Zagorath

How do they fair in their native western US?

support for Israel abetted a humanitarian catastrophe

Say the word, damn it. Genocide. Biden abetted genocide.

Oh right. Yeah I haven’t had the Facebook app installed on my phone in like a decade.

But yeah, clicking on an image on the Facebook website doesn’t actually add it to your browser history, because Facebook tries to act like an SPA, a decision they made seemingly specifically to frustrate the user. Because in addition to not adding clicked images to your browser history, they also will refresh the page if you tab away and come back after a minute or two.

Eh, not really. It’s more that at this level the difference in performance between men and women closes significantly, with some ultra swim records being held by women. For the English Channel specifically, the current record for speed of crossing is held by a man. So it’s not particularly amazing that it was a woman (though it is amazing that it was a physically disabled woman!), but neither would it have been amazing had it been a man.

Why are you being judgy about what websites someone uses?

I’m not actually sure what you mean, but if I’m understanding it correctly, uhh, what? No they don’t. If you click an external link on Facebook they send you to it with a redirect, so they know you went to that site, but they don’t know of any further links you might click.

But anyway, that’s not relevant to this here, because it was a photo shared on Facebook, not an external link.

Also, there was this hilarious comment under the original image:

I fucking hate the way Facebook changed how the site works so that clicking on an image no longer puts it in your browser history. Earlier today I saw a post where the swimmer whose track was shown in this specific image responded to the comments. It was actually quite an amusing interaction and I wish I could go back and share it here.

But also: the swimmer was a she, not a he.

edit:

wait I found it:

Sophie’s link: https://sophie-adaptive-athlete.com/2023/01/18/2023-channel-swim-introduction/

Ok that’s some really interesting context I didn’t know. I’ve only ever seen it done the mathematician’s way with dx at the end. Learning physicists do it differently explains why the person in the post would want to discuss moving it around.

But I still think they have to mean “if dx can be treated as an operand”. Because “if dx can be treated as an operator” doesn’t make sense. It is an operator; there’s no need to comment on something being what it objectively is, and even less reason to pretend OOP’s partner was angry at this idea.

You’re misunderstanding the post. Yes, the reality of maths is that the integral is an operator. But the post talks about how “dx can be treated as an [operand]”. And this is true, in many (but not all) circumstances.

∫(dy/dx)dx = ∫dy = y

Or the chain rule:

(dz/dy)(dy/dx) = dz/dx

In both of these cases, dx or dy behave like operands, since we can “cancel” them through division. This isn’t rigorous maths, but it’s a frequently-useful shorthand.

The operand is the target of an operator

Correct. Thus, dx is an operand. It’s a thing by which you multiply the rest of the equation (or, in the case of dy/dx, by which you divide the dy).

“operative” instead of, uh, something else

I think they meant “operand”. As in, in the way dy/dx can sometimes be treated as a fraction and dx treated as a value.

Fake and gay.

No way the engineer corrects the mathematician for using j instead of i.

I think google still listens to the quote operator first, but if that would return no results, it then returns the results without the quotes.

That seems to be what I’ve seen from my experience, anyway.

Work applications have been super bad when it comes to" people" sending me messages about my resume. Almost no real person has spoken to me.

What do you mean by this? Are applications getting rejected more than otherwise? Less than otherwise?

If guys like this are good at getting whole generations of people interested in science, more power to them

That’s the problem here though. He might be good at getting a certain kind of STEM bro into science, but his smart attitude turns away heaps more. He contributes to the perception of science as being hostile to women, at the same time as reinforcing the perception of science as elitist and exclusionary. He might’ve fit in well in the '90s and '00s, but unfortunately he’s around in the '10s and '20s.

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He’s more than just “a bit of a lolcow”. He discredits science by being an arsehole and inserting science into places it obviously does not belong. He’s the epitome of that stereotypical “STEM bro” that looks down upon the arts and humanities. Here’s one anecdote about him I found:

Just saw a clip of his on Instagram about whether “fahrenheit units are better for the weather” as opposed to Celsius.

He starts off with “well, the weather doesn’t care about how we measure it. It just is what it is, regardless of our units. What you mean is that fahrenheit makes it easy for us to understand the weather…” And then goes on to discuss it.

Like… Fuck off man. Everyone knows what the person meant, and he’s just being a smartass about it.

He’s also gone on “proving” that Santa can’t be real with real physics. That’s not stuff that makes people interested in science. It’s just dickish and does exactly the opposite.

Here’s an anecdote from someone who admits to overall liking him:

I still listen to [his podcast], but I’m gonna spoil it to you: just listen how often he interrupts people. Every question being asked he needs do change or add something and then “complains” that the section or question takes too long.

There’s also a clip with Joe Rogan where he’s not even listening but just rambles on, and keep interrupting.

And finally, I get annoyed by his words of wisdoms where he’s recycling the same sentences in his genius complex voice.

The claim there is that this is just one “side” of NDT and that his “real” side, when it’s allowed to show through, is a much better communicator of the wonder of science. My take is that we don’t get to see this “authentic” version of him nearly often enough to give him credit for it.

He has that bad habit that a lot of smart people (particularly physicists, for some reason) have, which is to think that because they’re smart in their one area, they must also be smart in others. He is certainly nowhere near as bad as some (looking at you, Sabine Hossenfelder), but he does have a nasty habit particularly when talking about the history of science (which, first and foremost, is history). One point that he’s particularly fond of (having repeated it regularly online as well as including it in his Cosmos remake) is the mediaeval flat earth myth.

As for the sexual misconduct allegations, they weren’t proven, but even if you take NDT entirely at his own word…it might not rise to the level of criminal misconduct, but it sure is creepy as fuck behaviour. Grabbing under someone’s dress straps? Inviting a subordinate home for a private meal?

But it’s not clear to me that we should just take him at his word. His own post defending himself, particularly the 1980s case, spends an awful lot of time attacking the character of the accuser. Whereas in the other cases he at least attempts to play it in the respectful “oh I can see how you might have gotten the wrong impression and I’m sorry” manner, here it’s just “no, you’re clearly my intellectual inferior and therefore why should anybody believe you?”

As for him being “cleared”:

According to Watson, the so-called “investigations” Tyson was referring to consisted of the following: “I had one 30-minute sit-down with a Fox HR representative and a 45 minute-hour sit-down with a man from a private company. I gave them both lengthy lists of extremely reliable people who could corroborate my story, text messages from that time, emails NDT had sent to me, etc. None of the people I gave contact info for were ever contacted by these companies.”

In his defence, I will say, I’ve seen a lot of people accusing him of also getting the physics wrong on certain things. And at least one case of him getting into a conversation with Richard Dawkins where he supposedly got something wrong about DNA. My read on most of the situations of this sort that I’ve seen are that they’re either minor errors that are naturally going to occur in off-the-cuff discussions, or stem from an imprecision of language where the actual point he is trying to convey was totally reasonable. Maybe, given he’s a science communicator, he should try better to get these things right, and be ready to correct them in the comments or in editing when they happen and are pointed out, which is something he seems not to do. But I don’t consider this a slight on him as a person at all. Not at the scale that I’ve seen.