My great great grandmother wrote a biography of her three brothers killed in WW1. I'm typing it all into a LaTeX editor and will be adding a family tree along with a sketched outline of their lives and newspaper clippings.
A best-seller it ain't, but it may interest a few here as these guys show autistic traits and are geeks from just over a century ago.
TL;DR version: 80s dystopian techno-horror geekfest with relatively accurate portrayal of cryptography and hacking.
Long version: Pretty much the same as above. It's a low budget BBC production that scores highly on accuracy of methods, exploits and technology of the era, insofar as TV ever gets.
The premise: a low-rank civil servant, tracking down bank fraud, discovers a trail of blackmail, corruption by intelligence services, deliberate weaknesses in security and criminal gangs operating with impunity.
By season 2, he's keeping himself alive the same way the Wikileaks journalists did, his wife has what we would call severe PTSD and the body count isn't slowing down.
Given trauma was barely understood in the 80s, the portrayal there and the bouts of temporary insanity are extremely close to what happens, again allowing for this being TV drama and not a psychological documentary.
The storyline deals with cryptography, surveillance society, backdoors and institutional corruption. All hot button issues of today. It even covers the inevitable issues of DIY security.
The conspiracy aspect is a trifle OTT bit, again, it's TV. It has to be to have a program.
It's geared to nerds, geeks and dystopia lovers, though, rather than the mainstream. I saw more reviews in computer journals than in TV guides.
It's the sort of show that would really need updating to be watchable by modern audiences, but fans of older shows would likely enjoy it.
It wasn't unusual for the time, which is the great thing
The 80s were a time for really bleak geek television - Codename Icarus (for the younger viewers), Edge of Darkness, Terry Nation's Survivors, Threads - all productions in this decade.
(Even late 70s had some dark stuff, Blake's 7, The Omega Factor, Day of the Triffids, and ABC/Central's Sapphire & Steel were not light watching. You have to go back to the start of the decade and Doomwatch to see a plausible contemporary dystopia.)
The stuff of a thousand bad dreams, these shows.
There were, at one point, quite a few historical wargames (Britannia, Decline and Fall, etc) but they were mostly about large-scale strategy rather than the history itself (which was mostly an excuse for blowing up other people's counters). History lessons via roleplaying games sounds quite an interesting approach and could be used to cover all kinds of events.
The expansion pack isn't out yet (it's still in kickstart) but there's enough information about it to get a good feel for how much depth there is in there. If it's done well, it could be very effective in the same way "...and then the Huns came and beat the sh*t out of the Romans before leaving again" isn't. Unless you're a Hun.
I'd like to get people's views on the use of roleplaying games and which system would be best for such gaming. Rolemaster? Call of Cthulhu? The ever-present Dungeons and Dragons? ("My 20th level mage casts a fireball at the fleeing Scots" sounds ahistorical.)
Ok, so let's start be defining a few terms, as it is obvious from Facebook genetic genealogy groups that people are truly ignorant on the subject. (Not that I believe this is common on Slashdot, where we're all much more knowledgeable.)
First off, most genetic testing is NOT carried out by sequencing all of your DNA, a widespread belief that resulted in outrage on one Facebook group when I pointed that out.
The vast majority of consumer testing is done by SNP genotyping. They look at very specific genetic markers and see if those markers have changed from one base pair to another. That's the only type of mutation looked for and they typically look at only a few.
So we've our first way to group companies: sequencing vs genotyping.
SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) are, as mentioned above, one type of mutation. Another is called STR (short tandem repeat), where a block of DNA is duplicated.
FamilyTreeDNA does both STR and SNP testing, STRs mostly for the Y chromosome. Both can be used for family history.
Most labs, though, use only SNP tests. It's quicker and cheaper than counting repeats but with many of the more interesting ones covered by patents or kept private by other means, there's a lot more secrecy involved.
(Note: This has doubtless led to a lot of unnecessary deaths, as genetic markers indicating a high probability of getting certain forms of cancer are being milked by private companies for profit. Few people get more than one test, so most people won't know if they carry such markers and can't take action in advance.)
So the second piece of jargon is SNP vs STR.
