There’s literally a Dead Sea Scroll talking about how Noah was a redhead, 2 Kings 5:27 is about how the descendants of someone among them are all “white as snow,” and the only sample of ancient Jewish hair from 1st century Judea was reddish brown.
The whole “there weren’t white people in the middle east when Jesus was around” is one of the most misinformed popular “confidently incorrect” phrases to be thrown out these days.
There’s a decent chance he was olive skinned and dark haired based on the demographics, but there was a much wider array of appearances in the region than most people realize.
Edit:
but tanned obviously
Well, I wouldn’t be too sure about that either.
Take for example Lamentations 4:7
Her nazirites were purer than snow, whiter than milk; their bodies were more ruddy than coral, their form cut like sapphire.
The reddish brown haired fellow from the 1st century had been exposed to lepers, and the 2 Kings 5:27 reference also referred to the descendants with skin as white as snow as being lepers.
So even the assumption of having a tan may be out of touch with the historical reality.
People just don’t realize the actual history when they comment on stuff like this.
Like most people tend to disbelieve when they see redhead and fair skinned Lybian Bernbers that they represent an indigenous African population from pre-history (though technically there’s evidence they came down from Europe during the tail end of the ice age).
In fact, Ramses II’s forensic report from when they shipped his body to France for examination reported he had red hair and fair skin like a Lybian Berber (which is particularly interesting given the Greek story of Danaus, Lybian brother to the Pharoh who had 50 sons, given Ramses II also had 48-50 recorded sons).
The Mediterranean was much more of a giant melting pot than most people realize. Heck, it was more of a melting pot than most scholars realized given some of the surprises just in the past two years regarding genetic export from North Africa across much of the Mediterranean as opposed to the previous view of mostly import to North Africa from the Phonecians.
I’d recommend most people set aside their preconceptions, because relying on them will almost certainly lead to misinformed positions.
There weren’t many school shootings, and suddenly Columbine happened.
The thing is - Columbine wasn’t really a school shooting.
It was a failed bombing. The shooting was to get everyone into the cafeteria where they’d set up barrel bombs which luckily didn’t go off. In fact, the largest casualty attack in a US school remains a bombing from 1927.
As a school shooting, Columbine was also quite atypical, with two perpetrators.
But as soon as you now had what was really a failed bombing being covered by the news as a school shooting, suddenly thereafter were a ton of school shootings (that fit the normal archetype of a mass shooting with a lone perpetrator).
And each of those got a ton of coverage and the numbers of mass shootings went up yet again.
If you suddenly prohibited covering mass shootings in media (impossible because of the 1st amendment, but hypothetically), I am certain you’d see mass shootings drop by double digit numbers.
The fact that Columbine was so atypical of what events followed in its planning but was so close to what followed in how it was covered in the news tells a pretty damning story of the role of mass media in this phenomenon.
Also see:
Towers, S., Gomez-Lievano, A. Khan, M., et al. (2015). Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings. PLOS One. 10(7): e0117259. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0117259
Lankford, A and Tomek, S. (2017). Mass Killings in the United States from 2006 to 2013: Social Contagion or Random Clusters. The American Association of Suicidology. doi: 10.1111/sltb.12366
Maybe 4chan self-propagandizing mass shootings as “something fantastic” should be one of those environmental factors being considered in what led up to the end result?
That the leader of a bee hive can’t be female because the gods don’t give women weapons, and that the drones can’t be male because they take care of the young.
Not only did Aristotle writing this in Generation of all Animals cause misinformation around this to spread for literally centuries on end, including the presumed gendering of a ‘king’ leading the hive to be used to argue for a patriarchal dynastic monarchy as part of God’s design - the wildest part is he acknowledged that other people were saying that the hive had a queen and the drones were male.
Dude was straight up like “some people say…but this can’t be the case because of my commitment to misogyny which ignores things like lionesses existing.”
