Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently,
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originally identified by
philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial
but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens
this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for
the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired
propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
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Notes -
Schizo check:
Does anyone else feel like Twitter is suddenly feeding you more fluff and less politics?
The opposite tbh. I oughta stop feeding the algorithm.
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Not recently, but I do get sudden changes in 'For You' content every few months, and past changes have occasionally been "more fluff" or "more viral garbage" or something along those lines. Usually a dozen clicks on "Not interested in this post", plus a few "Show fewer posts from ClickBait123" on top of that, is enough to fix the problem ... at least for another few months until the algorithm gets tweaked again.
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How often does Easter Sunday fall on the same day as Hitler's birthday?
Reserving commentary on the phraseology of the original question.
Calculating the dates for Easter is a sort of interesting question. Assuming Gregorian conventions. For any date between March 28 and April 20 inclusive the frequency is just over 3%. For April 20th the most recent occurrences have been: 1919, 1924, 1930, 2003, 2014, and 2025 with the next in 2087.
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For those interested in EU4, this guy is a standout. He has absolutely insane challenges like 'No Allies Norse Iceland Into Roman Empire' and gets surprisingly far into it, given the huge self-imposed restrictions.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dzpf_Q4eQmE
Or the 'No Soldiers, No Army Losses' campaign as Trebizond, right next to the Ottomans. No soldiers! Force Limit Zero! And yet he conquers and conquers.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=78LvsqRLRdE
His voice is kind of monotonous and I wouldn't say he's the best presenter of content but it's an amazing display of skill at the game, picking out weird, weird things to try. Zlewwik is probably better as a player and a youtuber but I find Rooo to be quite charming somehow. Like a charming Alfa Romeo vs a ruthless, perfect Ferrari.
EU4 is the first game I've ever seen where the interface text is still unreadable at 1080p on YouTube.
The video is blurry and it's a bad font.
YouTube's terrible bit rate does make 1080 a lot blurrier than it should be, if other stuff is happening on the screen.
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skill issue
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Probably I'll end up doxxing myself but I now have a substack.
If posting such violates the rules just lmk and I'll delete this.
Your son is adorable.
Thank you. Much older now.
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Nice piece. Very DFW-esque.
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I liked your piece! I'm more than a little bit of a hopeless romantic so I can't help but appreciate the echoes of Courtly Love in it. That said, I can't help but wonder if I'm misreading the last line on your notes, "imagine a world where things had no backs" Regardless of whether or not I got that right, my brain, too, has turned to mush trying to decipher those notes, but then, I never was a big English guy, even the idea of taking a course like Modern Criticism feels like the mental equivalent of the proverbial nails on a chalkboard for me.
Thanks. Reading it through it really is overly sentimental, but if I fretted over everything I wrote I'd never let anyone read anything. As for Dr.Hermann's class, my notes are probably a good reflection of how impenetrable I found most of his lectures.
Remember, your boos mean nothing. I've seen what makes you people cheer.
"We people" as in everyone on the Motte?Nevermind I see it's a quote and I'm daft.
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I hope you don't mind that I took this very nearly explicit "try and ID me" challenge as such! I quickly found an individual that seems to match the profile drawn by your opening post exceedingly well, but I can't see the associated photo as depicting the same person as the iPhone ad video you linked before. Is this just coincidence, my borderline faceblindness striking, or did you actually borrow someone else's biography for camouflage/misdirection?
I guess only a DM will determine this.
Sent.
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Anybody down to take an online IQ test? It's not timed but according to the site takes up to 20 minutes to complete.
Feel free to share your scores. I'll go first.
Full Scale: 138
Memory: 136
Verbal: 137
Spatial: 141
I'm not surprised my memory was the lowest of the three, I feel like I've always had a bad memory (and I hate that card game called Memory where you flip over the cards to make pairs.) I always wonder if the synonym thing is really the best way to measure verbal intelligence: I just don't care to memorize obscure words which I feel drags my score down but it just seems like a waste of time to remember words that I never encounter and can simply look up the other 99 percent of the time that I'm not taking an online IQ test. Besides that, if I can imagine that a word means something else, that isn't really valued in this test either, but it would be useful if I was writing poetry or a song or something. (Like if the word is "big" and a syononym option is "ebullient," I know that ebullient doesn't mean big but spiritually, to me, it has the essence of bigness...) But I guess the intelligence to override my imagination is what the test measures. I'd rather be imaginative than book smart though, really. The spatial portion was probably the closest to measuring "imagination" in that you need to imagine the shapes rotated in your mind. I feel like I used to be much faster at this, I found myself rechecking my answers quite a few times (of course the test was untimed so I could do that without penalty.)
