Deluded-wanderer - Deluded Wanderings

I used to be a grader and an occasional substitute prof for an introductory astronomy lab. That means that the majority of the people in this lab are only taking it because it’s a requirement and about half of them think it’s an astrology class.

I was grading midterms and this one girl. She was so nice and I think she was a business major. Fuck. The question on the midterm was to draw a diagram of the solar system and this poor girl. This fucking girl had drawn a Mars-centric solar system. As in every planet and the sun were orbiting Mars. I now actually have a custom Cards Againsy Humanity card I got at a con that says “A Mars-centric solar system”

I had a boy argue with me that there was liquid water on the moon (this was around when they had found liquid water on Mars in ~2015) and he wouldn’t believe me that he likely meant Mars and not the moon. After I marked his answer to the relevant lab question wrong, he took it to the department head who had promptly laughed him out of the office.

And there was another boy who, during a lab in our observatory where we would look at certain things in the sky, asked where the sun was. At 10pm in November. After some questioning it was revealed that he thought the moon and the sun were the same thing.

I work at a daycare with infants.

One of our baby girls is fat, in the 99th percentile for her age. She is super cute and sweet. Lately, she has been sick with various breathing issues, so she has been reluctant to take her bottles. Normally, she’ll take 4 ounces of formula at lunch and 8 ounces in the afternoon. Today, I was lucky to get to her take 5 all day.

There was a substitute covering a lunch break in my classroom today. We emphasized to her that we need to keep trying to get the baby to drink her bottle until she finished it. She said, “Why are you guys so worried about taking her bottle?”

My coworker replied, “That’s where all her nutrients are. She needs the nutrients and the water.”

To which the substitute replied, “But she’s so fat. She doesn’t need it.”

Thin privilege is a small, pretty baby getting better childcare because the caretaker doesn’t think she’s too fat to be allowed to eat.

You're dedication will take you more places than giving up ever will. Times will be tough, yes, and it will feel as if you just want to quit it all together. So you'll rest for a day or two which feels like an eternity but you'll get back into the swing of things. You'll simply remember nothing ever stays the same. Ebbs & Flows. Rather on fighting the old you simply learn to dance with the devil instead.

NEWS FLASH: BLACK LIVES STILL MATTER

😎😎

Ceausescu’s children (Wendell Steavenson, The Guardian, Dec 10 2014)

“When he came to power in 1966, Ceaușescu had grand plans for Romania.

The country had industrialised late, after the second world war, and its birthrate was low.

Ceaușescu borrowed the 1930s Stalinist dogma that population growth would fuel economic growth and fused this idea with the conservatism of his rural childhood.

In the first year of his rule, his government issued Decree 770, which outlawed abortion for women under 40 with fewer than four children.

“The foetus is the property of the entire society,” Ceaușescu announced.

“Anyone who avoids having children is a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity.”

The birth rate soon doubled, but then the rate of increase slowed as Romanian women resorted to homemade illegal abortions, often with catastrophic results.

In 1977 all childless persons, regardless of sex or martial status, were made to pay an additional monthly tax.

In the 1980s condoms and the pill, although prohibitively expensive, began to become available in Romania – so they were banned altogether.

Motherhood became a state duty. The system was ruthlessly enforced by the secret police, the securitate.

Doctors who performed abortions were imprisoned, women were examined every three months in their workplaces for signs of pregnancy.

If they were found to be pregnant and didn’t subsequently give birth, they could face prosecution. Fertility had become an instrument of state control.

This policy, coupled with Romania’s poverty, meant that more and more unwanted children were abandoned to state care.

No one knows how many. Estimates for the number of children in orphanages in 1989 start at 100,000 and go up from there.”

When its 5:19 in the morrning and your brain tells you to draw a spooky/ethereally cool dragon-like mythical monster thingy, listen to those urges, im making a *masterpiece* and i’ll show yall later :)

MBTI & Ideas

The Soar Cognitive Architecture (John E. Laird, 2012)

“The variability and the adaptability of cognition comes from the knowledge that is encoded in a cognitive architecture.

Thus, a cognitive architecture provides the fixed processes and memories and their associated algorithms and data structures

to acquire, represent, and process knowledge about the environment and tasks for moment-to-moment reasoning, problem solving, and goal-oriented behavior.

This leads to a simple equation: architecture + knowledge = behavior. (…)

An environment, though it may be complex and dynamic, is not arbitrary.

The laws of interaction that govern the environment are constant, often are predictable, and lead to recurrence and regularity that affect the agent’s ability to achieve its goals.

There are different regularities at different time scales, which makes it possible and useful to organize knowledge about tasks, actions, and the environment hierarchically. (…)

Computation resources are limited so that an agent cannot perform arbitrary computation in the time it has available to respond to the dynamics of the environment.

Thus, an agent has bounded rationality and cannot achieve perfect rationality (or universal intelligence) in sufficiently complex environments and tasks when it has a large body of knowledge. (…)

Thus, to preserve reactivity, a cognitive architecture must constrain the types of knowledge that can be encoded and or the types of queries that can be made.

The architecture can include fixed methods for organizing its knowledge so that it can be searched quickly (relative to overall temporal scale of the agent),

possibly in bounded time, using data structures such as hash tables, heaps, or trees that avoid the exponential explosion inherent to problem-space search.”