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acadapter

1,252 karma · joined September 4, 2021

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acadapter··on Birdwatching rewires the brain and slows cognitive decline
I agree, it would be interesting to see if there are some cognitive advantages associated with the "special interests" personality traits, in general.
acadapter··on Publish fake stats, get cited in LLMs
This has existed for a long time before LLM, although in a slower form. On Wikipedia it's called "citogenesis".
acadapter··on Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time
Greeks and Romans did experience a >99% loss of their literature during the medieval period...
acadapter··on Inventing Cyrillic
False etymology? You can roll back sound changes further to *ḱlew- in Proto-Indo-European

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

acadapter··on ‘Viking’ was a job, not a matter of heredity: ancient DNA study (2020)
Yes, but similarity alone is not a guarantee that words are related. The words val and [h]val are not related in Swedish, even though they ended up with the same pronunciation and spelling in the modern language. Sometimes, words can end up as "fossil words" because the main usage of the word was lost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_word

This can also happen to word roots. Because this is about a historical word, it's interesting to look at the broader Indo-European language tree for clues about the original meaning.

acadapter··on ‘Viking’ was a job, not a matter of heredity: ancient DNA study (2020)
It is linguistically possible that "viking" was simply a self-referential ethnonym, with the first part meaning "home" or "village".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

Compare Ancient Greek [w]oikos, and all the various ves, vas, wieś, which can be found all over Eastern Europe.

acadapter··on Startups are pushing the boundaries of reproductive genetics
What if, for example, a dentist refuses to remove malformed wisdom teeth because his morals don't allow him to fix problems that a person is born with, and only fixes tooth damage caused by accidents?

The taboo against genetic repairs is more comparable to antivax, rather than eugenics. Every part of the medical sciences is an intervention against "nature taking its course", in order to prevent harm to the individual.

acadapter··on Startups are pushing the boundaries of reproductive genetics
This kind of blanket ban reasoning is kind of cruel to people with genetic diseases in their family line.

"Hey, you've got a broken gene? Sucks to be you, my rigid ethics requires you to play the lottery with worse odds than the others!"

In another thread about the same subject, I mentioned the issue of color blindness, and how some professions are open to ~92% of men and ~99.5% of women (because of how it's inherited). Society seems to be quite uninterested to start some wide campaign to replace color-coded information, even during the 2010s when the equality debate was active, it was never "upgraded" to include male issues like these.

With DNA editing, this problem could be fixed on the other side (along with much more serious issues that can affect an unlucky individual).

I don't know why there is so much fear to be out-competed by a hypothetical "superhuman", when the most easy implementation of DNA editing seems to be fixing genetic diseases (often "flipping one letter" to the correct one)?

acadapter··on He Jiankui PhD Thesis: Spontaneous Emergence of Hierarchy in Biological Systems (2010)
This is sad though. I'd rather see that ethics gets upgraded so some problems can be fixed.

For example, about 8% of men get excluded from certain professions such as being a train driver, due to color blindness. And society doesn't seem to care enough to switch to colorblind-friendly signaling.

With gene editing, this problem could be repaired in the other end, so that men will have the same chance as women to get perfect vision.

acadapter··on The Great Feminization
I was hoping that this article would be about a hypothetical future where people have evolved to have a lower amount of bravery and a lower "fighting spirit", so that they're simply to afraid to fly fighter jets or be nuclear submarine captains.
acadapter··on A 1960s schools experiment that created a new alphabet
Would it be sane to have a special letter to distinguish the "p" in "park" from the "p" in "spark"? In some languages, it's important, but these two sounds can be represented by the same letter in others because they don't "compete" for the same contexts.

(the difference is aspirate vs. non-aspirate)

acadapter··on A 1960s schools experiment that created a new alphabet
Phonemics is more important than phonetics for these things. Sometimes two sounds need to be represented with the same letter if they are similar and their difference is context-dependent.

Then there's also the etymology and handling of grammatical endings. Polish spelling would be more difficult without "rz" for example, despite its two sounds already existing elsewhere in the spelling system.

acadapter··on Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)
I also noticed that part in the article.

>Why do we have all these studies showing that male and female behaviors are so similar, yet people in everyday life continue to think as if males and females were very separable?

