vanesa

What all five of my examples have in common is that they are minor elements in the text; they are not main ideas. In fact, your usual practice of reading which focuses on main ideas would dismiss them all as marginal or trivial. Another thing they have in common is that, although they are minor, they are nonetheless conspicuous, eye-catching: they are either surprising or repeated, set off from the text or too long. Close reading pays attention to elements in the text which, although marginal, are nonetheless emphatic, prominent—elements in the text which ought to be quietly subordinate to the main idea, but which textually call attention to themselves.

Most of you have been educated to ignore such elements. You have been taught to seek out and identify the main ideas, dismissing the trivial as you go. This has had to be trained into you: read to a young child sometime, you will notice she has the annoying habit of interrupting the flow of the story to draw attention to some minor thing. Close reading resembles the interruptions of that child. It is a method of undoing the training that keeps us to the straight and narrow path of main ideas. It is a way of learning not to disregard those features of the text that attract our attention, but are not principal ideas.

I was recently asked about resources for how to improve your skills at riichi mahjong, so I figured I'd make a big post about it. I'm not the very best at the game, but I do fly around the country to play at riichi tournaments, and have played (and won) at jansou in Japan.

One of the difficulties that you will immediately encounter is that most of the really good materials for the game are in Japanese, so some baseline knowledge of Japanese will help. That said, one of these recommendations is entirely in English!

This first book recommendation is 何を切るドリル (nani o kiru drill) which is technically from a series of books on offense and defense. Despite that intent, it's actually quite good as a standalone exercise book.

On the right-hand side of the book you will see questions. The questions will show you a bunch of tiles and you have a simple job: pick the best tile to discard. When you flip the page over, on the left-hand side, you will see the answer as well as an explanation (in Japanese) as to why that was a good decision.

As a newer player, you'll pretty quickly run into examples where the book and you would disagree. Use those opportunities to slowly work through the exercise again!

The next book I'd recommend is in English! It's the recent Riichi Mahjong: The Only Way to Play by Jenn Barr. Jenn Barr is a professional mahjong player, from the United States but living in Japan, and this book is leagues more accessible than the other major English publication, Riichi Book 1. It's also much better than RB1 because RB1 uses inconsistent language.

Next book we have is 麻雀手役 (mahjong teyaku) which is more of a reference guide on yakus. The important parts of this are examples of every yaku in the game, when you should go for them, and most importantly, when you shouldn't go for them. Probably the section on toitoi is the most important for newcomers (it's not a commonly won yaku! chiitoi (seven pairs) is more common!)

My last recommendation is to watch mahjong games played at a higher level, pause as they're being played, and learn from that. M League is the most accessible one to get into (even though it isn't quite the highest level of play imo)

Just note that the meta that pro players play at is different than what you'd encounter in lower-level rooms online. For example, a pro player may elaborately try to set up suji trap, but because lower-level players aren't as good at defense, your traps may mean nothing until you get to higher ranked rooms online.

And finally, a few online-specific resources:

Mahjong Efficiency Trainer is a great project on itchio that you can use to improve your efficiency and get to tenpai faster. Just note that in an actual game at a higher level, playing "perfectly" like this will make your waits a bit too obvious to your opponents.

Riichi Scoring Trainer is another one. This one matters more if you intend to play in-person, where you will need to verbalize the score after you win a hand. There are many score trainers out there but I found this one to be pretty good.

An interesting paper (Vermeij, 2015) on the "empty phenotypic space", i.e. the forms and adaptations that we do not see in the living world, possibly relevant to the convergence vs. contingency debate.

Some examples:

Wheels: some curled-up arthropods can roll around, and bacterial flagella and some parts of weevil legs rotate on their axis, but macroscopic wheels with a free axle do not exist, probably because smooth surfaces on which they'd be useful are rare and it would be difficult to grow them through embryonal development.

Animal-provided pollination and dispersal do not exist in water, with the possible exception of one species of fish-pollinated seagrass (which is a descendant of terrestrial plants). Presumably water is already good enough at carrying gametes and propagules that buying the services of an animal is a useless expense.

Mineral reef-building does not occur on land nor, more surprisingly, in freshwater. The reason for the latter is not clear, since there are enough mineral ions in freshwater to build shells. Boring of rock, shells, and wood in freshwater is also extremely rare though common in the sea.

Gelatinous plankton like salps or jellyfish (with few exceptions of the latter) is also not found in freshwater, probably because they can't survive dispersal between separate water bodies.

Endothermy ("warm blood") is generally not found in small aquatic animal, probably because water leeches away heat much faster than water, so aquatic endotherms (tunas, sharks, seals, whales) need to be bulky. On land, however, endothermy is found among tiny vertebrates and even insects.