My results:
Full scale: 136
Memory: 132 (VM 76/85, EM 15/26)
Verbal: 137 (V 25/34, A 22/27)
Spatial: 136 (MR 16/17, CP 13/18)
It is almost midnight for me, so I was fairly tired, but judging from other comments this is standard (in practice - who's actually going to block out some prime focus time in the midday to do an unmoderated online IQ test?)
My thoughts on the test sections:
Visual memory
I think this was a pretty good test in being robust to gaming - the only issue I can think of is the question of whether you can move your mouse into a convenient position whilst the image plays (I decided the fair thing to do is to not touch your mouse at all until the animation finishes)
Exposure memory
This felt like the most "IQ"ish test for me, in that there was no conscious thinking at all. I initially planned to just rapidly repeat the sequence to myself as it played, then I realised I can't articulate an image like this in words in a fraction of second. (Was there anyone who could actually generate short verbal encodings for the icons on the fly?)
My strategy was to just passively consume it and then just click whatever icons "spoke" to me without thinking (and then adding in any others I remembered properly with a few seconds conscious recall)
Vocab
I had heard before that Vocab is extremely g-loaded, and this EOK article gives r=0.8 (I haven't read the article though, I just skipped to the table)
I always found this really weird. When I first started believing in IQ (as a measure of something beyond "how well you do IQ tests") I had always assumed that any word stuff would be less g-loaded than "maths" stuff like shape rotation (because STEM people are smarter than humanities people) - I suppose since we hear/read so many words, even really weird ones like "diaphanous" come up at least once, and if you're more intelligent, you process your stimuli more efficiently, so fewer strange words and concepts fly over your head.
Anagram
I think this is the worst subtest. Some other tests are gameable in this specific interface, as there is no time limit, and they could just be fixed by adding a timer.
But I know from personal experience that anagram solving are extremely trainable - I have a friend (of similar intelligence to me, based on exam results and working together) who can unscramble 9 letter anagrams in seconds (even using bizarre words), as he enjoys playing "word games" like this, and knows various patterns, heuristics, etc. I believe he would easily max out this test.
Mental Rotations
As @Pigeon pointed out, the shape rotation was too easy (I got 16/17, and I believe it would have been 17/17 if I had used my \infty time correctly and checked my work properly), especially without a timer. I just did a "mental rotation" without much effort or strain (I suppose if you didn't partition the shape into "plane" + "protrusion" it might have been hard, but I suppose you need good spatial intelligence to notice something like this)
Center Points
After the test, I looked it up - it turns out this is a "thing" - it's called the Geometric Median, and there does not appear to be a simple "trick" that allows you to estimate it in your head.
I'm not sure to what extent they wanted us to just go on vibes for this one (The most advanced maths I used here was to count the number of squares in each group when they were clearly clustered) - I remember around Q10-ish I realised there were 24 questions and got impatient and started almost instant-answering a lot of questions.
Also - I realise the vague "mental picture" I had for this problem was completely off - I did not clock that the optimising set has to be convex (since the objective is convex), and had mental images of things like arcs or isolated points (and I think I even hallucinated correct answers of this form in my memory as I progressed through the rounds - maybe because the first question, of a 2x2 square doesn't look convex since the guide answer doesn't include the 2x2 itself)
This doesn't massively effect the actual problem, but curious if anyone else also had the same wrong picture in their minds? I don't know why, but it still feels sort of wrong to me that the objective is convex (even with really weird point placements, you can't get any local optima?) - but on the other hand... it's literally a sum of convex functions! This feels like quite a big oversight on my part, hopefully I was just tired...?
Amongst my close friends in undergrad, there used to be a guy who had a ~150 IQ (he was the only member of the group who had it measured "properly" by a professional - he had a psychologist friend and he agreed to be one of the test subjects for something), and he was noticeably duller than the rest of us in [hard STEM subject we all studied] - this was evidenced objectively in exam results (and he worked to try get good results) I'm not sure if he is just one of those unfortunate people on the vertex of the functionality/IQ ellipse, or if it really was just a "culture" issue (maybe he was just overloaded with extra-curriculars, he had test-anxiety, etc - normally I'd discount those explanations as cope - but then... 150 IQ!)