So I have a born again christian family member in their mid twenties who stated with complete confidence that there is a dome in the sky called the firmament and beyond it is where heaven is. She believes space doesn’t exist and rockets just blow up because the bible said so. She is not the brightest and normally I would let...
This was roughly the early cosmology of Judaism, but even by Jesus’s time was being abandoned. For example, the Greeks and Romans were familiar enough with both lunar eclipses and the Earth being round that the generally accepted explanation for lunar eclipses was that the Earth was eclipsing the sun and casting a shadow on the moon, which we know was popular because in De Rerum Natura Lucretius appeals to keep more of an open mind as that might not be the only explanation (meaning it was commonly enough endorsed that it was nearly considered the sole explanation in Lucretius’s circles).
This may even connect to the description of the three hour “crucifixion darkness” in the earliest copies of Luke where it is explained as being caused by the sun being eclipsed. That language is changed in later versions, and the language of ‘eclipse’ was criticized by early church commentators given that solar eclipses were known to be impossible on a full moon (such as Passover) and only last around 8 minutes.
But what’s often overlooked was that being written after 50 CE, visible nighttime lunar eclipses whose previous Saros cycle eclipses were during the daytime (and not visible) in the 30s CE would have allowed the latter to be trivially calculated by astronomers of the time.
Lunar eclipses take 3 hours, and have a 1 in 6 chance of occurring on Passover. We even know there was a daytime lunar eclipse on Passover of 33 CE, whose subsequent Saros cycle eclipse was visible in both Judea and Greece before any of the Synoptic gospels were written.
So not only was some of the anti-firmament cosmology known by the era of the New Testament, it’s quite possible that there was even originally text reflecting both knowledge the earth was round and that lunar eclipses are caused by the earth eclipsing the sun in the New Testament, but it may have been subsequently removed because later editors failed to realize the event was not an eyewitness testimony but a calculated celestial event and thus dismissed it as erroneously describing an impossible solar eclipse.
TL;DR: Your family member is nearly going pre-NT with the commitment to that cosmology there.
An explosive new investigation by the New York Times details how Adidas employees experienced frequent anti-Semitism from Grammy Award-winning rapper and Yeezy designer Kanye West for nearly a decade....
Watching Alex Jones keep trying to throw him lifelines and him swat them away as the white supremacist sat on the side nodding and grinning was beyond amusing.
There really isn’t any until the exorcisms of the NT, which is again missing much description.
Even the parts that some people think are describing demons often aren’t.
For example, the locusts of Revelations:
And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit; he opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft. Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth, and they were given authority like the authority of scorpions of the earth. They were told not to damage the grass of the earth or any green growth or any tree, but only those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads. They were allowed to torment them for five months but not to kill them, and the agony suffered was like that caused by a scorpion when it stings someone. And in those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will flee from them.
In appearance the locusts were like horses equipped for battle. On their heads were what looked like crowns of gold; their faces were like human faces, their hair like women’s hair, and their teeth like lions’ teeth; they had scales like iron breastplates, and the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots with horses rushing into battle. They have tails like scorpions, with stingers, and in their tails is their power to harm people for five months. They have as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit; his name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek he is called Apollyon.
Look closely at a few of the details there:
allowed to torment for five months
the agony suffered was like that caused by a scorpion when it stings someone
like horses equipped for battle
On their heads were what looked like crowns of gold
faces were like human faces
hair like women’s hair
their teeth like lions’ teeth
scales like iron breastplates
the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots
tails like scorpions, with stingers
in their tails is their power to harm people for five months
have as king over them
So back in the day, there was no Greek word for a specific hornet, just a general term that applied to any wasps.
But in Judea the equivalent of the murder hornet was Vespa Orientalis.
This hornet, like many wasps, was active outside its nest for 5 months.
At the time, they thought a hive was ruled by a king, not a queen (thanks a lot Aristotle). And their nests are made underground (like the pit in the passage above).
Like most hornets, they had mandibles with large ‘teeth’ like a lion.
Unlike locusts, their faces were more human looking with the placement of the eyes centrally as opposed to on the edges of the head.
