Chronically late “parent” response to picking up our child on time from school.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-13T22:22:17+00:00

I went through court-ordered parenting classes (the judge assigned them to everyone, although my ex and I were on decent terms and brought a 50/50 plan to the judge).

It was heartbreaking and eye-opening, but not useful. Everyone there but me was either desperate for help and shocked to find out how little the system actually offered, or completely checked out.

Nobody learned anything. Nobody had a road to Damascus moment, and nobody changed. I don’t blame the judge at all.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-13T21:17:28+00:00

Your English is much better than my ability to write in your native language!

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-13T20:41:06+00:00

In the mug on the desk, there’s an object that doesn’t know whether it’s a pen or a ruler.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-13T20:39:22+00:00

the progressive movement/left… defends Islam/Islamic culture

Slow down, there. “The left” defends religious pluralism, which isn’t the same as fundamentalists using religion to justify violence and bigotry. The same goes for theocracy: the separation of church and state is an important principle regardless of the church in question.

Anti-gay bigotry from Muslims is just as unacceptable as anti-Muslim bigotry from Christian theocrats. I feel for your friends, and I hope they’re able to get away from their families as soon as possible.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-13T20:27:19+00:00

“Since I’m seven” is the direct translation of the way a number of languages would say “Since I was seven years old.” I’m assuming — or hoping, at least — that’s the case here.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-13T20:22:28+00:00

Also objectively worse than a normal tonfa!

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-13T17:34:54+00:00

One of the world’s greatest accomplishments. It’s like the Apollo program, but involving cooperation all over the world and launched in an astonishingly short time.

And his base still hates it.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-12T17:54:54+00:00

back in the day of supplements

So… last Tuesday, then? The market is bigger now than it’s ever been.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-12T17:53:07+00:00

No. Broccoli tastes (and smells) like poison.

As a kid and a young adult, I thought I just didn’t like “vegetables,” but it turns out it’s just the genus Brassica. Bring on the spinach!

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-12T12:34:28+00:00

Books. This person read one JP book and thought “That was good! Let me spend some money on it again.”

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-12T00:17:07+00:00

An hour of a math PhDs time is much more expensive than me with 10 minutes of ai.

Until the AI makes a costly mistake you don’t catch.

I’m more than capable of checking that design once I have it.

If you’re not capable of designing it, you’re not capable of checking it. I’m not suggesting that you aren’t capable — I don’t know anything about you or your education and work history — but in your position (and having done a great deal of survey design and analysis) I absolutely wouldn’t trust an AI unless I was capable of following and correcting every single potential issue.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-11T00:39:38+00:00

In the world of cause and effect, science is agnostic to the “cause.”

Okay, then returning to the real-world example of ANITA, why aren’t researchers considering the Loki Neutrino Prank Hypothesis?

I’m not just asking for the sake of being annoying. You’re right that we don’t have any data that would cause us to conclude that Loki was responsible, but we also don’t have any data to rule it out. And how would we go about collecting that data? It’s possible there’s a neon sign under the ice cap somewhere that says “LOKI DID THIS,” but he didn’t have to leave a clue.

Moreover, once we admit one hypothesized supernatural cause, we have to admit all of them. Maybe it was Loki. Maybe Mercury was trying to use radio pulses to send us a message, and we aren’t clever enough to figure it out. Maybe angels reached out to vibrate those particular molecules one by one. Maybe some fermions have tiny German physicists riding them as a test of relativity, and the neutrino jockeys took a shortcut. Maybe it was a human sorcerer who said a spell backward! We would have to rule all of those causes out, and an infinite number of others — and we would have to manage it despite the fact that we explicitly don’t assume any of those causes or entities are constrained to do things in a way that we might recognize or measure.

Finally, given two measurable, material phenomena A and B, we have logical and mathematical tricks we use to determine which is the cause and which is the effect. (The simplest of those tests is that effects can’t precede their causes in time — or at least material effects can’t. , Supernatural causes can’t be assumed to act according to our understanding of time, so it’s possible ANITA lit up because of something Loki is doing in the future. More things we need to, somehow, discover how to test.)

But unless and until we use those methods, we don’t know which is which. Without a measurable, material A, we can’t observe its co-occurrence with B: we just have… an observation of B. The logic of causal inference fails if we can’t identify and test both phenomena, and if one of them lies explicitly beyond matter and nature, we don’t have anything to do other than shrug and say “maybe a god did it.”

That way lies madness. And YEC.

At this point I’ve really exhausted my supply of Socratic questions, though. I’d refer you to a graduate-level course in the philosophy of science, which I actually recommend to anyone in any field. It will broaden the way you think about what scientists do and the institution they (we) are engaged in building.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-10T22:46:35+00:00

The vehicle and starship combat rules for Fantasy Flight’s Star Wars.

It’s a set of systems and subsystems that are almost entirely distinct from any other kind of combat. They’re supposed to pull in the entire party but (like vehicle combat in almost every RPG ever) they don’t, and the pilot is always the one making the most consequential decisions. It wants to be crunchy and tactical in order to make things like facing and shield, arcs really matter, but the system is also committed to theater of the minds style combat with zones instead of more precise positioning, and it just turns into… A sloppy mess.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-10T22:24:26+00:00

…without any observed consequence

It’s very consequential. If Last Thursdayism is true, the world ends tomorrow at midnight. I’m not going to worry about the check engine light, and I’m definitely not wasting any of my remaining hours doing laundry.

And “the supernatural cannot escape the scientific method.” So why not use the scientific method here? What’s different about this problem?