Finally, we come to the different areas of DNA. There are regions that are especially good for ancestrial reserch (mostly non-coding DNA), then there's the exome (which is where most of the protein coding takes place), you've telomeres (suicidal buffers between chromosomes, which have a function in longevity), and so on. I won't list them all.
The Y chromosome is particularly good for ancestry, but only has 9 coding genes left in it. It's possible it will vanish in time, but it seems to be fairly stable for right now.
Most companies test only DNA that is good for ancestral research in the autosomal regions (aDNA, the regions outside the sex chromosomes). This allows you to identify anyone who is genetically connected, but because you (on average) get just under 50% (remember, there's mutations in each generation and that DNA comes from neither parent) of your DNA from each parent, the distance you can track depends on how many markers are tested (very few). Reliability falls off sharply.
YDNA (Y chromosome DNA) tests only test for paternal ancestry, but if two people have a common paternal-line ancestor, it's a lot more precise once you're past about second cousins. It's popular with anthropologists as it's very good for tracking how men have migrated.
mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) is only inherited through the maternal line. Again, it's very popular, this time for tracking how women have migrated. There are certain forms of mtDNA that are linked to health benefits and others to genetic diseases, so this one tends to be the most controversial of the ancestral DNA tests. It also changes very slowly, so you don't get high resolution on population movements.
These two (YDNA and mtDNA) tests can tell you a lot about whether societies are open or closed, and whether it was men who travelled to find partners, women, or both. So we can know something of the culture of even long-extinct societies.
The data I have been able to find is for 2019. It shows: Myheritage tests for 702,442 autosomal SNPS, AncestryDNA for 637,639, FTDNA for 612,272 and 23andme for 630,132. This is out of a total of 3 billion base pairs. So the best test that year looked at 0.0023% of the genome.
ISOGG produced a chart as well, but it's far older. Their chart is dated around 2013.
Since you inherit a random 50% from each parent, the assumption that this is statistically meaningful for such a small fraction of the DNA is questionable. It seems to work adequately, but I'm not sure what the error bars are.
FTDNA also tests up to 111 STRs on regular tests and 600+ STRs for their "BigY" (it depends on the quality of the genetic sample).
Companies that do sequencing sometimes offer partial kits (in the order of tens of millions of SNPs) or full sequencing (which is what the same suggests). These are rarer and more expensive.
Most DNA companies allow you to access the raw data, some only allow it if you pay vast sums of money, and some don't allow you to at all. Always check in advance.
When you download your own data, you can use public databases to search for matches (either for relatives or genetic conditions). The quality of public databases is less controlled, both in terms of privacy and quality of data. However, corporate databases will usually be smaller for both types of data and will also usually not contain data from rivals. If you want broad data sets, public databases are the way to go.
I've only tested with 23&Me, FamilyTreeDNA, CRI Genetics and Nebula Genomics, so can't tell you anything much about the quality of the other companies.
(Ok, I also tested with uBiome, a microbiome testing company in the US, but they had their computers seized some time back due to fraud. I have no idea what happened to my data on there, or whether there's a way to access it.)
The quality seems to be reasonable for all four.
FTDNA is the most expensive for a lot of things, but has less of a sticker shock than Nebula and gets more data than 23&Me. It looks like there are a few companies that are better for ancestry but it's one of the best and the one the Genomics Project used. They're the only ancestral company that gives you STRs AFAIK and they give you a much more detailed evaluation of haplogroups than anyone else I've tested with.
Nebula does up to medical grade (100x oversampling) DNA testing, so if you want results a hospital will trust, that's where you part with a vast amount of money.
23&Me is good for a lot of medical stuff and if you want to help with research is probably the best.
CRI Genetics produces a lot of data with much higher reliability than most of the others, but you can't access the raw data and their databases won't be as extensive. However, because you can't access the raw data, you have to test with them to compare against their database.
I have now passed the total of 30 different black teas. Not fruit, not spice, not herbal, not even green, white or red tea. Just black teas. No, blends like PG Tips and Yorkshire Gold don't count either.
Why so many? Aside from being my current monomania, it's because I'm fascinated by how different they are.
