tkmh

I think not being able to search for <random celebrity> is a good marker of how mastodon is trying to be something other than just a decentralized twitter clone. I personally find the twitter microblogging model, wherein most tweets seem to be retweets of high-profile users or comments on their posts, quite unhealthy for discussion among equals. Twitter is essentially a media site, whereas (I think) Mastodon hopes to be something else, more of a forum for actually taking to people. Whether it can work as/if the userbase grows remains to be seen, but I'm cautiously optimistic.

Referring to a colleague as a 'milf' is not 'clumsily making a move'. Everyone knows what that's an acronym for. If you start a private chat with a colleague, they tell you to keep it about work, and then you tell them you'd like to fuck them, then you should expect to be fired.

Gee, a subjective opinion from an anonymous source. I'm convinced.

Even if true, "very hard" /= "not allowed".

Where does it say they can't interview white candidates for jobs?

> If he can achieve his goal will mean that a lot of people could do that and there is nothing special in that project.

I think that's kind of the point of his personal challenges. He's trying to set an example of being intellectually curious, not show off that he's a genius. Wasn't one of his previous projects for the year to learn Chinese? A difficult challenge, but not a superhuman one. Plenty of other people are capable of it.

There are things to dislike about Zuckerberg, but I don't think these challenges are one of them. They're pretty admirable imo.

As Wendy Cope reminded us in Engineers' Corner.

I like this suggestion. I'm of course very much in favour of streaming as the primary mode of watching TV, but I'm very invested in seeing the BBC survive in a recognisable form into the future. Despite its considerable watering down of its original mission statement, the BBC still remains my best answer to the hypothetical "What's the best thing about being British?"

Yes, no one is a renaissance person any more. But I don't think that there were as many renaissance people in the past as we think. Admittedly I don't have much evidence for this. In the case of maths, I think our idea that many more mathematicians used to be polymaths in the past is slightly skewed dues to the fact that until about 2 centuries ago, 'mathematician' and 'physicist' were not distinct categories. We think of Gauss and Euler as polymaths, but Euler was by all accounts a terrible philosopher.

EDIT: I just remembered that Gauss was an extremely competent philologist, so maybe the above is no longer valid.

No I don't think this is quite right. The romantic artistic image of the mathematician is a prevalent one now, and we choose to see examples to fit the type. But it hasn't always been this way. Before the early 1800s the mathematician was scene as a pragmatic, man of the world sort. Or so Amir Alexander argues in his book Dual at Dawn: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Duel-Dawn-Mathematics-Histories-Tech...

I agree with you that sensitivity and complexity are not isolated to artists, and a agree to some extent that mathematics is an art form, just wanted to point out that 'mathematician as tortured artist' is a relatively modern trope.