Anyways, I always secretly hoped/fantasised that maybe the 150IQ really did correspond to the expected level of functionality, and that I was actually more functional - so maybe I was actually some kind of genius with a +4 sigma IQ (and I've never done genius things like getting an IMO gold medal because something something environment something something Newton was an unremarkable undergraduate something something) - so it was a little disheartening to have my unlikely fantasy extinguished completely.
And I think this is part of why I've never actually taken the effort to find an online IQ test (despite thinking about IQ and intelligence, and even talking about it with friends, a lot) - but obviously that was bad and irrational. More information can only ever add utility, because you can always do whatever you want anyways. I can already face the reality of having a 136IQ because I've been living it for my whole life, that which can be killed by the truth should perish, the cat was already dead before I opened the box, etc
Maybe he was mentally ill/traumatized. That can wreck cognitive performance.
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Not surprised that memory was bad, I’ve never been good at it. The whole thing is 10 points lower than last time I took a likely equally inaccurate test 10 years ago, which seems like it probably lines up with age, impact, and the kind of people I usually hang out with.
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The gizmo says I'm comparatively stupid in an isolated way.
Memory 109 Verbal 138 Spatial 149
Mostly got dinged on the first memory sub-test. This is possibly more interesting than the high-score all around or low-score all-around options.
The first one was the spatial one, right? I found that one to be a breeze (well, it took some focus to hold everything in my head, but I was nearly always confident that I got everything right), but was really struggling the whole time for the icon recognition one. Interesting that we disagree there, rather than the same things being harder/easier for everyone.
Yep. Have you seen the videos of chimpanzees doing similar tasks? They're super good, so I guess it's plausible for it not to covary with the other abilities. On the other hand, it's easy to come up with hypotheses as to why one might do idiosyncratically well or poorly on any given test. I assume that clinical grade measures have more parts to try and average this out.
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Despite being an ESL peasant I thought I had a pretty solid vocabulary for English, but there were quite a few words here I had never seen before. Does the list include some words that don't even exist? :P
I got a much worse score than I did on a clinically administered full battery test (in my native language) as a younger man. Perhaps aging and my chronic health issue have wrecked my brain more than I expected, or this test isn't comprehensive enough to give accurate results. Did get more confirmation of the fact that my memory just doesn't work that well though. Now I feel a bit more impetus to actually try to improve it, so taking this test wasn't a waste of time.
Yeah, I remember doing well on previous vocab quizzes posted here but there were some suspicious head scratchers in this one. It's not so much that I wasn't sure what they might mean so much as even as a native speaker I'd never seen them before. Didn't stop and check though.
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According to this very reliable test which leads with
I get
Apparently I'm a wordcel.
I don't find these results particularly plausible - SAT and GRE scores give me an estimate almost 1 sigma lower, and I'm more inclined to trust those. Still, this felt more like an intelligence test than Raven's Progressive Bitwise Operator Familiarity Test.
The center point one was interesting, and I struggled to find a physical analogue for the question (minimizing the sum of euclidean distances, which is not the same as finding the average point or the same as attaching a spring from a mass to each point and minimizing tension). Which I suppose reinforces my wordceldom.
I got a similar score and have a similar ~1sigma lower estimate from correlated tests (although memory was my best individual score). At first I thought the whole test was just a bit biased towards higher scores as multiple posters got scores in 140-150 range, but there are a few lower scores so not sure
For verbal I think it might be "I used to play a lot of Scrabble which trivialized the anagram task". I'd like to say my scores on the other tasks seem accurate except that for things like mental rotation I definitely struggle in real-world contexts (e.g. getting all the vector math right in a ray tracer) and yet I (and everyone else here who posted a score on that section) got a perfect score.
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Huh, odd, the percentiles seemed fine for me as compared with standardized tests like the SAT, and you're one of the people on this board who feel a bit smarter than me.
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Did it while a little distracted, went away to shower and do other things, did try to concentrate for the timed tasks, also I took this near midnight so might be a little sleepy
I'm surprised my memory and spatial is that high, and that my verbal is that low — historically formal IQ tests have pinned me as having significantly higher verbal IQ. I will blame it on English being a second language of mine (even if I am fluent), but I'm not sure it explains the disparity between thesynonym-matching and the unscrambling-words tasks. I was barely able to get any of the 5-letter words unscrambled. (For reference the previous LSAT thing that was floating around a while ago (?) was easy as shit in comparison, 5/5 no sweat — was the LSAT supposed to be a good proxy of verbal IQ?)