They were covered in fine hairs like a woman’s body hair.
Covered in segmented ‘scales’ with stings painful like a scorpion.
They had a yellow stripe across the lower part like a saddle (this was actually used to effectively solar power the insect).
But the most striking similarity between the above passage and this specific insect native to the area was the gold crown marker on its head: www.biolib.cz/IMG/GAL/33881.jpg
So while people have had their imaginations running wild with Fabio looking scorpion/horse chimeras for years now, it may have simply been a poetic description of the local murder hornet equivalent being really active and stinging people - a nightmarish scenario for anyone who has been on the wrong end of a hornet before, but not quite the nightmarish people have been dreaming up since.
There technically is a reference to Satan as fallen in Luke 10:18 (“I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning.”), but those New Testament authors really loved their Enochian literature and it’s almost certainly drawing from that as opposed to anything in the Old Testament (it isn’t until the KJV that the Isaiah commentary about the morning star falling is confused for talking about Satan by name of Lucifer).
Not my ‘favorite’ as I think Ron Howard is a hack and strongly disliked his retcon moralizing of Seuss’s story, but it’s pretty wild that the live action The Grinch has a reference to a key party (i.e. swapping sex partners based on what key you get) as the baby Grinch arrives down from the sky.
I really, really miss one sub in particular, /r/AcademicBiblical
Other than that I haven’t looked back at all. Lemmy’s smaller size does mean there’s a bit less expert commentary on a lot of topics, and I miss that, but not enough to put up with the dystopian crap spez is trying to establish.
The Jetson’s was supposed to take place 100 years from when it was being made in the 1960s.
Which means the following technologies beat their predictions by decades:
Video calls
Robot vacuums
Tablet computing
Smart watches
Drones
Pill cams
Flat screen TVs
Flying cars exist, they just aren’t economically viable or practical given the cost, necessity to have a flight license, and aviation regulations regarding takeoff and landing.
And we’re still 40 years away from that show’s imagined future.
Your thesis focuses too much on the things here and there that were wrong, which typically related to expensive hardware cycles being assumed to be faster because the focus was only on the underlying technology being possible and not thinking through if it was practical (doors that slide into the ceiling is a classic example - the cost of retrofitting for that vs keeping doorknobs means the latter will be around for a very very long time).
What we are discussing is the rate of change for centrally run software which has already hit milestones ahead of expert expectations several times over in the past few years and set the world record for fastest growing new product usage beating the previous record holder by over a 4x speedup.
The difference between the 2023 and 2022’s world records increased speeds for data transfer rates is nearly 5x more than the increase from 2020 to 2021.
As for your claims about being behind on AI, I’d strongly recommend looking at the various futurist predictions of what to expect from AI in 2020 from various firms, and how literally all of them completely missed the mark for the arrival of GPT-3.
Look at predictions for 2023 and you’ll see a lot of comments around a potential AI winter and how the data sources have been tapped. Meanwhile the major research advances over actual 2023 was basically “how is GPT-4 so good at all these things” and “it turns out using GPT-4 to generate synthetic data can train much smaller networks to be much much better than we could have achieved with previous data sets.”
And this is all in advance of the very promising work at a shift to new chip architectures for AI workloads, specifically optoelectronics which went from a pipe dream five years ago to proof of concept at MIT with DIY kits being made available for other researchers this year. So rather than hitting a plateau, if anything much like the gains in optical networking we’re heading towards more oil poured on the AI fire, not less.
Your thesis is great for things like colonizing Mars or living in spaceships, but it’s kind of crap for things like AI and software advancement.
Cites source that opens with satire agreeing with their point but then explicitly says the opposite:
If this is what you believe I would respectfully disagree and I would urge you to get on the phone and call friends and family around the country to hear about what their communities are experiencing. I would also suggest that you check out (reliable) websites and take a look at what’s going on in virtually every part of the world. If you do, here’s what you’ll find. […]
Scientists look at a lot of things – gas trapped in ice, tree rings, glaciers, pollen remains, even changes in the Earth’s orbit – to study the natural changes in our climate going back millions of years. What these natural changes tell us is that it normally takes thousands of years for the earth to warm just a couple of degrees. The temperature increases we’ve seen in just the past century should have taken almost a thousand years.
