Kora 🏳️‍⚧️

On the Effectiveness of Love Poems
(A Proof by Demonstration)

Von Neumann said,
per Fermi’s word,
that “four params can fit

an elephant,” elephant!
How absurd,
and there he didn’t quit:

“with five I’ll make
them wiggle their trunk,”
which shows to great effect:

with skill, an appendage
is easy to rouse
and even make erect.

Had an intriguing editorial discussion recently: how did people in the past talk about 'minutes' when they didn't have watches or standardised times? How does that affect your thinking?

Come down an Elizabethan/Jacobean rabbit hole with me.

1/

...accountant”) because... why would we bother? [I realize “identifies as” is used because there is contention whether sex or gender are inherent, immutable, chosen, or self-chosen; my point is that the phrase is unsubtly the expression of an opinion on the ultimate issue.]

...delegitimizing. We don’t say things like “they identify as (blood) type AB+”; we simply say “they are type AB+” because it is true, and we accept report of it on good faith. We don’t even say “identifies as” for obviously self-chosen identities (who on earth says “they identify as an...

...biologically categorized female rather than male by all reasonable standards. (Frankly, this ought to be neither here nor there; there are so few aspects of life where sexually dimorphic biology actually warrants differentiated treatment.) And “identifies as” is overtly patronizing and...

Phrases like “biological male who identifies as a woman” drive me up a wall. If by “biological male” you mean “assigned male at birth”, say that instead of pretending to be objective. Biology is not uniaxial, not discrete, and not immutable, and in most or all aspects a transfemme person may be...

thank you, annette!

hm “pierogies” is probably a better spelling

To clarify, this was when I was a child, not when my mother was a child.

TIL “pierogi” is plural! As a child, my mother would say, “we’re having pierogis for dinner”.

I am mildly (but genuinely) devastated to hear this. About a third of my lookups are to confirm hyphenation points!

(will I buy a copy nonetheless? well, yeah, but...)

Typing rules for existential types. The relevant rule is the last: if “p has type ‘exists α so that S’” and “x has type S implies e has type T” then “‘let ⟪α, x⟫ equals p in e’ has type T”.

This is incidentally the syntax I use in my personal notes!

(The older sense is surprising and interesting and I’m always tempted to share it, but anyone who’d be similarly interested already knows about it, and I’ve never actually seen use of the phrase cause confusion, myself.)

I’ve taken to avoiding the phrase altogether and saying either “implicity (or indirectly) assuming the conclusion” for the older sense and “raises (or invites) the question” for the newer sense. I’m not sure whether the latter works as well as “begs the question” for most people, though.

i do not think that nonhuman things have feelings to be hurt but i do think the intent to hurt feelings is bad for a person notwithstanding whether the object of their sadism is real

I know the intended meaning of this is “80% of people at hackerspaces are cool trans people” but I’m tickled by the idea of an “80%-cool person”, which... sounds pretty high actually. (That only leaves 20% for everything else!)

fuck that’s ABCB not ABAB

Fav’rite note place: in the margin
Fav’rite dash: most often en
Fav’rite glyph: the reference symbol (※)
Implement of choice: a pen

...in which case you can’t have one without the other – but I doubt we’ll ever be confronted with that question (it only exists in the limit, as it were). Put another way, I don’t think wanting contradictory things is contradictory, which for the longest time was my automatic, unconscious judgment.)

...but exist side by side in spite of each other. We can embrace and cultivate some aspects of our nature while trying to eliminate others, and although there may be some ultimate dilemma – if they come both part and parcel, then the ultimate and only question is existence versus nonexistence, ...

(And I think this extends pretty naturally to other aspects of the human condition. Can we cherish our humanity, cultivate our humanity, while also wanting to kill our humanity? I somehow think this is possible. Good things and evil things, eudaimonoa and suffering, don’t cancel each other out, ...

(After rereading what I just wrote, I realize I left the linking idea unspoken – what prompted the comment about acceptance and disavowal was the reality of death. Can we both love it and hate it, fear it and embrace it, attempt to overcome it without running from it?)

I’m not really sure where the right place to end up is, if there even is one.

You can both adore and defend the quality of being human and acknowledge the circumstances of our existence while also fighting against them, insistent that the universe bend to the consciousness that inhabits it.

About many things in life, I’m beginning to simultaneously feel both acceptance (or at least realize the foundational importance of acceptance) and disavowal, both appreciation and indignation or aspiration, which ought to be contradictory but in fact coëxist complimentarily.

“I will sacrifice some length of my days to add depth to another person’s experience of the rest of theirs. Many did this for me. The work is slow. Its results often go unseen for years. But it is no gimmick.”

– hedgehogreview.com/web-features...

[2/2] “It is to help them learn, together, to defend how they want to live, precisely because they, too, unlike a machine, will one day die.”

[1/2] “Part of a teacher’s job—certainly in the humanities, but even in professional fields like business—is to help students break out of their prisons, at least for an hour, so they can see and enhance the beauty of their own minds.

“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, [icons, races, ...], armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”