When you can't live without bananas

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Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Links - 12th November 2024 (1)

Meme - "Traditional: *Traditional Chinese character for love* I <3 you
Simplified: *Simplified Chinese character for love* Friendzoned"

Meme - "She's been in a coma and won't wake up"
"She's Italian right? I like to put hot water in the pot before boiling it then I snap my dried spaghetti in half before I put it in the pot"
*Wakes up*

Meme - "Saw this in a FB Group
I should be expecting a call from CPS soon. My son had one assignment and clearly he didn't understand it. Worst mom of the year goes to me. he really couldn't think of nothing positive #GrowingUpInTheHood"
"Sayings/phrases that were/are often repeated in your family
when we get in this store you better not touch anything
I brought you in this world and I could take you out
Imma give you sum to cry about"

Meme - "r/TrueOffMyChest
My coworker is a totally normal person and he fascinates me.
 He has no mental health problems like everyone else here and most of the other people in my life. He isn't on any meds, he's physically healthy. I've had to explain my panic attacks, anxiety, my meds, being overwhelmed by basically everything and so much more to him because he's never experienced/heard of them.  Almost everyone I know is a mess and the contrast between them, myself and him is amazing to me. It's like he's a machine.  Just some other things: He's never late to work, he doesn't over sleep, he doesn't have trouble sleeping.  He doesn't have meltdowns/tantrums/outbursts or shutdowns  He isn't allergic to anything and he has no food sensitivities, or at least none that he knows of.  He works out every day, either at home or the gym.  He has no chronic health issues  He doesn't get stuck or freeze or get trapped in a loop  He can drive without issue and knows how to get to where he wants to go without his phone. Detours don't cause him any issues.  If things don't go to plan or have to change or just fall apart he just adapts and moves on.  He can just talk to people, males, females, just casual conversation.  If a big choice has to be made he just makes it.  He does what he says he'll do when he says he'll do it the way he says he'll do it.  He can solve problems, there's no googling no looking it up, he just knows.  He doesn't keep his phone on him all day. He just puts it away and has no need to look at it.  He doesn't use social media, he doesn't follow it, he doesn't care about it."
This is probably a left winger

Meme - "And the award for the best sugar company name goes to ...
Daddy"

Meme - Lamar Jackson Stan Account @in_A_YamChele: "my nephew is 13 and starting to ask girls on dates. so he asked my brother what was the best way to ask a girl on a date and he told him to find something they were both interested in and ask if she wanted to do it. so my nephew asked the girl if she liked chicken nuggets."

Meme - "On this day Rebecca decided to start saving for a car
*Woman looking bemused as black guy gets blowjob in the bus row behind her*"

Meme - Hot Takes Nobody Asked For: "virginia heffernan is a journalist for wired."
Virginia Heffernan @page88: "There's something oily about describing your kids, every time, as "beautiful.""
Left wing anti-natalism strikes again
Her surname is Irish, so

Meme - "Scientists then: I can't wait for someone to try to disprove my findings
Scientists now: If you challenge anything I say than that's hate speech"

Meme - "19th century scientist: I must find the explanation for this phenomenon in order to truly understand Nature...
21st centurt scientist: I must get the result that fits my narrative so I can get my paper into Nature.."

Meme - Thought Police to Woman in House: "WE SAW YOUR MEME STEP OUTSIDE!"

Curator Finds Murphy Bed's Place in American History - "Inventor William Lawrence Murphy (1856-1957) began tinkering with hideaway beds while living in a one-room apartment in San Francisco in the late 19th century. He was falling for a young opera singer and courting customs at that time would not permit a lady to enter a gentleman's bedroom. But according to family legend, Murphy's limited finances and a strict moral code didn't spoil his chance at love. His invention allowed him to stow his bed in his closet, transforming his one-room apartment from a bedroom into a parlor.  The couple married in 1900."

Yakhchāls – Meybod, Iran - "Though they look like giant clay beehives, these structures in the deserts of Persia were used to make something much more needed and much harder to come by there than honey in ancient times: ice.  Yakhchāls, ancient evaporation coolers, came into being around 400 BC. The giant conical structures allowed ice to be made and collected during the colder months and used throughout the year for things like preserving food and making faloodeh, a traditional Persian frozen dessert made with thin noodles and semi-frozen syrup."