It’s really wild how committed dumb people are to receiving Darwin awards for them and their families.
“Vaccines don’t work and are a hoax, and it’s unrelated people who agree with me are dying from COVID at a higher rate.”
“Liberals want to take away my red meat every day of the week and limit how much high fructose corn syrup soda I drink in a day, but screw them. Unrelated, my whole family has diabetes and older members strangely have heart disease and colon cancers…”
People who treat science as a dirty word really seem to have higher all cause mortality. So bizarre and unexplainable.
Honestly, while it’s very much an unpopular opinion, at this point I think it’s unconscionable to add to that next generation and I definitely secretly judge my peers who do so as making an incredibly selfish decision likely dooming that child to a quite depressing future by the time they reach adulthood themselves.
Also, one of the worst things you can do for the environment in a developed nation is have a child.
Yeah, I’ve had a hobby over the past few years looking into the history of a particular apocrypha text, and its antinatalism is one of the more interesting features, with a great line like this:
A woman in the crowd said to him, “Lucky are the womb that bore you and the breasts that fed you.”
He said to [her], “Lucky are those who have heard the word of the Father and have truly kept it. For there will be days when you will say, ‘Lucky are the womb that has not conceived and the breasts that have not given milk.’”
This line is broken up into two different parts in the gospel of Luke (11:27 and 23:29) but the inherent parallelism makes me think it was originally a call and response as it then appears in the Gospel of Thomas above.
You also have the antinatalism in one of the surviving lines from the lost Gospel of the Egyptians where Salome asked “how long will death continue?” And the response was “as long as women bear children.” Followed by her asking if she’d done well in not having any.
It’s interesting how across history it’s inherently a position that dooms itself to obsolescence when it appears due to adherents dying out without passing it on, even if the inherent merit of it remains true from one age to another.
So we socially have a collective anchoring bias towards seeing procreation and “be fruitful and multiply” as such a good thing, even though this is simply a platform with an inherent survivorship bias and not necessarily actually a good thing at all.
Broadly, human quality of life has pretty consistently improved for as long as there’s been humans actually.
It’s happened faster than before in the past 100 years.
It’s happened quite a lot over just the past 20 on many measures.
It’s accelerating rapidly.
But alongside that acceleration and improvement has been knowingly playing a dangerous game in maximizing short term gains in exchange for long term consequences on which we developed technologies to increase the potential debt we were taking on for short term rewards.
Perhaps there will be a deus ex machina that averts disaster and delivers us from paying those debts we’ve brought on ourselves.
I too hope that’s the case.
But to me it’s irresponsible and presumptuous to gamble somebody else’s future on that hope.
“The world is going to end” has been a line for as long as there’s been lines to be written down.
And yes, it’s consistently a false prophecy.
But “not one stone will be left of these buildings around you” tends to be correct given a long enough time scale and in places in the world today it becomes true for neighborhoods or cities literally overnight.
The world may or may not end. But what we really need to worry about is the survival of civilizations under significantly increasing pressures. Because “the end of civilization” is potentially much, much worse to go through than the end of the world. The sun explodes? It’ll be over quick. There’s famine so bad people start eating their neighbors? Nuclear fallout poisoned the land around you? The oceans die?
Maybe not the best environments to raise a child, even if humanity overall will ultimately survive.
A baby born today will have microplastics inside their body when born and we’ve seen the most rapid change in global environment in millions of years, seeing changes that previously took tens of thousands change in decades. And they’d be born into a world with a so called “Doomsday clock” at a second away by scientists symbolically showing how close we could come to an end for an entirely different reason from why many other scientists today think we have less than a century of civilization.
The past performance may no longer be the best predictor of future returns.