Probably could've gotten a bit higher on the CP puzzles if I didn't rush and actually reasoned my way through some of these but then I suppose it's fairly pointless if you actually idk do it? Was I supposed to run purely on intuition on this?
Why so many excuses and humblebrags from someone who got a great score?
I actually think that it was probably a bit inaccurate and it might have overestimated my spatial/nonverbal IQ (as I thought the spatial elements could be gamed a bit too easily), but most of the soul-searching is due to being quite perplexed at my lower verbal score. Previous estimations/tests of my verbal IQ returned a score, like, >10 points above my nonverbal IQ.
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I think 135 is really good for verbal if English is your second language so I'm impressed personally. I did the same technique with the shape rotation that you described (identify the one plane then the other sticking out part.) I honestly already forget what the CP part of the test was so I can't comment on your questions at the end
English is my second language but I did start learning it very early, and often it feels more like a co-first language for me, so it still feels a bit off. I'm wondering if the poor ability in matching letters is due to spending quite a lot of time with logographic scripts as well esp. early on in life, so maybe on some level I treat words in alphabetical languages like independent glyphs?
I think the test-makers are a bit too optimistic if they think more time wouldn't help with the shape rotation portion; a monkey could do it given enough time and if it discovers a reliable method.
The CP puzzles were theguess where the midpoint of all the dots are puzzle
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I have done this test before, is it still accurate after 3-4 tries in as many years insofar as training for the test is concerned?
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Full scale: 111
Memory: 101
Verbal: 140
Spatial: 107
Not even a little surprised that I'm a wordcel rather than a shape rotator. In future, if you see one of my posts and think it's badly argued, feel free to discount my reasoning accordingly based on the results posted above.
I think it's interesting that someone could have such uneven results... Do you think you could like, practice and train at the memory and spatial tasks and get better at them over time if you tried? Are you just apathetic to those sorts of tasks compared with verbal skills? Did you excel at, say, english and history classes in school and do worse in other subjects?
Of course not - I wish these tasks came naturally to me the way they do to so many others.
When I did my Leaving Cert (Irish university entrance exam), I got a B in both English and maths. But I do think that, in general, I didn't have to work half as hard at English as I did at maths.
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Full Scale: 143
Memory: 144
Verbal: 135
Spatial: 144
This is close to the score I typically get on the "obvious crap" "IQ tests" that are commonly encountered on the internet, so I'm not in a hurry to apply for Mensa yet.
Spoilers for the test methodology.
They say their scores are normalized based on the slice of the population that takes tests. I wonder what's the real distribution of people who took this specific test w.r.t. their scores.
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Full: 149
Memory: 143. I was way better at the patterns than the icons. (VM: 84/85. EM: 18/26)
Verbal: 149. Probably could have gotten a touch more if I were more strategic on the vocabulary. (V:31/34) (A:23/27)
Sptaial: 144 (MR:17/17) (CP:15/18)
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A list of Trumpisms according to colloquial usage (am I missing anything?)
Very common
Many such cases
I have concepts of a [plan]
Open the schools
Many are saying this
Big if true
Common
We do a little trolling
You’re telling me this for the first time
Used Uncommonly
Sad!
Thank you [Kanye], very cool
Fortunately or unfortunately
Lightweight (more aptly a repopularization)
Everything’s computer
Don’t we, folks
Fake news (as interjection; regional variations in popularity)
Bigly
Drain the swamp
Deprecated Use
I like "stop the count!" In the context of sports, I use it uncommonly
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"Big, beautiful X" is used to good effect in a lot of comedy impersonations.
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A cursory Google search reveals that "big if true" has been around since year 2000 at the latest.
Yeah I thought that was more of a 4chan thing.
I first saw it on Reddit, personally. But I don't frequent 4chan's sports boards.
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NGL I didn't even know some of those were his. Where's "we do a little trolling" from?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=PobQzVsj7GE
I didn't find the context, but yeah, on the campaign trail.
