Jasper the Espurr is Ballin

@jasper-the-menace

POWEROUS

I love this, because there’s obviously something very clever going on to analyse patterns of language, but it’s also profoundly ignorant.

[ID: A screenshot of a Grammarly correction, labelled “clarity: conciseness”. The original text reads “Every book, which wasn’t many…” This is crossed out with the suggestion “Everyn’t many book” and the note “Consider shortening this phrase.” /end id]

Story time: this reminds me of some kids in an English class I’m in. They were doing written work and the teacher and I were going around checking their work. They had to do like, “do/do not”, and one example was “prepare”. Something like “My father does not/doesn’t prepare dinner”. I look at this one kid’s paper and this galaxy-brained child had written “My father preparen’t dinner” and it took everything in me to not lose it laughing right there like. This child saw a pattern and ran with it and I respect that.

Intermittentlysmitten hid this in the tags and shouldn’t have.

What is it about laying on the floor when you're overwhelmed that makes everything feel so much better?

When God has ceased to answer your prayers, it feels good to distance yourself from Heaven.

Adding this to my list of incredibly raw fucking lines gifted from the impossible wonder that is tumblr

Some hints about evaluating scientific studies

Firstly, understand that something being published in a scientific journal (or an academic journal for the social sciences) does not automatically make it true. Publishers profit from publishing novel, eye-catching, surprising research, which means they are more likely to publish positive results than ones that didn't find a connection between given variables. This means that scientists' careers benefit when they get positive results. Certain institutions also benefit from certain findings above others (a committee for research on "obesity" that is funded by a government organisation tasked with ending it, for example, is likely to try to stretch the evidence to find a link between body weight and poor health outcomes). So how do people evaluate scientific studies, especially without being scientists themselves?

Literature reviews

• Literature reviews, which aim to assemble and summarise most of the available or influential papers on a given issue, can be a good place to start when trying to research that issue. Typically, scientific studies shouldn't only be evaluated on a case-by-case basis (since even well-designed studies can be contradicted by other, equally well-designed studies), but a full survey of the different results people have gotten should be taken.

Background information and conflicts of interest

• Try to find out who funded a given study. Who published the study? What do these people stand to gain from the results of the study being accepted? (For example: you might pay special attention to the experimental design on a study on whether a certain essential oil helps to reverse hair loss that was carried out by a company that sells that oil.)
• In theory, many journals call for study authors to declare any conflicts of interest they may have in a special section of the paper. This section should also list funding sources. You might also look up the authors on linkedin or something to find where they're employed; also look into whether another conglomerate owns that company, &c.

Experimental design

• If the study involves a survey, have the authors of the paper provided the questions that people were asked, so that you can evaluate them for potential ambiguity or confusing wording? Not being transparent about the exact wording of questions is a sign that a study isn't trustworthy.
• What's the sample size? Is it large enough for the claim the study is making to be reasonable? (More on this in the next section.)
• Does the experimental design make sense with what the researchers wanted to study? Are the claims that they make in the conclusion section something that could reasonably be proven or suggested by the experiment that they performed?
• Does the experimental design "bake in" an assumption of the truth of its hypothesis? (For example, measuring skeletons to argue that they fall into statistically significant size groupings by sex, using skeletons that you sorted into "male" and "female" groups based on their size, is clearly circular).
• How was data collected? People might change their answers to a survey, for example, if they have to speak to a person to give them, rather than writing them down anonymously. Self-reported information (such as a survey aiming to figure out average height or average penis size) is also subject to bias. A good study should be transparent about how the authors collected their data, and be clear about how this could have affected their results.
• Also regarding surveys: do the categories that the authors have divided respondents into make sense? Are these categories really mutually exclusive? If respondents were asked to sort themselves into categories (e.g., to select their own race or ethnicity), is there any guarantee that they all interpreted the question / the boundaries of these categories the same way? How would this affect the results?

Interpretation of results

• Could anything other than the conclusion that the authors came to explain the results of their experiment? For example, a study finding a correlation between two variables and assuming that this means one variable causes the other ("being in a lot of stress causes short stature" or vise versa) could be missing a secret third thing which is in fact causing both of those things (e.g., poverty). Check to make sure that the authors considered other explanations for their findings and ruled them out (for example, by controlling for other variables such as socioeconomic status).
• Are the results of the study generalisable to the population that the authors claim they're generalisable to? For example, the results may not be true for the entire population if only cisgender men between the ages of 30 and 40 were tested. Sampling biases can also affect generalisability—if I surveyed my college to try to find out the percentage of women in the total population, you might ask "but is your college sure to have the same percentage of women as the Earth does?"

