They also make for great retro PowerPoint backgrounds :)
Readit Newsbiofox commented on Geocities Backgrounds pixelmoondust.neocities.o... · Posted by u/marcodiego
Short version:
Possibly the worst thing to be raided for: distribution of CSAM.
Apparently based purely on the 'evidence' of my IP address being on some list - that's the only explanation I ever got.
Funny thing is, they did so little background research they didn't even know to expect kids in the house when they raided at 6:30am.
It still triggers me. This was in August 2022. I wrote pages and pages of my memories and thoughts about it, and it still makes me angry for about ten different reasons.
The long version I haven't written yet and probably never will. I don't want to dwell on it, I want to get on with my life and have an even worse drama to deal with at the moment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44533637
I know I'm alive, that's for sure. I'm trying to make lemonade by the goddamn bucket load.
P.S. I have written prior HN comments referring to the raid if you care enough to go back that far.
That's absolutely horrifying! Glad to hear you've managed to move past it, as it would have absolutely broken me.
My home was searched by the police for something much less serious (buying lab equipment, completely legally), and the experience left me having panic attacks every time there was a knock at the door.
biofox commented on The Origin of the Research University asteriskmag.com/issues/10... · Posted by u/Petiver
> There is similarly little discussion on the origins of peer review and impact factors and journals, it's just taken as the obvious hallmark and basis of good science.
Pioneered and exploited by Robert Maxwell (father of the infamous Ghislaine). Good summary below; was an all around eye-opening revelation for me.
https://thetaper.library.virginia.edu/big%20deal/2019/04/26/...
> [Maxwell] entertained guests at parties with booze, cigars and sailboat trips. Scientists had never seen anything like him.
> “We would get dinner and fine wine, and at the end he would present us a cheque – a few thousand pounds for the society. It was more money than us poor scientists had ever seen.”
Similar to what Jeffrey Epstein did.
biofox commented on The Origin of the Research University asteriskmag.com/issues/10... · Posted by u/Petiver
Great thought provoking article, a lot of starting points for wikipedia deep dives. It's really surprising to me that most of the big name intellectuals from before the 19th century were indeed not doing their work in the university system. I guess it's in nobody's interest to highlight this. Academia wants to present itself as the obvious deposit and trailblazer of knowledge and that it always has been. There is similarly little discussion on the origins of peer review and impact factors and journals, it's just taken as the obvious hallmark and basis of good science.
I find it curious and bad that people can go through the academic pipeline without ever being presented with any deep explanation of what this thing even is, where it came from, what else it could be, what historical opposition there was or what debate there was around what it should be, what it is in ideal theory and what it is in real practice and what cynics see it as. People just enroll because that's obviously the thing to do. Then they may stick around for grad school and get comfy in the system but reflection and meta is rare.
It's a somewhat selective history. Off the top of my head:
Kepler developed his ideas while at the University of Graz. [16th century]
Galileo built his first telescopes while a professor at the University of Padua. [16th - 17th century]
Newton did all of his work while at Cambridge (although, admittedly, it took the plague and a lockdown for him to have his annus mirabilis). [17th century]
William of Ockham (of Razor fame) did his work at Oxford. [14th century]
Giordano Bruno did the work that got him burnt at the stake while at the University of Paris (and briefly Oxford). [16th century]
Roger Bacon developed the scientific method while at Oxford. [13th century]
biofox commented on Why are there no good dinosaur films? briannazigler.substack.co... · Posted by u/fremden
biofox commented on Why are there no good dinosaur films? briannazigler.substack.co... · Posted by u/fremden
The Alien, Terminator, and Matrix franchises have similar problems.
Aliens successfully changed genres, from horror to action. But subsequent movies could never recapture the primal horror of the original or the fun action of the second. It's almost like there are only two local optima in the Alien movie universe and Alien + Aliens took them both.
Terminator is the same. The first movie was a perfect sci-fi action movie, with a trippy premise and loads of fun. The second was a subversion of the first: the Terminator is the good guy! And that worked too. But after that, where else can you go?
And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix.
Similarly, in the Star Trek universe, the original films captured all of the local optima:
Wrath of Khan - Star Trek does a Shakespearian tragedy.
The Voyage Home - Star Trek does a family-friendly time-travel romp.
The Undiscovered Country - Star Trek does political allegory.
And just like The Matrix, later films do not exist.
biofox commented on The first non-opoid painkiller worksinprogress.news/p/th... · Posted by u/ortegaygasset
I think a better title here than:
> The first non-opoid [sic] painkiller
might be:
> The first non-opioid nociceptive pain-killer
Nociceptive pain being that by actual damage to tissue, as opposed to neuropathic pain like a headache or inflammation that you might take a (non-opioid!) NSAID for.
I'm a neuroscientist by training, and that doesn't match my understanding (although the definitions might have changed).
Inflammation would be an instance of nociceptive pain, and an NSAID would alleviate it by reducing the inflammation; and most tissue damage will result in inflammation.
Neuropathic pain, on the other hand, would be due to damage of the nerves themselves, and NSAIDs are completely useless here (ask anyone with sciatica or other nerve entrapment)
To the Stem-enlightened mind, the classical understanding and pedagogy of such ideas is underwhelming, vague, and riddled with language-game problems, compared to the precision a mathematically-rooted idea has.
They're rederiving all this stuff not out of obstinacy, but because they prefer it. I don't really identify with rationalism per se, but I'm with them on this--the humanities are over-cooked and a humanity education tends to be a tedious slog through outmoded ideas divorced from reality
If you contextualise the outmoded ideas as part of the Great Conversation [1], and the story of how we reached our current understanding, rather than objective statements of fact, then they becomes a lot more valuable and worthy of study.
biofox commented on Telephone Exchanges in the UK telephone-exchanges.org.u... · Posted by u/petecooper
Sort of, yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BT_Tower#Secrecy
Two more examples of exchanges that were kept secret:
biofox commented on Telephone Exchanges in the UK telephone-exchanges.org.u... · Posted by u/petecooper
This is an impressive feat of cataloguing!
Considering the telecom system is at the bedrock of almost all modern technologies, it really doesn't get enough love or attention in the public mind.
The dull derelict-looking, and often graffitied, buildings that house the system doesn't reflect just how cool the infrastructure is.