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TV comedy recommendation: "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," following a woman who goes from privileged Jewish housewife/mother to professional (frequently blue) comedienne, along with the ups and downs of her eccentric family, in the late 1950s/early 1960s. It's an interesting execution of a period setting, in that it's a mix of nostalgia and pastiche, rather than being either fastidiously accurate or sloppily inaccurate. It's 53 episodes (~45-75 minutes, each) long, over five seasons; available on Prime (... or elsewhere).
Second this, and despite them addressing a lot of topics that would be classified as "social justice" and "woke", it does not give off the impression of being a woke product. I have very low tolerance for "agenda" productions, and I quite enjoyed it (I'm Jewish though so there's that). It has an nice setting, masterful execution, and also Tony Shaloub who is, as expected, great, and got an Emmy for this work.
Luke Kirby also got an Emmy for his portrayal of Lenny Bruce and Alex [Borstein? I don't care enough to look it up] as the main character's hilarious manager, as well as David Mullen for cinematography. I don't know what other awards it won, but it was one of those shows that just batted .400.
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My incredibly off-topic comment justifiably saw no response, but it reminded me of one question.
Imagine you’re on a flight where somebody tried to smuggle murder hornets and they got loose. Only three people were immune and survived: you, and a basement dweller who spent thousands of hours in MS Flight Simulator including the plane model you’re on, and a real fighter pilot who has never flown a commercial plane ever. They look at you to decide who will be landing the plane. Which one do you choose?
I find it very suspicious that two thirds of the people who just randomly happen to be immune to the murder hornets are both somewhat experienced with planes. The likeliest scenario is that they are both part of an operation to steal that plane.
Of course, given that, I have to wonder about myself. Did I survive because I was also part of the plot? The two others seem to have covered landing the plane at its new destination, so what exactly was my part in all of this? Did I bring the hornets on board? So many died. Why did I do this?
The best way to redeem myself is to make sure that their bloody operation will not succeed. My biggest asset for that is that my two co-conspirators are still believing I am on their side. At the moment we are still over the middle of the ocean, and both of them just went into the cockpit to set a coarse for Havana or Mogadishu or whatever.
I think about sabotaging the emergency oxygen system and then blowing out a door. I find a connected oxygen cylinder, but then I begin to wonder. What if the cockpit has a separate, redundant life support system? Ambient pressure at commercial plane flight levels is low, but not zero. And the cabin pressure is also not sea level. Also, they closed the cockpit door again, so I can't really count on explosive decompression to take them out. And probably whoever had to design the doors had the secondary objective of making sure that they are not easily opened while there is a pressure differential. Or I would just get blown out of the door without taking both of the other conspirators out. And if anyone can hang on to consciousness in hypox.. anox.. in low oxygen conditions while their plane does a free-fall descent of a few kilometers, then it is probably a fighter pilot.
I look at the painful stings all over my hands. At least I can't see my face, but my left eye it totally swollen. The antidote kept me alive, not comfortable. I wonder about what hellish species that is which can take out a hundred people in minutes. Some were only stung once or twice. Should stings lead to anaphylaxis and death with such certainty? Are they GMO and producing botox or something?
What happens with the hornets after the plane is landed? Am I looking at some Alien scenario? They are likely not an x-risk, but the span between erasing some 500 QALYs and x-risk is pretty large. How do hornets even reproduce? Probably nests with a large number with individuals, so they have a queen?
Nah, the tail end is simply too dreadful, new priority one is to make sure that none of these bloody beasts escape.
I consider my options. While cabin pressure is maintained, the hornets are trapped in here with me. If the plane lands without damaging the hull too much, I can tell radio the authorities and tell them to build a tent around the plane and fill it with some insecticide. Still hinges on me taking over the plane and making a non-catastrophic landing.
The safest way to destroy the hornets would probably be a controlled watering at Point Nemo -- where we put our space junk and dread Cthulhu lies. Even if there is a hull breach during impact, the hornets are probably not able to fly hundreds of kilometers over the sea. Unfortunately, we are nowhere near it. Landing in some smaller pond will kill the hornets only if the plane remains sealed until it sinks. The other obvious choice is rapid deceleration followed by a fuel explosion. What are the odds of the tail part breaking off and not being caught in the fireball? How reliable is the acceleration to kill these big ass hornets?
Anyhow, this brings me back to having to disable the other conspirators to take over the plane. The bigger danger by far is the fighter pilot. He may not have a ton of training in close quarter combat, but he is a lot fitter than I am. The basement dweller is closer to a fair fight -- not that I plan on giving him one.
