Month: February 2019

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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theunitofcaring:

I wrote a while ago about my baby roommate and novelty. The idea is that people find things interesting and exciting when they have the right amount of novelty. Things that are too predictable, like a children’s book you’ve read to a demanding kid ten thousand times, are boring. Things that aren’t predictable enough, like a long novel in a language you don’t speak, are also boring. It’s the process of forming expectations that are often right but sometimes surprised which makes something fun. So for a baby, repetitive play is fun, because every time the duck lands in the bathtub is slightly surprising; for an adult, those variants all make perfect sense and aren’t a source of thrilling novelty anymore.

But I think adults also vary tremendously in how much novelty they enjoy. There are people who reread books all the time, and people who never reread books, both of whom tend to regard each other with total incomprehension. There are people who like their nice simple job doing mostly the same thing every day, and there are people who’d die of boredom. And people are often attuned to different kinds of novelty – for me, ‘sewing dresses’ sounds like doing the same boring thing over and over again, but I bet anyone who actually does it would tell me that different fabrics and threads and stitches and fittings and other constraints make every project different.

I think we tend to talk about jobs as if everyone wants high novelty (art! research! acting! travel!) and some are forced to settle for the mindless drudgery of accounting or marketing or human resources or middle management. But that’s not how it works. Things that are an exciting and satisfying amount of novelty for some people are above the satisfying threshold for other people, and they’re just stressful and demoralizing. Things that would have some people grinding their teeth with tedium have lots of hidden novelty of just the right type for some other people.

But we don’t give kids a lot of opportunity to discover if they’re someone who would find accounting delightfully rewarding minute-to-minute. We don’t even tell them that anyone finds accounting delightfully rewarding. There isn’t really a chance, ever, to try forty things and figure out which one of them hits the right spot in your brain. Which is too bad, because I suspect that getting this right (and noticing when your job has ceased to offer it) is a major contributor to day-to-day happiness.

 

gnomer-denois:

Why do people think accounting is boring? Learning it is boring. Doing the day to day job… you don’t just do the same thing all day. Almost everyday it’s a juggling of what’s normal important right now and in 30 mins or an hour that’s going to change and you have to shift gears because something else has come up. The part I like the most but find the least rewarding is reconciliation projects for accounts that are years old. I can spend hours digging through tons of information to figure out what caused the problem and when it’s resolved, I solved the puzzle! But all I have to show for all that work is a couple of sentences or *maybe* a spreadsheet showing what I found. But I almost never get to really dig in on those problems because there’s always so much to do that has to be done Now.

Maybe it’s more boring in companies that have sufficient staffing.

 

brin-bellway:

I have really been feeling that lack-of-opportunity-to-figure-out-if-you-would-like-doing-accounting lately. *Specifically* regarding accounting.

There’s a draft I never got around to posting that talks about how I’ve been considering the possibility of changing my major from computer science to accounting, but that it’s hard to tell whether that’s a good idea because I have so little sense of what accountants actually *do*. (I interact with enough programmers that at least I have some sense of what *they* do.)

I enjoy making my family’s financial spreadsheets and gathering and crunching the numbers on what possible frugality-efforts would get us, but I don’t know how suggestive that really is.

@gnomer-denois (it won’t actually let me ping you, but since I’m reblogging directly from you you’ll probably still see it), if I may ask, what made you decide to become an accountant?

 

gnomer-denois:

Um, well. My degree in floral design (BS in Horticulture) wasn’t proving very useful since I didn’t have the equity to open my own store. Then I realized that, despite my rebelling against my math teacher mother, I do actually like math. I was on the fence between engineering and accounting but I prefer the more basic number manipulation to the higher level math.

My grandfather was an accountant after he retired from the Air Force, but a bunch of uncles and cousins are engineers, so that part could have gone either way. I had already taken an intro to accounting course during my first BS, and while it was confusing at first, once it clicked it made sense and I knew I could do it.

Also, at the time I started my BS in Accounting, most job listings for accountants required a BS and most for engineers required an MS. Since then there were stricter requirements put in place to sit for the CPA exam that mean I’ve needed to go on to a Masters of Accountancy, though I suspect if it was worked right that might not be necessary for everyone, depending on state/country. Recently I’ve been considering going on for my PhD and becoming a professor.

It sounds like you enjoy doing cost-benefit analysis and some other things that might lend well towards managerial accounting. Www.imanet.org has information about that if you are interested.

 

brin-bellway:

Thank you! That sounds promising.

Traditionally I take two consecutive days off from school-related tasks after finishing a semester, but I will look through that website after I’ve had a chance to recover.

I have one intro-level elective slot left in my computer-science major, so I can take intro to accounting without any sunk costs (the credits will still count towards my degree even if I continue with CS). I’m planning to do that next semester, and we’ll see how it goes.

