Notices by EmmyNoether (emmynoether@spinster.xyz)

@thatbrickster @LadyMont I don't get your comparison with ear piercing.

A friend's baby had to have glasses.

She (the mother) had contracted CMV during pregnancy and her child was born with cataracts, so had to (a) be operated on pronto to remove the cataracts, and (b) wear glasses because she no longer had lenses in her eyes. Without glasses, she wouldn't have seen enough for the optical cortex of her brain to develop. So there wasn't really a choice. It was operation plus glasses, or go blind.

@Ladyfat I'm intrigued by people saying the rise in autism is due to better antenatal/neonatal care meaning more babies with these conditions survive. But we're not talking about conditions that would kill a newborn! We're talking about the huge rise in what used to be called Aspergers, or high-functioning autism, where people can live perfectly okay lives with these conditions.

There may be a small rise in kids whose autism is comorbid with genetic disorders which cause global developmental delay who might fall into the "better neonatal care" category, but the huge rise is not in these children.

@Flick @djsumdog @adiz Can confirm.

I've had shingles. Due to having had actual chickenpox as a kid (not due to a vaccination).

Reminder: Variola major smallpox had a case fatality rate of 30%.

Yes, for any individual vaccine you have to do a cost-benefit analysis of the side effects (which they all have - I also, personally, had a bad reaction to my smallpox jab way back in the 1960s) versus the severity of the disease. But on the whole, vaccines are a bloody good thing.

@HebrideanHecate @blingring @GalacticTurtle I would say, having had a handful of visits over about a decade, that the country has totally changed in that time.

In the 2000s there were signs that it was opening up and becoming a more liberal society.

Xi’s government has now done a 180 and totally cracked down on any openness. People are much more guarded about what they say, a lot of what they say comes across as “scripted”, the minders/watchers are far more numerous and far more overt.

@blingring @GalacticTurtle As someone who’s been to China (work-related) I’d say your worries are justified. I’d be wary of going back. Increasingly, there is the risk that they will have some sort of minor political spat ongoing with your country’s government and decide to grab a random national from your country on trumped-up spying charges to use as a negotiating lever. And that random might be you.

I was warned don’t take your own or work IT kit (even smart phones) into even their embassy, and take a burn phone with you.

Also, you will be approached by members of their security services trying to suss you out - if you’re there on business, you will be assigned a “minder”, there will be random strangers on trains trying to get you into conversation, the “work colleague” from the organisation you’re visiting trying to get you drunk (that failed hilariously because being white European, my alcohol tolerance was way higher), randoms trying to come into your hotel room as part of sex-blackmail sting (particularly used against male visitors, but I had a scary incident round this).

On the plus side, you will be totally safe walking the streets over there.

@HebrideanHecate @blingring @GalacticTurtle No, I missed that one. Sounds interesting. Can I watch it anywhere like i-player?

@HebrideanHecate @blingring @GalacticTurtle JUst checked and the silk road one is on Prime.

@Biff @GalacticTurtle @HebrideanHecate @blingring Wouldn’t work in China.

Written forms are different but he/his is ta/ta de, and she/hers is ta/ ta de.

(The history of that is fascinating - initially there was no written difference either, but western missionaries in the 19th century insisted there had to be a way of translating the Bible which would maintain the difference between he and she, something that various what we would now call feminist writers in China strongly resisted!)

@Biff @GalacticTurtle @HebrideanHecate @blingring https://andrewbatson.com/2023/03/22/how-chinese-ruined-a-perfectly-good-gender-neutral-pronoun/

(Annoyingly this particular account has a “yay, we could have handled non-binary people” vibe to it - the article I was looking for was by a linguistics scholar at Harvard, but I can’t find it.)

@GalacticTurtle @Piss_Ant I think it’s because of this:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2023/09/21/tiktoks-roman-empire-meme-explained/?sh=65834a75765b

Which is bullshit. I know loads of women who are obsessed by (and seriously knowledgeable about) the Roman Empire.

