apmee

Right. And how do we know his paper wouldn’t still have been accepted without his self-censoring?

I’m not saying I don’t believe him, or that we shouldn’t take such concerns seriously, but he could at least have acknowledged that this is effectively unfalsifiable conjecture.

I don’t quite understand how you’re able to acknowledge the rarity of such a sensationalised case as Isla Bryson’s, yet still use it to justify your support for policy that would hurt the trans people you know.

On the other hand, other parents may well wish to have access to cherished stories from their childhood to read to their own children _without_ first having to re-read them all in advance and prepare their own annotated versions.

I'm not even necessarily agreeing with the publisher's approach here, but I can certainly see there being a market for "modernised" versions of older books that tired parents can relax into reading aloud as a bedtime story, without that constant low-level unease about the possibility of some dodgy dated stuff popping up out of nowhere.

I don’t think this necessarily is evidence of his not being smart, as it could just as well be ascribed to malice.

Perhaps this will finally prompt Paul to stop giving him the benefit of the doubt though. I’ve long been flummoxed as to why he had continued to, long after it becoming obvious to most that it was not deserved.

Bit of a long shot, but I don't suppose you'd happen to know where to find that post or what it was called?

> Their FAQ on the topics simply says they'll block "medical misinformation" which they define as anything the WHO disagrees with

This seems entirely sensible to me.

> As the WHO has repeatedly disagreed with itself

Unless I misunderstand you, you're saying this as if it's a bad thing. No one's saying the the decision-making processes at the WHO are perfect, but shifts in stance and advice in response to newly available evidence is not "disagreeing with oneself". It's fundamentally how science works.

In fact, most of the criticisms from credible experts have been that the WHO have been too resistant to updating their positions (in the face of the increasingly overwhelming evidence last year that the virus is airborne, for example).

> this is pure authoritarianism. No fact-finding has gone into this decision.

You consider their policy of deferring to an internationally recognised public health body to inform their content guidelines to be an example of authoritarianism?

If so, what alternative "fact-finding" approaches would you suggest?

Because if we imagine for the sake of argument that YouTube somehow had the means, resources and competence to conduct their own rigorous studies and research, in such a notoriously complex field as public health, and used this to inform their content moderation decisions instead of information from the WHO, how would this be any less "authoritarian"?

> I have yet to see genuine criticism of [Jordan Peterson] which stands up to scrutiny.

I don't believe Peterson is alt-right, but I do think there's a fair case for dismissing him as a source for anything but his specific field of clinical psychology. His sudden rise to the position of "public intellectual” (on the back of his alarmist and widely disputed take on Bill C-16 [1]) is troubling when his unwavering single-minded crusade against what he considers a global cabal of “postmodern neo-Marxists” colours nearly every view he has [2][3].

Examples of this can be seen in his bold proclamations against feminists, Disney films, the concept of white privilege, but also in his occasional habit of linking to junk-science blogs to inform his position rather than peer-reviewed research (such as when he propagated the debunked[4] claim that contrary to what nearly every climatologist, atmospheric physicist, geologist, glaciologist and oceanographer has been telling us, Earth's climate sensitivity is actually trending towards zero [5]).

He’s also demonstrably not one to allow gaps in his knowledge to get in the way of proudly displaying his confirmation biases [6][7].

So as a trained clinical psychologist, I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about when he stays in his own lane, but for an academic and supposed advocate for scientific rigour he seems remarkably lax in applying the same care and scrutiny to his positions on social issues.

1. http://sds.utoronto.ca/blog/bill-c-16-no-its-not-about-crimi...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marx...

3. https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/79568716336716185...

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFDnxMp0Hw8

5. https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/92041514135884595...

6. https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/95073630669433651...

7. https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/95077370882567372...

I've often wondered to what extent my own password mnemonic "system" is either sufficiently secure or woefully misguided.

Each of my passwords is made up of the same eight-character non-dictionary word, plus the alphabet-position numbers of the first three characters of the name of the site I've made the password for (A -> 1, B -> 2, that old trick).

So for example, say the common word I was using in my passwords was "pizzadog", then my Hacker News password would be "pizzadog813" (H -> 8, A -> 1, C -> 3)

I admit my goal is convenience, as it's clearly only one step up from using the same password for everything, but with the added numbers making me feel a little better in the event of one of them being compromised. But is there any reason why this approach might be considered a bad idea?

Want to make your own? See this recent post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2877790

Raphael is great at what it does, which is to provide a graphics framework -- a layer of abstraction in order to easily manipulate SVG to create custom shapes and graphics.

