After a conference thing last week.
3: good luck not getting covid!
I officially have stopped wearing masks. I guess it was making me feel extra socially awkward, as often the only one around wearing one, (not that anyone said anything) and having gotten the bivalent vaccine, now I have a pseudo-rational explanation
I just got back from a pleasant conference where everyone was masked. Since mask-wearing is at about 0.1% around my home that was different. One highlight: after a speaker wrapped up his methods and results and worked towards the big finish, his voice rose and he said "So the question is 'HOW DOES hybridization affect spatial memory in chickadees?'" and his watch said quite clearly "Here's what I found on the web..." We all laughed.
Conference was a good low level ego boost for me. Old friends, new friends, a new potential collaboration and my grad student gave a great talk. Aside from a stupidly long drive it was a good week.
5: Don't leave us hanging! How does hybridization affect spatial memory in chickadees? My phone did have an answer, but I'm not sure if I should trust it.
shiv has COVID. I'm mildly annoyed at him for procrastinating on the booster shot. So far it's basically a man flu (thanks, Paxlovid!)
My stupid phone only provided me with spatial memory in chickpeas.
Ours might be frightened of the dark, because of the can.
6- I am not a hybrid but I still forgot.
Weirdly enough, earlier today I ran into a former neighbor who makes hummus. We just nodded and passed by each other.
11: I had no idea you were a chickadee at all! Carolina? Black-cap?
Tonight I was worried because I needed to cook up a giant dinner, I really wanted to run, and it was getting late.
Then we found lice in one of the kids' hair, so instead I spent the past three hours combing them out. And we noticed we were really hot, and discovered the AC died.
However there's supposed to be a cold front coming through overnight, so at least there's that. This is supposed to be the last 90°+day for awhile.
I'm awfully cranky right now.
14: ugh. That could make a person cranky
Now I have "that could make a person cranky" to the tune of "you could drive a person crazy" stuck in my head.
Good luck with home repair and lice.
I should probably turn off the AC for the season.
I have the window open, and it's finally perceptibly cooler outside than in. It's 85° inside. I cannot wait for this storm to get here.
Anyway, it's suppose to get near freezing this week here.
it's already down to 84 in the house! honestly, it could gave been far worse.
Getting a bit above freezing here lately, which is warmer than it had been for a while.
This one's for heebie https://twitter.com/longformmath/status/1581720236503408640?s=46&t=G8qun4kRrgS2FWgPkcwJlQ
Oh hey, here's some news: I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but my father-in-law is a high school football coach. He was the head coach at one of the big Anchorage schools for ~20 years until a couple years ago. He left that school and now teaches at another school in Anchorage, and has also been helping out with coaching at Homer High School. Yesterday Homer won the state championship for their division in a huge upset of a dominant, undefeated team that had beaten them 46-0 when they played earlier in the season. (He isn't mentioned in that article but is in one of the pictures.) It's Homer's first state championship in the history of the program. So that was nice.
25 is hilarious. I'm not totally sure why the field's medalist is so perplexed by the idea that there could be multiple correct answers, but I sure am glad I too do not have someone like that reading over the assignments I give.
28: I suppose winning a Field Medal is nice, but the real dream of every mathematician is to go viral on Twitter.
Bah! After three days of negative tests, I tested positive this morning as I was preparing to head to the office. I feel fine, but it's super-annoying. I had stuff to do!
That's such a great solution to so many life problems.
Someone may have cracked the case: https://twitter.com/wtgowers/status/1581747427861614593
ha! It's a small world, after all.
One of my favorite faculty members is outside my office, and I'm eavesdropping. He's maybe 70. He said, "A good student came up to me after I passed back tests this morning, and he was disappointed with his grade and asked me what he could do. I said 'better'."
I know that sounds cold, but this is actually the kindest, most genial guy, which kind of makes it all the more hilarious and cutting, but also I'm 100% sure he followed up to take the sting out of it and connect/help the student. It sort of reminds me of the Hola Papi blog with the story about the girl who ran a miserable cross country race, and said, "I just want to put all that behind me!" and the mother reluctantly said, "At least something will be behind you." Reluctant burn!
5: "So the question is 'HOW DOES hybridization affect spatial memory in chickadees?'"
Curious if that was specifically about Black-Capped/Carolina hybrids? We live right smack dab in the narrow zone* of their hybridization so have spent more time looking closely/listening to the little bastards than I might have otherwise. (Only subtle observable differences, and then there's the fucking hybrids of course.) I assume there is some significant endogenous differences, but am not sure what they are. (Maybe it's spatial memory schemes!)
*In our area it has seemed to be creeping northward over the years, as Carolinas sometimes now found where previously only Black-Capped.
Once we've got his chickadee thing worked out, we can move on to discuss the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow.
