botfly's comments

On: Why Do Obese Patients Get Worse Care? Many Doctors Don't See Past the Fat

[botfly]

You're 5'3" and weighed 175? You must be built like a tank

[scarface74 → botfly]

5"4. But like I said. I don't lift weights anymore at all. But most people assume I do.

As far as the caliper body fat test. It was done using 6 parts of the body.

On: Airbnb Adopts Rules in Effort to Fight Discrimination by Its Hosts

[botfly]

This seems naive. The market will not automatically reward the non-discriminatory actor.

On: Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash

[botfly]

I don't know if Jet was a "small guy" before the acquisition either if they had a 1B valuation. Plus pricing at a loss to get market share and compete with Amazon or get acquired by Walmart isn't really a small guy business plan. My idea of small guys I'd want to help is a local mom and pop stores. Maybe that guy likes the idea of helping start-ups though? It's his money

On: Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)

[botfly]

To be fair, you don't have to refer to them as "Indians". Most serious academic anthropologists would refrain from doing so, preferring Native American instead. So to label them as "Indians" yourself and then to state that "it's not hard to see how there are misconceptions about them if they're still referred to as 'Indians'" is a bit disingenuous. I'm sure there are misconceptions but I don't take as evidence the fact that you chose to call them "Indians".

[pastProlog → botfly]

I said they're still referred to as Indians because they're still referred to as Indians. The point is the very name shows the nature of the ingrained misconceptions about them - the idea that they're from India for one. Yes, I know they're not from India, you seem to have missed the point.

On: Company town

[botfly]

Why don't they just eat cake?

On: What Musical Notes Can Look Like

[botfly]

Isn't that "what things look like"? Like what you see when you see a tree isn't actually a tree but the interpretation of light waves hitting your eye. It's a rendering of the light in a particular way and we somewhat casually call this "what a tree looks like". Often when we talk about the projection of a thing into some visual form we us this kinda casual language. I think to your point, any one of those methods of rendering the information into visual form has equal claim to "what the notes look like"

[lisper → botfly]

Yes, that's true, but in the case of macroscopic physical objects like trees there is a "natural" rendering designed by evolution that is reasonably called what the thing "actually" looks like. In the case of sounds, there is no such a natural rendering. Turning sound into images necessarily involves some design, and so there's no basis for calling any particular rendering the "actual" appearance of a sound.

[runeks → lisper]

    > Turning sound into images necessarily involves some design, and so there's 
    > no basis for calling any particular rendering the "actual" appearance of a sound.

Turning light into images necessarily invokes a design, too: an eye. And depending on whether this eye is that of a human, a fish, or a fly, a different image will be experienced. So here, too, there is no basis for calling any particular image, that you experience from the light that an object reflects, the actual appearance of that object.

It's just one instance of an appearance of an object in your field of experience at one particular point in time. Not even you will ever experience that object in exactly the same way again.

Furthermore, we have no way of knowing if there, some place on earth or elsewhere, exists a life form that experiences sound exactly as these two-dimensional images. If there has been an evolutionary advantage to doing so, I see nothing preventing a sensory organ from picking up these vibrations and creating this experience out of it.

[lisper → runeks]

> there is no basis for calling any particular image, that you experience from the light that an object reflects, the actual appearance of that object

Sure, but "the actual appearance of an object" is generally understood to mean, "the actual appearance of an object relative to a typical human visual system", at least when the phrase is uttered by one human to another.

[botfly → lisper]

So the problem in this view is the primacy of one particular projection asserted by the word "actually"? Fair enough.

[lisper → botfly]

Yes, exactly. If the headline had been, "A neat way to turn sounds into pretty pictures" I would have had no problem with it.

[burkaman → lisper]

But the current headline is "What Musical Notes Can Look Like", emphasis on the "Can". Your suggestion is basically just a condescending way to rephrase that.

[lisper → burkaman]

The headline has been changed. When I posted my original comment, the headline was the original headline: "This Is What Musical Notes Actually Look Like"

[rhizome → botfly]

It's important to recognize pretenses of objectivity.

On: My Venezuela Nightmare: A 30-Day Hunt for Food in a Starving Land

[botfly]

Additionally, the Venezuelan crude is generally viewed as a low quality product. It's not as suitable for many applications. So when prices drop it's one of the first products to get pushed out of the market

But why talk about that when we can have silly ideological arguments over the merits of communism and capitalism instead

[astrodust → botfly]

It's heavy crude, not light crude, but it's oil nonetheless.

On: My Venezuela Nightmare: A 30-Day Hunt for Food in a Starving Land

[botfly]

You're free to simplify and to contemplate

On: My Venezuela Nightmare: A 30-Day Hunt for Food in a Starving Land

[botfly]

Does that happen often?

On: The Brexit Possibility

[botfly]

Well really the opinions of economists on this DID have real, quantifiable backing. It's not just ideological conjecture when economists assert that backing out of a trade union will have negative consequences.