Not Exactly A Linkspost

miscellaneous interesting things

I’ve been working on a few large posts, and a few other major projects, which has reduced posting intensity. But I’ve been reading a lot of interesting things! Miscellaneous links, fun discoveries, etc. for mid-May, that are too brief to get a full post of their own:

• I’m working on a literature review of homeschooled adult outcomes. Most of the published work on homeschooled adults is specific to the Christian homeschooling movement, which constitutes a sizable chunk of homeschoolers but not a hegemony. (The dominance is partially because homeschooled adults by definition were often homeschooled in eras where it was much rarer, and partially because the people interested in researching homeschooled adults have historically been in or adjacent to said movement.)
  
  This means, as a general rule of thumb, that participants in these studies have very conservative social/religious/political views. Most people take after their parents, homeschooled or not. A historical concern has been that homeschooled adults take preternaturally after their parents, that lacking the influence of the outside world means they’d never be exposed to disagreement, and thus religious homeschoolers specifically would form some subset with completely rigid intolerance of positions unlike their own.
  
  …anyway, it actually seems that adults who were raised in (and agree with) the Christian homeschooling movement are more, not less, accepting of alternative positions! Amongst students at a private evangelical university, who have self-selected into such an environment, homeschooling is a predictor of outgroup tolerance. A survey with over 5000 homeschooled adult participants, most of whom were raised in that context (and 93% of whom said they had “basically the same” religious beliefs as their parents), found more of them supported freedom of antitheist speech than the American average. Other evidence suggests that conservative-leaning subsets of homeschooled adults are fairly supportive of gay people, at least compared to their parents.
  
  There’s little serious research on this, but it’s the opposite of the direction people tend to speculate about, and would be a really interesting finding to look into more/identify potentially causal factors of.

From CRHE & HARO (2014). This is a…complicated study. It was originally sent to “homeschooling survivor” groups that skew extremely negative, then got passed around the entire internet, so you have to read a hell of a lot into its findings. The survey design clearly expected most respondents to be from the relatively homogeneous survivor groups, so it’s missing a *ton* of questions that could have been super-informative (e.g. expressed political orientation).

• A poorly-understood fact of academic publishing: if a paper is open access, that almost always means the researcher had to pay for its publication, usually on the order of several thousand dollars. This model was invented some years back to produce a financially viable (for the journals, that is) OA model that wouldn’t cause everyone to starve to death after losing subscription revenue.
  
  While “not starving to death” is a noble cause and all, there are many obvious flaws with requiring researchers pay several thousands of dollars to publish, like the part where it doesn’t stop them from starving to death. People really want open-access papers, and in particular many major funding providers have mandated them, but said providers are getting increasingly sick of “please add another $3000 to our grant so we can comply with your minimum requirements”. Accordingly, we’re seeing rapid changes to the article processing charge model as it’s historically existed. As The Brief notes, the proposed replacements-or-lack-thereof have a few bugs to work out:

  It is hard to know what to think about a research policy that on the one hand implies that the research Gates funds does not require peer review (at least by one reading of their policy-by-tweet, which states that a preprint alone is sufficient for compliance), and on the other hand suggests that the research they fund needs 20 different ethics and integrity checks.

• A researcher recently had her PhD revoked for a long history of falsifying data. Her research focus was “how moral violations and unethical behavior, such as tax evasion or adultery, influence consumer choices”. Method acting!

• The origin of the term “the beatings will continue until morale improves” is remarkably recent. It has a whole old-timey sensibility, given, you know, beatings. But the first snowclones that fit the rhythm of the phrase date to 1961! “Beatings” here must be an intentional anachronism, as the early similar-looking renditions were about shore leave for sailors.

• In 1988, the New York Times wrote about a chess hustler who hung out in Manhattan betting people to challenge him to chess. He learned chess from an Orthodox rabbi, credited it for keeping him out of prison for 17 years, and achieved an 1800 rating while apparently engaging in none of the memorization most people at that level will. (Chess past a certain level is very memorization-based.) He gave weaker players material imbalances in their favour to give them a chance, which led me down a rabbit hole of chess odds.

• Speaking of chess, some incredible stories on the Blunder (chess) article:

  Someone in the audience shouted "Archil, take the rook!" Further shouts from the audience followed. Eventually, Ebralidze shouted back "I can see that, you patzers!". Ebralidze played 41.Rd5??, missing the free rook entirely.