No second round of Covid for me after not wearing a mask in northern California last week. I did the same in eastern California, in a county with a current rate of I think less than 1 case per day, and it seems likely that I'll be fine.
I'm happy to have confirmed on these trips that after a few months of doing very little exercise following my mid-July Covid, which left me feeling some after effects in my lungs as late as Labor Day, I seem to be fully recovered now and can go for long hikes again.
I passed by a pizza place in the Owens Valley that had a sign in the window that said, in large type: "We respect freedom of choice." Then the small print said that meant they wouldn't enforce any vaccine passports*, mask rules, etc. I'm sure they thought it was very clever.
*Did those ever happen on a large scale?
36: yes, and the study was done in the hybrid zone, which is definitely creeping or marching or fluttering northward. In the zone there are a mix of hybrids, pure Black-caps and pure Carolinas, and the chickadee people have a neat system for genotyping them and assigning them on a 0-20 scale by 10 snps, so 20 alleles that could each be BCCH or CACH. There is a whole little cottage industry studying that hybrid zone and I probably saw 3 or 4 presentations or posters on it. Most fieldwork from around Hawk Mountain, PA, I think. I forget what local university had the professor spearheading the research.
Oh, and now I remember the hybrids were worse.
37: First we need to know what is the capital of Assyria.
39.last: I'm reliably assured there were concentration camps for beleaguered white assholes.
Serious question: so, I'm running a local politics blog, and there's an older man with some mental illness who speaks at city council meetings sometimes. He seems to have some paranoia and delusions.
He emailed me asking if he could write a story for my blog, and I politely declined. Then he emailed back saying I might find this other thing interesting.
In theory, I don't mind having an email correspondence with this guy, but it seems like it could easily go off the rails and end up in a situation that I'm not comfortable with anymore. For example, it could easily be the case that he's extremely lonely, and the frequency rapidly escalates. Or his needs and untreated illness become more intrusive. Or whatever.
Is there a benefit (to him) to maintaining the correspondence with him, or would it definitely end poorly? Are there guidelines from mental health types of how to keep a correspondence as a small thing, and not letting it swell into a big thing?
In my experience, friendly people with delusions make enemies of their friends very quickly.
Oh never mind. After writing that, I checked that email account, and there are two more emails from him. The first is "Who the fuck goes nonrespond?" and the second is "Do You ANSWER YOUR EMAIL?"
I am definitely not responding.
There's a guy like that on my street that I fell into talking to on my walks. He's friendly, then a few days later he starts yelling at me because I didn't want to do something. He doesn't understand why his neighbors keep calling the cops on him, but if I weren't bigger and younger, I would be worried about his ranting too.
I'm on a subscriber list for a specific kind of razor that Hawaii likes and just got an email with the snippet "Introducing On The Spot Wax Strip Kits - for skin as smooth as silk" which I misread as "foreskin as smooth as silk" which really threw me for a loop.
Still alive and doing well. The person responsible for assigning many of my peers work got married and is away on honeymoon... so, given emergency last minute assignments by the person covering their desk, three of my peers worked over the weekend and I had a deluge of work to review yesterday. Survived it, but worked much later than I like to.
So a few weeks ago I had a bad fall coming out of the shower (actually coming out of the bathroom into my tiled bedroom floor with insufficiently dried feet and also a few too many beers). I had an MRI a couple of days ago and was just at the orthopedist. Completely ruptured posterior cruciate ligament. The hospital is one of the best in the country but the injury is rare enough that they don't operate on it there. So tomorrow I'm going off to the top-rated sports medicine hospital and hope they can do something for me before the major sporting event here happens and they're all blocked off for potential injuries.
Good luck, Barry!
And congratulations, of a sort, for an injury so unexpected that the hospital didn't know what to do.
51 Thanks.
And at least the second opinion comes baked in
You shouldn't let them operate while baked.
Watching the UK Tory government melt down in real time is something else.
Eventually, they have to call an election, right?
If she holds out for two more months, the Tories can blame the cold, hungry winter on Truss alone, and not their policies for 6 years. She's their sin-eater.
I got one more email from the guy in 42/44. He responded to my initial polite declination:
"For some reason your email did not show up as a new email. I had to search through my emails to find your reply.
Disappointing to hear that. I hope you go under."
He seems like a peach.
Also he does have a blog, which is inadvertently a very coherent description of what it's like to have schizophrenia. (He does specifically allude to that mental illness in particular, so I'm not inferring much.)
Inference is still safer than induction.
And both are safer than introduction, in this case.
re: 55
Not for another couple of years. It's an absurd situation, but unless they lose a vote of no confidence and a new government can't be formed, it's 2025.