There is no passive air-floating plankton, since air is not dense enough to support living tissue or dissolved organic matter by buoyancy. For that reason filter-feeding is also rare outside of water, while carnivorous plants are not found in the ocean (the water already carries enough nutrient). Aquatic plants do not produce wood as buoyancy is enough to keep them upright.

Large terrestrial animals do not specialize as scavengers (all mammals famous for scavenging also hunt actively); large carcasses are too spread out. All specialist scavengers on land are either very small, or flying.

Herbivory is rare among active fliers, because plant matter has a low energy density and takes a long time to digest. Herbivorous birds and insects are poor fliers or flightless, and the best fliers, like geese, are the ones that can take shelter in water.

Many more examples are only excluded from specific groups (e.g. live-bearing, despite being very common in reptiles, never appeared in birds, probably because the bird egg-shell is too mineralized to be retained in the womb as transition toward full live-bearing).

Even though the author calls them "forbidden phenotypes", only some of them are actually impossible (because they cannot evolve in the first place, or because they cost more energy than they're worth), and others simply never happened to evolve. At the end of the paper there is a list of phenotypes that would have been "forbidden" in the aftermath of the Cambrian Explosion and Ordovician diversification, but which appeared later, and they include

cutins, suberins, lignins, flavonoids, alkaloids, vascular systems, roots, leaves, rigid frameworks of stems and branches, nutrition complemented by animal matter, and basal growth in land plants; nitrogen-fixing symbiosis on land; animal-mediated dispersal/pollination; silk-producing, sound-emitting, flying, eusocial, terrestrial herbivorous, wood-boring, terrestrial shell-bearing and endothermic animals; embryos nourished within the body of an animal or plant parent; mineralized phytoplankton; and rock-excavating marine herbivores. [...] photosymbiotic and chemosymbiotic molluscs, the bivalved condition in gastropods, terrestrial life in gastropods and vertebrates, complex septa within the phragmocone of externally shelled cephalopods, internalization and loss of the shell in cephalopods, cementation to the substratum with a glue of calcium carbonate and organic matrix in several animal groups (gastropods, brachiopods, bivalves and barnacles), spines on shells of several groups (brachiopods, bivalves and brachiopods), mineralized tubes in polychaete annelids, mobility in bryozoans and pelmatozoan echinoderms, jaws and teeth in vertebrates, and vascular systems in brown and red algae. A vast diversity of potent venoms also lay in the future as part of the defensive and aggressive arsenal of many gastropods, cephalopods, aculeate Hymenoptera, vertebrates and land plants.

Red flags: Unbelievable nature you've never seen before!, no external source cited, low image quality could be hiding AI artifacts, lacks scientific name for plant, OP is an aesthetic blog (no offense, I see you credit most of the artists you post, OP <3).

Green flags: Common name of the tree provided (although the leaves don't look like any olive tree I've ever seen).

Reverse image searches and citation trails all seem to lead back to now-deleted Reddit posts. Google Images says it's this one in r/NatureIsFuckingLit, and TinEye says it's this one in r/interestingasfuck. Both were posted back in 2020. This is important because the rise of AI images was in 2022.

People in the comments of places this image is posted throw around botanical terms like "dichotomous branching" [branches split into two at the nodes] and "divaricated" [branches grow far apart from each other], which are cool, but don't tell me what the tree is.

Searching up "Black Olive" on iNaturalist finally got me some answers, and it turns out that YES. This is a real tree! This tree is a Dwarf Black Olive (Terminalia molinetii, Formerly Bucida spinosa). The above photos are some particularly nicely framed shots of a tree with particularly small leaves, which really highlights the branching structure. I really wish we knew the photographer's name. Here are some more photos of the same species:

Terminalia molinetii by jriveracruz50 on iNaturalist, posted under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

This tree is native to Southern Mexico, Belize, the southern tip of Florida, and Cuba. Dwarf Black Olives are completely unrelated to Olive trees in the Olea genus that I'm more familiar with (the former is in Order Myrtales [Myrtles, Evening Primroses, and Allies], and the latter is in Order Lamiales [Mints, Plantains, Olives, and Allies]).

If you're like me and you're trying to keep an open mind that there may someday be a non-scam application of blockchains, you've probably read some articles about "Web3", which promises to re-decentralize the web by something something Blockchain.

I realize this is far from the most important criticism but i think it's really interesting that the standard explanation you find replicated nearly word-for-word at the beginning of most "Web3" articles has a big ol' chunk of historical revisionism in it. It goes like this:

"First there was web 1.0, which was, like, geocities pages and stuff, and it was decentralized. Then there was web 2.0, which was the centralized silos of social media - facebook, twitter, etc. Now Web3 is gonna re-decentralize everything by letting you own your own data on the blockchain…"

No! Stop there! Web 2.0 was not social media! You're rewriting history that's less than 20 years old!