That oxygen cylinder I found will have to serve as a blunt weapon. And it's contents could help me prepare a distraction. The third corpse in first class I check smells like a smoker, and indeed he has a lighter in his pockets, as well as a pack of cigarettes with a label "SMOKING KILLS", not that he has to worry about that now. Just as I have picked the ideal location for my little fire, I notice that one of the passengers does not have the swollen face of the others. Yes, she is not moving as the hornets crawl on her, but she is very faintly breathing. Shit, what now?
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My understanding is that the division of labor in an emergency is for the co-pilot to take the controls and the captain to manage comms and the checklist(s), the reason being that experience and a (hopefully) cool head are more valuable for the latter tasks. So, I'd have the sim pilot take the controls and the fighter pilot take the radio and checklists.
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I've always wanted to land a plane.
Serves them right for putting you in charge really.
Imagining your eyes widening like a child opening a present as you say it and the dread they would feel in that moment made me laugh my ass off, kudos.
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I'm not terribly frightened of this hypo. Either, or both, or neither I'll do it myself just for the story. Landing a plane isn't really THAT hard. It's reasonably difficult to do perfectly every single time, without damaging the plane or anything around the plane. I would bet the median mottizen could land an airliner with no serious injuries or fatalities with 98% success or better with radio guidance.
IIRC there has, quite literally, never been a talk down landing that hasn't succeeded.
Wow so this hypo is very much in Man Or Bear territory of stupidity?
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Yeah, funniest case scenario, I'm sure each of those three hypothetical characters could successfully be told how to hit the Cat III autoland button.
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Fighter pilot.
Resilience to stress is more important than excellence. Both of them can fly a plane. Only one of them knows how to keep his cool in stressful circumstances.
The MSF guy, with pilot as copilot.
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Can I choose a team of the hornets?
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...what's the delta between the transferability of MS Flight Simulator skills versus a fighter jet? I have no idea. I'd probably go with the fighter jet pilot, on the assumption that MSFS is sufficiently streamlined that it transfers less.
Your average fighter pilot has probably flown maybe a half dozen other aircraft types too: you don't go straight from a simulator into a jet.
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...I doubt that. Last I checked MSFS was for those guys who loved having all of the bullshit on a plane down to the last button. That was a decade ago..
XPlane or Prepar3d are better as instrument trainers, but you can still get MSFS to the point where it can be blessed for BATD purposes (effectively, can clock a limited number of hours on it as a pilot). The biggest worry I'd have is that they are still buttons; even high-end yokes tend to be horribly unrealistic when it comes to physical feel, and many parts don't really have good physical equivalents even if you're willing to pay an arm, leg, and first-born child.
In normal conditions a pilot only really has to manage the aircraft in the sense of a checklist, where there's literally very exact steps involved for procedure at every point in the process, but high crosswinds, bad visibility, (very) low fuel levels, equipment failures/non-ops on aircraft or ground, or particularly annoying airports can make that less true. In those situations, being able to identify the feel of different types of whole-aircraft movement go, or knowing how to count off time properly in your head under stress, or how to handle procedures that aren't covered in flight simulator work could be more relevant.
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I don’t want to be a dick, but you’re a brand new account and the only two responses you’ve gotten (within minutes of each other) are usernames I don’t recognize that were each created within a week of this website’s creation.
Does that seem weird to anyone else?
We notice the influx of new posters and we often have suspicions about new accounts.
That said, it's not conducive to actually drawing in new members if people start publicly accusing every new poster with a hot take of being a bot or a sock or a troll.
You can report suspicious accounts. But even when we're fairly sure someone is a returning alt we usually don't take action immediately if their behavior doesn't immediately throw red flags.
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No. What would be the purpose of this conspiracy? You can't just throw these aspersions into the wind, make it interesting.
And I'm gonna go with the basement dweller. I had almost the exact hypothetical situation happen to me last month. My brother had received a small, remotely controlled airplane toy, but he couldn't keep it in the air for more than 15 seconds, even though he can jump higher than me. Thanks to my extensive experience watching youtube videos on airplane crashes, I just leveled the wings and stopped giving it gas when the AoA was too high, and voila, stall averted and everyone saved.
Many troll accounts that have already been banned were dormant usernames that were registered in September of 2022. There's no need for a conspiracy.