I couldn't tell you the chemistry that makes that difference, nor could I tell you what difference it makes in terms of the various compounds affecting alertness or sedation. (It contains both), in terms of health benefits or even in the simplest term of how water is retained in the body.
But I'm determined to find out at least some of this. It'll have to be on my own, as essentially no research is being done on the subject, and I've no idea of what that'll require beyond a very good gas spectrometer (I'm going to have to count molecules, not atoms).
But I think it would be fun to find out, and definitely worth doing as long as I can figure out how to (a) control the parameters, and (b) afford said piece of gear.
This appeared in my
Relationship Change
sent by Slashdot Message System on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @12:05AM
GayAnalSex (5103247) has made you their foe.
TL;DR version: 20 years ago today I started writing an enormous story, this year I finally started putting actual effort into it, and now it's almost kinda-sorta readable and I'd love it if anyone would acknowledge the fact that it even exists. It's called The Chronicles of Quelouva.
Way back in 1997, teenaged me and some internet friends set out to start a new video game company. Our founder had one game already in mind that we were going to start developing, but we all foolishly got ahead of our teenaged selves thinking about all the other games that we would make next. To that effect, I started writing a story for one of my game proposals... and then other stories for other, then-unrelated game proposals... and so on before we even had the first game barely begun.
That group of teenage wannabes quickly fell apart, of course, but different members of it kept reforming it with slightly different membership over the years that would follow, one attempt after another under different names. Within about five years the last of them fell apart as well and at that point I basically gave up on all dreams of ever doing any video game development.
But all the while I had continued developing all of those stories from what had once been unrelated game proposals, mutating them drastically over the years, tying them together with each other and with basically every other story idea that occurred to me into an extensive fictional universe.
After the last attempt at a game company died I didn't know what I was ever going to do with all of those ideas, and they mostly languished for about half a decade while I focused on other things, occasionally writing myself notes about further ideas for them. Eventually I started telling myself that some day, when life was all sorted out, I would spend my free time writing a series of books based on the stories, slowly over the course of my entire life. As soon as all of my real problems got fixed, I'd get right on that. It would be my life's work. Something small that I had done besides just struggling to barely survive.
Around 2008, after finally graduating university and subsequently having my entire life fall apart in every facet, I decided that I was going to start writing the basic story ideas down in a readable format because that mythic time of getting life sorted out was never going to come. I came up with a tentative name, "The Chronicles" of... something, eventually settling on "The Chronicles of Quelouva". I put up the bare-bones structure of an outline on my personal website, filled it out with tiny little unreadable scraps of story serving basically just as notes to myself to write more there later, and then started with the first story chronologically and tried to actually write something worth reading about it.
I barely got through one rough draft of that first story. Life kept getting harder and I just couldn't think clearly enough to write anything that sounded good. It was too much, I was too exhausted, I couldn't force myself to be creative enough after every long day of shit. At least that's what I told myself. Whenever I actually feel good for long enough, I told myself, I'll get back to it. Just start writing the next story. And keep going and eventually it will all be done. But of course I never felt good enough, and that never happened, and almost another decade went by with no progress besides the occasional further notes to myself to write something more later about an idea I'd just had whenever I could get around to it.
Around the end of 2016 and the start of this year, I ended up writing myself surprisingly many neat ideas to write more about later, and I was subsequently reflecting on how what I had online was such an unreadable mess that nobody could even just take in the big picture of what it was I was aiming to create without wading through the crap excuse for an outline I had managed to create so far. If I were to just die right then, nobody would even have the vaguest idea what it was in my head that I had once dreamt of "spending my life creating". So despite being busier and more beat down by life than ever, I forced myself to find some time to write at least a highest-level summary of the big picture, all on one (albeit long) page.
And then I thought, you know what, I'll write some little three-paragraph summaries of each of the three sagas that the whole project is divided into, just writing like a paragraph a night every other night (ish), over the course of less than a month. Something slow, and manageable, just so that people can see on a high level what it was that I once dreamt of making -- so that like, maybe, if I died and people found all of my notes to myself, someone might find it worth sorting through them and assembling it all into what the summary painted a rough picture of.
