Sign language isn’t just another way of expressing English that can be picked up like learning a different alphabet or a secret code. It’s a full, independent language with its own complete vocabulary, syntax, inflectional system, etc. that takes as long to learn as any other natural language.

It would be great if more people knew it for the sake of communicating with the deaf, but as a means of foiling surveillance, there are many other approaches that would be more effective for less time investment. (Hell, you might as well learn a really obscure spoken language that would be less likely to be recognized or deciphered than ASL.)

Global Thermonuclear War.

We queried the TriNetX Global Research Network for adults ≥ 18 years with an insomnia diagnosis (ICD-10 F51.0). The exposed cohort required ≥ 1 melatonin prescription and ≥ 365 exposure-days; controls had no melatonin exposure.

I interpret that to mean that both the study and control cohorts had insomnia diagnoses, but the cohorts weren’t randomized and no other variables were controlled for.

Before trains, sea travel was the standard way to travel long distances even if a land route was available. Sea voyages came to represent any destination that was far enough away that communities wouldn’t be in regular contact.

I had a really good pizza topped with stinging nettle once. (It doesn’t sting after cooking.)

Assuming that

• human phenotypic traits that correlate more closely with mouse traits have more-predictable outcomes with mouse-tested medicine, and

• more-predictable medical outcomes correlate with higher survival and reproductive rates,

can’t you plug that straight into the Price equation?

So 58% of districts are at or above median income, but only 24% of districts have more drivers than riders?

Could it be that both variables are closely correlated, and the latter is just sampling closer to the tail end of the distribution?

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In the long run, using mice to test human medicines will result in selection pressure for humans whose physiology more and more closely resembles mice.

What I’ve got in my pocket.

I don’t have any direct experience with that, and I can’t say if it’s a good or bad idea—but I’d say if you’re going to do it, it can’t hurt to do it with some friends and try to create some positive new experiences to overwrite the traumatic ones.

I’d say devices like metaphor and synecdoche are compression tools for meaning, and devices like rhyme and meter are checksums for error correction.

Yeah—Milton’s Paradise Lost seems closer to the modern conception.

It’s like a double negative: a cool dog is the opposite of a hot dog, but a cool cat is the opposite of a cool dog, so you end up back where you started.

Tang-era Sogdian dance music.

I think that’s reversing cause and effect: the AI bubble is the result of the preexisting corporate practice of enshittification getting a new toy to play with.

Maybe Georgism?

an economic ideology holding that persons should own the value that they produce themselves, while the economic rent derived from land—including from all natural resources, the commons, and urban locations—should belong equally to all members of society.

Immediate civilizational collapse.

Because any putative simulation of the universe would itself be algorithmic, this framework also implies that the universe cannot be a simulation.

How do they conclude that any simulation would have to be (purely) algorithmic? (For a fictional counterexample, take Douglas Adams’ Total Perspective Vortex, which simulates a universe by extrapolating from a physical piece of cake.)

Sure… I was just addressing why determinism might make us feel like our free will was in jeopardy—I wasn’t implying that it was a logical possibility.

Like I said, I think it’s an instinctive feeling rather than a logical one. Like if you’re playing cards and you realize your cards are visible, you feel like the game is compromised—even if the other players can’t see them in practice.