Family resemblances are complicated

Jul. 12th, 2025 05:49 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
via [personal profile] oursin, something I found interesting: We still don't understand family resemblance, and some of what we thought we knew is mistaken, or might be.

This article describes research that used data from almost a million people: every Norwegian student who took a standardized test from 2007-2019.

Quoting the article: "The resemblance of twins cannot be reconciled with any model....The resemblance of adoptees cannot be reconciled with any model."

Adjusting a model to account better for twins makes it a poorer match of adoptive relationships, and vice versa. Any attempt to account for one of these moves the model away adopted siblings makes it fit twins less well, and vice versa.
cut for length )

Birdfeeding

Jul. 12th, 2025 03:27 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today is cloudy, mild, and wet.  It rained earlier.

I fed the birds.  I've seen a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches plus a male cardinal.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 7/12/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

It started drizzling again.

EDIT 7/12/25 -- I potted up 2 apricot seeds.

I picked the first ripe cucumber.  :D






.
 
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
and completion of orientation. They really are taking anybody with a pulse, as judged by the extremely detailed list of instructions for appropriate behavior during orientation. I'd be more insulted, but that's good for me, I really need a job. If they had higher standards they would hire somebody with formal work experience, or at least an associate's degree.

(Don't think I've stopped applying other places, mind you, but I'm really not in a position to be picky, either.)

**************


Read more... )
petra: Barbara Gordon smiling knowingly (Default)
[personal profile] petra
I had the opportunity to go to a concert of his recently and enjoyed his part of the show exceedingly. The opening act, Puddles Pity Party, was very much not my thing, alas, but Mr. Yankovic is exuberantly himself, the costume changes are lolarious, and the music is inimitably Weird. If you like his work, you'll almost certainly like his concert. Extra points awarded for the songs (not all of them, alas) that had text videos, effectively functioning as closed captioning with a sense of humor.

Also, the audience was full of people wearing extremely cheerful shirts, and made great viewing.

I have not seen the most recent Murderbot yet, but I did spot David Dastmalchian as John Deacon in a clip of Weird-the-biopic which was played at the concert, so that's almost the same thing, right? I was very proud of my facial recognition software for picking up on that. I would like to belatedly award points to the casting department for finding a way to get another MENA-descended person into Queen, which is a great joke I didn't get at the time.

I loved the new Murderbot short story, which I read aloud to my SO.
spiralsheep: Sheep wearing an eyepatch (Default)
[personal profile] spiralsheep
The real Salt Path (link to The Observer): how a blockbuster book and film were spun from lies, deceit and desperation.

The Salt Path-ological liar, The Wild Lies, and Landlies )

Most importantly, to me, disabled people suffer collateral damage from both aspects of her fraud: firstly by being told they could do x or y if only they had as much willpower as Walker's fictional character with CBS/CBD, then secondly from the assumption that many disabled people are frauds like Walker. I'm betting she'll continue to profit from her crimes while her victims, intended and indirect, suffer for her choices. (I also feel sympathy for the Walker children and hope they avoid being dragged into this.)

we will be visiting London

Jul. 12th, 2025 11:42 am
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
Cattitude, Adrian, and I are going to be in London for a week, starting Monday July 14th. This trip is partly so my brother and I can sort out my mother's things, including photos and papers, but we should have some free time to see people and/or do tourist things.

We'd like to get together with people. I realize this is somewhat last-minute as well as vague, since we don't know how much time we'll have available.

I have visited London several times, but that trip to see my mother in April was Adrian's first visit to England; Cattitude was three with me for a week in 2001.

We mask indoors, but it's July, so we're hoping for restaurants with outdoor seating.
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
Well... if you're interested in reading a book about how living in an over-privileged Connecticut town is terrible and nobody should ever do it (especially if that's going to intersect badly with their terrible childhood) then this is a book you'll like. I preferred Dreadful - the realism : magic ratio in this book leaned a little too realistic, also, I just do not believe that the only school choices are a. fancy schools for wealthy overachievers that have massively high standards and high stakes testing b. xenophobic schools with very low standards and c. homeschooling. Even if there are no public school options there still have to be artsy fartsy schools for wealthy people who know that their kids cannot do the pressure cooker thing starting in kindy.

Reading adventures

Jul. 12th, 2025 05:16 pm
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[personal profile] cimorene
I haven't been able to get invested in reading a specific fandom in several years. Every now and then I look at fandoms I have read in the past and manage to spend a few weeks rereading some of them before I run out of patience to keep looking, but that's not very long.

About a month ago, I tried to read some 911 fic from [personal profile] waxjism's spreadsheet. She is keeping a spreadsheet of every fic in this fandom she has read. She records the title and author; pairing (even though they're all the same pairing); summary - which is sometimes the author summary and sometimes she writes something in this field like a comment, or a whole rant, that doesn't actually include a summary; a column called "good/no" where she categorizes them as very good, good, above mid, mid, "sub mid", or bad; and a column called "comments" where she sometimes rants, or continues the rant from the summary columnn, and sometimes just says things like "fun-ish" or "not flawless" or "pretty hot" or "unbearably written by a child or a super-offline person". This is different from how I, at least, used to keep track of a recs list when I had to do it manually, because she puts in everything she starts even if she DNF immediately, and also it's for private use. I tried to use it to find things to read, and it's not like I'm unfamiliar with reading fanfiction without canon but also I had seen some of this show accidentally while she was watching it. I did keep trying for a while and I read... some... number of the ones she marked very good or good, based on the comments and summaries, but I kept getting bored and annoyed at the characters. It just wasn't grabbing me. Very disappointing because there would've been a lot to read. (A huge amount of the things on this spreadsheet are marked bad or sub-mid even by her, and I think she is in general more forgiving in judging quality than I am even though unlike me she never reads things that seem kinda bad or mediocre to her for fun. And she has never gone archive-spelunking or read directly from the tag: she ONLY reads from recs and bookmarks. There's no control to test it here, but I think this bears out my personal conviction that there is a 0% increase in quality from recs and bookmarks (of random people that you don't know as opposed to someone vetted and trusted) vs. the slushpile (the entire content of the archive at random)).