Technically the King can dissolve Parliament whenever he wants, and (since this year) the decision to do so is non-justiciable. Now, there's a general understanding that he'll only do so on the advice of the PM, but it is undeniably true that he doesn't have to grant a dissolution simply because the PM wants one. And so it is probably also true that he can still grant one even if the PM doesn't want one.
History, however, contains few encouraging precedents for kings called Charles who try to dissolve Parliament against its wishes.
5 years is so long to not have an election. Have there been similar crises in the past? It seems like this situation isn't "supposed" to happen.
I was thinking at some point they would lose a vote of no confidence. I thought that used to happen after repeated failures.
She's going to have a really empty Prime Ministerial Library.
5 years is so long to not have an election.
Normally things don't tend to move quite this fast. (The Chartists wanted annual elections - about the only item of the Charter that hasn't happened. That would have been interesting.)
Have there been similar crises in the past?
I don't think that in modern history we have had a PM who didn't become PM through winning a general election, didn't stop being PM because they lost a general election, and didn't actually call a general election at any point during their premiership. (Almost every postwar PM fits into at least one of those groups, but I can't think of any that fit all three.)
Just a frictionless glide through power without any contact with the electorate whatsoever.
The basic asymmetry here is that there are, right now, different criteria for becoming PM and for not being kicked out as PM. To become PM you must have the support of one-third (plus one) of all Tory MPs (in order to get into the final of a leadership contest) plus 50% plus one of the Tory membership (in order to win the final). But to stay PM you must have the support of 50% (plus one) of Tory MPs, otherwise they'll have a vote of no confidence which you will lose and you will not be allowed to run in the ensuing leadership contest.
This is exactly what happened to Truss.
Instability, rather than asymmetry. Though I suppose it's an asymmetry as well.
The membership vote is so insanely stupid, how did it come about? They've had it since 1998 it looks like?
Just a frictionless glide through power without any contact with the electorate whatsoever.
There may be a hidden downside to that.
Not that having contact with the electorate has solved many problems here.
To be fair, the lettuce wasn't attacked by the IMF.
But to stay PM you must have the support of 50% (plus one) of Tory MPs, otherwise they'll have a vote of no confidence which you will lose
Is this another part of the current Tory rules, making it not the parliamentary VONC we're used to but a sort of "vote of no party confidence"? Or is it an actual VONC that the party allows/expects its MPs to do if support drops below 50%-of-party?
75: pretty much. This is confusing because "vote of no confidence" can mean two different things. It can mean a vote of no confidence in the Government - either an actual motion that is debated on and voted on, that says "this House has no confidence in His Majesty's Government", or a vote that the Government announces it will regard as a confidence vote. Normally the Budget is one of these. If a government loses one, there is an election.
Or it can mean a vote of confidence by Tory MPs in their own leader. This is part of the leadership challenge process which goes like this:
20% of party MPs write to Graham Brady saying "party leader needs getting rid of"
Graham Brady announces this
Party votes on whether to get rid - this is the vote of confidence in the party leader
If she loses, there is a leadership contest, to win which you need a third plus one of MPs plus 50% plus one of the members, and in which the deposed leader cannot compete.
It is highly unlikely, I would say, that there will be a proper parliamentary VONC because the Tories are about 30 points behind in the polls at present and would be reduced to a single-digit number of MPs, and that single digit, according to some polls, would be a 2, or possibly a 1.
If I understand right, the key point is you have to put the specific number 1922 in the sentence to distinguish the two scenarios.
It is a little convoluted but don't worry, non-UK unfoggeders, by the time we've had another couple of these you'll all be experts on the process as well.
Election nowcast: https://electionmaps.uk/nowcast
It's pretty unusual for a party to be *this* unpopular, no?
Well, my 56 was wrong, although I assume she's staying as caretaker so perhaps there still won't be a new PM before January.
81: They're talking about this leadership contest taking a week, presumably because they're going to find some way to cut the lunatic membership out of the process completely. She's definitely not still going to be around in January. Or December. Potentially not in November either.
I moved my next comments to the new bespoke thread.
It's pretty unusual for a party to be *this* unpopular, no?
This kind of slump has happened once before in UK history to a major party - in 1922, to the Liberals. They didn't come back from it.
They should just dissolve the Tories, everyone picks whether to join the Lib Dems or the Brexit Party.
Do we have any University of Chicago alumni here? I have a good friend applying for a position there, he's a Brit who's never worked in the US and I'm vaguely aware of some peculiar conventions regarding the way U of C admin/faculty prefer to refer to the university. Can anyone enlighten me?
84: I'm stating the obvious, but that happened-once is the time this level of unpopularity coincided with election time - there could have been many other instances of unpopularity between elections that the respective party survived.
87: true. More than we know, given that opinion polling is a recent thing. The Conservatives hit 19% in May 2019 - third place behind Labour and the Brexit Party.