@LuvGreenTea2019 That poor child - my heart breaks for her.

And I’m raging at the evil, evil system that has brought this situation into being.

@Gnomeshatecheese @Piss_Ant Friends of mine who’ve worked professionally with drug addicts tell me that their experience is that you have to stabilise the addict’s chaotic lifstyle first before you have any chance of weaning them off drugs.

I’ve got a lot of time for Boghossian’s grievance studies expose, but he’s wrong on this. He’s making the classic liberal intellectual mistake of thinking that drug addiction is a rationally chosen cost-benefit analysis about the lifestyle options open to a given individual. Addiction really, really doesn’t work like that. (Possibly he’s buying uncritically into the Alcoholics Anonymous rhetoric of “you have to hit rock bottom” and extending it to narcotics).

@mk @FemaleIsNotAFeeling @alex Are they going to change their acronym to IWADNF? (Internet watch and do nothing foundation)

@Flick My results look almost exactly like that.

Largely because I hate seafood.

(As an aside, who the fuck makes truffle mac and cheese with fusili? Mac and cheese requires actual macaroni which retains a bit of bite, otherwise you have a plate of slime. Also baked potato with American processed cheese slices? Fuck no.)

@FemaleIsNotAFeeling Bait and switch - the MO of the whole genderist movement.

Whatever you do, they are going to find a way of twisting it to lose their shit with you. Because it’s a movement fuelled by narcissistic rage, and finding excuses to lose their shit is the whole point of the game.

It’s not that you did something he construed as wrong so he lost his shit. It’s that he hated you for being something he could never be, so he wanted to lose his shit, and whatever you said, he aribtrarily found some really spurious interpretation of it to do what he was going to do anyway.

@Gnomeshatecheese @GalacticTurtle Forgot to answer your “why” part of the question… because adolescent hormones meant I desperately wanted to get laid, but I was too shy to do anything much about it for ages…

@Gnomeshatecheese @GalacticTurtle Echoing Gnome, “dating” wasn’t a thing in the UK either back in the early 80s, but again, assuming you meant “first snog/ trip to the pictures”, about 17, which was not that unusual - many girls would start “going out with” (the UK term of the time) boys at the age of 14 or 15, but many of us were “late developers”.

First proper “boyfriend” aged 19 I guess.

@GalacticTurtle @Gnomeshatecheese For me, there’s emotional intimacy, which one can have with a friend, and sexual intimacy, which is (again for me) only with a partner, and what distinguishes friendship from romantic partnerships.

I know there’s a whole elaborate taxonomy of shades of “asexuality” (which somewhat counterintuitively, for me at any rate, seems to involve a whole load of “spicy straights” who are having lots of sex, very enthusiastically, but for reasons which somewhat escape me, conceptualising this sex as a form of “asexuality” - oxymoron or what). According to this somewhat baffling world-view there are people who yearn for romantic attachments without sex and sex without romantic attachments (which as far as I am concerned is not asexuality but simply every frat boy ever…)

For me it’s a lot more simple. I fancy some blokes. Generally I don’t want to actually go through with having sex with them unless I am also drawn to them romantically and like them as friends, because long experience has taught me that the endorphin rush of orgasm will result in me becoming emotionally attached regardless of whether they are a complete shit or not, so I tend to be very cautious until I have established that - as far as one ever can tell upfront - they are decent blokes and I will still be able to have reasonable interesting conversations in a few months time.

But beyond that it really is as simple as “I like this person. Do I want to have sex with them? Yes: potential romantic/sexual partner. No: friend.”

@Flick Aaaaannnd I am totally wrong.

1. Canada
2. USA
3. Mexico

@Flick Having tootled around the mid Atlantic rift on a visit to Iceland, I can indeed confirm it is in the middle.

You need a Peters projection map. It’s amazing how small the countries near the equator look and how huge the ones near the pole look on a Mercator projection.

Without googling, and assuming this is a “trick question”, I would guess Canada as 3rd largest just for this reason - Mexico might actually be larger.