@ergative@wandering.shop
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

ergative

@ergative@wandering.shop

SFF booknerd; calligrapher; Islamic geometric art doer; figure skating appreciater; coffee-drinking, granola-baking, tofu-eating wokeratum; psycholinguist by vocation, fretful porpentine by aspiration.

Header image: 2 repeats of an Islamic geometric tile pattern from the Alhambra Palace

Avatar: single repeat of a pattern from the Royal Alcazar of Seville

Contributer at Nerds of A Feather (http://www.nerds-feather.com/)

#nobot #nosearch

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ergative, to ukteachers
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

Hey, Mastodon! Indiana's attorney general has created an anti-teacher snitch portal for people to report school teachers for being too woke. It allows you to upload files and everything!

There appears to be no safeguard against entering any text you want in any of the boxes, and no location/residence checking.

Dare I ask you to do your thing?

https://www.in.gov/attorneygeneral/education-liberty/

Boosts welcome!

#academicChatter #education #bts #taylorSwift

ergative, to SF
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

Hey, friends, I wrote a review of Foundation (the book--the OG!) for Nerds of a Feather.

(Don't click through if you love this book. I didn't much care for it.)

http://www.nerds-feather.com/2024/05/first-contact-foundation-by-isaac-asimov.html

#SF #BookReview @bookstodon #sff

ergative, to fountainpens
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

I'm reading a book that mentions inherited , but also is set before railways to Inverness opened, so I'm doing a bit of research into relative timelines to see if this is even possible.

Turns out it is, just barely: First railway to Inverness opened 1854, while eyedropper fountain pens were patented in 1809. So if this takes place 1850, fountain pen is 30 years old, it's possible. (But not if pen is self-filling, patented in1832.)

Did the author check dates, or just get lucky?

ergative, to random
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

Hey, friends, a quick reminder that although Make America Kittens Again (MAKA) has been blocked from Chrome, it still works on Firefox:

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/make-firefox-kittens-again/

(MAKA is a browser extension that replaces all images whose metadata includes the word 'Trump' with a creative-commons picture of a kitten. Here's what it did to the front page of today's NYTimes for me.)

ergative, to Julia
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

I find it WILDLY FRUSTRATING implementing contrast coding in Julia.

If I use ContrastCoding(), I can specify my own contrast matrices (yay!) but I can't label them. So the regression output just reuses my actual factor levels to label an actual model term that means something like, say, 'mean of levels A and B vs. mean of levels C and D'. Or whatever. To interpret my model, I must make physical notes on a piece of paper about what each term means.

1/2

ergative,
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

If I use HypothesisCoding(), I can label everything nicely (yay!), but it insists on re-weighting my matrix for me, so if I put in the matrix I want to use, it changes it into something else. I have to put in a different matrix, with the positive term as 1 and the negative terms as fractions adding up to 1, to trick it into reweighting the matrix into what I actually want it to be.

I LEARNED HOW TO BUILD CONTRAST MATRICES
BY HAND JULIA! Don't try to do it for me. You're just breaking it!

2/2

ergative,
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

@exa StatsModels.

Judging from Dave Kleinschmidt's very useful tour of it, I think possibly it was simply built for someone who learned to specify contrast matrices differently from me.

I infer this from the bit where Dave remarks that the hypothesis matrix is transformed into a contrast matrix in a way that he wouldn't be able to derive off the top of his head. To me, the contrast matrix is great! It's the hypothesis matrix that I have to puzzle over.

https://repsychling.github.io/contrasts-and-formula/

ergative, to random
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

Hmm. I'm considering registering myself as a very very small business to sell my art. Hmm.

, advice would be welcome. This would be extremely small-scale. Like, a commissions or two a year, plus maybe prints. I know I don't need to do tax declarations if I earn under £1000, but I could imagine going above that, so I want to do it properly.

ergative, to random
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

A propos of , here is a photo that Mr Absolutive found, of all places, at the Daily Mail (ptooey).

(please don't infer anything untoward about him; he checks all the newspapers on election day now that twitter is gone)

ergative, to random
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

looks around nervously

licks lips

takes deep breath

So--um, why does @bitterkarella pretend that musk is italian?

Like--I get it's a joke. But I I don't get the joke.

I've googled. Musk says Italians will become extinct because of low birth rate. Italy is willing to host the musk-zuckerberg cage match.

Is one of those the source of the joke?

Did Musk claim he was Mario or something?

I don't get it.

ergative, to fantasy
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

Hallo, shop! Yesterday I didn't much care for 'The Cartographers', but today you can read about why I LOVED Starling House, by Alix E Harrow, on Nerds of a Feather!

