Do you know how many truly terrible COVID and vaccine takes I've seen from cardiologists and ophthalmologists? How many terrible mask takes I've seen from engineers? How many proudly bad ideas I've seen on public safety from people with PhDs?

If you are any of:

1. Masc
2. An engineer
3. A medical doctor
4. A Ph.D. in an unrelated field

It serves to take about five steps back before commenting on something to see if what you are saying is actually accurate. All of these are plagued by variations on thinking that because you are an expert in one area (or male) you are an expert in other (or any) areas.

The more of those boxes you tick, the more careful you need to be.

Ugh. I do not need to be having a high pain day on a day when I am oncall.

Then on top of that I nearly gave myself a concussion working outside.

So this day is going to be great, I can feel it. Maybe I'll spend the rest of the day playing BG3 and/or mandolin.

@Jackiemauro

I view some of the work I have done with probability (and specifically stochastic modeling) to be some of the most challenging, difficult work of any mathematics I have studied.

Also some of my favorite, but there's just _so much_.

@futurebird @DaleHagglund @Jirikiha @whknott

@futurebird

Meanwhile everyone still graduates and doesn't seem to be ale to figure out these things (https://ics.uci.edu/~jutts/AmerStat2003.pdf), which to me are some of the core lessons I'd impart on people, even if the class has nothing to do with calculating per se. Who cares if you can calculate a t-test if you don't know when to apply it?

But things like understanding the difference between significance and effect size is huge and matters regardless.

It's challenging.

@DaleHagglund @Jirikiha @whknott

@futurebird

I actually struggled when tutoring someone in one of those stats courses that doesn't require calculus.

Because it was all rubrics and heuristics. Many of which I had not memorized or, if I ever had memorized them, had not retained them.

We've lost the essence of something important there.

@DaleHagglund @Jirikiha @whknott

@futurebird

Really the "really basic stats courses" have done us all a huge disservice, as you point out.

My first statistics course was a 3xx course that required calculus and after that I went on to take several topics in advanced probability and statistics. It's _so so_ nontrivial and people think it is just like… plugging in this formula and trying to get at least 30 people in your sample or somesuch.

@DaleHagglund @Jirikiha @whknott

I've now seen someone downplaying how bad RFK will be because "they have already been lying to you about COVID" and I just.

It is allowed to not comment on things you are completely and totally ignorant of.

Shut. the. fuck. up. until you get one single clue please.

#politics

The way it is usually made in this tradition is a lot simpler. It produces a product that for ritual purposes works well, is safe, and is hard to screw up.

This particular attempt is a mixture where I'm trying to more closely replicate what is found in nature. So it is a mixture of sodium carbonate, sodium bicarbonate, mineral salt, and sodium sulfate with water and I'm doing everything at lower temperature.

We'll see if I like the end product.

@MedeaVanamonde Traditional mummification required something like 500 lbs of it, where most of my applications require ten "grains" (about the size of a kernel of corn). So a lot less.

@MedeaVanamonde I would need… about 500 times as much

@smallcircles heh, no, though when I felt it I went "this is a base for soap" then it turned out this was literally correct ^^

It's for religious purposes: it's used for ritual cleansing and purification.

Still needs to dehydrate a little longer before storing it

Natron is coming along

@jdp23

I've maintained for a while now that I am not afraid of Threads federating, I'm afraid of Meta releasing a _client_ or a _server_ platform.

We are in such a vulnerable position against that and with an active user count that is flat-to-negative growth it makes everything particularly vulnerable.

Especially given all of the people who aren't here.

@Jennifer

@jdp23

Simply: that is not the active users graph of a healthy service. Especially given all of the factors that should have brought people here.

That is the monthly user graph of a dying service, and dying services are very, very easy to EEE for a large company. Even without the company meaning to, even if we assume the best of intentions (which I'm not inclined to do), it becomes trivial to EEE.

@Jennifer

@MxVerda lol, you're fine

The first person who looks at this and then says "you're just thinking too much like a capitalist, actually…" is getting blocked. Be forewarned.

This terrifies me for the future of any of this. https://mstdn.social/@soveryoleary/113489119309279501

@jenniferplusplus

Really I've found that these conversations are great vehicles for sounding out a group so you can see how much work you're in for and to get a feel for when you start to do power mapping exercises.

@ireneista