It could be that some gender-neutral behavior patterns are part of the modern Western equivalent of "tatemae", and that they easily appear in studies because of interaction with strangers.

acadapter··on Subsonic Weapon used on the crowd in Belgrade today
Most of the research on this, has been done in the US though...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect

acadapter··on Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family
Maybe this is how the branches of Indo-European evolved.

Laryngeals replaced by vowel lengthenings, merging of consonsants, vowel shifting based on other sounds, etc. It's like there were many different events where "Indo-European with a heavy foreign accent" suddenly emerged.

acadapter··on They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
Social media no longer represents "many people are saying it".

The early internet could give an overview of what's being said in general on a particular topic - but today's content is often manipulated to support or attack a particular viewpoint.

acadapter··on 2024 first year to pass 1.5C global warming limit
I assume the unspecific "they" is a linguistic shortcut for "people in power"
acadapter··on London's 850-year-old food markets to close
The things people say in the era where comment fields have been removed from news websites (in the name of "avoiding misinformation")...
acadapter··on What has case distinction but is neither uppercase nor lowercase?
Both Serbo-Croatian and Hungarian have these multi-character letters, but these Unicode points were created for the typographical needs (or rather, bad habits) of Serbo-Croatian. The "Dz" was probably included for the use-case where someone transcribes something in Macedonian.

One example can be seen on the Croatian 2kn coin, which features a tuna and a title written T U NJ.

Hungarian has more of these multi-symbol letters (with each letter having 1-3 symbols. It also has some other complications, such as having two "sz" in a row appear like "ssz", unless separated by a line break or a hyphen (then it's just two "sz").

IMO it was probably a mistake to let the article focus so much on Hungarian, as these Unicode points don't seem to be created for the purposes of the Hungarian language.

acadapter··on Humans Are Evolving Right Before Our Eyes on the Tibetan Plateau
We are also not descendants of the 18 year old who eagerly followed a leader and died in a trench.

What is it with people nowadays, can't there be at least some room for touching this type of sensitive topic?

My post seems to become a downvote magnet. I just wanted to try an unusual perspective that is seldom talked about.

acadapter··on Humans Are Evolving Right Before Our Eyes on the Tibetan Plateau
But there are nuances to that.

I know several people who have escaped a war-torn country and had a successful life elsewhere, instead of getting affected by military propaganda, and possibly losing everything just because of other people's territorial conflicts.

acadapter··on Adaptation to high-altitude hypoxia on the Tibetan Plateau
Another interesting aspect of modern human evolution is the fact that brave men have a higher risk of dying in war, extreme sports, etc.

Will male risk behavior be more similar to female risk behavior, 10000 years from now?

Nowadays, the use-case for masculine bravery is more or less obsolete. It had a purpose when there were wild animals roaming around human habitations, but nowadays it may very well trick a man into becoming a war casualty.

Historians of the future might look back on pro-conscription advocates as those who stood in the way of the modern human.

acadapter··on Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn
The bad feeling I get from cashless is "what if some future political conflict will lower the status of my ethnicity to such a low position, so I'll be denied buying food and nobody will care?" or some similar scenario.
acadapter··on Do you still count on your fingers?
The months after July are named after numbers, but the names are from the old calendar when the year started in March.
acadapter··on Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
There is a whole Reddit thread about this, many people noticed some flickering at 9PM.

https://old.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/1cozkpa/blinkade_di...

acadapter··on Possible to dot your Is with hearts?
Heart-dotted i and j should be added to Unicode.

Medieval monks used to do this with the first letter of the word for "eye" (oko), and those got added, despite the fact that one of them had only one historical occurence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_o_variants

acadapter··on Long-term nuclear waste warning messages
Make sure to include warnings in dead languages that people from many cultures have taken an interest in, such as Latin and Ancient Greek.
acadapter··on China's Age of Malaise (2023)
Articles like these makes me want to read English translations of writings where Chinese authors and journalists have described the USA in the same style. I wonder what details and observations they would compose their story of.
acadapter··on Swedish data brokers claim journalists' legal protection to evade EU law
It's in the constitution. If you register as a publisher (ansvarig utgivare), a different set of free speech laws are used (freedom of press).

This is probably the "license" they're mentioning.

acadapter··on Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years
The "n" in "na" is not the same as the "n" in "ni".

However, only some consonants get this treatment, such as "sa" and "shi", because it only takes into account what a typical English speaker can distinguish.

Do they have to keep such an English-centric approach? Why not "nyi"?

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