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NikolaiFyodorov's comments
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NikolaiFyodorov  ·  49 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: February 7, 2024

I don't believe I've heard that proverb before, so thank you for sharing it. Sorry to hear you're in a slump. I hope you find yourself in higher climes, soon.

NikolaiFyodorov  ·  327 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: May 3, 2023

In a Qantas lounge waiting for my flight to be called after a full-on month. It appears things will continue to be full-on for another month, and travelling for work will be no excuse not to keep up.

This time nine years ago, I was so broke and desperate after coming back from Tasmania I was working for criminals (as in, criminally underpaying and violating every conceivable health standard) at South Melbourne Market while struggling to make debt repayments. Now I'm off on a business class tour of North America and Europe.

On reflection, shit is wild.

Planning to open up The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon once I'm on board.

NikolaiFyodorov  ·  399 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: February 22, 2023

I am being sent on a study trip to North America and Europe for work. The world is ticking back up.

NikolaiFyodorov  ·  504 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: November 9, 2022

Condolences to you and goobster.

My father in law was diagnosed with CJD in 2020. It was during this shit time when Melbourne was in lockdown. He lived in Staten Island, which meant it was impossible for his daughter to fly out to say goodbye to him. He got unwell, then went into delirium, then became unresponsive, and all she could do was speak to him over the phone while his wife held it to his ear. And then it was just a matter of weeks or a couple of months until he died, with her calling his wife and her brother every couple of days to touch base.

Six weeks later, she's sitting at her desk at our new apartment, two minutes out from a very tense zoom meeting with her very tense boss, when her phone rings from her father's number. She thinks "this is it" and picks up the phone, expecting to receive the news we'd all been expecting.

It was her father, calling with a question about documentation she'd mailed to his wife while he was in decline (the conversation literally started in the form: "Hey, that x you sent me, does it relate to z or y?"). He had no memory of what had happened to him for the past two months, but he was back to normal, except that two months in a hospital bed had left him unable to walk. The doctors also had no explanation for what had happened to him.

Anyway, he eventually passed away 18 months later (he'd lived a big life; his body was falling apart). Because he'd been diagnosed with CJD a year and a half earlier, that remained the official cause of death, even though it very clearly wasn't any form of CJD I've heard of. And of course, because his official cause of death is CJD, his daughter, who has a rare blood type and a regular blood donor, is now unable to donate blood.

Six months after this, a family friend of my mother's died ... of CJD. So now I've known two people who've died "of CJD".

The whole experience has left me wondering how many deaths attributed to CJD are actually something else that can't be accounted for.

NikolaiFyodorov  ·  910 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: September 29, 2021

Not terribly, but somewhat. It would have meant moving to Sydney, which would be no small endeavour (not least because we've only recently become homeowners). But my current advisory role has reached a natural pause with the departure of my previous boss, as well as COVID, and on paper the Sydney position would have been a very good fit for me. I'll get by well enough.

NikolaiFyodorov  ·  1211 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: HUBSKIVERSARY

It's been special. Congratulations.

NikolaiFyodorov  ·  1240 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: November 4, 2020

> I hope that MI isn't in play.

I hope you slept well, mk, because I have some news for you.

NikolaiFyodorov  ·  1249 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Woke up this morning to zero new COVID cases in Victoria

UPDATE: Retail restrictions finally end tomorrow 11.59pmAEST. It's been a long, long winter.

NikolaiFyodorov  ·  1331 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: August 5, 2020

When will it stop?

NikolaiFyodorov  ·  1771 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: May 22, 2019

Federal Election in Australia last Saturday. Since voting is compulsory (sorta), everybody turns out, has a sausage and then goes to the pub. It almost feels like a public holiday. This one was particularly portentous because the conservative government of the past three years has been bloody awful and there was widespread expectation that the progressive Labor Party would walk it in. Instead, an electoral car crash ensued and we woke up on Sunday stuck with the government unchanged. A lot of people are deeply disappointed.

That was a great read.

> I think it’s a combination of subconscious emotional cues, subconscious statistical trickery, perfectly conscious fraud which for all we know happens much more often than detected, and things we haven’t discovered yet which are at least as weird as subconscious emotional cues.

So it's a bit of everything, then.

NikolaiFyodorov  ·  3341 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: NASA secures extra funding, confirms Europa mission

In the (unlikely?) event that complex intelligent life is discovered under Europa's surface, I find myself musing over how utterly incomprehensible it would be for them to encounter humans.

Our sky is open to the heavens and in spite of this it's really only in the past half millenia (ignoring Aristarchus) that we've had solid observational evidence to demonstrate that the heavenly bodies are physical worlds like our own.

Consider, then, the position of the intelligent squid-beings of Europa. Their intellect is every bit as refined and analytic as ours. Their fourteen appendages give them a dexterity that far surpasses anything that can be achieved by our opposing thumb. However, they are bounded entirely by kilometres of ice. They have no reason even to conceive of the possibility that there might be another side to the limits of their world. For humans to enter their domain would be akin to creatures stepping out of thin air, bringing tales of a universe infinitely larger than their own, surrounding them on all sides. Makes you wonder if we are similarly bounded, and if so, by what.

tl;dr Europa is Flatland.

