tingilinde

why it's called a pitch

Why soccer fields are called pitches

Not authoritative, but it seems to make sense.

 

 

issues with rideshares

As some of us have been saying for years - they pollute and the lower prices (for awhile) were based on breaking laws. 

 

on reclaiming a normal life

In the Bubble on rapid at home tests.

the old math behind a hot card game

The math behind Spot It!

a tip of the hat to Greg

steven sinofsky on the rise of the portable pc

He was a serious player at Microsoft for well over a decade and an observer and historian of the rise and direction of personal computing.

His tweetstream on an innovation.

 

healthcare vaccination mandates

It's amazing they weren't required before.  There was a lot of handwriting that people would leave in droves, but guess what...?

A friend says his brother has sent notes of a vaccinate mandate for their Thanksgiving dinner. About thirty people show up with three people over 80,   He's requiring proof of full vaccination. 

 

 

a right way to do things

An Andy Slavitt sermon

 

john v fleming on pronouns

Reacting to Jha McWhorter's op-ed on changing language and pronouns.

(Fleming is always fun to read.  A must-follow blog)

snip

...

But some who revel in breaking free of the restraints of grammatical correctness want us to succumb to the shackles of political correctness. Language must serve many functions, but one of the most vital is to talk about the empirical world as we actually experience it. There are limits to the extent that the social experience of the centuries can be coerced or abolished. Hence I speak of and enjoy a beautiful sunrise or sunset. Even I have enough elementary astronomy to know that the description of observed reality is not the same as a scientific one. But linguistic innovation leading to manifest absurdity is of limited utility.

Imagine that you are the sole witness to a crime. You saw a violent incident on the street. Two people seemed to be arguing. One of them pulled out a gun and shot the other one to death. You are absolutely confident in what you saw, and that you would be able to help the police identify the killer. In the police investigation, the following dialogue ensues.

Police Investigator: Can you describe the perpetrator?
Witness: Yes, about six four, two hundred and twenty-five pounds, three-piece suit, receding hairline and thin, graying hair, probably about fifty years old. Caucasian.
Police Investigator: Man or woman?
Witness: Certainly.
Police Investigator: No, I mean was it a man or a woman?
Witness: Dunno. It all happened so fast I didn’t have time to ask for their pronouns.

It is an old legal adage, or at least used to be, that hard cases make bad law. That is perhaps why linguistic change has, on the whole, been slow and consensual, rarely abandoning common sense.

...

 

 

35 to 54?

Covid-19 is currently the number one cause of death in that age range.

a tip of the hat to Jim

 

 

guessing at number 10

Using AI to take a stab at Beethoven's vastly unfinished 10th symphony.  Of course this is impossible, but they try to flesh out some ideas. I don't find the excerpt very convincing, but I'm sure it was fun.

 

 

the canadian meteorite

A dramatic entry.  Meteorites of exceptional scientific interest are rare, but they happen.  Either way it's worth a lot of money. I hope she's being properly advised.

 

the addressable unvaccinated

Zeynep on how progress might be made - even in a public heath-backward nation like the US.

then read this - 48 hours

 

 

 

 

the italian mandate

The Italian vaccine mandate for all workers takes effect.  Unvaccinated can still work, but they need frequent tests and have to pay for the tests themselves.

 

 

a beautiful structure disappears when a dimension is added

The nice geometric structure of grid cell firings in the brains of rats and bats when they navigate two dimensional spaces goes away when a dimension is added.

snip

...

since all of the experiments were conducted in 2D environments, it hasn’t been clear how grid cells might represent environments of three dimensions (or higher, in the case of cognitive spaces).

Kate Jeffery, a behavioral neuroscientist at University College London, has — like Ulanovsky — sought to answer that question for more than a decade. To get her rats to explore the vertical dimension and measure their neural representations, she and her colleagues built a veritable playground for them, gradually adding ramps and spiral staircases, climbing walls and jungle gyms. Watching the animals roam through those contraptions, Jeffery has looked for clues into how grid cells might extend their regular patterns into 3D space.

...

 

 

 

the iCane (eyeCane?)

An affordable navigation tool for the blind.