 

justice-turtle:

@tigerkat24 I can’t recall if our housemate the accountant does tumblr (or I’d just message her directly), but perhaps you could ask if she’d be interested in talking to Brin about what-accountants-do?

Tags:

#(November 2017) #(this bit never went anywhere) #(but in any case my sense of what accountants do has improved enough since this post to think it worth pursuing) #((though if any accountants would like to talk to me about what their job is like I remain interested in hearing it)) #conversational aglets #adventures in University Land #adventures in human capitalism

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Anonymous asked: would be good if individuals could just easily adjust their own sex drives up or down as wanted, really. I mean, I know there are medications with either effect, but I don’t mean like that, I mean like you’d adjust a setting in a piece of software.

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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theopjones:

brin-bellway:

theopjones:

brin-bellway:

argumate:

it would indeed be very handy!

I think like most emotions it would be kind of self-reinforcing, in that once you’re at one end of the scale the other end seems unappealing, but it would still be good to have the option available.

…do people normally find a given level of libido self-reinforcing?

Only middling-libido!mes want to stay that way long-term; I get sick of high libido after ~1 day and of low libido after ~1 week. (Unless I’m too distracted by other things to notice the vague sense of being incomplete that happens when my libido is too low for too long, which is how I spent the month of April. But even that is more “being sufficiently fucked up that your damage-assessment mechanism is also damaged”, rather than actually being okay with it.)

Mind you, when I see other people complaining of loss of libido, they’re almost always talking about practical effects and not the inherent badness of having an ego-syntonic part of your psyche go missing, which makes me wonder if maybe ego-neutral libidos are more common than typical-minding would lead me to believe.

Kind of my feeling is that I often get the feeling of IQ reduced by 25% around hot woman + weird effects on inhibitions (both reduced and increased. Which is sort of self-reinforcing. 

But is also why I agree with the anon that I don’t really like a lot of my sex drive. 

I would kind of like it if I could turn off my feelings of sexual and romantic attraction 2/3rds of the time. And thats a lot of the reason. I often don’t like a lot of the effect that it has on me.

And I also wish I could shut off a lot of inappropriate times I’m attracted to someone or a lot of the feelings of unrequited crushes and such.

…okay, in hindsight I guess I should have figured my other divergences would imply divergence here as well. I had…kind of forgotten that sex drives could have interpersonal effects, since mine doesn’t really.

(I wish you good luck and good coping.)

Yah. 

For me its very difficult to separate any feeling of sex drive from attraction to particular people that I find hot.

While I haven’t actually had sex yet, even when jerking off, its pretty difficult to separate the feeling of sex from individual attraction. Its pretty much inseparable from fantasizing about the people I find attractive.

Tags:

#(October 2017) #conversational aglets #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #asexuality

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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theopjones:

brin-bellway:

justice-turtle:

wtf-viz:

Shattered distribution.

i’m sorry i understand this is trying to make a point but literally all i can think is “what the shit kind of graphic design is this”

Recently, I had a practice exercise for Critical Thinking class (Unit 7: How to Lie with Statistics) in which I had to find a terrible graph in a news source and explain why it was terrible.

As such, my reaction to this post is “*sigh* howmuch.net is at it again”.

(In the case of the post I linked, the article was even worse than the graph taken in isolation. Fun fact: as far as I can tell (and admittedly it’s not all that clear), the original data source uses “housing” to mean everything involved in maintaining a residence (such as utilities), but the article strongly implies that “housing” = “rent”. And they casually assume that a household with average income will also have average expenses, and at one point actually conflate income and expenses!)

—

On the bright side, the OP is wtf-viz, which means that the point this post is trying to make is “what the shit kind of graphic design is this”.

Side note, a lot of the high concentration of bitcoin ownership in a handful of accounts is due to the fact that early in the history of bitcoin, when bitcoin mining was really easy but bitcoin was not very valuable, a number of people mined a lot of bitcoin but then left the network presumably losing the private key for their wallet.

Tags:

#(October 2017) #conversational aglets #adventures in human capitalism #embarrassment squick

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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jadagul:

Growing up, I would often read people describe “the spot on your back that you can’t reach.” Generally in the context of, like, putting on sunscreen.

I was always super confused by this, in a classic case of generalizing from one example. I can still overlap my hands at the small of my back; there’s nowhere on my back I can’t reach pretty comfortably. It still surprises me every time someone can’t do that.

 

shedoesnotcomprehend:

….wait, that’s actually a thing?

I always assumed that when people said that, they meant, like, “the spot on your back that’s slightly awkward to reach so maybe if someone’s putting on sunscreen right next to you they’ll get it for you since you can’t see it anyway”

 

brin-bellway:

Me, reading a story with centaurs that has just mentioned them having a scratching post†: “Huh, yeah, centaurs *would* have large swaths of their bodies they can’t reach with their hands. It’s *weird*, trying to wrap my head around the idea of people who can’t reach every part of their skin with their manipulating appendages. What must that be like?”