Meme - George RR Martin: "Gandalf should have stayed dead.."
Theoden: "When last I looked, Tolkien, not Martin was the author of LOTR..."

Throwback Thursday: No, expensive running shoes do not lead to 123% increase in injuries

8 years after declaring it took 'courage' to remove the iPhone's headphone jack, Apple has finally decided buttons and ports are cool again - "It took courage to release the MacBook Air, a computer so thin it could house only two USB ports. It took courage to remove the iPhone's multifunctional home button. It took courage to start selling Earpods that only worked with the iPhone's proprietary lightning cable once the headphone jack was gone, and it took even more courage to sell some pricey new Bluetooth headphones at the same time. It took courage to release a MacBook with a keyboard so bad it clearly played second fiddle to making the design just a touch thinner (and cost the company $50 million in a class action lawsuit). It took courage to finally update the iPhone to USB-C—and then saddle it with USB 2.0 transfer speeds from, literally, the year 2000.  But y'know, it also takes courage to admit when you're wrong. And while Apple didn't say it was wrong while unveiling its new iPhones this year—admitting you ever made a mistake with a past product is not a very Big Tech thing to do—that's actually the message I took away from Monday's iPhone 16 presentation"

Meme - Black man to boy on bike: "Hurry up son, the owner is coming"
bobthek: "Sorry I don't quite get the joke. Is the owner of the bike coming or the owner of the two?"

Why Fritted Glass Makes Buildings Even Better - "To make their designs more energy efficient, architects often use glass that is printed with a ceramic frit and fired into a permanent, opaque coating. Not only does fritted glass help reduce glare, cut cooling costs, and lower the danger to birds, it can also give the exterior a distinctive look with patterns ranging from simple shapes and gradients to intricate designs"

young tiempo on X - "Well my ex canceled the Spotify premium I was using which unfortunately means I am revoking her Dads access to my Disney +. Good guy. Hate to see him caught in the crossfire"

Meme - "3 stages of getting a back rub"
"This is nice."
"THERE'S A TONGUE IN MY ASS!"
"This is nice too."

A College Marching Band Apologized For Seemingly Forming Their Rival's Mascot Eating A Dick - "During a Kansas State football game against South Dakota on Saturday, the former school's marching band made a curious formation: It appeared like the University of Kansas's mascot, a Jayhawk, was eating what looked very much like a phallus."

Meme - Amy @starboots_: "looking for an app that stabilizes time- lapse videos and uh i would have maybe gone with a different name. and logo. and just everything"
"PRO LAPSE"

The Terrible Tale Of The Deadly Aldgate Pump - Living London History - "In 1860 the water was noted as tasting ‘bright, sparkling and cool, with an agreeable taste’.  What people did not realise was that the ‘agreeable’ taste was due to calcium from the bones of dead fellow Londoners! The underground stream, winding its way from Hampstead, had passed through, or near to, many graveyards… People drinking from the pump started dying. In fact hundreds died in what became known as the ‘Aldgate Pump epidemic’"

Actual Fact Bot: Revived | Facebook - "Deadpool forgetting his bag of weapons in a taxi in the final act of this film was the result of over $7 million dollars being cut from the movie’s budget right before the script was greenlighted, forcing the writers to trim down the b*mbastic action sequence."

Meme - Adam @adamthealright: "Leonardo DiCaprio and his girlfriend celebrating her 25th birthday" *Peter Griffin from Family Guy and Ariana Grande*

Meme - "WHEN YOU REALIZE THAT THEY ARE NOT "MILFS" ANYMORE, THEY ARE SIMPLY WOMEN YOUR OWN AGE. *Man in shower drinking Jack Daniel's*"

Meme - "When you see your girlfriend with some other guy, but you need to be calm because you're with your wife and kids"

How the CIA Trained Jim Carrey to Endure The Grinch 'Torture' - "Carrey said he felt ‘buried alive’ under mounds of green make-up and prosthetics: “The first day was eight-and-a-half hours and I went back to my trailer and put my leg through the wall.”  The actor was ready to quit when Oscar-winning producer Brian Grazer (Apollo 13, Empire) made a call.  “One of the CIA people I’d talked to years before specialized in training US agents to survive torture if they were captured,” Grazer recalled in A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life. “We had an actor being held prisoner by his costume - he was being tortured by his makeup.”"

