As you get older, you realize that you’re not always right and there’s so many things you could’ve handled better, so many situations where you could’ve been kinder and all you can really do is forgive yourself and let your mistakes make you a better person.
Are women tougher judges on other women?
UK government can’t kick consultancy habit despite promises The Register
The Myth Of Simple Truths 3 Quarks Daily.
It seems obvious that the Statue of Liberty was designed to resemble a sun god, not Lucifer.
SELF-DEFENSE: Don’t look like prey, and the predators won’t mess with you
Look, I’m 61. This adulthood thing is sometimes still a work in progress. Or maybe it’s the times we live in.
Evidence found of Europeans using cocaine as far back as the 17th century
The Neolithic era had more long distance trade than we typically think
The consensus on Consensus. p.s. they are hiring
On the economic origins of concerns over women’s chastity
Insider trading by other means
Geoffrey Manne on the Google decision
Longlegs, with Nicholas Cage, is a very good movie, probably one of the best horror movies ever? But it is difficult to watch
Peter Marshall of Hollywood Squares, RIP (NYT). I don’t think of myself as a television person, but perhaps that show in particular would have been a good match for me? Though I don’t think I would have deserved the center square
The center-left Moderate Talent Pipeline
Have we been underrating steam power?
Peter Thiel on Joe Rogan. They even talk about Galaxy Quest, and Paypal trying to hire James Doohan as a spokesperson. Among other things
The 12 Best Ways to Share Files With Anyone Over the Web - Make Use Of
“There are many ways to share files between people and devices, but a lot of those methods can be cumbersome by requiring app downloads, account registrations, cloud storage setups, and so on. That’s why we prefer these no-hassle file sharing websites that let you drag-and-drop files and share links to those files so that others can download them right away.”
Even laypeople use legalese Eric Martínez, Francis Mollica and Edward Gibson – MIT. Published August 19, 2024. PNAS 121 (35).
“Why are laws so complicated? Across two preregistered experiments, we found that people tasked with writing official laws wrote in a more convoluted manner than when tasked with writing unofficial legal texts of equivalent conceptual complexity. This tendency held constant, regardless of whether people wrote the document iteratively or from scratch.
These results suggest law to be a rare exception to the general tendency in human language toward communicating efficiently, and that convoluted structures may be inserted to effectively signal the authoritative nature of the law, at the cost of increased reading difficulty. These results further suggest laws can be effectively simplified without a loss or distortion of communicative content. Whereas principles of communicative efficiency and legal doctrine dictate that laws be comprehensible to the common world, empirical evidence suggests legal documents are largely incomprehensible to lawyers and laypeople alike.
Here, a corpus analysis (n = 59) million words) first replicated and extended prior work revealing laws to contain strikingly higher rates of complex syntactic structures relative to six baseline genres of English. Next, two preregistered text generation experiments (n = 286) tested two leading hypotheses regarding how these complex structures enter into legal documents in the first place.
In line with the magic spell hypothesis, we found people tasked with writing official laws wrote in a more convoluted manner than when tasked with writing unofficial legal texts of equivalent conceptual complexity. Contrary to the copy-and-edit hypothesis, we did not find evidence that people editing a legal document wrote in a more convoluted manner than when writing the same document from scratch.
From a cognitive perspective, these results suggest law to be a rare exception to the general tendency in human language toward communicative efficiency. In particular, these findings indicate law’s complexity to be derived from its performativity, whereby low-frequency structures may be inserted to signal law’s authoritative, world-state-altering nature, at the cost of increased processing demands on readers.
From a law and policy perspective, these results suggest that the tension between the ubiquity and impenetrability of the law is not an inherent one, and that laws can be simplified without a loss or distortion of communicative content.”
'Some Could, Some Could Not, Shake Off Misery'
Last week I wrote a post about the poet Bob Barth, the patrol he led as a 21-year-old Marine Corporal in Vietnam, and the war correspondent who wrote a dispatch about him for a newspaper. Two days later, after learning that the stringer, Albert W. Vinson, soon took his own life, I wrote a second post recounting the wounds he had sustained as a young Marine in the Pacific. Among Bob’s recurrent themes is that all wars are one and all warriors are brothers of a sort. He makes the theme explicit “2ndLt. Albert W. Vinson, USMC,” subtitled “Talasea, New Britain 1944”:
“Those Japanese machine gun rounds
That shattered shoulder, legs, and arms
Killed you as surely as, years later,
The freight train on that lonely night.”
The poem reminds me of another written about an earlier war – Thomas Hardy’s “And There Was a Great Calm” -- composed shortly after the armistice went into effect on November 11, 1918. Soldiers, stunned by the sudden silence, stare at the empty sky where artillery rounds had recently fallen:
“Breathless they paused. Out there men raised their glance
To where had stood those poplars lank and lopped,
As they had raised it through the four years’ dance
Of Death in the now familiar flats of France;
And murmured, ‘Strange, this! How? All firing stopped?’”
For some, the war never truly ended:
“Calm fell. From Heaven distilled a clemency;
There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;
Some could, some could not, shake off misery.”