Me: “…wait, hang on, there are some humans who are like that”

Me: “my *mom* is like that”

(When it first came up, Mom was likewise surprised to learn that I *could* reach every spot on my back. She brought up age and fatness as possible reasons for us to differ on this, but I remember there’s a Shel Silverstein poem about the one spot on your back you can’t reach that expected children to find this a relatable feel, so I expect it’s not that. Fatness could maybe still be involved.)

†Edit: I mean this in the sense of “a post you rub against to scratch yourself”, not the sense of “a post you scratch”.

 

justice-turtle:

I was always told this was a sexual dimorphism thing – that (cis) girls could reach the middle of their back while (cis) boys could not, and that it was due to some kind of evolutionary thing about girls having specialized baby-holding elbows while boys had specialized spear-throwing elbows. (hence “you throw like a girl” = you throw badly)

I take it this is all a load of bullcrap?

 

brin-bellway:

Probably a load of bullcrap, yeah. Even if it is sex-linked, I doubt those are the reasons for it.

(Mom and I are both cis women, though she has PCOS and I don’t so our hormonal profiles are noticeably different. And I think jadagul (the OP, who can do it) is cis-male, but I won’t swear to it.)

 

jadagul:

Yeah, I’m cis-male, and the partner I mentioned elsethread who can’t is cis-female.

Now, (cis-)women are more flexible on average than (cis-)men, so I would guess that more women can do this than men. But that’s a weak guess—if someone who knew what they were talking about said that more men can reach the small of their back because, I dunno, they on average have proportionately longer forearms or something, I would believe them.

(Side note: your elbow really isn’t the limiting factor here regardless; very few people are limited in how far they can flex their elbows. It’s going to be driven by shoulder mobility and by the relative dimensions of various body parts).

Tags:

#(October 2017) #conversational aglets #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #gender

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

tumblr_n9ht4omiep1rcio35o1_500

accessibilityfails:

i-need-that-seat:

pseudosoph:

i-need-that-seat:

For structures that have no entry steps, ConvertaStep also makes ramps of three sizes that come in a manual as well as automatic version.

(via ConvertaStep | Wheelchair Accessibility | Ramps | Convertastep – Freedom In Mobility)

This welcome mat converts into a fully accessible wheelchair ramp. Beautiful and functional design. I want it.

Some more info, for people who are interested.

First of all, I can’t believe this has almost 3,000 notes. I’m so glad that people are sharing this – both as a cool design, and also as an important accessibility feature.

Thanks to pseudosoph for linking to additional info (above) regarding weight limits, lift height, and product background – the creator is a wheelchair user himself! Very cool stuff. Keep sharing!

This isn’t a fail. Just wanted to share an accessibility win so people can get ideas for improving accessibility

Tags:

#love the decor fandom

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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writing-prompt-s:

You’re a regular office worker born with the ability to “see” how dangerous a person is with a number scale of 1-10 above their heads. A toddler would be a 1, while a skilled soldier with a firearm may score a 7. Today, you notice the reserved new guy at the office measures a 10.

 

wakeupontheprongssideofthebed:

You decide it’s best to find out what you can about this person. Cautiously, you approach his desk. He’s a handsome man, tall, but with a disarming smile. How could such a friendly guy with such cute, dorky glasses be dangerous?

You extend your hand. “I noticed you’re new here. What’s your name?”

He shakes your hand warmly. His gaze is piercing, as if he’s looking right through you. “The name’s Clark,” he says. “So, how long have you worked for the Daily Planet?”

 

misscrazyfangirl321:

This one wins.

 

janothar:

It’s been a few weeks, and one of Clark’s friends shows up.  She’s pretty and all, enough muscle that she must work out.  First thought would be that she should be maybe a 6.

Clark’s introducing her around.  “This is my good friend, Diana, she’s in from out of town.”

You blink, and take a step back in fear.  You’ve never seen an 11 before.

 

aniseandspearmint:

The day Bruce Wayne shows up for his long promised interview with Lois Lane, you can’t help it, the mug your holding drops from your fingers and sends a shock of hot coffee and ceramic shards across the floor.

Clark stops a few feet away and squints at you worriedly from behind those ridiculous glasses you’re 99% sure he doesn’t actually need, and asks tentatively, “Everything all right?”

You ignore him in favor of staring at the inky dark numerals hovering over the beaming fool gesticulating some fantastic yacht story for a gaggle of secretaries and minor columnists.

That’s it. Your gift has officially gone haywire. There is no other explanation. Because there is absolutely no way that Brucie Wayne is a 10.

 

petitstar:

At this point, you’ve seen it all. Miled manner reporters and billionaires at a 10 and a model-like woman at 11. You were really starting to doubt your power. The day you really stopped believeing in it was when Bruce Wayne came for another visit, and this time with a kid. The kid couldn’t be more than 10 years old, a bit on the short side.