I take it I was being a dick.
I mean, mollie the mare has 200 comments, it's not a dormant troll. And two accounts posting within 2 minutes of each other is well within the realm of innocent events. The worst troll here, post-nazi-insider-spat-and-delete-guy, uses new accounts that date from the time his last one was banned, so if he ever used them, he's out of prime dormants.
I appreciate you posting this. Pretty rich for a guy with their posting history hidden to accuse someone else of being a troll. I don't post as much as the more prolific users of the forum, but it would have been trivial to check if I was a sleeper account.
I sincerely recommend you also hide your post history. I think it’s bad the mods disabled the option for newer accounts.
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We seem to have some new faces around. 4chan refugees?
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Fighter jock, so very hard. There's a reason "flying by the seat of your pants" became an expression. Even the very best simulators don't match the actual experience of putting a plane back on the ground safely. Also a commercial jet is much much harder to crash than a fighter jet which, by design, trades stability for agility.
The biggest issue would be a lack of familiarity with the controls. Put simulator guy/gal in the co-pilot's chair so they can point out where the appropriate dials and buttons are and you should be fine. Aside from being in a plane full of corpses and murder hornets anyway.
You are imo wrong.
Fighter jets are far smaller, have greater power reserves. I remember playing flight sim and the biggest thing I could ever land successfully was a Learjet. In a big plane everything you do ..lags? More... It's hard.
Maybe a pilot would get used to it, but a guy who has done it in Sims seems like a safer bet.
I'm not sure why you'd consider the very real performance difference between a fighter and commercial jet to be prohibitive but think the much, much larger difference between a sim and real life is just fine.
.. larger ? Good sims model the planes accurately. A big jet vs a small jet is a great difference in handling. I think a fighter pilot would be able to land a passenger jet but I think the experienced sim enthusiast would be more likely unless he never flew large planes in a good sim.
Yes, larger. Try doing a loop in a simulator then do one in real life. Even the very expensive sims that airlines and the military use can't 100% replicate the feel of real flight. A PC and desk chair certainly aren't going to do it.
You try to avoid such wild maneuvers with liners.
Iirc, no one has ever flown a loop with one, but one pilot performed a barrel roll at a lower altitude with a 747 in view of corporate onlookers.
You also try to avoid killing off the entire flight crew yet here we are.
Regardless, the point was that physical sensation is an integral part of the piloting experience and it's not one you'll get from a desktop sim. Replace looping with strong turbulence if that makes you feel better.
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Conditional on:
The basement dweller. Otherwise the fighter pilot. In the first case everyone will probably walk away with quite a story to tell. In the second everyone will probably survive, but there might be some injuries and the plane is probably going to be totaled.
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An acquaintance put together a microsite for writing 100-word stories. The account creation is bugged (the modal doesn't close when you do, nor is there email confirmation) but I'm gonna be doing it every once in a while: https://hectalex.com/
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Book subthread.
I've been on a tear through the stuff on GlobalComix recently, which for a fairly reasonable $8/month lets you read as many comics as you'd like. Their catalog is extensive, and includes both amateur and A-list publisher content. DC comics, Dynamite Entertainment, Image Comics, of course there's no Marvel because House of Mouse. It's been a while since I've read comics, and I've been enjoying it immensely. Things I've read and enjoyed so far were A Righteous Thirst for Vengeance, Fire Power, Radiant Black, Rogue Sun, Nemesis, and Brit. Some of these I'll freely admit are very little more than gunporn, but A Righteous Thirst for Vengeance and Radiant Black are quite good.
The site UI leaves a lot to be desired, and their search function is atrocious, but overall I've found it was worth the money.
What's Fire Power like? Kirkman can be hit or miss for me, I never got into the walking dead but outcast was great, but then oblivion song was just blah.
You don't mind superhero deconstructions it looks like, have you read Warren Ellis' superhuman trilogy? Black Summer, No Hero and Supergods are the titles, if you like Radiant Black I think you'd at least enjoy Black Summer if you haven't read it. They all get very fucked up though, I should warn.
I've been reading Uber recently, Kieron Gillen's series about nazi supermen. I've only read the first two trades so far but it's fun so far. It's so hard finding good new comics.
I liked it, but it wasn't nearly as good as Invincible. Still it manages a fairly satisfying ending, even if I wasn't a fan of one decision, and then the climax felt a bit rushed.