But then after that month of fairly easy slow high-level summarizing was past, I thought to myself, this is easy enough, maybe I can expand each of those three paragraphs per saga into three paragraphs of its own, so that each of the 27 core stories (nine trilogies across the three sagas) has its own one-paragraph summary. I can keep up this pace for a few more months and do that, and that would be a better summary than what I have so far. So I did that.
And then, after that wasn't too hard either, I did the math and realized that if I split each of those paragraphs into three again, working at the same slow pace, I could flesh out each story into its own full page, three-paragraph summary by the end of the year. As kind of a challenge to myself, I decided to try that. And so far, I've been keeping it up. I'm about two thirds of the way done (almost 40,000 words in), right about to begin the climactic final stretch of it, and on schedule to have these summaries finished by the end of the year.
Not only that, but I realized I was having difficulty keeping most "paragraphs" down under a full screen of text, so I started automatically splitting them into threes again (and went back and split up the ones I'd already done), giving each part of each tripartite story its own page with its own three-paragraph summary. And then my English-major girlfriend pointed out to me that the figure I had looked up for an average paragraph was actually about a full page of double spaced text, and I could do well to split each of them in turn into three smaller, more readable paragraphs.
So now the whole thing is structured into "Episodes" (summed up in this phase into three short paragraphs each), three of them per "Part" of each tripartite "Story" of each trilogy "Series", of which there are three per each of the three "Sagas" of the overall Chronicles. That adds up to about the equivalent of nine full-length (27-episode) television seasons' worth of story, with a word count for just these summaries approximating what Google tells me is about that of a small novel (almost 60,000 words), once it's done by the end of the year.
Of course these are only summaries, not full scripts, and I've basically put no effort at all into making them look or sound pretty, just putting the ideas down in a minimally coherent form. But I've already done more to bring this thing that was once going to be my "life's work" into some kind of readable form this year than in all the twenty years that I was "working" on it before.
And that's why I'm telling you about it now. A month or two ago I realized, thinking that maybe I would remember this as the year I finally did something about the Chronicles, that I've been sitting on all of this for about twenty years now. And because I'm a digital pack rat, I still have the original text document in which I wrote the first draft of the very first game proposal that eventually grew into this project, with a creation date of August 25th, 1997 -- exactly a month after my fifteenth birthday, and twenty years ago today.
I just wanted to commemorate that anniversary somewhere.
If you want to see the very rough work still in progress, I'm posting it to my personal website as I go. If anyone wants to ask questions or point out typos or anything like that, I'd love just to know that anyone at all even looked at it:
If the universe were deterministic, then it must be possible to, given sufficient data about the universe and its current state, predict what the state of it will be at some point in the future. We shall confine our predictions for this purpose only to the outcome of a single experiment, and let us take a black box that can tell us what the outcome of the experiment will be. If such a black box cannot exist for any reason, then it follows that there are at least some factors in the universe that are non-deterministic.
The experiment is designed as follows: One first designs a deterministic system that outputs the opposite of its input. For example, let us say there are two switches labelled A and B, and if A is pressed then it outputs B and if B is pressed it outputs A. There is no reason that such a system could not be built. One then arranges for the input of this system to be the output of the aforementioned black box, which if it were possible for the black box to exist then there is no reason why this could not be done.
However, one quickly realizes in this experiment that a contradiction occurs, anything that the black box can possibly predict about the outcome of the experiment is wrong, and so either the black box cannot exist or else it is impossible for the black box to communicate to the outside world such information about the future state, which suggests that the universe is either non-deterministic, or else it may be treated as non-deterministic for *all* experimental purposes.
Skye
---
Skye died, February 14, 2016.
The first time I saw Skye, I came in and saw her in the cage she was later to die in, after being attacked (probably) by the other new bird, Jack.
That first time, Jack was in a box in another part of the room, a baby still. Skye was old enough to perch by herself in the cage Tracie would later put both Jack and her in, when she left, and at night.
The first time I saw Skye, I walked up to her and said hi, and looked at her, smiling.
She was wary at first, eyeing me carefully, a bit scared. Everything must have been so new to her; she had just been moved to a new house, seeing new people, new birds. She sat on a high perch in the cage, quietly, and looked at me carefully. What was I going to do to her?
I just looked back, smiling, talking in soft tones, greeting her, trying to make her feel welcome, loved.
