MagosInformaticus

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.
Anatole France

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

This is pretty much the underpinning question of the entire field of evolutionary developmental biology, so naturally any answer is going to be a bit surface level, and I get out of my depth fairly rapidly to be honest. Still, it is quite interesting.

One of the central ideas is that as an embryo grows, its cells go from being all equivalent multipotent stem cells into being different from each other - at first more specialized types of stem cell that can only turn into certain tissues and gradually specializing more and more. Since these cells are differentiated and expressing different genes from one another, they can then start to co-ordinate with each other using chemical markers and gradients of concentration of those markers across space to regulate what types of cells should be growing/dividing, where in the embryo they should be doing it and at what time they should be doing it.

That signaling is in turn controlled by some often complicated networks of regulatory genes - ones which when they are expressed make proteins that selectively attach to other bits of the DNA in that cell and make the genes there more or less likely to be expressed themselves. A lot of evolutionary variation is actually focused on these regulatory systems rather than on the genes which they are switching on and off.

So to my knowledge, something like nose shape likely comes down to some of those regulatory genes controlling where the cells that will eventually be forming the cartilage get placed relative to the skull etc.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

Or sometimes fold them over trees of objects!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

make reapportion something that happens every 10 years with the census

That's... the current state of affairs? New apportionments of Rep seats to states take effect on the 4th year of each decade and have done so consistently since 1933 and in particular the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act. It also does little for the major structural issues with voting, which are much more about voting method and the drawing of voting district lines.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's the typical phrasing of social pressures to not stand out in Scandinavia, drawing from a book where the author phrases the "rules" somewhat as a legal code. Tall poppy syndrome is an overlapping idea that might be more familiar to English speakers.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

Shout out to Retro Video Game Mechanics Explained for his explanation of the entire construction of the cries.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

It's genuinely funny to me that one of O'Keefe's major sins in the eyes of his conservative donors was being such a theater kid he staged a musical hagiography of himself.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

That phrasing refers to a very broad set of movements and individuals. The usual core beliefs are:

  • Legislation in their jurisdiction and the government's authority to enforce it is in some way defective.
  • People in their jurisdiction can opt out of laws and government, and live only under "natural law".
  • People have to perform a set of legal procedures (spells, effectively) in order to achieve that.

Exactly why and how law/government authority is defective, how they understand natural law, what the spells are that they have to cast - all of these are extremely variable both between jurisdictions and between individuals.
Primarily it's a set of grifters charging money for courses and materials to learn about these beliefs from whoever they can convince. Sometimes, as in Germany, it's a group of neo-Nazis plotting to reinstate the Kaiser.

You might enjoy münecat's longer form explanation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Interesting. I guess for me the "trans" bit just isn't as strongly coupled to the person - that it's natural to use "man" for such a person in general, and it's a context (e.g. healthcare or the politics of it) that can make the subcategory be relevant.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

If I describe someone as a "tall man" or "clever man", do those qualifiers/subcategorizations call into question whether he is a "man"?
If they don't, I'm genuinely interested in hearing what distinction you apparently see between those two and saying he is a "trans man".

[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

It becomes inherently difficult to make datasets actually anonymous the more data points they have about a given individual - it doesn't much matter whether names and such are listed data points if they can be inferred from the rest. This investigation by Svea Eckert and Andreas Dewes, for instance, managed to identify a named German member of parliament (Valerie Wilms) and other public functionaries within a data set on web browsing habits they received from data brokers.

Most countries do have data privacy legislation and relevant regulatory/enforcement agencies, but the data brokerage business is big and intensely international so the picture on audits is kind of unavoidably complicated.

view more: next ›