I haven't read Black Summer, I'll give it a look!
And Uber was great. Good characters, good art, good action.
Ah yeah I forgot he did Invincible! Alright awesome, I know what I'm doing this evening.
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I liked Uber. The art became meh in later issues.
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Humble Bundle is offering a DRM-free collection of thirty books in the Vampire Hunter D series for just 18 dollars. Before reading the books, you may wish to first watch the acclaimed movie (loosely based on the third book) in order to get a feel for what you're supposed to be visualizing.
Oh shit, I never knew that got translated. I'd wanted to read those since I saw the original movie during Japanimation Week on Sci-Fi channel in the 90s.
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Court opinion:
In year 1992, Dorothy dies at age 85. She has no descendants, so her only potential heirs are her two brothers, Yale and Zangwill. The probate judge appoints Zangwill's son John as administrator. Harold, a friend of the family for the past thirty years, submits a family tree to the probate judge and testifies to his personal knowledge that Yale, having been born eleven years before Dorothy, died six years ago at age 90, so Zangwill is Dorothy's only heir. Zangwill renounces his interest in Dorothy's estate in favor of John, so John gets the entire estate. The largest portion of the estate is a piece of real property in New York City, worth 280 k$.
John renovates the property. By year 2018, its value has skyrocketed to 2.3 M$, and he decides to sell it. Whoops! A title search reveals that Yale actually died, not six years before Dorothy at age 90, but one year after Dorothy at the unlikely age of 97. This means that Yale should have gotten half of the estate back in 1992. John sues Yale's ultimate heir—a trust set up by Yale's now-dead brother-in-law, presumably for the benefit of the brother-in-law's children—to confirm that John has obtained full ownership of the building through the doctrine of adverse possession. The trust counterclaims, alleging that in 1992 (1) Harold committed fraud by giving false testimony and (2) John breached his fiduciary duty as administrator by failing to conduct a diligent search for heirs (compare the hiring of a professional genealogist in this other case), so adverse possession does not apply.
The trial judge rules in John's favor, and the appeals panel and the supreme court affirm.* There is no evidence that Harold did anything but make an honest mistake. And Harold was a disinterested witness who provided both sworn testimony and a family tree, as required by state law, so it was not unreasonable for John to rely on Harold's mistaken facts. John has been in possession of the building for more than twenty years, so he easily meets the ten-year requirement of adverse possession under state law.
One justice on the supreme court dissents. He thinks that Harold's unresearched testimony and family tree do not count as the "diligent search" for heirs that the law requires of an estate administrator (and for which the law permits three years of time), and therefore John's reliance on those mistaken facts counts as a breach of fiduciary duy. But the other six justices disagree with this view.
*New York's courts confusingly are named (from lowest to highest) "supreme, appeals, appeals", rather than the "trial, appeals, supreme" pattern that is more familiar. I have translated the New York terminology to regular terminology.
One thing I've noticed in my years of practicing law is that probate courts are, in general, more favorable to questionable claims that involve people who are actively involved in the family and not distant relatives. While the legal reasoning may be impeccable, the justices probably secretly considered the fact that Yale and Dorothy weren't exactly close if he didn't even know that his sister died, and that his brother didn't even know if he was still alive. Then take it back one more level and have a trust for the benefit of the brother-in-law's heirs trying to put a claim on a piece of property 25 years after the estate settled. And on the other hand you have a nephew who was close enough to act as the executor of his aunt's estate. No judge is going to undo a done deal for the benefit of some strangers unless there's compelling evidence that the law requires it, like some sort of evidence that the nephew was intentionally keeping his uncle in the dark about Dorothy's death so he could inherit the property. BTW, the actual terminology is Supreme Court, Supreme Court—Appellate Division, and Court of Appeals. New York is just more egalitarian in that they believe all their courts are important enough to have the Supreme Court label.
... Well at least one would as it seems in this case
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This is an interesting one. 26 years is a long time to pass to have someone come out of the blue and try to make a claim on your inheritance. In my opinion, it would be fair for Yale's estate to get a small piece of sale price, but half would be far too much. Something in the realm of 10% seems more fair to me. 0% also seems fair to me, but I wouldn't quibble if he was awarded 10%.
If Yale's estate was entitled to compensation, I'd have gone with the 1992 value of his portion of Dorothy's estate, adjusted for inflation.
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