Web 2.0 was:

blogs with comment sections

wikis (wikipedia was far from the first wiki!)

forums (that is, discussion that was previously on Usenet migrating to like phpBB web forums)

bookmark sharing sites like Del.icio.us

user-defined tagging systems as in del.icio.us (and computer nerds who spent a lot of time defining taxonomies being blown away when it turned out you could let users define their own tags and a useful system could organically emerge)

on a technical, behind-the-scenes level, static HTML files, server-side includes, and Perl CGI scripts were getting replaced with structured, database-backed web frameworks (Ruby on Rails, Drupal, etc.)

AJAX as a way of loading content dynamically into a page without the user navigating to a new page

Javascript in general allowing more full-featured applications - as did Flash

RSS feed as a user-defined way of aggregating content

when someone tried to buzzwordify all these disparate trends they noticed that what a lot of them had in common was "Website owner allows website visitors to enter words that will be seen by other website visitors" and summed that up as "User-generated content" and branded it "Web 2.0" around 2004-2005.

I was there. I worked on backends for a lot of this stuff!

The key shift was where things were hosted. In Web 2.0 you might use off-the-shelf software like WordPress or phpBB or whatever but you were still hosting all that stuff on your own server. Your server, your rules; you'd set your own moderation policy and wield your own "banhammer". The free speech compromise was "don't like my moderation policy? Make your own website."

It was a huge paradigm shift in 2005-6 when YouTube started and said "we'll host your videos for you". (What? trust a third-party website to host my videos? Sounds sketchy) That was the beginning of the end, because once people gave up running their own server in favor of letting a big company host their stuff on a centralized server, we gave up all the power.

Social media wasn't web 2.0, it's what killed Web 2.0!

You might think I'm arguing over mere nomenclature but the important fact is that this era existed, and the Web3 pitch pretends it didn't. We already had decentralized internet with social features. This fact contradicts the story the Web3/blockchain advocates want to tell you, so their story skips this entire era.

Web 2.0 lost to siloed social media because:

running your own server is a pain

running your own server costs money, especially if you want to host video

signing up for facebook/twitter/etc is much easier for non-computer-literate users, who outnumber us 1,000 to 1

once there's a critical mass of users there, anybody who wants an audience has to be there (network effects)

non-technical users didn't understand about paying with their privacy, and in most cases had no experience with the freedom they were giving up

the price was not apparent until everybody was locked in

Apple made a fateful decision that mobile-phone internet should be app-centric, not browser/website centric. Then Android copied their mistake.

To make the web3 argument you have to explain why "a distributed ledger where each update contains a cryptographically signed pointer to the previous update, replicated across many computers via a decentralized protocol, that rewards people for hosting nodes by paying them pretend money when they brute-force solve a cryptographic hash" is relevant to any of these problems. I suspect it is not relevant, because:

the blockchain is incredibly slow, inefficient, and energy-intensive, and it can only hold miniscule amounts of data. (The ape pictures are not on the chain, only links to them are on the chain). So everything still has to be hosted elsewhere.

for most web3 stuff "the" blockchain means the Ethereum blockchain, where it sometimes costs thousands of dollars to make a single transaction process.

people who don't want to run their own webserver sure as heck aren't gonna run their own blockchain node

in practice, people don't interact with the blockchain directly, but through intermediarires (coinbase.com etc), who inevitably become centralized.

in practice, control over blockchain itself, for any popular blockchain, is highly centralized to a tiny number of the largest mining consortiums

if you want to make the dream of "buy your Minecraft skin as an NFT and bring it with you to wear in Fortnight!" work (why is this the example every article uses?) you would need to get all the games involved to decide to implement equivalent items, or some kind of framework of item portability, and if you could do that then you wouldn't need the blockchain!

What might help solve any of the problems that killed Web 2.0:

cheap and easy (EASY!) web hosting

portable data standards

antitrust enforcement with teeth

privacy laws around data collection that make the centralized social media business model unprofitable

a critical mass of dissatisfaction with corporate social media

i have just stumbled upon the most beautiful public document i have ever laid eyes on. this also goes for anyone whose pastimes include any sort of character creation. may i present, the HOLY GRAIL:

https://www.fbiic.gov/public/2008/nov/Naming_practice_guide_UK_2006.pdf

Medisafe has been my medication app for over a decade. Now that they've switched to a paid model, I need an alternative to track my medication.

I wanted something that reminded me to take my meds and tracked it. I wanted to see the history of when I took it. I need this becaise even with an alarm and a pill organizer, I sometimes think I did take my meds when I didn't and only turned off the alarm.

The best alternative I've found is this open source app called MedTimer:

It has an interface similar to Medisafe and it's open source, free, and private. There's no unnecessary news section, either, which is a bonus.

The only thing it lacks compared to Medisafe is the Medfriend feature, where loved ones can sign up to keep you accountable for taking your meds. I've never used it, however.