Statistics

• Are the results statistically significant, or are they within expected margins of error?
• Many studies provide a p-value (a number between 0 and 1) for their results. In theory, a p-value represents the chance that the study's results could have been achieved by random chance. If you flip a coin ten times (so, your sample size is 10), it's not very odd to get heads six times and tails four times, and you wouldn't accept that as proof that the coin lands on heads more often than tails. The p-value for that result would be high (that is, there's a high chance that the coin appears unfair only because of random chance). On the other hand, if you flip a coin 100,000 times and it lands on heads 60,000 of those times, that's much better evidence that the coin is not a fair one. The p-value would be much lower. Typically, a p-value lower than 0.05 is considered statistically significant.
• In practice, there's more than one way to calculate p-values, and so studies sometimes claim p-values that seem absurdly low. A low p-value is not proof of a claim in and of itself. Check to make sure that the authors of the paper also provide the raw data, and not just the p-values; this indicates a concern with other people being able to independently evaluate their results, rather than just trying to get The Best Numbers.

Citations

• If the study cites something that seems foundational to their claims or interpretation, try tracing it back to the paper that was cited. Does the source actually claim what the authors of the first study said it did? Does the source provide proof or support for the claim, or does it seem flimsy, like a "common-sense" assumption?

Replication

• Check the studies that cite the one you're currently looking at. Has anyone else tried to replicate the study? What were their results?

What if I really, really don't want to read scientific studies?

• That's fine. Not everyone is concerned enough with specific scientific questions for regularly reading scientific papers to be reasonable for them. Just keep in mind that not everything in a scientific journal is necessarily true; that profit motives and personal and institutional bias impact results (e.g. when some studies revealed a lack of poor health outcomes for "obesity," and many scientists responded by calling it a "paradox" that needed to be "solved"); and that pop science and journalistic reporting on science are subject to distortions from the same sources.
• Try finding commentators on scientific matters whose output you like, and evaluate their writing the same way you would evaluate any other critical writing.

Retraction Watch is a great place to keep up with ongoing scandals and also has a database of papers that have officially been retracted by the journals that have published them.

Additionally, in most fields there will be journal issues and articles about improving reproducibility of research, where scientists publish work on the challenges facing reproducibility. Searching for "Field name + reproducibility/replication + challenges" should help you find some. These issues, like this one for robotics (IEEE RAS, published in 2015) often highlight what specific challenges exist in the field. It is really difficult to replicate results for experiments that require expensive equipment, so experimental physicists have different challenges than say, computer scientists. These should give you reasonable assumptions for what best practices can look like in the field. This is useful to compare where the publication you're reading falls short.

Cannot believe I am seeing people getting their tits bent out of joint about a man taking his daughter into a women's room. That shit was like, completely normal when I was a kid. We really have taken a flying leap backwards as a society into the Cootie Zone

"Men don't belong in the women's room" is in fact a subordinate social imperative to "children should be kept an eye on so they don't get hurt" and especially when you're talking about a toddler, most men's rooms don't have changing stations or suchlike. Morons

It should really not go without comment that afaik this is a black man taking care of his daughter, racism is a factor in people making a big stink about this and I'm not really gonna let the ~daughters of the witches you couldn't burn~ forget that their actual grandmothers probably got pissy about integrated washrooms

We’re winning.

I found his bio on societyofpresidentialdescendants.org and it was so delightful I had to copy paste the whole thing:

“Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave it to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale (BA, 1977), and was trained to be a museum curator in the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture (MA, 1980). A decorative arts curator at the Newark Museum for thirty-seven years before he retired, Ulysses has never stopped writing for the sheer pleasure of it. Aside from books on Victorian furniture, art pottery, studio ceramics, jewelry, and the White House, Ulysses created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel, appeared in 2012. His most recent novel, Cliffhanger, was released by JMS Books in December 2020.

“Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of 45 years. They have two grown children, adopted in 1996.

“Ulysses is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant. His late mother, Julia, was the President’s last living great-grandchild; youngest daughter of Ulysses S. Grant III, and granddaughter of the president’s eldest son, Frederick. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City. He is also on the board of the U.S. Grant Presidential Library and Museum at Mississippi State University.”

And frankly, the novels sound like they slap:

Desmond was nominated for a Lambda Award.

“With his husband of 45 years.” You kids don’t know ... they got together before AIDS, at the peak of the Gay Glam Life. They stayed together as their generation died around them, and made through it to the point where they could marry and have a legal family. He looks like a chipper preppie who never had a serious thought or care in the world, but it took *incredible* determination, commitment, and also luck to get here.

today’s date is the 3rd? what’s next, the 4th? the 5th? the minor fall, the major lift? 

grant me the serenity to kill you with a brick, the courage to kill you with a brick, and the wisdom to kill you with a brick. amen

i really greatly enjoy the looser, more rules-light storytelling focus of a lot of indie TTRPGs but also sometimes for me, dnd really does scratch my innate urge to roll a fuckton of dice and go "oooh, book #1939 says that next level i can learn to cast tommy's cromulent fuckcrustable and do 15d14 fire damage!"

everyones got that homie who, within the depths of the dungeon, found a cruel facsimile of that which he desired most, and was corrupted absolutely

SAG-AFTRA (the actors' union) just released a list of all the A-listers who donated $1 million or more to the strike fund.

New overpowered broken combo discovered!!

you put your hand down .and then you pick uit up again

Allow me to introduce the pirate wizard

amateur spotted!! 🫵

Infinite turns is nothing cmopared to chumbawumbaing your hand

UWAH!! I've been chumbawumbaed!