Eventually, Skye turned her head and closed her eyes in a very feminine, very cute manner. In that instant I knew she was female, and a gentle, good bird. I fell in love with her, she was so sweet. She reminded me a little of Peach.
---
I remember many other interactions with Skye, catching her and Jack to put them in that same cage together when I was leaving one day, for example.
Another memory that stands out is when I looked at her and promised to get, or build, a flight cage for her. She looked back at me for an instant with a very intelligent, knowing look in her eyes. I felt in that instant that she understood what I was saying, at least she could hear from my tone that I was promising her something she would like. And she was hopeful, expectant, but there was an element also that didn't trust me to go through with the promise.
And I didn't, not before she died.
---
I feel such a sense of injustice, at Skye's death. I imagine her, attacked, mortally injured, lying in her little tent, licking her wounds, in pain, waiting to die.
She was so quiet, Tracie didn't even realize she was injured for a while after she finally came home and opened up the cage. Skye lay in her hanging tent, dying, not making a peep, resigned.
I listen to Kurt Cobain singing "Ain't it a Shame", over and over again. When he starts screaming, in the antepenultimate chorus, I cry. It is a shame.
I think Kurt felt the injustice and the pain that Skye felt, and even when he became rich and famous he couldn't forget it. It is not fair, for any to suffer. No amount of popularity or money could change that, for Kurt, I think. Nothing will take away the pain I feel, for Skye, for Peach, for Buddy, for all the birds I have known, for all the injustice I have experienced or heard about.
Charlie. Everytime I hear the song "Clap Hands! Here Comes Charlie" on the Swing Kings music station, I think of how I used to tell Charlie his name was in the song now playing, when it came on, while he was still with me.
I was in a box canyon with two female friends (not recognizable from real life). At the end of the canyon, I found a couple rooms that looked like they had been lived in. There was no roof but there was a bed, a table, some drawers or shelves, two rectangular living areas.
Exploring the box canyon further I encountered some people, a long-haired cool rock-star-looking dude and his friends. They accepted me into their group and I found myself unable to get back to my original friends. They showed me more living areas in the box canyon, with supplies so I had everything I wanted to survive. But I was uncomfortable.
Here I am remembering that one of the things that made me uncomfortable was that part of living amongst this group involved sticking a long tube into my throat. Day residue: I watched a Sonoran Desert movie before bed, which showed a hummingbird feeding its young by inserting its long, narrow beak into the young bird's throat and regurgitating. I think the scene in the dream was some representation of that visual experience.
I didn't want to stay in the new group. I wanted to find my old friends, go back to my old way of living. But I couldn't find a way out. I looked, but I couldn't find my friends again.
Immediate interpretation upon waking: I am afraid of being assimilated into the Tohono O'odham culture. The thought in my head on waking was that the new group of people in the dream were Tohono O'odham Indians and they had very strange practices wherein they became like intertwined puppets, and the tube-insertion was part of the intertwining. I didn't want to be like that.
More day residue: the previous day I had written a diary on k$5, an open letter to the Tohono O'odham Nation. And there was an event in the library (at which I wrote the diary) involving kids, including native kids. So the Tohono O'odham were on my mind, as was the hummingbird method of beak-insertion feeding.
Thursday, July 9, 2015
The first time I saw Sunny, she popped out of Tracie's purse and looked at me with supreme confidence. Her feathers were slightly fluffed from being carried in the purse that morning after Tracie had picked her up from her previous home.
She was a yellow lovebird with blue tailfeathers, very pretty. She was curious. The other day I was holding the washing machine, so it wouldn't vibrate as it does excessively when it spins. Sunny was sitting on my shoulder, curiously inclining her head to see what I was doing. I explained to her I was trying to keep the machine from making so much noise, and showed her how when I put my hand on it, the noise lessened, and when I took it away, the vibrating sound got louder. I repeated these actions, of using my hand to dampen the vibrations and taking my hand away to let the vibrations sound unmuffled, several times, talking to her about what I was doing. She watched my hand, listened to me, looked at the machine. My impression was, she understood what I was trying to convey.