Where D3 differs is in its focus. It's not just a graphics library, but a means of manipulating the DOM to facilitate data visualisation (often via SVG, but data-based manipulation of simple HTML elements is equally feasible).

This reliance on standards such as the W3C DOM and SVG APIs means that, unlike Raphael, there is minimal proprietary markup to learn, and it also brings a lot of flexibility and power: anything you can do with SVG and HTML you can wield with D3.

From the horse's mouth: http://vis.stanford.edu/files/2011-D3-InfoVis.pdf

To be pedantic, Protovis did also use SVG; it just had a layer of abstraction that somewhat obscured this, whereas D3's lower-level syntax makes it feel like you're manipulating SVG directly (making it a bit more intuitive to learn if you're already familiar with SVG).

I'll +1 the recommendation though. D3 is (unsurprisingly, coming from Mike Bostock: http://bost.ocks.org/mike/) brilliant.

http://mbostock.github.com/d3/

Great as that is, it's not really a garden path sentence, as there's no element of being misled. It looks absurd from the outset.

Interesting, thanks. But, without meaning to excuse it, I do wonder how much of that was

a) tongue in cheek (given that it was an informal talk rather than an essay or article)

b) just a reflection of the general attitudes of the era

c) indeed down to personal prejudice

I'm guessing though that whatever prejudices he had must have been re-evaluated by the time he encouraged his sister to go into science

Really? Can I ask what you're basing that on? I'm not disbelieving you, just skeptically curious :)

To be fair, the difference is that it's now displaying images by default, and this will simply have caught a lot more people's attention

It's much much harder to gain muscle and lose fat simultaneously, than it is to simply focus on one then the other. They are fundamentally at odds with each other: to lose fat, you need less calories; to gain muscle, you need more calories.

The advice I've heard is to build strength and size first, by eating lots and training hard until you have the muscles you're after. Then you can turn your attention to losing fat and maintaining muscle, by eating less (though you'll still need more calories than before, as larger muscles burn a lot more energy even at rest), lowering the intensity of your training, and focusing more on cardiovascular exercise like jogging and cycling.

"I’m not feeling that good about the design at the moment as it’s shit," made me laugh.

Also it's always heartening to see even great designers like Mike have to scrabble and grab for inspiration.

Or indeed consumers who are perfectly happy with the sound of 210 kb/s VBR mp3s on an iPod through £80 Grado headphones.

I'm not trying to take any side myself here, but it does sound like you're implying that it's the "audiophiles" versus the "mindless masses", when I think you'll find there is also a significant population of people who value good quality sound but who can't necessarily discern any difference in quality between the top brands of mp3 player. I've owned models from three of them, and I certainly can't.

What's interesting is that antidepressants such as Prozac have a few established, proven and well-documented side-effects, one of which is orgasm inhibition:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ssri#Sexual_side_effects

So I'd imagine that the men who are prescribed antidepressants for things like premature ejaculation find that they very much do live up to (a different kind of) hype.

Ah right. I must be an outlier then.

Forgive me if I'm missing something, I'm not trying to catch you out but I'm curious why you believe that one late night will affect the rest of your week.

Surely a correspondingly early night the next evening will redress things?

I wonder if the other fifth is just British expats who still think a trillion is a million cubed.

They seem to spend a whole lot of time describing how Apple "launched a revolution", and very little on the key point in the headline which is that they've supposedly been "overtaken" (a couple of very vague and unenlightening closing paragraphs, along with a lazy and completely inappropriate comparison to the Apple II).

Film critic Mark Kermode's thoughts on movie piracy:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/markkermode/2009/04/piracy_240409...

The ~10km/s figure refers to the speed an unpropelled object needs at the Earth's surface in order to escape gravity, so it doesn't apply to rockets and shuttles. Assuming it could keep the engine running, the shuttle could go into orbit at 1km/h.

Sorry to nitpick, but I couldn't resist as I used to have the same misconception.

It's working fine for me, at the moment. Thanks.

If the effects are anything like those encountered by William Hurt in Altered States then I'll be keeping well away from all beats, binaural or not, from now on.

For anyone as fascinated as I am by the orange-box-on-blue-background phenomenon in #4, I really recommend Josef Albers's Interaction of Colour. http://www.amazon.com/Interaction-Color-Expanded-Josef-Alber...

It's educational and illuminating, but compared to most colour theory books it's more poetic than academic in tone, and more emotional than theoretical in its insights.