Meme - "We were so poor growing up, my dad had to keep my sister pregnant so we could have fresh milk"

Man's Fake Optician's Letter 'From The NHS' Has Made A Lot Of People Laugh - "A freelance designer has sent the internet into fits of giggles after staging an optician's letter from the NHS in a gigantic font.  The letter reads: "Dear Mr Andrew Lang. Following your recent eye test we are writing to confirm your next appointment which is at: 12:45pm Tuesday 1 March 2016."  Andy Lang, 49, said the prank was inspired by an original letter which his colleague received inviting her to go for an eye test. The letter was printed with a "larger font than usual"."

Meme - "The most terrifying capability of the United States military remains to be the capacity to deploy a fully operational Burger King to any terrestrial theater of operations in under 24hrs"

Meme - "Hi ***, is this still available?"
"Yes it is"
"Awesome, would you take $100?"
"We're firm on the price"
"Alright then thanks"
"*** reduced the price to $100 for 9x12 Edmund Hillary nylon tent"
"Well well well"

There are more tigers in captivity in the US than in the wild - "The World Wildlife Fund estimates about 5,000 of the big cats live in captivity around the country, although animal welfare experts say precise numbers are hard to find. That’s compared to the roughly 3,900 wild tigers left in the world, experts estimate.  Most of the tigers in the US are held in backyards, breeding facilities and at small theme parks or roadside attractions, the WWF says. Only about 6% are at accredited zoos, the group says."

Should Your Web History Impact Your Credit Score? The IMF Thinks So - "However much the authors of this paper know about banking systems and finance, they're clearly not up to date on the latest in AI research. This is a bad idea in general, but it's a really terrible idea right now.   The first major problem with this proposal is there's no evidence AI is capable of this task or that it will be any time soon

‘The Big Lebowski’ Got to Use a Rolling Stone Song for Free Because They Insulted the Eagles - "The Big Lebowski famously plays a cover of The Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers” over the closing credits – and it turns out they got to use the song for free.  The Coen brothers almost had to drop the song because they couldn’t afford the $150,000 licensing fee.  So T-Bone Burnett invited Stones manager Allen Klein to a special screening of the movie.  What convinced him to change his mind? When The Dude (Jeff Bridges) delivered the line “I hate the f***in’ Eagles, man!” Klein stood up and said “That’s it, you can have the song! That was beautiful!”"

Marloween on X - "Expecting Parents, PLEASE I beg you Please look at what your child's name will be spelled backwards. Sincerely, Marlana"

