The Penny Post 22/02/20
As promised, today is not Saturday. I’ve gone a bit heavy on links and a tad light on text this time. I encountered a couple things since Saturday which allowed me to have more sections than usual. I’ve been noticing though that I usually don’t have that many things that I find valuable enough to share in a week. I think in the future I may share a select few things and focus mostly on a written response to them.
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Trigger warning times a thousand. This content is extremely emotionally affecting so don’t listen unless you’re ready for it.
The first and last links are part 1 and 2 of investigating the New York Times did into online depictions of child abuse. The second link is to an episode of the Psychology in Seattle podcast discussing how to treat non-offending pedophiles. There’s no way I could respond to everything in here but I’ll say a few relevant things. In part 2 of the New York Times story they should’ve consulted a tech expert. There’s no way to erase the pictures totally from online. Social media platforms can mitigate the content distributed using them but there’s no way to control beyond that. This is important to note because the nature of the internet means that a significant amount of the solution to this problem has to exist in society, as discussed in the second link. I know how foreign the second episode can seem but both perspectives are needed to create a viable solution to this problem.
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Crazy Ex-Girlfriend - season 1 commentary album
A friend told me about this a couple months back but I completely forgot until now. I talked about the show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend last week. It’s a musical sitcom about a person with mental health issues and it’s fantastic. This is an album with all the songs from season 1 of the show followed by a short commentary from the creators. They give the same sort of behind the scenes and authorial intent details that are in movie commentary tracks. It’s fantastic if you’re a fan of the show and want to know more about it.
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On The Media - Corporations Were Always People - February 19th 2020
An interesting episode from a podcast that both tells the news and analyzes its makers and history (as well as “media” more generally). The Citizens United case that gave super PACs the free speech rights of people may seem like a new development but it has a long history. American courts have often favoured corporations over individuals.
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Hidden Brain - When Things Click - February 3rd
Honestly this one isn’t worth listening to, it’s just fairly interesting. You can start at 33:15 if you want to listen just for the main points. Clicker training is the currently preferred training method for dogs and animals. You have a device that makes a click and you give the dog a treat every time you make that click. Once the dog associates the click with treats it knows that the click means something good. At this point, you start using the clicker whenever the dog does the exact movement you want it to. If you’re training it to sit you click as it tenses it’s leg muscles when going down. If you’re training it to fist bump you click as it starts raising its leg. The success of this in animals is in the specificity that it has in letting dogs know when something is going right. This lets you accomplish more complex trainings much more easily.
What this episode focuses on is extending this type of training to humans. It only has one example of a person using it but it seems to work fairly well. There are two advantages the episode outlines. The first is the same specificity that makes it work well in animals. Note that, this being the main advantage, there’s little use for it outside of training physical tasks. The second advantage is that it imparts no social connotations. If a person says good, great, or bad to you you may start worrying about their perspective observing you. If you’re in a group you may get jealous that another person got higher praise than you. With the clicker, it’s a binary correct or incorrect for specific tasks removing social connotations.
I don’t fully buy this, I’d need to see studies to believe it’s full success in humans. But it is an interesting concept and seems worth exploring. The beginning of the episode walks you through the history of clicker training; the people who pioneered it and how it got to be so prominent. It’s interesting on its own if you want to hear that.
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https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.191338
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200220101121.htm
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200224111330.htm
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200224151502.htm
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv6GcsLxMiQ
Rhapsody in Blue was intended as a synthesis of jazz and classical traditions towards a multi-ethnic America, but overshadowed the work of black jazz musicians of the time and, because of how the two genres developed in the future, ended up being a part of neither tradition. This video is an interesting break down of its history and musical structure. The channel it’s on is great as well, one of my favourites. Too much meme humour though, like the Lindsay Ellis video a few weeks ago it’s getting on my nerves.
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https://twitter.com/xpatriciah/status/944632423312224256
https://www.wired.com/2009/03/ff-diamonds-2/
Just joyous. The third part in this trilogy is the film Logan Lucky.
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Music this week
Græ: Part 1 - Moses Somney
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEqgalnL-po
I have been utterly utterly adoring this album for the last week. I hadn’t heard of the artist before but I’m very much looking forward to its second part.