I'm late to the party here, but as I look through the comments, about three-quarters of them fall into one of two basic types:

1) Modern shows are too preachy and politically-correct! That's why no one is watching them!
2) No, they're not! You must be one of those awful Republicans!

(I refuse to use the word "woke", in this context. It's a stupid word.)

My response to comment #2 is, well, if "preachiness" and "political correctness" is indeed not the problem, then what *is* the problem? When you compare a typical TV show from 2024 to a typical TV show from 2004, are there other consistent differences you can identify?

There's exactly one gas station in my suburb which doesn't have ads at the pump, and I will, no kidding, drive out of my way to go to it. I also routinely drive out of my way to go to the supermarket that doesn't blast ads over the PA. I can't be the only customer who does this kind of thing. Wonder if they've conducted any studies on *that*.

I'm not sure what a Roku is, but I know I won't be buying one.

Sure, but even the pentatonic scale has some moderately dissonant intervals in it-- for example the major second is "dissonant" (compared with the octave, the fifth, the major thirds and the major sixths). You're right that it's not a scale that produces a lot of dissonance (it's impossible to get the tritone interval). And maybe that's why songs in a *pure* pentatonic scale tend to sound kind of bland or plinky-plonky (case in point, the opening of "Oh Susanna"). Not to be confused with songs in a blues scale, since that scale is different.

All of this is sort of tangential to the research article itself. The article itself has to do with whether "consonance perception is affected by timbre". Of course, it is-- and this isn't a new observation. Pete Townshend of the Who did an interview once where he talks about this in relationship to guitar tone (he will voice chords differently depending on whether he is using distortion).

It's obvious to any reasonable person that Okoli's remark about "killing people with your sauce" was a meant as a figure of speech, not a literal accusation of murder. It's as if you sued me for defamation because I said "You're killing me with all these dumb questions". If she had accused the company of literally killing customers by selling a product that was contaminated with arsenic, then this would be a basis for a serious defamation case.

It's also very strange that Okoli was arrested and jailed pursuant to a civil case. This is technically possible even in the US (e.g. you can be jailed for contempt of court even in a civil proceedings), but in most countries, it's rare. It also requires that the arrestee defy a court order.

I suspect that we don't have the full story here-- Nigeria is notorious for its graft and corruption, and it's hard to believe that things would have played out this way if someone hadn't been paid off (although I don't know this for sure). Either way, I sincerely hope that this leads to so much public backlash that the company responsible goes bankrupt.

Right off the bat, there is a major misconception in the summary. Musical intervals with simple integer ratios (like 3:2, the interval of a fifth) are associated with a feeling of "consonance". But this feeling of "consonance" has nothing to do with the feeling that a musical interval is "pleasant" or "beautiful" (as the summary suggests), and conversely, a feeling of "dissonance" has nothing to do with the feeling that a musical interval is "unpleasant" or "ugly". Really, this is basic Intro-To-Music-Theory stuff.

(It goes without saying that if you wrote a musical composition that contained nothing but "consonant" intervals, the resulting composition would probably be perceived by most listeners as bland and boring, and rather fatiguing to listen to-- not "pleasant" or "beautiful" at all).

"People who only got four hours of sleep for the past two nights generally don't feel as good as people who have been sleeping well". Yes, OK, what of it? You're not telling us anything that wasn't blindingly obvious to begin with.

The only reason this "study" is getting attention in the media is this: The researchers, evidently, used some sort of bizarre questionnaire that asked people to rate their sense of well-being in terms of how "old" or "young" they feel. As someone who works with psychometric scales for a living, I think this is a pretty dumb way to quantify how someone feels (it's imprecise, nonspecific, and doesn't give any information that you couldn't obtain through other, well-validated scales).

I wonder if the next step in developing "true" AI, or general AI, will require giving the programs bodies.

One of the striking things about current AIs is that although they have access to enormous amounts of information, they often seem to lack knowledge that is commonly shared by all reasonably-sane human beings (what psychologists call a "general fund of knowledge"). That's why they will say things that appear absurd. They also seem to lack reality testing-- they will express statements that a reasonably-sane person knows are not possible.

Most of us acquire a substantial "general fund of knowledge" as small children, simply through daily experience. We learn that gravity is a thing, that water flows downhill, that some processes are reversible (dropping a hat) and other processes aren't (dropping a bowl of oatmeal), that it's reasonable to spend ten minutes preparing a meal but not reasonable to spend 300 years preparing a meal, that people eat chickens but chickens don't eat people, and so on and so forth-- it's a vast body of implicit and explicit knowledge that we don't ever have to think about. But if we didn't have that body of knowledge, we couldn't function, and we would appear insane.