Individual choices not to have children seem extremely unlikely to suddenly reflect a universal avoidance of having children, and given the world was working pretty fine with populations of only a billion people in the past, especially given automation is coming along which can replace a large number of people within the workforce, even a global drop in population to 50% or 20% of what it is today would likely be more than fine. Sure, a drop to 0% for a prolonged time would spell the end of humanity, but that assumes conditions and forecasts don’t improve such that people resume having kids.
As for “we already have all the tools needed to protect against without any material loss of quality of life” - not sure what hopium you rely on, but that’s patently not the case for most of the existential threats we face.
In theory we have had the technology to end all wars and have peace on earth since at least the invention of the drum circle and singing Kumbaya. Weirdly that hasn’t happened yet.
The existence of theoretical solutions is very different from the probable solutions given the various complex competing interests and short-sighted myopia dominating the majority of decision makers.
Yes, I agree, right now no one should have children. If in a decade we have benevolent AIs doing work for everyone and universal basic income and peace on Earth, this should probably be reassessed. But as of this moment right now, everyone should not have children. What I’m saying is that your argument this would have higher odds of disaster than other things is baseless as we both know that not everyone will stop having children even if they should.
We’d be back to encouraging elders to commit suicide rather than being a burden on society.
We literally already are back at that with some of what’s going on with the euthanasia program in Canada in practice, even if that wasn’t in the intended design.
for a lot of people raising a family is the biggest contributor to their happiness and fulfillment
Sure about that?
Most people think of their children as making their lives better. Yet many studies have found that those without children value their lives more than those with children.
Oh, so there are scalable technologies to bring climate change back to decades earlier levels in existence already and not just in theory in research? Is that what you’re claiming?
It’s fine, as outside of laboratory conditions it won’t work anyways (diverse image “reverse labels” would erase their signal to noise ratio of biased pixels across aggregate real world training data), so no need to stress about any kind of reaction to it.
It’s not delaying anything. It won’t work outside of the paper.
If you draw fantasy cats, and you bias towards pointillism dogs, and someone else draws cubist cats, so they bias towards anime dogs, you dilute the effect of the biasing data as multiple axes are flipped.
And this assumes that all artists drawing cats agree on biasing towards dogs and not that some cat artists bias towards horses and others towards cows, which again dilutes any signal to just be noise.
It had a measurable effect in what were effectively artificial lab conditions to get the authors attention with a clickbaity pitch for the paper, but in the real world this is completely worthless right out of the gate.
Oklahoma’s Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond on Friday sued to stop a state board from establishing and funding what would be the nation’s first religious public charter school after the board ignored Drummond’s warning that it would violate both the state and U.S. constitutions....
It’s one of the oldest cons in the world. Convince people that an intangible really good thing like salvation is dependent on their getting in your good graces and fleece them for all they are worth.
One of my favorite descriptions of the racket comes from the Gospel of Thomas whose portrayal of Jesus had a theology of salvation as a universal birthright, chastising people who would give the shirt off their backs to prophets or messengers that are delivering them what they are inherently due (it also makes fun of fasting or praying as dumb sauce).
In it, there’s a parable about a kid who inherited a farm with a buried treasure, but isn’t aware there’s buried treasure, so the kid sells the farm to someone else who finds the treasure and turns around to lend it out to people at interest.
Portraying the concept of salvation as an inherited treasure which people hand over to others to lend back to them at interest is probably one of the most on point descriptions of organized religion I’ve ever seen.
And it says a lot about humanity that so many are more ready to believe that they are inherently flawed and doomed and it’s only through the good graces of others that they can be entitled to good things, then they are to believe that every life brought into existence would be ethically entitled to salvation if brought into existence by a being of agency which also had the capacity to deliver salvation.
Like, if you’re just making shit up, why not just default to good stuff? Especially when the Bible literally has a story about a litmus test to tell a true parent from a false one that boils down to a false parent caring only any recognition even if the child comes to harm and the true parent caring more about the child’s continuing to live as their full self than ever even being known to it. Pretty weird the surrounding text promotes a divine parent that only cares about recognition even if it means the suffering of their supposed children…
The tool, called Nightshade, messes up training data in ways that could cause serious damage to image-generating AI models. Is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission....
