[pilowsky]

My favourite Italian dessert is Zabaglione.
It stands out from the pack (imho) because it is so hard to make at home.
This means that you have an additional pleasure in finding an Italian restaurant that can make one.


As an alternative to actually eating Italian one can also read any of the Montalbano detective books. Salvo will have you salivating instantly.

[Winstonm]

Texas Governor Abbott tests positive for Covid 19.

LMAO

[Gilithin]

Winstonm, on 2021-August-17, 15:56, said:

Texas Governor Abbott tests positive for Covid 19.

And used it as an opportunity to prostitute himself by advertising for one of his donors while receiving a treatment from them that any of his voters would have been refused given the diagnosis that was reported.

[johnu]

Landmark study about honesty and cheating relied on faked data

Quote

A landmark study on how to curb cheating has been retracted after nearly a decade and the prominent professor whose team produced the paper is himself accused of cheating and relying on faked data.

Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economist at Duke University, rose to prominence with his 2012 study that found people would be less likely to cheat and lie if they signed an honesty declaration at the top of a form before answering questions.

Surely this is a story for the Hall of Irony.

[pilowsky]

johnu, on 2021-August-22, 00:54, said:

Landmark study about honesty and cheating relied on faked data



Surely this is a story for the Hall of Irony.

Maybe, but is the story true or made up?

[thepossum]

It's beautiful whatever

Maybe they hadn't signed their ethics declaration 😂

[kenberg]

johnu, on 2021-August-22, 00:54, said:

Landmark study about honesty and cheating relied on faked data



Surely this is a story for the Hall of Irony.

My first thought was "This is where I came in". In high school I wrote a term paper on parapsychology. At the time, J. B. Rhine and his studies were a big deal. See
https://en.wikipedia...eph_Banks_Rhine

An excerpt from the Wik article:
"Rhine's results have never been duplicated by the scientific community."

To write my high school paper, I interviewed a psychology professor who stated exactly that. I was 17 and my high school paper no doubt showed that I was 17, but I did express skepticism about Rhine's results. I left it at skepticism. And probably I should just leave it at skepticism in this case although I imagine The National Academy was pretty certain when they retracted the paper.

As to what affects honesty, that's a very interesting topic. I like a quiet life, playing it straight can help achieve that. But of course that's an oversimplification.

[y66]

Kim Severson at NYT said:

he other day I sent an email to a colleague asking if she had heard anything on that promotion she was up for. “Not expecting any news soon, since the whole world seems to be collapsing around us!” she wrote back.

I think a lot of people might feel that way lately. If we were all in therapy together, I would let you know that I hear you and I see you. But we’re in a cooking newsletter together. So let’s cook.

https://messaging-cu...896ed87b2d9c72a

[johnu]

E.T., Phone Hell? Creationist Ken Ham Says Jesus Can’t Save Space Aliens

Quote

Creationist Ken Ham, who built a giant non-floating “Noah’s Ark” themed attraction in Kentucky, says he doesn’t think there’s life outside of Earth.

And if such life existed, they shouldn’t expect any form of salvation from Jesus Christ.

“Jesus came to save us, not to another planet to save another race of beings,” he wrote on Twitter, adding that it’s clear “salvation through Christ is only for the Adamic race,” aka human earthlings.

On the bright side, however, he said they won’t need redemption anyway... since they don’t exist. The Bible, according to his strict interpretation, says only Earth was made to be inhabited “and the other celestial bodies were created for signs, seasons, days, and years,” he wrote.

I loved this statement

"only Earth was made to be inhabited “and the other celestial bodies were created for signs, seasons, days, and years"

More "normal" people could love religious nuts like him if they had their own isolated country, let's call it the New Confederate States of America.

[y66]

Morgan Stickney’s Race Against the Clock

[pilowsky]

An AI implementation of Hide-and-Seek.

[kenberg]

pilowsky, on 2021-August-31, 21:57, said:

An AI implementation of Hide-and-Seek.