He was an 8.

 

actuallyalivingsaint:

The day you started believing in it again was when you saw on tv the formation of something called the justice league.

There were those same numbers over superman, batman, wonder woman and robin. That’s when you put two and two together. You wonder how nobody at the daily planet noticed that Clarke was Superman with glasses. You wonder why you didn’t notice. You wonder why nobody put two and two together that Diana Prince and Wonder Woman looked exactly the same. You look in the mirror as the realization hit you and you see your own number change from a 3 to a 9.

 

rainnecassidy:

IT GOT BETTER

 

dottydayedream:

Despite this, you go about your life. You don’t talk to Clark – Superman? – and kept out of his way. His girlfriend Lois Lane – she was a five when you first met, but now she’s a nine just like you – tries to get you to interview Bruce Wayne, but you refuse. You meet other people in Clark’s group of friends with high numbers. The daughter of the police commissioner from Gotham. The forensic scientist from Central City. More and more people to avoid and worry about.

Meanwhile, your paranoia gets to you. You start working out. Training in self defense. Studying the Justice League, trying to find its members. Finding out all their identities so you can be ready.

One day you wake up with a ten above your head.

That day you get a call. You recognize the area code. Gotham. Your heart is in your throat. You should throw the phone away, run. They’ve found you. You’re doomed. You might be a ten, but you can’t beat them all.

You pick up the phone anyways.

“Hello?”

“Hey, this is Clark Kent. I was wondering if we could talk.”

Your mouth goes dry. “About what?”

Clark’s voice goes quiet. “Well. About the Justice League.”

 

dottydayedream:

You stiffen in your seat. Your adrenaline kicks in, and your eyes dart around the room. You can hang up, pack, grab a plane ticket to wherever and disappear. Your passport hasn’t expired, and you’ve been talking to Perry White about a vacation anyways. You could say it’s a family emergency and never come back.

But they’d find you. You know they’d find you. They’re goddamned superheroes. They can carry buildings. They could probably manage finding you.

“Hello?” Clark’s voice returns, tinged with concern, and suddenly you stop. Calm down. They’re the good guys. At least they’re supposed to be.

“Yeah, sorry, just a little shocked you–”

“Caught up to you?” Clark asked. He laughed a little, but it wasn’t teasing. His voice had his regular ease, the same casual tone he would employ to talk about the weather in the break room. “Yeah. Lois noticed your odd behavior, actually. We didn’t realize it was linked to the League until you refused to interview Bruce, and then we knew something was up.”

“Speaking of Bruce Wayne, are you using his phone? Your area code is Gotham, not Metropolis.”

Clark laughed. “Damn. Lois wasn’t kidding when she said you were the best investigator working for the Daily Planet.”

“I just notice things is all.” You laughed nervously. You still can’t shake your general unease. This guy could kill you without any effort. You’re no match for him, or for any of his friends for that matter. Hell, Batman didn’t even have powers and he’d still fuck you up.

“Yeah, and that’s a skill we could use around here. Would you like to talk about joining? Bruce can send you a car, bring you here–”

“No,” you say, sharper than you intended. “Sorry. I’d rather meet in public, if that’s okay with you.”

“Of course. Lunch or coffee? It’s still early, but it’s a bit easier to cram all of us in a restaurant than a coffee shop.”

“Lunch, I guess. And no superhero stuff.”

Clark pauses, then sighs sadly. You’ve heard this sadness before in rare amounts. When bad things happened and fear and greed overtook people, he’d always frown and sigh, like someone watching their best friend self destruct, unable to help or save them. “You’re afraid of us. Aren’t you?” His voice is concerned and hushed.

A pang of guilt starts to replace the fear. “You can throw around buildings like a sack of potatoes, Clark. Your friend is powerful on an impossible level, Bruce’s kid is a fucking eight–”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Clark said, the sadness disappearing. “You have a number system for us?”

“Look, it’s a whole thing. I’ll talk about it over lunch.” You grab your laptop bag. “Where are we meeting?”

Clark said something to someone else. “Got any restaurant ideas? They want lunch.”

Bruce Wayne – you’ve heard enough interviews to recognize his voice – said, “Saffron’s pretty good.”

“Jesus,” someone else said. You’ve heard the voice, but you couldn’t place it. “I keep on forgetting you’re rich.”

“You don’t think it’s a little much, Bruce? The pay at Daily Planet is good but not that good,” said Clark.

“I’ll cover their tab.”

“Okay…” Clark returned to the call. “Saffron, in…thirty minutes? You’re downtown, right?”

“You can get a table to Saffron in thirty minutes?” said the strange voice. “Boy, am I glad I made friends with you guys.”

“Yeah, that works.” You’re a bit hesitant, but you swallow your nerves. At least for now. Your thoughts about threat levels made you forget that Clark is a decent guy. All you could do is hope that he thinks you’re decent, too. “See you then.”