NikolaiFyodorov  ·  3429 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Discussion: Why do you stay in the US?

> When I think "France" and "Muslim" I think "banning the hijab" and "race riots." When I think "Denmark" and "Muslim" I think "cartoons of Muhammad." But when I think "United States" and "Muslim" I think about the molotov cocktail some shithead threw through the window of the mosque in my old neighborhood. And I think of the immediate vigil every old white man and old white lady launched around that building. And I think of the flowers and potted plants that occupied the stoop for the next six months, and I think of the rotating watch of old codgers playing checkers on the steps so that the muslims could go to prayers without worrying about some fuckin' inarticulate redneck who thinks "Islam=hate" because he can't think past generalizations. And I think about the fund raiser the neighborhood did to pay for an expanded parking lot rather than bitching about the mosque in city council meetings, and I think about the vigil the mosque held five years later when some other shithead shot up a synagogue.

As an Aussie who's previously lived for a couple of years in Europe and recently spent several weeks in your fine country, I believe this this paragraph sums up your country more aptly than anything else on here.

I reside, allegedly, in the world’s most liveable city. And let me be clear: I know that I live in one of the world’s most liveable cities. That said, I could move to the north east of the United States tomorrow.

You’ve got an optimism and a can-do attitude, a positive sense of entitlement, that seems to be damn near universal amongst your population - an attitude that is not only taken for granted, but is fucking expected of you as a citizen – that just isn’t there in a lot of other countries. It’s a bizarre thing, and a paradox, that I found these attributes as frequently among the obnoxious, flag waving, marine-loving crowd as I did among the vegan, latte sipping crowd to which I belong. Even when you’re at odds with each other I feel as though there are these basic principles you agree on that underpin your success as a country. And you’re all as friendly as fuck.

Sure, you’ve got a lot of problems. Holy shit there’s so much wrong with your police and your prison system and your drug laws. I’d hate to be born a minority in the US. But there’s a lot wrong with every country, and the only reason that you think there’s more wrong with you guys is because you spend more time in the centre of the world’s attention. Look at the treatment of indigenous Australians in the Northern Territory and northern Queensland, or domestic violence and alcoholism in regional NZ, or the eternally alienated welfare class in north east England. We’re all of us rooted to some degree, and these are all countries at the top of the spectrum, as far as standards of development go.

You do need to do something about your health care system, though.

NikolaiFyodorov  ·  3445 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Conversation now has a US site

For those unfamiliar with it, The Conversation cuts out the middle men and makes the academics behind the research the frontline journalists. The criteria for becoming a contributor are quite strict, which means a lot of the typical bullshit is eschewed.

NikolaiFyodorov  ·  3470 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski, what are you doing tonight!

I'm flying to America! Having never been there before, I'm quite excited.

NikolaiFyodorov  ·  3592 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Give me a great quote from something you're reading, have read recently.

Languages that have evolved in distant times or places may differ extensively in their resources for dealing with one or another range of phenomena. What comes easily in one language may come hard in another, and this difference may echo significant dissimilarities in style and value.

But examples like these, impressive as they occasionally are, are not so extreme but that the changes and the contrasts can be explained and described using the equipment of a single language. Whorf, wanting to demonstrate that Hopi incorporates a metaphysics so alien to ours that Hopi and English cannot, as he puts it, "be calibrated," uses English to convey the contents of sample Hopi sentences. Kuhn is brilliant at saying what things were like before the revolution using -what else? -our post-revolutionary idiom.

Donald Davidson, On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme

NikolaiFyodorov  ·  3604 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski Newsletter #023: One of the best newsletters yet

Thanks, insom.

What an emotional week.

NikolaiFyodorov  ·  3821 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why I Will Never Return To the USA - Problems With Border Patrol

This appears to be a fairly common problem, but we only hear about it when it happens to white writers. Lohman should probably be grateful: science fiction author Peter Watts was beaten, detained and then charged with a felony under comparable circumstances.

NikolaiFyodorov  ·  3824 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Gashlycrumb Tinies: Edward Gorey

I've always been more inclined to the work of his alter-ego, Ogdred Weary. Are you familiar with The Curious Sofa?

NikolaiFyodorov  ·  3826 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How did you find out about Hubski?

In days of yore I moved to darkest Tasmania to live in a small cottage on the wild coast and write a novel. Not having a television I spent a great deal of time listening to Radio National and surfing the internet. On one particularly fateful night I chanced upon fledgling Hubski in its first first few months of genesis. I recognised the usernames of two people (kleinbl00 and @saydrah@) who'd been prominent identities on a very popular news aggregator site (the name of which now escapes me) before it went into decline. I decided to loiter awhile, and two years later am still here.

NikolaiFyodorov  ·  3922 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: [48 hours] Edward Snowden's Half-Baked Revolution

Anyone who likes Mark Ames' writing should also have a look at his colleague Gary Brecher's outstanding War Nerd columns.