Anyone who thinks this is going to work doesn’t understand the concept of signal to noise.
Let’s say you are an artist who draws cats. And you are super worried big tech is going to be able to use your images to teach AI what a cat looks like. So you instead use this to pixel mangle it to bias towards looking like a lizard.
Over there is another artist who also draws cats and is worried about AI. So they use this tool to make cats bias towards looking like horses.
All that bias data taken across thousands of pictures of cats ends up becoming indistinguishable from noise. There’s no more hidden bias signal.
The only way this would work is if the majority of all images in the training data of object A all had hidden bias towards object B (as were the very artificial conditions used in the paper).
This compounds by multiple axes for what you’d want to bias. If you draw fantasy cats, are you only biasing away from cats to dogs? Or are you also going to try to bias against fantasy to pointillism? You can always bias towards pointillism dogs, but now your poisoning is less effective combined with a cubist cat artist biasing towards anime dogs.
As you dilute the bias data by trying to cover multiple aspects that can be learned from your images by AI, you further plummet the signal into noise such that even if there was collective agreement on how to bias each individual axis, it’d be effectively worthless in a large and diverse training set.
Our universe has a funky property where what’s unobservable can be more than one thing at once, and as of a few years ago it was discovered that separated eventual observers of something in that state can each measure conflicting results.
So the journey that each of us have past the grave may well be uniquely our own.
The story goes on a bit longer than I was expecting as I was playing through it, and it definitely gets more and more epic as you ramp towards its conclusion. It will let you know when you are starting the final mission too, to give you time to do other stuff if you want before wrapping it all up.
Also, if you are a fan of the comics I highly recommend playing through the flame side quests. Probably the thing that has me most excited for DLC or the next game.
It looks amazing. Especially the later half of the game. There were a few fights in particular where it felt like playing a stop motion animated film with the way the enemy model moved and blended with the environment. Very cool.
The story is MUCH more interesting and engaging than the previous games. It helps that they are arguably using some of the most interesting story beats from the comics, but the main questline is excellent.
Because of the next gen tech, the epic moments in the game are able to be much bigger and epic in scale and some of the little cinematic touches.
So the open world gameplay hasn’t evolved much outside of better scene density and a bit more refined a combat system with core powers/gadgets rather than switching around a lot.
But the main questline experience is a huge, huge step up from previous games, and well worth the price of admission alone.
You still have a fair bit of stuff ahead, though yes you are getting close to the end.
And yeah, given the flame arc foreshadowed character is my favorite from the Spider-Man lineup, I was grinning ear to ear as it became clear where it was definitely going.
The upside is that from your last boss battle to the end of the game was my favorite part of the main questline.
The caption is BS and the markers don’t actually correlate with the topics, even though the topics are all present in there.
And actually there’s a pretty interesting history of empowered women buried underneath the later misogynistic revisions, which is the case for both the OT and NT in separate developments.
Looking at the two big news publishers in my country. One isn’t reporting about the current bombings at all, while the other one is phrasing their words mostly anti-Palestinian....
The most neutral coverage I’ve seen was from The Intercept.
It has a fairly anti-establishment bias, but that includes both Hamas, the PA, and the IDF.
They basically give a crap about civilians, but not about any of the institutional interests causing them to suffer, and spread that evenly across the various players.
I ‘upvote’ more or less all posts I interact with (sometimes I forget to vote). I feel like we should bring back open dialogues and heavily dissuade people from simply disregarding someone’s entire belief system or ideals based on 200 characters of text (an example)....
The simplest solution is dealing with visibility by changing default sorting settings.
Maybe the top three comments are always most upvoted, most upvoted new (i.e. ‘hot’), and most controversial.
But really the upvote/downvote is just data, and it’s up to each client to handle that data as seen fit.