“See you then. Be safe. Bye.” Clark hangs up, and you’re left in your room. The worry is starting to turn into something different. Excitement.

You shove the phone into your pocket, grab your keys, and head out the door. You’re so full of restless energy you walk the whole way there. Once you arrive, you catch your reflection in the mirror and notice that you’re starting to suit that ten above your head.

 

capregalia:

KEEP GOING!!!!!!!

 

dottydayedream:

The hostess takes you to a hidden corner of the restaurant. It’s mostly empty, as though it’s only just opened. Sitting at a long table, chatting politely, was the Justice League.

They aren’t wearing masks or uniforms, no bright colors and costumes. Clark Kent is in his usual office wear, Bruce Wayne is wearing a tailored suit, Diana Prince dons a nice blue dress, and Oliver Queen wears a nice button down. You don’t recognize two of them – a twenty something in jeans and a hoodie, a man in a green shirt, and a burly guy in a baggy t-shirt and old jeans who looks like he had just washed up from the sea. All of them, aside from Diana, are tens, of course.

Clark Kent stands, shakes your hand when you come in. “Glad to see you made it.” He introduces you to the others, and they all shake your hand quite happily and greet you like a friend. You learn that the guy in the hoodie is Barry Allen, the dude in green is Hal Jordan, and the beach dude is Arthur Curry. Waitresses, all ones, twos, and threes, come in with drinks, and one plops a mug of coffee in front of you, along with a small menu. Clark Kent gives you a knowing gaze.

Once the waitresses clear out, Bruce sits up straight. “Clark, would you rather I do the honors?” His silver watch glitters in the light from the windows.

“No, no, Bruce,” Clark says, setting down his glass of water. “I think it’s best if I ask them myself.”

Within a moment, you piece it together. “You want me to join the Justice League?”

Clark Kent cracks a smile. “How’d you guess?”

“You call me out of the blue, mention the Justice League, invite me to Bruce Wayne’s place, and then here, where you introduce me to a group of people who all look strikingly similar to the members of the Justice League.” You take a sip of coffee. “Subtlety is hardly your strong suit.”

Barry Allen laughed. “They got you there on that one.”

“Well, you’re right. At first Bruce wanted to handle the situation himself,” – you’d rather not think about what handle was a euphemism for – “but I insisted we do some more digging. We did, and what we found was…surprising. To say the least.”

You look at him oddly. You aren’t normal – no one else saw numbers floating above people’s heads – but you weren’t surprising. Your parents were the only ones who knew about your ability, and they’re long gone. You’ve got no checkered past, no odd history–

“You have powers.” Clark’s voice was clearly impressed.

“How did you find out about that?” The fear comes back, forming a knot in your stomach. “I’ve never told anyone else about it.”

“It’s not hard to notice,” Barry Allen says in between sips of soda. “Most of the information we got we got from Lois after she’s hung out with you.”

“I’ve never her told her anything about the numbers, though.”

Oliver Queen sits up, flashing you a confused look. “Numbers?”

Okay, something’s not right here. “The number I see over everyone’s heads,” you say, keeping your voice low. “It ties into how dangerous everyone is. Usually it’s just a one or two, maybe a three or four or five if they’ve got some kind of training or if they work out or whatever. Almost everyone at this table has a ten.”

“Almost?” Diana furrows her brow.

“You have an eleven,” you add.

Diana nods, smiling with a bit of pride and making an “I told you so” face to Bruce Wayne, who rolls his eyes. Oliver Queen clears his throat as Bruce and Hal pass him a couple bills.

“Ignore them,” Barry says, rolling his eyes at the three of them. “What you said was interesting – I might have to ask you a few questions on that later – but it wasn’t what I found. Remember the sensory and memory study you did when you were ten?”

You do remember it. Your parents were contacted by a scientist friend of theirs who needed kids to run a study on memory and stimuli. You remember it clearly. The large sterile room, the tests, the person conducting them, a handsome woman with a four above her head, the questions, the smell of latex gloves and fresh bleach. But you don’t remember the results. You were never told the results, other than that they were good, though with a test like that it was hard to say.

“Well, I found the tests. And they were superhuman.”

 

mentallydobious:

Oh shit this is the best one!

@sophus-b, thought you might like this longer version.

Tags:

#recs #Superman #fanfic #long post

Homophones in Chinese

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

serinemolecule:

In Chinese, the sound shí can mean any of:

 • time
 • the number ten
 • rock
 • food
 • to eat
 • honesty
 • seed
 • fruit
 • to pick up
 • dill

And these are just the more common meanings. There are approximately three times more possible interpretations if you want to be obscure. And this also doesn’t get into shī, shǐ, or shì, which are just tonal differences and mean entirely different things.

And this is true of basically any sound in Chinese. If you ask me, out of context, what Qing means, I’ll give you a list of like forty possible meanings and say “it’s probably one of these, I’ll need to see the context to know which one.”

