General discussion - public

[Thialfi]

All the best @BlueKrono and @dinotoyforum. Take care ❤️

[ceratopsian]

My condolences, @dinotoyforum. 

[Crackington]

Yes, sorry to hear about this Dr Admin and I send my deepest sympathy.

@BlueKrono I hope you and your family are recovering from the virus. It's always a worry when your little ones get ill.

Stay safe everyone.

[ZoPteryx]

I'm so sorry @dinotoyforum and @BlueKrono.  My thoughts are with you both.

[GojiraGuy1954]

I don't know about everyone else, but the new forum is already starting to feel like home. 

man it's hard to believe that the "new" forum is this old now

[DinoToyForum]

I don't know about everyone else, but the new forum is already starting to feel like home. 

man it's hard to believe that the "new" forum is this old now

Tell me about it.

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Thanks @Shonisaurus, @Thialfi, @ceratopsian, @Crackington , @Zopteryx for your sympathies. @BlueKrono hope you are feeling better now.

[Halichoeres]

My family has also been affected by Covid recently. My aunt somehow caught it. She was double vaccinated and had her booster jab two weeks before she caught it, so had taken all the precautions. She was taken to hospital where the covid eventually killed her. She was in an 'at risk' age and health group, which explains why the vaccine wasn't enough to protect her.

The pandemic is not over, so it is important that we keep talking about it. Please be careful everyone and get vaccinated to help protect yourself and your loved ones and stop the spread.

I'm so sorry to hear that. My condolences.

[GojiraGuy1954]

Does the new forum turn ten this year?

[Faelrin]

Not really sure where to share this exactly, but uh anyways yeah. I was bored and thought it would be a good idea try out the craiyon ai image generator again, with something as simple as yee dinosaur (from that one meme):



Sorry for the nightmare fuel, I guess.

[Dilopho]

Not really sure where to share this exactly, but uh anyways yeah. I was bored and thought it would be a good idea try out the craiyon ai image generator again, with something as simple as yee dinosaur (from that one meme):



Sorry for the nightmare fuel, I guess.

I remember somebody on Twitter generated 'Walter white and dinosaur, realistic photograph' and I can't even show you the results because in one of them it made him NUDE.

[Faelrin]

So like I'm still sitting here in shock about what happened today, with the Queen's passing. Can't believe how long she has been around for. What an end to an era. I hope her family and friends had a chance to be there with her until her final moment. I missed that with my grandmother in 2019 and wouldn't wish that on anyone (15 minutes away from the hospital after traveling all night from PA to MA!). On top while I knew this day was coming eventually, I was dreading it for a while.

This stings in a similar way to losing Betty White earlier this year. Not looking forward to the day we lose Sir David Attenborough as well.

Edit: Saw this on reddit. Thought I should share. She was a beautiful woman who aged gracefully. 

[SidB]

Well said and done, @Faelrin .

[ceratopsian]

She was a wonderful horsewoman.

Like @Faelrin, I immediately thought of David Attenborough too.

[CityRaptor]

Learned about it yesterday. It was also a topic when listening to the radio during breakfast. "God save the King." just sounds so strange.

Regarding Sir David Attenborough, we also already lost his brother Sir Richard. Although that was largely overshadowed by some guy's suicide.

[Tylosaurus]

Humans don't live forever, nothing really does, it's the ways in life.
But even passing away at 96 years is pretty an amazing age to even reach, not many have even passed 91 years and still an amazing age to pass away if you'd ask me.
And it's not many times you'll see a country have a King or Queen for 70 years average, that is an amazing achievement.

My condolences do go out to my friends in the UK and the British memebers of this forum for the pasing of their beloved Queen for them 70+ years she has proudly served.
Not many will surpass her active duty runtime.

[Faelrin]

So not really sure if this is the best place to share this, but as I went to google Emily Willoughby's name to make sure I spelled it right for one of my recent posts (as it did relate to her art that I've adored for years), it brought up something regarding a controversy. Of course out of curiosity I've gone digging in that rabbit hole and found out that both Darren Naish and Mark Witton have renounced wanting to work with her, along with a lot of other troubling information, that I'm still trying to process and research here. Did anyone else hear (or rather seen I suppose) about this? Honestly quite upsetting to find out an artist whose works I've liked could have a serious dark history, but it wouldn't be the first time (especially after finding out that I'm trans, and how many are openly transphobic, but I digress).

[ceratopsian]

All new to me too. I'd heard nothing about it.

[Halichoeres]

There was a big to-do about this on Twitter several months ago. When she was young she made some kinda dodgy art consistent with white supremacist sympathies, and she's currently doing a postdoctoral fellowship that includes research on racial differences in IQ. That endeavor has historically been pretty fraught, to say the least.

[dinofelid]

There was a big to-do about this on Twitter several months ago. When she was young she made some kinda dodgy art consistent with white supremacist sympathies, and she's currently doing a postdoctoral fellowship that includes research on racial differences in IQ. That endeavor has historically been pretty fraught, to say the least.

The tweet here seems to show she's doing work on heritability of individual differences in IQ, which can't be extrapolated to group differences for the reasons discussed here (an example originally due to Richard Lewontin):

Suppose you buy a bag of ordinary seed corn from a hardware store. Grow one handful of it in a carefully controlled environment in which the seeds get uniform illumination and uniform nutrient solution. The corn plants will vary in height, and because the environment is uniform, the heritability of height will be 100 percent. Now take another handful of corn from the same bag, and grow it in a similarly uniform environment but with a uniformly poor nutrient solution. Again, the plants will vary in height, but all will be stunted. Once more the heritability of height is 100 percent. Despite the 100 percent heritabilities of height within each group, the difference in height between the groups is entirely environmentally caused. So we can have total heritability within groups, substantial variation between groups, but no genetic difference between the groups.

I found that tweet above when I googled her name and came across an August post by Jerry Coyne here where he says that "she repudiates racial extrapolations from within-population genetic data". Has anything come out since then suggesting she thinks group differences on IQ tests are due to genetics rather than environmental differences?

[stargatedalek]

I care less about how such views may or not have expressed or have risk to express themselves in her current work, and more about how she has yet to apologize or otherwise renounce her previous behaviour.

I'm all for forgiving people, especially for things they did as stupid kids, but I'm not going to forgive someone until they at least become cognizant what they did was wrong.