I was looking forward to developing more communication with her, to learn from her, to teach her, to sing with her, to have fun, to watch her have fun flying and chirping and swinging on a swing and running across the floor and taking baths and sitting on my shoulder and crawling in my pockets and nipping my toes.
I remember another time, Sunny had been running up to me as I stood watching TV or something, and biting my toes. I usually would yell and step away, and she would look pleased with herself. Once she caught me so much by surprise, I fell over onto the floor when I lifted my foot up to get it away from her beak, and lost my balance. I remember her sitting there motionless, looking very pleased with herself
I love you Sunny. I will remember you. I hope we meet again in other incarnations, and remember each other and learn more from each other and communicate with each other again.
I wish I could fix Sunny's body, heal her broken neck. I imagine a future where such fixes will be routine, and each mortal lives as long as they please.
From https://class.coursera.org/money-002/forum/search?q=10.6+trillion#15-state-query=10.6+trillion:
Quoting from http://www.milkeninstitute.org... [milkeninstitute.org]:
The total value of housing units in the United
States amounts to $19.3 trillion, with $10.6 trillion
in mortgage debt and the remaining $8.7 trillion
representing equity in those units as of June 2008.
Of the approximately 80 million houses in the
United States, 27 million are paid off, while the
remaining 53 million have mortgages. Of those
households with mortgages, 5 million (or 9 percent)
were behind in their payments and roughly 3
percent were in foreclosure as of mid-2008.
So, say 10% of $10.6 trillion was at risk of default, or $1 trillion.
The notional amount of CDS
increased from less than $1 trillion in 2001 to slightly
more than $62 trillion in 2007, before declining to
$47 trillion on October 31, 2008.
So the derivative market inflated the real value of the mortgages by about a factor of 6, and then magnified the size of the possible default problem by a factor of 15.
---
More figures: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2013/1/10/21236/5547
---
November 9, 2014
Thoughts on the death of Peaches
I would like to run a bird rescue on a marijuana farm, powered with solar or other alternative energy sources.
I would take in abandoned or injured birds, care for them, tend to marijuana plants, and maybe experiment with robotics or solar energy or bots in a barn.
Why shouldn't the government create money to help me? Would I be contributing to the General Welfare?
I would give pot away. I don't want to sell anything.
Why is my dream so threatening that I must be marginalized, impoverished, scorned, targeted, teased, trolled, bullied, scammed, ripped off? Do you people just shrug and say "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em"?
---
Peach produced some chirps I'd never heard from her in the last few days. High, arcing, short chirps, as she attacked a bowl of seeds for what she knew must be one of the last times.
Three weeks ago, she produced bloody droppings. The emergency room vet seconded an internal tumor diagnosis by the regular vet. What can you do for an avian tumor? Nanotechnology, one day? Target all and only tumor cells, dissolve them or something?
She seemed to recover, no longer having bloody droppings. She ate well for a couple weeks, and chirped a lot, and asked to be carried around. I spent a lot of time with her perched on my shoulder.
Then she turned less active, and spent a lot of time sitting with her eyes closed, leaning against a wall or cage bar.
In her final hours she was having obvious difficulty breathing, and had stopped preening herself.
Peach has a very special and strong spirit. I believe we shall meet in other lives, and I tried ot get her to remember me so we might recognize each other again.
---
I knew Peach for 16 years. She saw us go through a lot. We have lots of memories, some of which I've written about in diaries.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/10/can-capitalism-democracy-co-exist.html
I'm going to say that no, finance-driven capitalism like we see in the US and UK cannot exist is inherently anti-democratic. Industrial driven capitalism has a better chance.
A black man is gunned down by police for handling a toy gun in a Walmart. A gun that Walmart was selling.
http://www.vox.com/2014/9/24/6839953/video-john-crawford-walmart-police-beavercreek-ohio-toy-gun
But this white guy can carry a real, loaded rifle (and body armor) in front of a school, refuses to show ID to police and nothing happens.
http://politix.topix.com/story/14304-was-this-man-wrong-to-demonstrate-open-carry-in-front-of-a-high-school
Open Carry laws are clearly meant just for white people. Laws that only apply to one race are the definition of racist.
Genetics explains why you look like your father, and if you don't, why you should.