Well, I'm in favor of stricter gun control, and I would never try to ban civilian use of guns. Just about 100% of the people I know are in favor of stricter gun control, and not a single one of them wants to ban civilian use of guns (indeed, some of them own guns themselves). That's not a very scientific sample, of course, but it does tend to support my statement.

If you want a slightly more scientific sample, we can look at recent polls. 56% of Americans think that current gun laws are not strict enough. Do you honestly think that 56% of the U.S. population is involved in a super-secret conspiracy to ban all guns?

There is indeed an "extreme" wing within the gun-control movement-- I'm thinking for example of the retired Supreme Court justice who proposed rescinding the 2nd Amendment-- and I don't support them any more than you do. Indeed, I think they do immeasurable damage to the gun control movement, and I wish they'd shut up.

Ah yes, the old "if-guns-are-outlawed-only-outlaws-will-have-guns" argument. This argument might be valid if gun-control advocates were trying to *ban* civilian use of guns, and most of them are not. Instead, they are trying to be more selective about who gets to have guns. That means things like stricter background checks, which, of course, will disproportionately affect criminals (and psychotic individuals).

The more logical slogan would be "If we try to prevent outlaws from having guns, then fewer outlaws will have guns". It's not as clever or catchy, but it's more accurate.

Also, with regard to what guns are most often used for... citation please. (I'm the second poster to call you out on this). Last I checked, the #1 cause for gun-related fatalities in the US was suicide. Followed (very closely) by murder. All other causes (law enforcement, accidents, self-defense, undetermined) trail far behind.

It's also statistically very, very unlikely. Most 81-year-olds are not in "the best mental shape they've ever been in". If Biden really is, that makes him a curious outlier, neurologically speaking-- we should sequence his DNA to find out his secret.

No, I'm not really sure. But I do know that there were a lot of Moors in continental Europe, back in 1000. The Moors seem to have been a mixture of every possible skin color, but at least some of them were described in contemporary accounts as being "as black as a raven". And there were plenty of well-traveled trade routes between Britain and the rest of Europe.

Then, as I mentioned, there are all the "cameo appearances"-- there's a picture of a Black guy in the Domesday Abbreviato (1241), there was the Fairford skeleton of a North African female (dates to about 1000 AD), there are the Ipswich skeletons (13th century), etc.

Not saying that Black people were at all commonplace in medieval England, but the OP's estimate of "there were maybe a dozen" seems unlikely.

I know it's completely irrelevant to the main point, but as a casual history nerd... I think "12 black-skinned people in all of England" is hard to believe. I have no idea what the correct estimate would be, but something like 500-1000 might be more plausible. This is based on the fact that Africans make a lot of cameo appearances in pre-Norman British history (all the way back to Roman times), and also on the fact that we've found a number of British skeletons from this era which appear to be African.

In one of his (multiple) autobiographies, Leonard Nimoy talks about looking at Star Trek fan art and seeing some "extremely realistic" paintings of himself cavorting in the nude. Usually with Captain Kirk. He thought it was pretty amusing.

Ain't nothing new here, except that the requirement for artistic talent has been removed.

Yes, I do get it that this sort of thing might seem a whole lot less amusing to the subject, when the subject is a woman. But to describe it as a "safety" issue? Eff off.

I'm as close to a free-speech absolutist as you're likely to find (check my posting history), but I don't agree at all with this interpretation. In fact, this law reminds me of the famous quote by Louis Brandeis: "the remedy [for problematic speech] is more speech, not enforced silence".

I've suggested many times that this is the kind of solution social media should use to cope with "problematic" speech (posts by Russian bots, so-called "fake" news stories, etc). Don't hide the posts or ban the posts-- just attach a label explaining where you think the post came from or why you think it's misleading, and I'll come to my own conclusions, thankyouverymuch.

Agree 100%-- as I was reading through the list of surveillance techniques, I thought to myself "One of these things is NOT like the others". Even the staunchest privacy advocate must admit that there is no "expectation of privacy" when you are talking to a police officer.

As a resident of Chicago-- which is legendary for its police corruption and abuse-- I believe that police should always be required to wear bodycams. Any time a policeman's bodycam is absent or "not working", this should be treated as a disciplinary matter and a cause for grave suspicion. The EFF's arguments for distrusting bodycams (which you have quoted) are simply incoherent nonsense.

It's too bad, because in other respects, I greatly admire what the EFF is doing here.