I have to listen to this a couple more times, at least if there will be a quiz, but my first impression is that it is a real kick. The narrator injects some humor as he explains what's going on. I will send ot off to some others.

[pilowsky]

If there is a quiz, it would have to be done over at least 5000 iterations to make sure that you didn't get the right answers by a fluke.
There are quite a few others - one of them asks if altruism is worthwhile.
It was - sort of.

[pilowsky]

Burnout is a problem in Australia and even if Shane was hooning about and thought he was deadly, that's no reason to be getting shot at.
It's just unacceptable.

[y66]

Robert Wright in"Why Buddhism is True" said:

So what exactly is the illusory part of pursuing doughnuts or sex or consumer goods or a promotion? There are different illusions associated with different pursuits, but for now we can focus on one illusion that's common to these things: the overestimation of how much happiness they'll bring. Again, by itself, this delusional only in a subtle sense. If I asked you whether you thought that getting the next promotion, or getting an A on that next exam, or eating that next powdered-sugar doughnut would bring you eternal bliss, you'd say no, obviously not. On the other hand, do often pursue such things with, at the very least, an unbalanced view of the future. We spend more time envisioning the perks that a promotion will bring than envisioning the headaches it will bring. And there may an unspoken sense that once we've achieved this long-sought goal, once we've reached the summit, we'll be able to relax, or at least things will be enduringly better. Similarly, when we see that doughnut sitting there, we immediately imagine how good it tastes, not how intensely we'll want another doughnut only moments after eating it, or how we'll feel a bit tired or agitated later, when the sugar rush subsides.

[pilowsky]

Is it good to be bad or bad to be good?
In this AI simulation, the blobs learn about sharing vs fighting for food.
Still trying to work out the implications for Bridge.

[Gilithin]

pilowsky, on 2021-September-06, 03:23, said:

Is it good to be bad or good to be bad?
In this AI simulation, the blobs learn about sharing vs fighting for food.
Still trying to work out the implications for Bridge.

Super video!

[kenberg]

pilowsky, on 2021-September-06, 03:23, said:

Is it good to be bad or good to be bad?
In this AI simulation, the blobs learn about sharing vs fighting for food.
Still trying to work out the implications for Bridge.

Very interesting, and the links for further exploration are very tempting.

As to bridge, it probably depends some on whether you are playing something like a team game robot challenge with three robots at your table and four robots at the other table, or playing against humans.

In 1961 I was a 22 year old with a summer job where I was an underling in a project doing a computer simulation of war. It was very primitive and my reaction was "I hope to hell no one is actually using these results to make decisions". Much progress since then but I still think caution is advisable.

Anyway, the video is interesting and I will follow some of the links. Probably not today. Oops, history shows that when I say "not today" it often doesn't happen. We will see.

[Gilithin]

Perhaps the best equivalent for bridge is - if you are better than your opponents, try to play a similar system to minimise variability; if worse than the opponents then play as different a system as possible to add more randomness to the final result. The other obvious similarity comes in the form of the odds required for bidding game or slam at MP. But that is already widely known by almost every bridge player out there.

[y66]

A Century Ago, Miners Fought in a Bloody Uprising. Few Know About It Today.

Quote

At the Battle of Blair Mountain, thousands of miners clashed with sheriff’s deputies in the largest insurrection since the Civil War.

Quote

“It is one of the most amazing confrontations between workers and bosses ever in this country and no one knows about it,” said Cecil Roberts, the president of the United Mine Workers of America and a great-nephew of Bill Blizzard, who led the miners’ army in 1921. “It seems to be almost impossible unless there’s a concerted effort for people not to know about it.”

Quote

But it was primarily the coal industry and its supporters in state government, Mr. Keeney and other historians said, who tried to smother any public discussion of the history. State officials demanded that any mention of Blair Mountain be stripped from federal oral histories. A 1931 state law regulated the “study of social problems” and for decades, the Mine Wars were left entirely out of school history textbooks. Today, the battlefield is owned in large part by coal operators, who until recently planned to strip mine Blair Mountain itself.