A couple of weeks ago I saw a post on Tumblr that said something like, paraphrased, "There's a very popular notion that in the past all literature was good quality compared to now, but that's not true. This is survivorship bias. The stuff we still know and read in the present day is the good stuff, but a vast quantity of bad and mediocre stuff is lost to time." Someone responded by linking to The Westminster Detective Library, a project investigating the earliest history of the detective fiction genre. Apparently the professor who began it was initially inspired by a conviction that Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue was not actually the first detective short story based on features of its writing which in his opinion betrayed the signs of a genre history. The website contains transcribed public-domain detective fiction that was published in American magazines before the first Sherlock Holmes story's publication. I have been enjoying reading through it chronologically since I read the post. Reading in one genre is a bit like reading in one fandom, and reading very old fiction has several special points of interest to me because I love learning about history and culture in that way. Of course on the minus side, it isn't gay. But I'm getting fascinating glimpses of the history of the genre and the history of jurisprudence in both America and Britain. And although there is definitely mediocre and "sub-mid" writing published in the periodicals of the 18th-19th centuries, awash in silly cliches and carelessly proofread if at all, they are still slightly more filtered for legibility and literacy than the experience of reading modern fanfiction (even, as mentioned in the last paragraph, from recs lists and bookmarks, unless you have a supply of trusted and well-known reccers to follow. I sometimes come near tears remembering the days when I could always check what [personal profile] thefourthvine and [personal profile] norah were recommending, but I can't blame them for the decline, either, because I was generally reading and at least bookmarking if not reccing just as productively at the time).

The other thing that has happened to affect my reading is that my little sister's high school best friend got engaged and invited my sister to her engagement party in Florida, which is going to be "Gatsby-themed". The 1920s is possibly my single oldest hyperfixation, dating from before the age of 10, and it's the historical period that I know and care the most about. For the past ten years or so the term "Gatsby" has, consequently, inspired me with the most intense rage and irritation, because its popularity after the movie version of The Great Gatsby flooded the internet with so much loathesomely inaccurate "information" about and imagery of the 1920s as to actually make it harder to find real information, and nearly impossible to filter out this dreck. So my sister began shopping for her Engagement Party Outfit, which is supposed to be "Gatsby"-themed, and I am the permanent primary audience for this (just as she is the permanent primary audience any time I am planning outfits or considering my wardrobe). This has led me to reading 1920s magazines online from the Internet Archive and HathiTrust - initially the middle-class fashion magazine McCall's; then also Vogue and Harper's Bazar (much more pretentious and bourgeois). I tried to branch out into interior design magazines of the same period (House & Garden and Better Homes & Gardens), but it has been harder to find scans of them. I find 1920s romantic fiction (serialized copiously in all these magazines) much less readable and enjoyable than the 1920s detective fiction which I am more familiar with (I've read plenty of it thanks to my interest in Golden Age detective stories)... but I've also learned a lot more physical and aesthetic details about women's fashion and interiors from the romantic fiction, which makes me think I perhaps need to seek out more of it.

Philosophical Questions: Poverty

Jul. 12th, 2025 02:36 am
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
People have expressed interest in deep topics, so this list focuses on philosophical questions.

Is poverty in society inevitable?

Read more... )

Extinct Birds

Jul. 11th, 2025 11:31 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
'The Lord of the Rings' director Peter Jackson is on a mission to revive the world’s tallest bird, 600 years after it went extinct

Inspired by their debut project, Jackson is now working with Colossal to bring the ancient moa back to life through subfossil sourcing and genetic engineering.

On July 8, Jackson and his partner donated $15 million to the project
.


The moa is an excellent choice for de-extinction, as it died out relatively recently and due to human misbehavior.

Read more... )

Today's Adventures

Jul. 11th, 2025 09:34 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today we went to the Marshall Farmer's Market. It's an evening market from 6-8 PM, followed by a band concert, which is way better than a morning one.

Read more... )
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Take Us North is down to the last day or so of its campaign. If you want to participate, now is the time.

$50,976 pledged of $30,000 goal
509 backers
26 hours to go
rocky41_7: (Default)
[personal profile] rocky41_7 in [community profile] fffriday

Today I finished the latest book in the Baru Cormorant series (fourth book remains to-be-released), The Tyrant Baru Cormorant. Y'all, Baru is so back.

! Spoilers for books 1 & 2 below !
 
If you've looked at other reviews for the series, you may have seen book 2, The Monster Baru Cormorant, referred to as the series' "sophomore slump." I disagree, but I understand where the feeling comes from. The Monster feels like a prelude, a setting of the board, for The Tyrant. The Monster puts all the pieces in place for the cascade of schemes and plays that come in The Tyrant. They almost feel like one book split into two (which is fair—taken together, they represent about a thousand pages and would make for one mammoth novel).
 
If you felt like Baru was too passive in The Monster and that there wasn't enough scheming going on, I can happily report those things are wholly rectified in The Tyrant. Having located the infamous and quasi-mythological Cancrioth at the end of The Monster, Baru wastes no time in whipping into full savant plotting mode.
 

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