Understandably, when I tell people this, their first reaction is, “How do you tell them apart?”

The generic response here, the one you’re going to hear from most people, is “context”.

Like, if someone says “I’m a little hoarse”, your first response isn’t going to be “you look nothing like a pony”. Context generally makes the thing obvious.

But come on. Context clues are enough for the two-to-three-at-most homophones you get in English. Not the forty-or-so homophones you get in Chinese. This is Serine’s Linguistics Blog, and here I’m going to tell you the real answer.

The real answer is…

Most Chinese words are made of multiple characters. Multiple-character words have a lot fewer collisions.

But that’s still not enough. The real real answer is…

Chinese is just really redundant.

One of the common blessings in Chinese New Year was

迎福纳祥

These characters mean [welcome][fortune][receive][luck] – as you can see, it’s just saying the same thing twice.

Here’s my dictionary’s breakdown of the word “to welcome”:

tumblr_inline_pmio29hclo1u6eyq8_500

And triple-redundancy isn’t rare, either:

坚定不移 – staying still

Which breaks down to:

 坚 – unchanging
 定 – settled down
 不 – not
 移 – moving

Tags:

#language

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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shedoesnotcomprehend:

(i)

A side effect of my sleep disorder is that I have lots of really vivid strange dreams, which I remember well when I wake up.

Last night I dreamt that something inexplicable/apparently paranormal (details not important) happened, and that I posted to tumblr saying “hey, so this really weird thing happened, and I can’t come up with a mundane explanation for it, does anyone have any ideas?”

In the dream, I got several replies to the post, offering potential explanations. I posted again thanking people for their input and saying that, as it happened, none of those could apply in this case.

“Obviously,” I added, “from your point of view, the most plausible explanation at this point is ‘some random person on the internet is lying.’ But I’m curious what the most reasonable explanation is from my point of view, given that I know it really did happen.”

At which point I woke up, making the answer immediately clear: the most reasonable explanation was that it did not, in fact, happen, because I was dreaming – even if I was quite sure it had happened.

(ii)

A while ago I had another dream along the same lines.

In that dream, something had happened that could happen in real life, but happens much more frequently in dreams – I don’t remember what it was, but something like “leaving the house and then realizing you’re not wearing pants,” or “finding out you’re signed up for a class you haven’t gone to all semester.”

Within the dream, I noticed this, and turned to the person next to me. “You know,” I observed, “if I were being strictly logical, I should now conclude that this is all a dream and none of it is really happening. Just goes to show how silly and impractical that kind of thinking is.”

Whereupon, of course, I woke up, and subsequently felt very silly indeed.

(iii)

I’m pretty sure my subconscious is trying to tell me something.

I’m a little concerned that what it’s trying to tell me seems to be “you’re living out Inception; wake up.”

But then, that would just be ridiculous.

 

shitifindon:

huh!

This is fascinating to me because, while I do (very rarely) sometimes consider in a dream whether or not I’m dreaming and come up with a “no”, when I do that while awake there is an experiential/intuitive factor present that makes the answer *super obvious* and that is consistently missing in dreams. (It’s just that in dreams I don’t always retain the information “hey, if you can’t feel The Thing That Means You’re Obviously Awake Right Now, you probably aren’t”.)

And like, MOST of the time, if I’m dreaming and it occurs to me to wonder whether I’m dreaming I can notice the absence of The Thing That Means I’m Obviously Awake. Or if not that I can pick up on another blatant sign, such as having a super hard time visually focusing on objects, or the stubborn refusal of bathrooms to continue having walls when I’m in them, or my mother being alive.

Do you not have a thing like that, or what?

 

shedoesnotcomprehend:

I definitely don’t have a Thing That Means I’m Obviously Awake. (A fairly common experience for me is picking up on environmental/mood cues that correlate with being-in-a-dream, and going “oh shoot I am totally dreaming right now aren’t I? great, the jump scare is coming any second,” and then it turning out that I am in fact awake.)

I do have a good reliable check I can perform, though (like you) I often forget it exists in dreams: I don’t feel pain in dreams, so I’ll bite the side of my hand, and if it hurts a little I’m awake and if my teeth go straight through painlessly I’m asleep. (As a kid I assumed everyone had this and that was what the “pinch yourself to see if you’re dreaming” thing was about.)

Unfortunately, though, this really only works while I’m doing it, because (I don’t know if other people experience this?) dreams don’t just give me invented current-experiences, they often come with fictional memories. This can range from “ah yes I have been searching for this mystical artifact for years” to “I can remember clearly the day I learned to fly” to “oh yeah I’m definitely awake because I checked just a little while ago.” (I first consciously noticed this phenomenon after Inception came out; I tried the remember-how-you-got-here thing, and discovered that my brain was cheerfully willing to spin out vivid memories of how I got there.)