• I really like the concept/aesthetic of Blood on the Clocktower, a vaguely clockpunk social deduction game where everyone has various crazy powers. I’m not sure what I think of the game itself, which I’ve played exactly once as a semi-spectator and felt kind of overwhelmed by, but the concept is very vatcore.
  
  A newly introduced character in BotC is the Yaggababble, a demon that kills through secret phrases. The storyteller has to come up with something the player can get away with saying multiple times a day, without making it super-obvious that said player is repeating the same phrase over and over again. I love picturing what kinds of shit you could come up with here. Get your friend who has some annoying phrase he loves saying, make it his Yagga phrase, and watch the increasing despair of the players! (Other potential options: “I’m not evil”, “can we get pizza”, “I hate this game”.)

• Sharma et al. (2024) confirms that cachalot (“sperm whale”) communication is complex in a remarkably similar way to human communication — that is, we can be more confident cachalots “have language” in a sense like humans do, that this is decodable, and that cachalots are a candidate for being sapient in the sense humans are:

  Our results demonstrate that sperm whale vocalisations form a complex combinatorial communication system: the seemingly arbitrary inventory of coda types can be explained by combinations of rhythm, tempo, rubato, and ornamentation features. Sizable combinatorial vocalisation systems are exceedingly rare in nature; however, their use by sperm whales shows that they are not uniquely human, and can arise from dramatically different physiological, ecological, and social pressures.

• The discovery of the jet stream was originally published in Esperanto. It didn’t spread very far, but to be fair, it also probably wouldn’t have spread very far if it were published in Japanese, which was the alternative here. (Can we teach cachalots Esperanto? Multiple possibilities emerging)

• Finally: Nathan Rabin, who coined the phrase “manic pixie dream girl”, has a GoFundMe for dental surgery. Rabin’s oeuvre includes a ton of stone-cold classics. I could frankly write a whole linkspost of hilarious Rabin articles. He’s one of those people who focuses on writing about impressively bad media, a long-time soft spot of mine. Great entries include:

  • “Yes, there’s an Easy Rider sequel, and yes, it’s awful”: Review of an absolutely unhinged Easy Rider sequel produced by a lawyer who somehow wrestled the rights away from the creators, then turned it into his deranged fanfiction. Rabin has a knack for reviewing media you can’t believe exists, but this might be the single most glorious example.

  • “Lost in translation case file #48: Pink Lady And Jeff”: The notorious “show that killed variety shows” (except SNL), an attempted American vehicle for two Japanese popstars who couldn’t speak English. Impressively Seventies even for a variety show, which are all impressively Seventies: “As one of the women awkwardly flirts with him, he replies, “You just get turned on by my sexy round eyes.””

  • “Funky Man Case File #19: Ramones bassist Dee Dee King goes hip-hop”: As Rabin puts it, “[i]t seems like every punk-rocker in the world wanted to be a Ramone except for Dee Dee Ramone”. One of the things Dee Dee Ramone got up to in his attempt to not-be-Dee-Dee-Ramone was “try become a rapper”. It…didn’t work out very well.

  • “(Insert Double Entendre Here) Case File #10: Sextette”: An attempted star vehicle for Mae West, who was, at this point, 84 years old. It didn’t go exceptionally well: “In the interview, Whitcomb, who clearly adores West and considers working with her one of the highlights of a busy and eclectic career, shares the tragicomic story of watching an already-senile West meet with a costumer for the film early in the project and look at an old picture of herself from decades before. A nostalgic West told the costumer that she wanted a diaphanous gown exactly like the one she wore in the picture. Furthermore, she proclaimed, she wanted the handsome co-star in the picture to star in her new film as well. As tactfully as possible, the costumer told West that wouldn’t be possible, since the man in the picture had died more than 20 years earlier.”

  • “My Year Of Flops Case File #56: The Real Cancun”: For various reasons, people sometimes complain that we live in the worst of all possible worlds. Fortunately, we can rule this out! There are a few reasons we can, but one of the biggest is that there are no reality films, like reality TV shows (no, documentaries are not the film equivalent of reality TV). We know that’s not just because they haven’t tried, because they’ve tried.

  • “My Year Of Flops Case File #79: The Apple”: I think the baboon/organ grinder line might work? It could work. You could stick that shit on The Normal Album, it’d sound great.

Thanks to everyone for what you do. New post soon™.