It doesn't matter where Brits keep their dryers. The point is they don't work (aka "One household staple sums up why Americans and Brits will never see the world the same way") - "Laundry is a hot topic right now in the UK.  Last week, a small war raged on Twitter over the class implications of the British habit of keeping laundry appliances in the kitchen... “He went through a rite of passage that every U.S. expat must endure: an encounter with the typical British combo washer-dryer,” Furseth writes. “It appears to be a stroke of genius until you realize that the dryer part doesn’t really work—and everyone who lives here knows this.”  This last sentence encapsulates what is, to me, a fundamental difference in the British and American psyches. The frustration an American feels upon removing a poorly washed, barely-dried load from his or her UK appliance isn’t really about the laundry at all. It’s about the tension between how each culture sees the world... Clothes come out damp. The end result is a flat with socks and undershirts dangling over bathtubs and radiators. Of course, there are worse ways to live. But—why? When a technological fix is available, why would anyone choose to live this way?  Home drying technologies have been slow to catch on in the UK. An estimated 85% of US households have a clothes dryer; only 56% of UK ones do... Electric tumble dryers were a fixture of middle-class US homes by the 1960s... To an American, this is baffling. Britain is not sunny Italy, where I’m guessing you can simply fling washed clothes onto the terrazza in the morning and they’re crisp by the end of your post-prandial nap. Britain is damp. It’s wet all the time... there is no place in a home of any size for a large appliance that doesn’t work.  This acceptance is at the heart of many American immigrants’ frustrations about life in the UK. And it highlights a fundamental cultural between the US and UK that I’d characterize, broadly, as a British inclination to accept things as they are, versus an American inclination to alter and change them. There is an Oscar Wilde short story called The Canterville Ghost about an American family that takes up residence in a haunted English manor. The (British) household workers insist that nothing can be done about the specter. But the Americans cheerfully eradicate the hauntings with a series of American consumer products: Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator for the ghost’s clanking chains, Doctor Dobell’s Tincture for his agonized screams, Pinkerton’s Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent for blood stains he throws on the floor. To the disapproval of the staff and the great irritation of the ghost, a 300-year old poltergeist is quickly exterminated with cleaning products. This American bias toward change—newer, better, different—has fueled countless innovations. It has also fueled a culture of thoughtless consumerism... In contrast, in the outstanding book Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behavior, the anthropologist Kate Fox described such acceptance as a “quintessentially English” mindset: “a sense of passive, resigned acceptance, an acknowledgement that things will invariably go wrong, that life is full of little frustrations and difficulties … and that one must simply put up with it.”"

The quiet revolution: China’s millennial backlash - "Lu was circling around a problem: as an unmarried 30-year-old, she is seen by her parents and their contemporaries as a “leftover woman”. At the end of her speech, she presented a veiled request: “I am so grateful to you for not bothering my parents too much to ask when I am getting married.”  When she had confided in friends what she planned to say at the dinner, they did their best to dissuade her. She was hoping for the impossible: to convince her family she could be 30, single and happy. When Lu had discussed her ideas about the future before, her parents said she had been “poisoned by foreigners” while studying abroad. But she was determined to carve out a different life for herself.  Across China, millennials like her are committing small acts of rebellion. Society puts pressure on young people in China to find a good job, buy an apartment and get married — in that order, before the age of 30. But economic restructuring, soaring house prices and increasing numbers of students in higher education are making those goals harder for millennials than they were for their parents. At the same time, millennials have developed different visions of the “good life” to their parents. This generation wants something new from China, and in pursuing it they are changing China, too. A quiet revolution is under way. Behind a stall in Beijing’s central business district, a barista offers drinks with names such as “Can’t-Afford-To-Buy-A-House Iced Lemon Tea”. Another stall of the same chain sells “My Ex-Girlfriend’s Marrying Someone With Rich Parents Fruit Juice”. This is the brand Sang Tea (sang meaning “dejected, dispirited”) — a business that began in Shanghai last year, initially meant to be a temporary pop-up stall to mock the brand “Lucky Tea”, but whose dark comedy and deadpan presentation resounded with millennials, and prompted franchises to open across the country... For young men, owning a property is seen as a prerequisite for marriage, and it is said to be unlucky to give birth to a child while living in a rented flat... A study last year by real estate research company E-house China R&D Institute found that in Beijing the average tenant spends 58 per cent of their income on rent; in Shenzhen the figure is 54 per cent, and in Shanghai 48 per cent. By comparison, the UK’s Office for National Statistics reckons that as of 2016, the average rent-to-income ratio in London was 49 per cent. China’s millennials are starting to experience the economic precarity of their western peers... “Chinese parents are conservative: they want you to respect the plans they’ve made for you. My parents think I have no ideals,” she says. But then during her sick leave, she realised that as a young teenager, she had plenty of ideals — just not the ones her parents had hoped for... she worked as a waitress in Islington, north London, while doing design projects on the side. “It sounds silly, but it was then that I first realised being a waitress wasn’t humiliating,” she says, sitting in a sushi restaurant in Beijing while uniformed waitresses circle us. “If I had been a waitress in China, it would have been considered an ‘indecent’ job — all that education for nothing. But in that café in Islington, my colleagues were all really happy. They were all working evenings and being actors or scriptwriters in their spare time.”... Lu’s parents have not fully got the message, and are still trying to set her up on blind dates — the latest with a young employee at Beijing Capital Airport, whom they had thought eligible based on the criteria that “an airport won’t ever go out of business”."

