea... · Posted by u/jonnydubowsky
It is sad that even in this case, the orthodox line that "the ancients were ignorant about the movement around the Sun" is pushed by the very people who perhaps ought to know better. This machine would clearly have been a useful predictor of the positions of the planets regardless whether you subscribe to the heliocentric model or not.
It was more likely inspired by the pythagorian numerical model of the universe. Who is to say that Pythagoras was wrong? For example, all of modern chemistry is explainable in those terms.