Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: mainiac on October 15, 2016, 09:36:17 pm

Quote from: Flying Dice on October 15, 2016, 09:26:44 pm

I mean, the thing is,

I mean the thing is, the bootstrapping is already taking place.  As evidenced for instance by the major party candidate whose plan is that solar alone adds 10% of current US capacity for all electricity in four years.

Token additions to solar doesn't mean jack shit if she gives the wink and nod to the companies which are continuing to increase production even as they're forced to tap into markedly more difficult deposits.

Either you're drinking the cool-aid because she's your horse in this race, or you legitimately don't understand what peak oil means. Small increases to solar is less than what we should have been doing fifty or sixty years ago. It's the same bullshit as the centrist money-grubbers are trying to feed us on the ecology side, making recycling programs and moderate reductions in carbon emissions out to be massive, sweeping changes when they're basic entry-level efforts being tossed out half a century behind the curve to appease people who actually care about things beyond the next few decades.

This isn't even funny, it's on the same level as promising free state-funded cold medicine and pretending that that's equivalent to comprehensive public healthcare.

Yes, she is the very personification of the saying that 'politicians go where the wind blows', yes she tried to use poll tested ancedotes (every single letter is chosen by her team, I don't know how much of any of her talk is her origional words) and got failed, yes, she is the very epitome of establishment, but dammit, she isn't a complete sleazebag like Trump is.

Well it's named after a part of the female genitalia, because the condition does actually disproportionately affect women, just as other mental disorders disproportionately affect men. There's actually a conspiracy theory about this, that the condition (originally called hysteria) was concocted to keep uppity women down. Another one which is gendered is Dissociative identity disorder. It's 9 times as likely to be diagnosed in women than men. The mirror-image of autism-spectrum disorders, which are 10-to-1 male-to-female. I'd argue that the reason these conditions came to be known as "hysteria" wasn't because of sexist doctors labelling uppity women, but they actually noted the real conditions which were prevalent in women, and gave them a gendered name because of that valid observation. Sure, their explanation was dumb (linking the uterus to mental disorders), but it was a "correlation is not causation" issue rather than doctors making shit up.

Quote from: Amperzand on October 12, 2016, 10:42:38 pm

You're probably right, I'm basing my opinion solely on a book I read once.

Snow Crash?  =P

Quote from: Avis-Mergulus on October 12, 2016, 10:21:37 pm

It's actually a major point in theoretical linguistics that we have no record of a defective or incomplete language (with the possible exception of pidgins, which aren't really an exception because they're only defective while used in a narrow range of contexts, but rapidly develop all the nuances of 'real' languages once they gain native speakers who use them in everyday communication. See: creole languages).
A proto-language is something that linguists would very much like to discover, because it would answer a lot of theoretical questions about the development of language in the human race (a topic that is currently treated about the same as perpetual motion or other hackery since there's literally nothing to base serious research on). But it is estimated that the human language system has been in its current state (and therefore all of its products equally complex) for a very long time. Like, start with a hundred thousand years, add more until satisfied. Again, very conjectural since there's literally no data.

Dolphins were in the news recently for the observation of possible sentence structure in their vocalizations (click-baity, but eh). I don't know if there is a branch of linguistics that deals specifically with non-humans, but if there isn't there likely will be soon.

Using Neural Networks to simulate the recently deceased, and aid in the grieving process

The story was a pretty moving one, if you've the time and interest. Some friends of the deceased in that article mentioned how they'd never been able to ask him for advice before he died, but the advice was something he'd say. Others said the process was like sending a message-in-a-bottle to the deceased... the replies felt strange sometimes, but it was a way of helping them say some of the things they never got to say, and all that.

I have complicated feelings about this, but what a weird and interesting application of the technology.

Spoiler: Some chats with a Neural Net AI trained using old texts. (click to show/hide)

Quote from: Covenant on October 10, 2016, 08:02:43 pm

Can't really blame him for being anti-Clinton considering she wants to drone him, though.

How many times will you post conspiracy theories that are false with no remorse?

You bear a small but real personal responsibility for the decline in civility of american political discourse when you spread lies and slander of this nature.  If you were a good person you would be deeply, deeply ashamed right now.