Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

@Moon_custafer

“Apparently the excuse held up well enough in court that they successfully blocked a candy company in the 1930s who actually did have Babe Ruth’s license to use his name, for being too similar to “Baby Ruth.” “

Big company using their money bs excuse to obtain a bs ruling in the court system? How can that be? ?

The human brain is primed to pick up on patterns. Before climate controlled homes and grocery stores, it would’ve been crucial for survival. For example, noticing that certain kinds of edible plants grow in certain kinds of weather and certain types of locations. But it also means we see patterns that aren’t there. Like seeing shapes in the clouds. Our brains are funny things and a lot of what we perceive as external isn’t.

ETA: Ninja’d by Scildfreja by a long time. Should’ve refreshed!

one of the things Carl was especially angry about was that the alt-righters weren’t angry enough at sjw folk; too much focus on teh jooz, he complained.

Did he miss that the alt-right has always seen social justice movements as creations of “cultural Marxism” aka teh jooz? People who aren’t wealthy white cishet men only want human rights because they manipulate them into it. Because reasons. This is by no means a new opinion for them. Almost from the start gamergate memes were anti-Semitic for example.

Whoa, I just had a cluster of stuff happen myself! Tuesday, Husbeast shows up back home half an hour after leaving for work wanting me to take him to the chiropractor for his shoulder because driving had become too painful. He worked from home the rest of the day.

That same evening, his mother (who is blind and lives about 40 min away) called and said she fell in her apartment. We had to go check her for injuries since scrapes and cuts are hard for her to detect/treat. She had a bruise on her head (no concussion), some other bruises, and some muscle strains but is recovering.

Then yesterday, the battery in my truck died. I got it to crank over enough so I could take it in to the mechanic. It didn’t crank over at all once I got there! Got a new battery and a check on the alternator, which is fine.

Valya – I’ve found that kittens can crank out a continuous loud purr while (most) adult cats have a quieter, more rhythmic purr.

@Katamount, Moon_custafer:
Well, Saint Michaels (and previously Wellesley, which was closed several years ago and had most of its staff and support moved into Saint Michaels) is a teaching hospital as well, but there are a number of posters for international gastroenterology conferences lining the walls with locations set at those hospitals.

And there are a few Toronto people here, but Toronto isn’t exactly a small city, and there are lots of other places where you find multiple people from as well. It’s sort of like the birthday paradox, where the odds of two people in a group having the same birthday are better than even once you have more than 23 people. The more people you have, the more places they could have come from, and you start getting ‘coincidental’ matchups a lot faster than people expect because the number of potential matches starts going up as the square of the number of people involved.

Which brings us back to the clustering illusion…

@Scildfreja:
Yes, the flip side of humans being really good at seeing patterns is that we’re really bad at determining randomness. Especially when you consider that with, say, a simple shuffle, 12345 is exactly as likely to happen as 42531 or any other sequence. But people would assume that a random number generator was broken if it output 12345, despite the non-zero probability of it happening.

It’s my understanding that a lot of music player ‘shuffle’ algorithms actually reduce the level of randomness to make it seem more random to the people listening by trying to ensure that they never play consecutive tracks in order.

And between that and the birthday paradox, I’m reminded of a Martin Gardner puzzle where he proved that if you took ten randomly shuffled numbers (he gave it as ten tin soldiers of different heights) you could always find at minimum a set of four that you could extract from the sequence that would be ‘panpipes’, all in increasing or decreasing order.

Re: randomness

If you ask a group of people to arrange themselves randomly in a room, they basically end up standing equidistant from each other. Hardly anyone stands next to anyone else, even though there should be clusters.

Wonder if that’s something innate, or people just misunderstanding the word?

wwth,

this means my kitten is unhappy when he comes in my bed to sleep on my neck? I don’t find his sound annoying but my girlfriend can’t sleep at all when he makes it.

Here’s an article about it

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2009/07/cat-purrs-evoke-baby-cries

My memories actually held up!

I don’t mind the solicitation purrs either. I guess I’m just that much of a cat lady

Re: Randomness

Yah, things will randomly cluster, but a lot of seemingly random things also seem to cluster at a higher rate than you would expect with chance. Like I said with births, people tend to have more sex during some months than others. I think car trouble becomes more likely during a spell of financial trouble, because financial trouble means that the odds that you might not have brought it in for a small leak, or had the car looked over by a mechanic, and found a potential problem while it was still brewing, grow.

I don’t think we ever know all the factors going into something.

@Moon_custafer

At least three of us are. 😛

Another example of domesticated animals evolving to do something that takes advantage of human biology is that annoying, exaggerated “weeking” that guinea pigs they do when they are hungry. (Which is always). Considering that wild cavies don’t make this “week”, domesticated cavies do this automatically, and it is about the right frequency to mimic a baby’s cry, I’d say that this is a win for the cavies.

Bailey is the queen of the exaggerated head tilt when begging for food. She also throws in the classic puppy dog eyes and brows and perked up ears. It’s pretty impossible to not share food with her. Especially since she’s so good. She never tries to steal the food even if you get up and leave the room and leave her with the plate. Just looks cute until you give in.

I always give her some of the crusts when I order pizza. The next morning she always tries to get me to hurry up and eat the leftovers by looking at the box and then me and then the box and then me. Hint, hint, human. When are you are going to heat up that pizza already?

My grey and white cat used to eat vomit. *Shudders*

Diane Neal, who played Assistant District Attorney Casey Novak on
“Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” has announced that she is
making an independent run for New York’s 19th Congressional
District seat.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/07/entertainment/diane-neal-law-order-congress/index.html