20191228

Sat Dec 28 06:00:01 EST 2019 ======================================== Slept from midnight to eight. Woke once in the night. Partly sunny. Highs in the lower 40s. Southeast winds up to 5 mph. Vacuumed, took out trash. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/30/arts/latin-dictionary.html > n the 125 years since, the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (T.L.L.) has seen the fall of an empire, two world wars and the division and reunification of Germany. In the meantime, they are up to the letter R. > This is not for lack of effort. Most dictionaries focus on the most prominent or recent meaning of a word; this one aims to show every single way anyone ever used it, from the earliest Latin inscriptions in the sixth century B.C. to around A.D. 600. The dictionary’s founder, Eduard Wölfflin, who died in 1908, described entries in the T.L.L. not as definitions, but “biographies” of words. > The first entry, for the letter A, was published in 1900. The T.L.L. is expected to reach its final word — “zythum,” an Egyptian beer — by 2050. A scholarly project of painstaking exactness and glacial speed, it has so far produced 18 volumes of huge pages with tiny text, the collective work of nearly 400 scholars, many of them long since dead. The letters Q and N were set aside, because they begin too many difficult words, so researchers will have to go back and work on those, too. > It is also expensive: An online version costs $379 for individual yearly access. Many universities have subscriptions, but to improve access, this year the T.L.L. posted PDFs of entries through the letter P for free online. https://www.thesaurus.badw.de/en/tll-digital/tll-open-access.html Finished at least one little (sub-)project this vacation: ssh://paulgorman.org/~/repo/str2svg This sounds very like what I see with signal-desktop: https://github.com/meetfranz/franz/issues/592 The window fails to repaint, and the console logs "libnotify-WARNING **: 14:58:13.784: Failed to connect to proxy". > I had a similar problem with Slack notifications: it would freeze when a new message notification was to be displayed and there was the same libnotify error in the command line. > The problem in my case was the same as described [here](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1471560#c23). Dbus was starting the KDE notification service instead of xfce4-notifyd(I am using xfce on my machine). Removing org.kde.plasma.Notifications.service from /usr/share/dbus-1/services/ made the problem dissapear. Although the "fix" might look a bit hackish, it was still good enough for me as a short term solution. I hope this info helps someone. ``` 🐚 bava ~ $ sudo apt purge plasma-desktop plasma-workspace 🐚 bava ~ $ sudo apt autoremove ``` …and a logout/login _may_ have fixed it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21406356 https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/ Twenty-minute walk in the afternoon. Cooler and mostly sunny. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21883283 > People trend to underestimate the historical influence of some subjects in nowadays' fringe science. Many ideas in Sci-Fi and fantasy stories didn't come from nowhere, but based on actual history. Parapsychology, as you said, is an interesting example. In the scientific progress and Cold War paranoid of the 1950s, the idea of "mind power", "mind control" were popular. It convinced many people, even those with a scientific background, and only universally rejected by the mainstream in the 1970s. Even the CIA had a program, "Stargate Project", to study the applications of ESP to gather military intelligence, but it seems the CIA never had reliable results (as modern readers expected), and some participants eventually suffered a mental breakdown. (And around the 1960s, the same history repeats. People started to think that psychedelic drugs have great effects on the human mind, the counter-cultural youths did experiments first, and later the CIA also established a program, MKULTRA, and conducted a lot of unethical human experiments.) > To illustrate how influential ESP was, just read the paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950) by Alan Turing. In the beginning of the paper, it summarized nine arguments against artificial intelligence and the feasibility of Turing Test, the 9th argument was parapsychology. > Alan Turing said, > > I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it: telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. [...] How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately, the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. > And he pointed out, that some readers may suggest that telepathy can be used to distinguish human intelligence and artificial intelligence, and "this argument is to my mind quite a strong one", and he continued to describe one experiment setup... > > A more specific argument based on E.S.P might run as follows: "Let us play the imitation game, using as witnesses a man who is good as a telepathic receiver, and a digital computer. The interrogator can ask such questions as "What suit does the card in my right hand belong to?" The man by telepathy or chairvoyance gives the right answer 130 times out of 400 cards. The machine can only guess at random, and perhaps get 104 right. > But he also gave an interesting and creative response to this objection, > > Suppose the digital computer contains a random number generator. Then it will be natural to use this to decide what answer to give. But then the random number generator will be subject to the psycho-kinetic powers of the interrogator. Perhaps this psycho-kinesis might cause the machine to guess right more often than would be expected on a probability calculation. Started watching The Witcher on Netflix. More fun than I expected. Servings: grains 2/6, fruit 2/4, vegetables 2/4, dairy 1/2, meat 0/3, nuts 0/0.5 Brunch: pineapple, celery, coffee Lunch: macaroni and cheese Afternoon snack: banana, cucumber, chips Dinner: 126/74 -17

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