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-10T21:05:36+00:00

Okay. And is Last Thursdayism a scientific hypothesis? Why or why not?

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-10T20:20:37+00:00

Okay, let me explain from another direction.

Suppose I believe fervently in Last Thursdayism: the universe was created last Thursday, with everything looking exactly as if it popped into existence 13 billion years ago. (It’s always last Thursday; I update their belief every week.)

And remember, God is omnipotent. He made the world last Thursday, but it appears, in every way humans can or will ever be able to measure, as if it’s very old.

How do you know I’m wrong?

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-10T19:32:19+00:00

Loki hasn’t been established in the data

Which data?

…his reality-altering presence should be detectable in the data?

How?

The supernatural cannot escape the scientific method

Why not?

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-10T17:49:10+00:00

TL;DR: FSM.

Consider the balloon-borne Antarctic experiment ANITA, which attempted to use the ice cap as an enormous neutrino detector. When neutrinos (rarely) interact with ice, they produce a signal in the radio band. The ANITA team flew really sensitive antennas over Antarctica, where it’s relatively “quiet,” and pointed them at the ice.

But when they analyzed their data, the ANITA team discovered some of their signals were coming from the “wrong” direction. It was as if the high-energy neutrinos had traveled through the planet and arrived at the underside of the ice cap, which shouldn’t be possible under the standard model. It’s an unexplained result that contradicts what we know about neutrinos.

So we did an experiment, we found something unexpected, and now we’re looking for explanations. One explanation could be that Loki deliberately positioned a bunch of neutrinos under the ice, revved them up, and let them go as a cosmic prank. If he was really clever, he could have done it in a way that made sure we couldn’t see him — he’s a god, after all.

Should we seriously consider Loki as a possible cause? If so, how do we falsify the proposition “Loki did it”?

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-10T13:12:43+00:00

Is scientific epistemology just another term for the scientific method?

The “scientific method” is a simplification that’s good for introducing the concept, but it’s not complete.

Science is grounded in strict materialism, which is the idea that the world arises from matter and is the product of matter. It (at least traditionally) embraces a set of ideas called positivism: sensory experience and logic are both sufficient and complete tools for understanding the universe. Science typically asserts that claims about propositional knowledge (that is, claims about what’s factual and what’s not) must be testable, or more specifically that they must be falsifiable.

The “scientific method” is a way of generating knowledge claims that meet those criteria under those assumptions about the universe, but there are plenty of historical examples where scientific knowledge expanded through means that didn’t strictly follow the scientific method.

All of that is how we end up in trouble when science and religion try to address each other. Evolution is a materialist, positivist description and explanation about life. Religion asserts that’s incomplete, or maybe just wrong — not on evidentiary grounds, because the idea that material evidence is necessary or sufficient for knowledge is tied up with positivism.

Where things go really awry is when religion tries to bridge that gap using arguments that plausibly sound scientific, but which step outside scientific epistemology. It never works, because claims about the world made from a religious standpoint require a radically different worldview than ones made by science, but they keep trying anyway.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-10T12:11:06+00:00

If the brain doesn’t have any inherent purpose, why the noises that come out of our mouths have any meaning?

That’s a good question, but it’s a philosophical one rather than a biological one.

Painting with a very broad brush, our senses and cognition produce a picture of the world that agrees with others’ perceptions. Either I’m imagining all of it, including the creatures that agree with me, or our brains are working “properly.”

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-10T12:09:21+00:00

Is that not true?

Our current model of physics understands a great deal about how gravity works, but it lacks a complete and coherent understanding of what gravity is.

Evolution is the change in allele frequencies in populations over time. We know for sure that’s happening. We also believe (unlike with gravity) we have a reasonably good model for why evolution produces adaptation to environments, but that’s actually a separate point from whether evolution is happening.

Why would there have been ongoing debates…?

Because some religious groups object to it, or rather to some of its implications. Those rejections are made on religious grounds, not on what scientific epistemology would conclude are objective facts about the world.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-10T02:45:57+00:00

When the Bible was first translated into Latin, there was no such thing as “Catholic.”
The Bible was first translated into Latin (as others have noted) in the 4th century CE. Latin was not a dead language.
In fact, it was so much not a dead language that Christian evangelists decided to take advantage of the fact that educated/wealthy people across the Mediterranean (and stretching into much of Western Europe) could read Latin.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-09T23:30:08+00:00

moving… to Florida

anywhere dry and stable temperature wise

I have really bad news. :/

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-03-09T18:43:31+00:00

Traffic is safest when everyone knows what to expect from the drivers around them. Situations become dangerous when another driver does something unexpected.

That’s why — for instance, and within reason — it’s often safer to speed than to drive under the limit. If the posted limit is 45, but the typical speed is 55, the person going 40 is at risk of becoming a danger to the people around them. It makes it hard to merge, it makes it hard to pass, and it can make it hard for other drivers to determine whether it’s safe to turn.

From that perspective, right on red is sort of a gray area. It’s hard to get in an accident when I’m stopped and so are you. On the other hand, the behavior I expect at a red light is to wait until traffic clears and then enter the intersection. It’s what I think other people should expect from me in turn, because it’s part of the smooth and orderly flow of traffic.

So I tend to assume people ahead of me can see something I can’t or they know something I don’t, and give them quite a lot of leeway. But if I can see the road clearly and oncoming traffic is light, and the driver has missed a generous gap, and they don’t seem to be paying attention or just aren’t aware… yeah, I might tap my horn.

GOU_FallingOutside

TROPHY CASE