Look, just do what the nice sentient house wants, all right?

http://www.nerds-feather.com/2023/07/review-starling-house-by-alix-e-harrow.html

@bookstodon

ergative, to bookstodon
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

Sitting here thinking about how Mr Rochester spends an important chapter of Jane Eyre in full drag.

@bookstodon

ergative, to linguistics
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

It's only just occurred to me decades late that the joke of 'The Addams Family Values' is based on ambiguous phrase structure. We could have [Addams Family] modifying 'values', as in Fig 1 -- the intended interpretation, but there's also the alternative bracketing which is automatically invoked by the highly frequent collocation 'family values'.

It's rather a brilliant film title!

(don't come at me for using X' schemas. I like 'em, they serve my non-syntactician needs)

Fig 2: Phrase structure tree of the bracket structure [NP [D the] [N' [Adj?? Addams] [N' [NP [N Family ] ] [N Values ] ] ] ]

ergative, to books
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

Day 3 of ! Get yourself a copy of Alix E Harrow's newest, 'Starling House'. Southern gothic at its finest, which I raved about at length here on @NerdsofaFeather: http://www.nerds-feather.com/2023/07/review-starling-house-by-alix-e-harrow.html

@bookstodon

ergative, to fountainpens
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

Hello, bookfriends! Up on Nerds of a Feather today I share my thoughts about The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd, which could have been a lot better than it was, alas. (Fanciers of may well enjoy the footnote.)

http://www.nerds-feather.com/2023/07/review-cartographers-by-peng-shepherd.html

@bookstodon

ergative, to bookstodon
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

Hallo, friendos! I have a review of a vintage body-swap book up at @NerdsofaFeather this morning: Strange Journey, by Maud Cairnes.

http://www.nerds-feather.com/2024/03/review-strange-journey-by-maud-cairnes.html

#bookReview @fantasy #sff @bookstodon

ergative, to random
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

Look, I know it's now a millennial cringe thing to talk about , but today I've gone to the dentist, put in a warranty claim for a dehumidifier, applied for a formal position as a statistician, and emailed the electricians about fixing an electrical thing, and I need some goddammed recognition that I have been a goddamned responsible fucking adult today.

ergative, to bookstodon
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

Dannnng, @chloroform_tea 's review of Grace Curtis's book 'Floating Hotel' really makes me want to read it.

http://www.nerds-feather.com/2024/03/review-floating-hotel-by-grace-curtis.html

@bookstodon

ergative, to random
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

TFW you encounter a super-simple algorithm for converging on a Sierpinski gasket through randomly sampling from one of three perturbations of a random starting point on the plane, and realize you can spend 10 minutes in R and simulate it yourself:

#rstats

ergative, to fantasy
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

Dear book publishers everywhere:

Hire this artist to do your covers!

https://www.instagram.com/superstarfighter/

#fantasy #publishing #artists @bookstodon

ergative, to SF
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

I'm reading Foundation for the first time, in preparation for an upcoming review for @NerdsofaFeather , and I'm torn between 'Asimov is doing something brilliant' and 'Asimov is doing something very silly'. I really hope it's the former. I can see how it could be. But I fear it's going to end up being the latter, because in my experience reading Golden Age , writing in that era doesn't tend to do the thing that needs to happen for the former.

We'll see!

(No spoilers, please)

ergative, to calligraphy
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

What an odd, uninformed article about . I am delighted that it's experiencing a revival, but it gets so many things wrong!

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/29/style/calligraphy-handwriting-revival.html

1/?

ergative, to fantasy
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

Hey, Mastodon, I'm halfway through book four of Libba Bray's 'Diviners' quartet, and it is really good! Just super-solid, well-plotted, well-paced 1920s magical flappers who have to save the world from ghosts. The ensemble cast is effortlessly diverse, and the mood does a brilliant job of capturing that breathless optimism of 1920s America without losing sight of all the darkness lurking underneath it all. A tiny bit purple at times, but super-good.

@bookstodon

ergative, to random
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

Fuck yeah, this is my home town! Go go go, good job kids! (ht to @waxy for original post).

When I was in high school, a theatre student at the local university wanted to put on a production of Corpus Christi, in which Jesus was gay, and there were bomb threats and it went to court (see second link). I think it did eventually get staged.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/05/31/marian-school-theater-lgbtq-indiana/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2001/07/21/the-show-goes-on/b223b78b-0963-4a1d-8dfe-cdbf02dc877d/

ergative, to random
@ergative@wandering.shop avatar

I can tell exactly who on mastodon is in Europe because they're all complaining about time changes this morning.

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