Though yes, there’s very often ‘hivemind’ where people will pile on top of whatever the trend of a comment is, upvoting ones that had a few initial upvotes or downvoting ones that had a few initial downvotes. It’s less common to see a comment switch from the initial momentum, even when a very similar comment in a different place in the thread has a very different response from users.
So the solution there is to show relevant ranking/sorting data like “3rd most controversial” or “22nd most upvoted” but to hide the specific counts.
This was part of the whole Reddit thing of hiding votes on new comments to prevent bandwagoning like lemmings (pun intended).
The Old Testament literally doesn’t contain gender neutral language, which is a large part of why this all is so messed up in the first place.
Hebrew didn’t have a neutral gender.
There was no ‘parent’ just ‘mother’ or ‘father.’
So a number of passages ended up super weird as a result, including the “he made them male and female” in Genesis 1 where a plural God makes humans male and female in ‘his’ image.
Which was the key line that’s been used for millennia now to prejudice against gender nonconformity, including its being cited in the NT regarding marriage in works written just a few years after the emperor of Rome married two different men.
Edit: Expanding on this as some people seem to be confused…
The article is only about the etymology of the word:
But the question of where the word woman comes from is also of interest, since, as is so often the case with everyday words whose etymologies we take for granted, the origins of the term ‘woman’ contains several surprising details.
The etymological fallacy is thinking that the etymology relates to the contemporary definition, which is what the commenter was doing in confusing the etymology of woman or man as being somehow connected to its meaning.
In general, the commenter was mistaken, as while it is true that a number of stories in the OT were likely based on earlier concepts of neutral or multiple genders (such as the example I originally gave), from the earliest Hebrew onwards there was literally no way of representing it.
So you ended up with later reinterpretation of passages with binary gender like the Genesis 1 example as having related to a hermaphroditic original man (Philio and the later Naassenes) given it was in the image of what was supposedly a singular God but rendered male and female both. Whereas what’s more likely was this passage dated back to the days of a divine power couple of Yahweh and his wife which was later reworked into a monotheistic form without updating the creation of men and women in their images.
But the topic of binary gender representation in the language is fairly broadly discussed and is distinct from what the commenter is trying to represent as being similar in languages with neutral gender representations with some bizarre appeal to etymology.
I suspect it was even the driving concept in the 1st century behind the comments about “make the male and female into a single one” in the Gospel of Thomas saying 22, which ironically still elsewhere referred to the ‘Father’ as opposed to ‘Parent.’ (Aramaic was also a binary gendered language.)
…the next pick to the people who saw you pick the “winner”. Now half of those people see one team, the other half see you pick the other team, and whoever saw you pick the winner thinks you’ve got a 100% accuracy rate over two games. You could do that for a while and then offer to sell your pick for the Superbowl....
The better way to do this is to ahead of time predict the number of games you’ll do in a row (n), and then create 2^n pseudonyms from which you post picks on a public site.
After each, abandon the pseudonyms that guessed wrong.
At the end, you’ll have one pseudonym that correctly predicted n games in a row, and especially if the public site you uploaded to has records of the times each pick was posted (or you used something like the web archive), you have a verifiable 3rd party record of getting it right that you can market to your full contact list, rather than cutting out your contacts in each round.
By design was using procedural generation to build out the planets and to place points of interest into the world.
But what’s wild is that they had such repetitive and uninteresting “points of interest.”
They aren’t interesting at all. The name is a lie.
So yeah, if you wander the procedurally generated planet you can come across a cave. But it’s effectively the same cave you have gone through a half dozen times already.
My suspicion is that the creation engine isn’t very well equipped for complex procedural generation, so the point of interest areas are also broken up onto reused tiles that get repetitive quickly, as opposed to more modern engines that allow for procedurally generating levels and assets with enough entropy that even if it looks familiar it isn’t that it looks exactly the same.
Like, just look at the demoed features of UE5’s procedural generation, and how much less repetitive it looks when filling in areas than Starfield.
