"If you're under 25 your brain isn't fully developed, so you can't be trusted to make informed decisions"
I'm seeing this a LOT lately, especially today with the Cass Review fallout. And it's utter guff, based on hearsay, misunderstandings of neuroscience, or wilful ignorance.
Why? I'll tell you why
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Wouldn't it be easier to just refer to HRT as 'meds'? Like if you take epilepsy meds, you will have a bad time.
It seems easier to explain 'trans men do not produce the right hormones for men, so they need these meds'.
Dear UK residents. I’m sorry to be tedious, but I’m going to do the trans Cassandra thing again.
The government is now moving towards regarding trans people as effective children until the age of 25.
This will be established as precedent and then used to screw over any and all young adults who can’t escape from abusive parents, especially young women.
If you want to do anything about this, you need to fight for trans people. Yes, you. Now.
We all know that isn’t going to happen to any significant extent though.
As you were.
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@crocket2001
I think it's easy to underestimate how far most people have moved on this already. (Not that *most* makes it safe). There seem to be two groups pushing this:
1. boring folk who moan about the metric system, car parks, youth of today, ULEZ, "they're all as bad as each other", immigrants, etc.
2. Westminster-y policy type people, both left and right, professional dinner-party attenders, columnists, writers, wonks, essayists, student union types.
The (dangerous) difference now is that these groups -- our society's loudest, most boring, dull, dim, and reactionary, who only differ in social class -- are united on one subject.
The public don''t need to "come round".
People think Guardianista idealists lay out liberation's groundwork -- surveyors going ahead. But they're just apologists hanging on the coat-tails of emperors, minting excuses for comfortable lives at court. The powerful, their "clients", are moving right, so they're representing them, coining theories and writing reports.
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After about the first night or so it’s amazing how you get used to sleeping on a boat. The rocking motion and creaking sounds of the lines just become the comforting background rather than the thing that keeps waking you up.
Reminds me of a holiday where the B&B was right above the platforms of Lancaster station. The noise of trains quickly became the background. So much so that when there was engineering works in the last night it was eerily quiet and hard to sleep.
I just made a command-line typo: 'locat' in place of 'locate'.
Ubuntu's command-not-found package offered me 'lolcat' as a higher-ranked preference than what I actually intended.
The Internet has won.
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A few years ago I was on Scarlet (the yacht of @Sarah Brown and @Zoë O'Connell ) and noticed mid morning that I didn't have the bloating sensation I was used to having some time after breakfast. The reason for this, of course, is that Scarlet runs on lactose-free milk. Evidently I was slightly lactose intolerant, started buying lactose-free milk at home, and everything was better.
It shouldn't have been only today that I extrapolated this experience to cover a large takeaway banana milkshake.
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Observant viewers will note the presence of hydrofoils. Each one of those is an INTERPLANETARY SEAPLANE!
Also, not a single expendable launch in this game.
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I guess the takeaway from the xz backdoor situation is:
If you’re an open-source project maintainer, and somebody starts getting on your case for not doing enough free work for them, you reply “big Jia Tan energy there” and then block them forever.
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A new post on misleading Covid charts & why Covid really is low right now, and why we should be glad of it.
christinapagel.substack.com/p/hospitals-...
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Given the news of the xz backdoor, may I recommend this seminal paper from Ken Thompson's 1984 Turing Award lecture showing how a compiler with no backdoors in the source code can nevertheless propagate a backdoor.
Reflections on trusting trust | the morning paper
blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/09/re…
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on this Trans Day of Visibilty, remember that you are valid, you matter, and you’re trans if you say you are
if you’re not cis, this day is for you
and remember that on this, the most holiest of trans days, TDoV and The Matrix’s 25th anniversary…
she is risen 😉
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Is anyone on Mastodon knowledgeable about Tironian notes? I've got tentative readings of two headings in a 9th c. Text from the Loire Valley, which mix Tironian notes and Latin charaters. But there are 13,000 T. Notes in Schmitz, many of which look very similar. Thanks!!
@histodons @litteracarolina @medievodons @chaprot #bookhistodons @mssprovenance
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@matz
Sure! Be forewarned, the MS is very hard to read (which is why it remained for us to decipher.)
Line 1: the start seems to be "Versus in baptisterio" but after that -- "Petri" something maybe. Extremely hard to read. The last character that looks like some Carolingian miniscule A's -- "abstergentis"? "delati"?
Line 14: we read "De petra manante"
We = me + Mike Fontaine (Cornell) + Rachel Fickes (Middlebury library.)
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Christians: This Friday we celebrate!
Non Christians: Cool! What’s the occasion?
Christians: Our god died. Tortured to death quite horribly, in fact.
Non Christians: You celebrate that?
Christians: There are sound theological reasons.
Non Christians: Bit weird, but ok.
Christians: We call it “Good Friday”
Non Christians: …
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In fact the word good stood for "holy", not the modern meaning:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Fri…
And of course christians don't celebrate good friday, but commemorate it. It's like say that jews people celebrate Holocaust_memorial_days.
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Completely agree!
The use of eth in Anglian and Brythonic names seems to imply a soft 'th' sound, whereas the use of thorn seems to imply a harder one; and my understanding is that the same is true in modern Icelandic (Seyðisfjörður, Egilsstaðir vs Þórsmörk, for example).
