Friday Ephemera

Spot the error. || The thrill of beavers. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Bold statement. || Baggage of note. (h/t, Ben) || New job. || Not yet junk. || Incoming. || Needles and a bag of shit. || Assorted things, close up. || Reviews of U.S. national parks, presented as catchy posters. || Assorted historical photos, from adhesive bras and polar bear mascots to the making of Godzilla, 1954. (h/t, Things) || Dad skills. || A little anxiety. || She’s “an avian-human hybrid” and she wants you to memorise her pronouns. || I was previously unfamiliar with the breast paradox. || Women’s football match interrupted by something more interesting. || And finally, for a moment there, I wasn’t quite sure what it was he was making.

Comments

[WTP]

I know, right, advanced degrees make you smaaart, totally immune to woo, and qualified to be in any government position.

Maybe...maybe in the 20th century or before. Since about 2010 or so, not so much. Even from MIT. I subscribed to an MIT technology magazine back in the late 90's and they sent me an MIT coffee mug. I liked it because it was black and thus cleaning it...well. I digress. Anyway, I got a tad embarrassed when a young lady with whom I worked and who graduated from MIT assumed that I had gone there. It was a litt Joke between us for a few years. Then, when working for "a major defense contractor" years later, I started to see stories from MIT, wokey woke stories. But I liked the mug. Did I mention it was black and...well...not wanting to be associated with MIT, even mistakenly anymore, I did the proper engineering fix and covered the logo with duct tape. Another problem solved.
...
Damn json error again...

[Chester Draws]

One way to see what % of multiple personality cases are self-created is to compare before and after widespread media (including self-help books in the 80s-90s). Just like the massive increase in teen girls declaring that they are trans. Mass delusions.

Indeed. There have always been men who have lived as women, and women who have lived as men. Many people lived relatively happy lives that way in the past (though I suspect it is harder now, because your choice to live as the opposite sex is supposed to come with *being* the opposite sex).

Multiple Personality Disorder, by comparison, is simply not real. People can have hallucinations, manic episodes, etc which are supposedly diagnosed as that. But it is always associated with being not mentally well.

[epicur]

If there's a breast paradox, then there's gotta be a butt paradox, too.

Actually, that is, or was, one of the older theories, that when homo whoever switched from rear mount to a face to face encounter, the permanently inflated breasts imitated a hiney.

[Steve E]

Maybe...maybe in the 20th century or before.

Not so sure. I would do all the interviews when I hired in my department. I didn't trust HR to know what character was and how empty a seemingly stacked resume could be. I vividly remember interviewing a candidate for an inside sales position (esentially a job for a really good customer service representative) in the mid-nineties. He went to Upper Canada College, which is the top prep school in Canada, and he eventually went on to get a PhD from the University of Toronto (in what amounted to butt-fuckery). He was driving cab (I've hired people who had driven cabs who were awesome) and had attitude a mile wide. He seemed to think he was interviewing me. It was a hard pass.

I had someone working for me--who I inherited--who went to Princeton and wore his school tie to work almost every other day. He wasn't exceptionally bright and certainly wasn't the best man on the team. If your parents have got the bucks and you've got the inflated marks you can go to school anywhere. It's still just an undergrad degree that you probably half-assed, while someone who went to state college worked his ass off and had an idea of where he wanted to be.

[Squires]

age slider

Fucked up in character creation.

An all too common problem these days.

[Farnsworth M Muldoon]

Remember the scoops from Soylent Green?

[WTP]

So the Twitter seizure of my devices has finally made its way to the ONE browser (bare bones Safari) through which I was still able to view tweets without signing up/joining twitter. At least on my iPad anyway. Anyone having success viewing Twitter on iPad?

[WTP]

Heh. Nvr mind. Figured another way around it.

[Farnsworth M Muldoon]

Figured another way around it.

By doing what? I found that if you hit the sign up button and then just X out of the sign up pop up you can be on your merry way.

[sla]

Reviews of U.S. national parks, presented as catchy posters.

"Scenery is distant and impersonal", "There are bugs and they will bite you on your face".

Reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh's description of a tour group in an Egyptian tomb...

... clutching their candles, like penitents in procession, this whole rag-tag and bobtail of self-improvement and uplift. Some had been bitten by mosquitoes and bore swollen, asymmetrical faces; many were footsore, and limped and stumbled as they went; one felt faint and was sniffing 'salts'; one coughed with dust; another had her eyes inflamed by the sun; another wore his arm in a sling, injured in heaven knows what endeavour; every one of the party in some way or another was bruised and upbraided by the thundering surf of education.

[Princess Cutekitten]

A good account of the multiple-personality fad can be found in Sybil Exposed, by Debbie Nathan.

[WTP]

I found that if you hit the sign up button and then just X out of the sign up pop up you can be on your merry way.

Similar. I clicked on through to where it asked you to enter an email address then back arrowed from there.

[Farnsworth M Muldoon]

Similar.

Thanks - it is a wonder to me that sites like FaceSpace, Instagram, Pinterest, and the like all block people who don't sign up. Seeing as how thy live and die by advertising, it seems rather counterintuitive not to encourage casual visitors. Same with many news sites - block me, GFY, the story usually is someplace else.

[pst314]

Seeing as how thy live and die by advertising, it seems rather counterintuitive not to encourage casual visitors.

Speculation: The rates they can charge advertisers depend on the number of registered users, the tracking data extracted from those users, and the click-through rates from those users.

[WTP]

Well, I just got another leftist to quit a FB group and possibly FB entirely. That makes three or four now. Is anyone else even trying?

[anon a mouse]

The rates they can charge advertisers depend on numbers derived from imaginary targets of said advertisers...

Bubble 2.0

[Ed Snack]

I suspect that MPD is indeed real but far rarer than it would appear. Interestingly enough Daniel Dennett looked at this (couldn’t say investigated as it wasn’t that in depth) by going to a “Com” for sufferers and talking to people there. In as much it is a self reported problem, his conclusion was, as I recall, that if it wasn’t real some (but by no means all) were reasonably convincing witnesses and fully believed it themselves. A bit like his theories on consciousness in that the only source we have is people and what they can express, heterophenomenology I think he labelled his approach. Just FWIW.

[pst314]

Should have posted this two days ago:

[WEP]

" Is anyone else even trying?"

Lately, I've been clicking on all the ads on Google Gmail and YouTube. I'm hoping they get charged for a wasted click, as well as screw up any tracking data they're collecting on me.

Baby steps, I know, but helps counterbalance the spam phone calls we get.

[WTP]

as well as screw up any tracking data they're collecting on me.

I like to engage obvious FB phishing scams with wrong information. Information that is obviously wrong to anyone who knows me but believable to those who don't. I read a book once, forget the name, where a character in the novel was an NCO or such in the Hungarian military near the end of the Cold War. When they had routine exercises or such he would take as much equipment as he could justify and then lose some of it. It was his way of fighting back against the system.

[pst314]

I like to engage obvious FB phishing scams with wrong information.

I do see a lot of them: FB commenters requesting "friend" requests, using obviously generic language showing that they know nothing about the person they are attempting to scam.

[WTP]

Should have posted this two days ago:

Canada wasn't born, it was hatched.

[pst314]

Hatched like a bird? Or like a plot?

[WTP]

Like a loony.

[pst314]

Well, they did put a loon on their one-dollar coin....