(“Try reading a book” used to also be a good check for me; in a dream, I was never able to. Then one time I tried to use it and my brain cheerfully generated pages of made-sense-at-the-time text, and I concluded I was awake, and was quite startled when I woke up. These days, my second-best check for dreaming is that I can never type in dreams, especially not dialing phone numbers; I constantly hit the wrong keys, and then backspace too far, and then hit the wrong keys again…)

 

shitifindon:

Weeeeeeird. Brains, man!

(If I had to describe The Thing That Means I’m Obviously Awake, I’d say it’s something like… a solidity and concreteness and embodiedness of experience? Dream experiences hit all or most of the right highlights, but fall down on the really minor stuff like ‘this table is at the exact same height every time I touch it’, and the framing stuff like ‘I have functioning vision, hearing, taste, smell, and proprioception all of the time, but cannot ever see the events of my life from a third-person perspective’.)

 

brin-bellway:

I think I’m in between the two of you. One of my big differences in dream-vs-real experience is that my sense of touch (and related senses, like proprioception and nociception) keeps running in the background when I’m awake, but when I’m dreaming I only feel touch/pain/position-in-space if I’m paying attention to it.

This is similar to your experiential/intuitive factor of Obvious Awakeness, yet is almost completely useless for dream testing because of pink-elephant problems. If you try to actively determine whether your sense of touch keeps working when you’re not paying attention to it, well, now you’re paying attention to it.

(I suspect it might be the reason why I pretty much never get false *positives* on dream tests, though (with only one exception I can think of). If I’m seriously wondering whether I’m dreaming, I almost certainly am. But dream!me generally doesn’t find that line of reasoning convincing *enough* to bet on it (do things that will go badly if I turn out not to be dreaming), and I can’t say I blame her.)

I don’t currently have any tests that consistently or even near-consistently work, just some that work sometimes.

—

Somewhat tangential, but kind of related: after watching the Doctor Who episode “Extremis”, I found myself occasionally performing shadow tests in dreams and failing them. I thought it was weird while watching that episode that everyone leaps from “we’re part of a simulated reality” to “we must be a training ground for aliens preparing to conquer the alpha-reality Earth”, without considering other reasons you might be part of a simulated reality, and it seems my subconscious agrees.

 

gasmaskaesthetic:

I was dreaming once and decided to see if I was dreaming…by throwing myself down the stairs. I don’t recommend that test.

(see also)

Tags:

#(August 2017) #conversational aglets #dreams #unreality cw #embarrassment squick #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

On matched betting

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

jbeshir:

brin-bellway:

jbeshir:

reasonableapproximation:

I decided to do a little bit of matched betting to earn a small amount of money. I used the guide at https://matchedbettingblog.com (and their calculator.

So far:

  • I made about £10 profit from Coral, which is lower than it should have been but partly because I misread their odds for my qualifying bet and lost ~£3 on that instead of ~£0.50. This was a few weeks ago, now I’m doing a second bet.
  • I chose ComeOn for my second because they had a £10 free bet, and small bets require less stake. They aren’t a very good website. I had trouble finding things to bet on and they don’t seem to offer very good odds. I expect to make about £6.50 profit from them. (I’m betting on France v Paraguay which started a few minutes ago.)
  • My betfair liability is ~£40 to make £7 on a £10 bet. To extract closer to £10 (well, £9.50 thanks to commission), liability needs to go up crazy fast. Also, if my free bet was x times larger, liability would also need to go up x times. (“Liability” here is not how much money I risk losing, but how much I need to have in betfair. If I lose that money it just means I gain money somewhere else. But betfair is the convenient place for it to be.)
  • This does not seem a very time-efficient way of earning money, though I do expect to get faster.
  • When I withdrew money from Coral it went into my paypal account. I think I can use that money as partial payment when I make charity donations, maybe? I’m not entirely sure how to use it if not, I can link a bank account to my paypal account but effort.
  • I should probably sign up for Smarkets, but I already had a betfair account so I’ve been using them.
  • It looks like I have a free £5 bet from betfair? I’m not sure where that’s from. Presumably it’s stake not returned, so… I’m not sure how to calculate my optimal strategy using it. I could do the arithmetic, but I might just use it to place a bet, for simplicity.
  • It’s possible to do this as an ongoing thing, but it doesn’t seem very convenient. It looks like you need to do things like “place bet on this game while it’s in play”, which is only like a two hour window (and ideally you place at half time to avoid odds moving, which is even shorter), and you only get a few pounds at a time.
  • I’ve heard that this does bad things to my credit score. I don’t know how much I should care.
  • I have not received noticeable amounts of annoying emails from Coral or Betfair. Or ComeOn, but too soon to tell with them.

I made upwards of a grand from this during the last year and a bit; I did it fairly intensively for a while farming easier/larger signup bonuses, and then just settled into collecting money whenever any of the betting sites I’d signed up for sent me an email offer I could turn into free money readily.