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I see GamerGate is in the news because it’s coming up to the tenth anniversary. Ten years ago, I was in the middle of a nervous breakdown caused by transphobic harassment from TERfs organised on social media. They were using the same tactics that, months later, would be the hallmark of GamerGate.
And yet the surviving narrative is that this sort of organised, “culture war” harassment originated with GG.
It didn’t. They did it to trans women, and probably others, first, and we raised the alarm, and nobody thought it mattered enough to do anything.
And then they came for the rest of you.
They keep doing this. We keep raising the alarm. We keep being ignored.
Maybe one day people will learn.
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Henry the goose spent many years in a love triangle with two swans, helping raise their children.By Yvette Tan (BBC News)
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I'm looking for work again, after the most recent temporary thing came to an end. (Arguably I did it all too quickly!).
Apart from the challenge of persuading myself that I'm actually good enough to do _any_ described job, I find I haven't a clue what job titles mean these days. Cambridge University hides everything under a "Computer Officer" blanket, and I know I'm a system administrator (who does networks and other stuff too), but the job market is full of "Thing Analyst" and "Site Reliability Engineer" and "DevOps" and I haven't a clear idea what boxes if any I fit into.
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I made an HTML/DOM viewer you can paste into your console to view or debug any website in 3D. Choose from random/gradient/clear colors or whether layers have sides.
You can save it as a bookmarklet so it's 1 click away. It's just a tiny IIFE JS function.
gist.github.com/OrionReed/4c37…
3D DOM viewer, copy-paste this into your console to visualise the DOM topographically. - DOM3D.jsGist
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Star Trek Prodigy is silly.
"You want us to jump? I do not think that option is logically sound"
"In outer space, there is no sound"
"Your rebuttal is correct, but nonsense"
Etymology is so cool.
The term "microblog" comes from micro + blog, ie small blog.
Then, "blog" is a shortened form of "Web log". And a "log" comes from "log book", which is a book used to record events on a journey.
So get this, the "log" in log book is because you would use the book to record the progress and speed of a ship by using a reel attached to a chip log... So called because it's made of wood... ie a log.
So a microblog is a small record of your journey.
I think that's very poetic that this very post is a direct descendent of mariners from 400 years ago.
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I had to sign up to a private dentist (no NHS in the area). One thing I always notice the few times I've had to go private for things is that you don't get lectured.
With the NHS it's like waiting for the NordVPN bit in a YouTube video, except you can't skip it.
You need to lose weight, stop drinking, eat better, exercise, wash behind your ears, phone your mother, come more often, not come as often, get more sleep, work less, just be happier, find some "me" time, stay informed but worry less, get out more, close the door (were you born in a barn?).
I wonder if there's been any papers on contrasting primary care providers who moan at their patients and those who don't. I can't help wondering if it's counterproductive.
It's made me much happier to book checkups knowing that we both start on the basis that I'm trying.
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Dean Burnett (that brains guy)
Unknown parent • • •That's not my stance, in the slightest. But if you're going to make rigid rules that insist on individual's brains having the capability of a 'fully developed' one, then you can't ignore the fact that this development can be 'reversed' due to the consequences of age.
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Dean Burnett (that brains guy)
Unknown parent • • •Why? Well, if you're a species who likes familiarity and safety, you're at risk of stagnation. But if certain members of your population, particularly ones in their physical prime, tend to reject the norms and wander off to try new things, that'll stave off stagnation
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Dean Burnett (that brains guy)
Unknown parent • • •The risk-taking, emotive, exploratory, parent-rejecting tendencies of adolescents are seen in many social species, not just human. Unless it's the mother and father of all wild coincidences, this shows that teen brains are *meant* to do what they do.
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Dean Burnett (that brains guy)
Unknown parent • • •Thanks to basic entropy, if you're at retirement age, your brain will likely be losing fluid intelligence, the ability to reason, solve problems etc.
Can you trust such people to make important decisions? If you insist and a peak-performance brain, then technically no
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Dean Burnett (that brains guy)
Unknown parent • • •Teens in particular get a lot of stick for this. Their rebelliousness, they're highly-emotional nature, it's seen as proof they have something 'wrong' with their brains, because they're immature
The opposite is true. Their brains are doing exactly what they evolved to do
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Dean Burnett (that brains guy)
Unknown parent • • •Also, let's follow the logic to its conclusion
If having a brain functioning at its peak is a requirement of making important decisions, then it's probably more important to have a *maximum* age limit than a minimum. Because the older you are, the more your brain wears out
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Dean Burnett (that brains guy)
Unknown parent • • •There seems to be this idea that an 'underdeveloped' brain is like a half-built house: not fit for purpose until completed
In reality, it's more like evolution. Every step on the evolutionary ladder is a fully functioning species, they just change over time
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Dean Burnett (that brains guy)
Unknown parent • • •If under-25s are too neurologically underdeveloped to make decisions that affect their body and wellbeing, then that rules out all career athletes under that age. You can't possibly let a 18 year old take up a sport that comes with significant concussion risk, surely?
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Malin
in reply to Dean Burnett (that brains guy) • • •Once you're over 45 your brain's completely calcified.
It's basically just a lump of granite that replays songs from your teenage years while you still think of technology in terms of the poorly-scripted Sci-Fi TV you still own on DVD.
Definitely can't be trusted to vote on any new issues (i.e. 'any issues at all') once you lose all ability to develop beyond the thinking of the previous century.
Wayne Werner
Unknown parent • • •