Man SHITS in the janitors mopping bucket while he’s turned away… : r/ImTheMainCharacter

Jim Carrey - Wikipedia - "In April 2022, Carrey announced that he was considering retirement, saying: "I have enough. I've done enough. I am enough." He said he would return if he were offered a script that he felt would be "really important for people to see". In February 2024, it was announced that Carrey would reprise his role as Dr. Robotnik in Sonic the Hedgehog 3."

Thread by @stat_sherpa on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Data Literacy Basics - Part 1. Below are five foundational concepts that EVERYONE should understand (in no particular order). Also, let me know what you would add.
1. Outliers rarely disprove trends. I see this a lot. People, when presented with a statistic, will often try and discredit it by bringing up edge cases, or outliers. The reality is data, in general, has natural variation, even within a distribution or trend.  We all know this. If I were to say “The average height for an American male is about 5 feet 9 inches,” but my friend chimed in with “That can’t be true! My uncle is 6 feet 8 inches,” you surely wouldn’t agree that single data point disproves my statistic. That's an easy example as we are all familiar with the height of people, but for data we aren’t accustomed with this becomes very important to keep in mind.
2. Correlation does not imply causation I’m sure we’ve all heard this ~1000 times, but for good reason. When you see variables, data points, trends, distributions, etc. that are related or move together, this doesn’t necessarily mean one is causing a direct change in the other(s). In general, causal analysis is difficult. There might be other variables not accounted for (called confounding variables) explaining the correlation.  Textbook example: When ice cream sales increase, drowning incidents also tend to increase. However, this does not mean that eating ice cream causes drowning or vice-versa. The real reason for this correlation is that both ice cream sales and drownings increase during the summer, where warmer weather is the underlying cause of both.  Additionally, a correlation could be a coincidence made to look strong through visualization, like the correlation between the consumption of margarine and the divorce rate in Maine.
3. Per capita Another one I see omitted frequently. Adjusting your numbers to be “per capita” is normalizing your metric to be averaged across individuals. This often allows you to compare averages without worrying much about differences in the number of individuals in the groups.  For example, if we want to understand GDP differences between two countries, just looking at the totals for each may be more of a function of population size than anything else. Dividing each countries respective GDP by the population (i.e. GPD per capita) is usually a better comparison. When in doubt, focus on per capita.
4. Means vs Medians Both are usually used for the same goal: understanding what a "typical" value in a dataset might look like. However, the calculations are very different even though I hear them used interchangeably.  The mean is simply the average value of the dataset. Sum everything up and divide by the number of data points (we’re just sticking with the arithmetic mean here). The big downfall with a mean is it’s heavily influenced by extreme outliers.  The median is simply the middle value of the dataset when ordered, therefore it avoids the outlier influence. If your data is relatively “normal” (balanced looking), either will work well. If your data is “skewed” (unbalanced looking), medians (or maybe even modes) might be a better representation of a typical value.
5. Sample size matters, but not as much as you might think Interestingly, this last one usually trips up people with some data literacy more than those starting from zero. One of the go-to questions for a study is “what was the sample size?” and if you’re asking that, you likely shouldn’t be worried about it. The reality is that you can get very close inferences of a large group (called a population) with a relatively small sample. Sample sizes hit diminishing returns very quick. There’s a lot of fun math as to how and why this is the case that us stats nerds use, but that’s beyond the scope of this.  What is infinitely more important than sample size, is good, representative sampling methods. I could write a whole thread on this (there are entire textbooks and courses on this topic), but just know that with proper sampling methods and study design, you can easily infer statistics about millions with a sample of a couple thousand.
These were just 5 basic ideas off the top of my head. There are more to cover in future posts. Let me know what you would add or expand on. In the future I might dive into more intermediate topics (hypothesis testing, regression analysis, model validation, etc.) occasionally if there’s interest."

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