A common thing is that I get an email offering me a free in-play bet of up to £50 if I place a same-size pre-match bet, which means by being around at the time of the match and jumping on it I get a free £30-£35ish. Just today, though, I woke up to an email offer from Betfair for a refund on losses up to £100 on bets settled today or tomorrow, and set myself up with them against Smarkets to get a free guaranteed £75-£80ish out of that. The annoying emails are not really annoying! They are actually quite handy. They think you are a potential gambling addict and will offer you free money, and you can be like “sure thank you I will take your free money”.

Smarkets is better for any markets with enough volume; I would sign up, it’s worth it for the 2% commission vs 5%. You will still need to use Betfair for any markets where volume is low. You also will need Smarkets to match Betfair; if you try to match Betfair with themselves they will get angry and refuse to give you the offer, and maybe bar your account if especially pissy. Betfair never used to send out offers, but this is the second I’ve had from them in the past few months so maybe they’ve shifted strategies.

The biggest individual profits I made were from large signup free credit offers, which were in the region of £200 but had to be turned over lots of times so it only nets to about £120ish. /do/ account for accumulating losses to cycling; things which have to turned over more than ~5 times are liable to either be a lot less profitable than they look or actually a net loss, because each matched pair makes a small guaranteed loss leaking your profit.

Matched betting really does work! The big limiter is that you need to do a lot of research to understand what you’re doing, and you need to stick to common sports or else deal very carefully with differences in adjudication between markets, so we’re talking this being for quite clever people, and you need upwards of a grand in capital for any of the bigger things; to jump on that offer I got today, I had to have £800ish around to tie up for the next week or so (withdrawal is reliable and safe, but takes days, unlike the instant deposit) and I had to have it immediately on hand.

This limits the people who do it enough that we’re an acceptable business expense to hook the potential gambling addicts they’re after. It does emphasise how often they must hook people and how much they must get, though, that they will put so much free money out there as bait. That said, I’m not sure how many of the big signup offers are still around, and I get the impression an increasing number of offers are designed to be hard to match.

…are British gambling companies more trustworthy than American ones?

Word in American supplementary-income circles is, if you think you’ve found a loophole in a set of gambling rules that will allow you to get risk-free money out of it, the loophole will usually turn out not to exist. If necessary, casinos will straight-up lie about what they will and will not do, in order to prevent you from exploiting it. (I’ve heard so many stories of casinos that just *didn’t pay* a promised sign-up bonus, and didn’t respond to messages about it.)

*Sometimes* you get places that actually give you the bonuses they say they will, under the circumstances they say they will. But because a significant portion of them don’t, and you don’t know for sure which category any given instance will be in (and you can’t necessarily trust that it will at least be consistent person-to-person), the money is no longer risk-free: you’re meta-gambling.

Trustworthy to do what they said they will when they said they would, yes. There’s regulators that insist on it.

In general if they pick up on you as probably pulling matched shenanigans your account can get closed after, or much more commonly, flagged as no longer eligible for offers (I think two of mine have been?), but they cannot arbitrarily rescind an offer that brought them trade AFTER extending it, and in the rare cases of smaller iffier companies which have done that, threatening them with the regulator has brought them to behave.

In general, the terms they have do forbid guaranteed win betting, so if you find one of the rare offers which can be exploited within that single provider without pulling in an exchange for a guaranteed profit you are liable to have your account closed and money refunded (this happened to me with Sky Bets about two years before I got into matched betting, they ill-advisedly put out an offer which included roulette, so you just turned your money over on that and withdrew. they cancelled everyone who did that).

In theory, those terms might preclude matched betting- however, they do not have access to the betting exchanges and can’t see that you are doing it, and without the ability to prove you are doing it they must do what they said they were going to do. So matched bettors are just a cost of business they have to bite.

Much more common in the smaller iffier companies are terms which are impossible; a free bonus that must be bet 20 times before any winnings can be withdrawn or something, at minimum rates and overheads that prevent it ever being profitable. Or a huge list of conditions that in practice you are going to struggle to meet. Those you just don’t touch.

Some of this is because of gambling’s unambiguously generally legal if regulated state in the UK and much of Europe; the bigger betting companies are big brands; Sky, for example, is the big satellite TV company, and Sky Bets is a betting subsidiary they made, comparable to if the US had a Verizon Bets or something. Discourages scumminess. I think some of it might be that casinos are just plain bad relative to other kinds of businesses even within gambling for this, though; I would be leery trying it in person for the first time. I am not sure where that intuition comes from.

(I would also note that the exchanges generally don’t care if you are doing matched betting. They profit just fine- you are effectively taking the offers and “selling” them on the exchange to other exchange participants, and they get their commission in the process. It’s only the end extending the offer which cares.)

Tags:

#(June 2017) #(I was actually referring to online casinos but I didn’t bother to clarify) #conversational aglets #gambling #adventures in human capitalism