I expected more from Bethesda given Todd Howard has been focused on procedural generation for decades now, but I think they really shot themselves in the foot with not sending creation engine to a farm upstate.
Yes, they were able to reuse a lot from past development, but the core of what they were trying to deliver completely fell apart ultimately and his decades old dream project is going to be forgotten within a few years.
Lo, His first miracle! (lemmy.world)
The magic genie has appeared to grant you your wish. What small thing do you wish for that would have the biggest positive impact on the world?
We have had guns for 200 years but mass shootings only became common in the last 30. So what changed?
Story of Cruz (lemmy.world)
What is one fact that someone shared so confidently but turns out to be false?
Is there any christian religions that don't believe in space?
So I have a born again christian family member in their mid twenties who stated with complete confidence that there is a dome in the sky called the firmament and beyond it is where heaven is. She believes space doesn’t exist and rockets just blow up because the bible said so. She is not the brightest and normally I would let...
What are the Top 3 Games that you have played in your lifetime?
For me, its probably Halo 3, Call of duty Black Ops 2 and GTA V
Kanye West to Jewish Adidas employee: 'Kiss a picture of Hitler every day' (www.rawstory.com)
An explosive new investigation by the New York Times details how Adidas employees experienced frequent anti-Semitism from Grammy Award-winning rapper and Yeezy designer Kanye West for nearly a decade....
I call upon thee, theist majors and Lemmings who know the Scriptures well, what can you tell us about Bibicially accurate demons?
Exactly what it says on the (dramatic) title....
18+ Whar's your favorite adult innuendo line hidden in a kids movie?
Question to the ones that fully left Reddit
How has it been for you? Do you get FOMO feeling sometimes?...
Sony Defends PS Plus Price Rises - IGN (www.ign.com)
In a new interview, PlayStation’s top business executive defended the decision, insisting the company had to “adjust” to market conditions.
AI will change the way we do everything. All jobs will be replaced. (lemmy.world)
15,000 Scientists Warn Society Could 'Collapse' This Century In Dire Climate Report (www.vice.com)
Vice.com
This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI (www.technologyreview.com)
Not a member, but thought I’d share this for the artists here in case they haven’t seen the news.
Oklahoma attorney general sues to stop US's first public religious school (apnews.com)
Oklahoma’s Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond on Friday sued to stop a state board from establishing and funding what would be the nation’s first religious public charter school after the board ignored Drummond’s warning that it would violate both the state and U.S. constitutions....
Nightshade - A new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI (lemmy.world)
The tool, called Nightshade, messes up training data in ways that could cause serious damage to image-generating AI models. Is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission....
Wake up. (lemmy.world)
Spider-Man 2 is The Fastest-Selling Game in PlayStation History (www.gamescensor.com)
Find yourself (lemmy.ml)
The Rule Book (climatejustice.social)
Where can I NEUTRALLY keep up to date about the Palestina/Israel situation?
Looking at the two big news publishers in my country. One isn’t reporting about the current bombings at all, while the other one is phrasing their words mostly anti-Palestinian....
Do you think the Internet and websites with 'voting' systems encourage hivemind thinking and discourage any debate or discourse? Solutions?
I ‘upvote’ more or less all posts I interact with (sometimes I forget to vote). I feel like we should bring back open dialogues and heavily dissuade people from simply disregarding someone’s entire belief system or ideals based on 200 characters of text (an example)....
Executive order bans gender-neutral language in Arkansas government documents (fayettevilleflyer.com)
Is it illegal to con people into thinking you have a perfect ability to pick football games by emailing out two lists: one picking one team, and the other picking the other team, and only sending... (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
…the next pick to the people who saw you pick the “winner”. Now half of those people see one team, the other half see you pick the other team, and whoever saw you pick the winner thinks you’ve got a 100% accuracy rate over two games. You could do that for a while and then offer to sell your pick for the Superbowl....
rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Wall Street Journal complains about workers using their sick days (boingboing.net)
Starfield Desperately Needs More Unique Locations (www.thegamer.com)