The most common cause of female infertility – polycystic ovary syndrome – may be caused by a hormonal imbalance before birth. The finding has led to a cure in mice, and a drug trial is set to begin in women later this year.
Polycystic ovary syndrome affects up to one in five women worldwide, three-quarters of whom struggle to fall pregnant. The condition is typically characterised by high levels of testosterone, ovarian cysts, irregular menstrual cycles, and problems regulating sugar, but the causes have long been a mystery. “It’s by far the most common hormonal condition affecting women of reproductive age but it hasn’t received a lot of attention,” says Robert Norman at the University of Adelaide in Australia.
No, but seriously, do you know how amazing Vincent Price is?
Not just as an actor, although he was a blast to watch in everything he did. He’s one of those actors who’s just clearly having a whale of a time, no matter how bad the film is. He’s just genuinely happy to be there (it makes his villains a particular delight, and he played a LOT of them).
But did you know that he was also on the PFLAG board after his daughter came out to him? And that he was one of the earliest celebrities to speak out against the silence surrounding the AIDS epidemic?
Did you know that when his daughter came out to him, he admitted to her that it had been difficult for him during his first two marriages, because his wives had not been pleased to find out that their husband was just as interested in men as they were?
That’s right, kids, Vincent Price was BISEXUAL AS FUCK, and it was one of those open Hollywood secrets. And his wife Coral Browne? The one he grew old with and wrote cookbooks with and was basically ridiculously sweet with?
Also bisexual as fuck. They were the queer power couple of Hollywood in the 70s. His daughter, Victoria, grew up around Rock Hudson and members of the LGBT community. When she came out, Vincent Price became a board member of PFLAG and was just about the most accepting and awesome dad.
Did you know that Vincent Price played Oscar Wilde in a one-man play, and when it was denounced by anti-gay activist Anita Bryant, he dismissed her right back, saying that Oscar Wilde had already come up with a term for her: a Woman of No Importance? Because Vincent Price was deliciously witty and an awesome person.
Let me conclude with a quote from his daughter (from this article, where I got a lot of this information):
‘“In a funny way, and I think I’m going to cry, he understood me at 22 better than I understood myself then,” Price concluded. “Of course, he was in his 70s and lived a hell of a lot longer than I had, and he understood that at the end of the day it’s about who and what and how we love. And I have not been a person who has been very successful at conventional relationships, but loving well and loving deeply has been the most important thing to me.”’
Happy birthday, Vincent Price. You were a gem of an actor, and an even greater human being.
Machine learning algorithms are not like other computer programs. In the usual sort of programming, a human programmer tells the computer exactly what to do. In machine learning, the human programmer merely gives the algorithm the problem to be solved, and through trial-and-error the algorithm has to figure out how to solve it.
This often works really well – machine learning algorithms are widely used for facial recognition, language translation, financial modeling, image recognition, and ad delivery. If you’ve been online today, you’ve probably interacted with a machine learning algorithm.
But it doesn’t always work well. Sometimes the programmer will think the algorithm is doing really well, only to look closer and discover it’s solved an entirely different problem from the one the programmer intended. For example, I looked earlier at an image recognition algorithm that was supposed to recognize sheep but learned to recognize grass instead, and kept labeling empty green fields as containing sheep.
When machine learning algorithms solve problems in unexpected ways, programmers find them, okay yes, annoying sometimes, but often purely delightful.
So delightful, in fact, that in 2018 a group of researchers wrote a fascinating paper that collected dozens of anecdotes that “elicited surprise and wonder from the researchers studying them”. The paper is well worth reading, as are the original references, but here are several of my favorite examples.
Bending the rules to win
First, there’s a long tradition of using simulated creatures to study how different forms of locomotion might have evolved, or to come up with new ways for robots to walk.
Why walk when you can flop? In one example, a simulated robot was supposed to evolve to travel as quickly as possible. But rather than evolve legs, it simply assembled itself into a tall tower, then fell over. Some of these robots even learned to turn their falling motion into a somersault, adding extra distance.
[Image: Robot is simply a tower that falls over.]
Why jump when you can can-can? Another set of simulated robots were supposed to evolve into a form that could jump. But the programmer had originally defined jumping height as the height of the tallest block so – once again – the robots evolved to be very tall. The programmer tried to solve this by defining jumping height as the height of the block that was originally the *lowest*. In response, the robot developed a long skinny leg that it could kick high into the air in a sort of robot can-can.
[Image: Tall robot flinging a leg into the air instead of jumping]
Hacking the Matrix for superpowers
Potential energy is not the only energy source these simulated robots learned to exploit. It turns out that, like in real life, if an energy source is available, something will evolve to use it.
Floating-point rounding errors as an energy source: In one simulation, robots learned that small rounding errors in the math that calculated forces meant that they got a tiny bit of extra energy with motion. They learned to twitch rapidly, generating lots of free energy that they could harness. The programmer noticed the problem when the robots started swimming extraordinarily fast.
Harvesting energy from crashing into the floor: Another simulation had some problems with its collision detection math that robots learned to use. If they managed to glitch themselves into the floor (they first learned to manipulate time to make this possible), the collision detection would realize they weren’t supposed to be in the floor and would shoot them upward. The robots learned to vibrate rapidly against the floor, colliding repeatedly with it to generate extra energy.
[Image: robot moving by vibrating into the floor]
Clap to fly: In another simulation, jumping bots learned to harness a different collision-detection bug that would propel them high into the air every time they crashed two of their own body parts together. Commercial flight would look a lot different if this worked in real life.
Discovering secret moves: Computer game-playing algorithms are really good at discovering the kind of Matrix glitches that humans usually learn to exploit for speed-running. An algorithm playing the old Atari game Q*bert discovered a previously-unknown bug where it could perform a very specific series of moves at the end of one level and instead of moving to the next level, all the platforms would begin blinking rapidly and the player would start accumulating huge numbers of points.
A Doom-playing algorithm also figured out a special combination of movements that would stop enemies from firing fireballs – but it only works in the algorithm’s hallucinated dream-version of Doom. Delightfully, you can play the dream-version here
[Image: Q*bert player is accumulating a suspicious number of points, considering that it’s not doing much of anything]
Shooting the moon: In one of the more chilling examples, there was an algorithm that was supposed to figure out how to apply a minimum force to a plane landing on an aircraft carrier. Instead, it discovered that if it applied a *huge* force, it would overflow the program’s memory and would register instead as a very *small* force. The pilot would die but, hey, perfect score.
Destructive problem-solving
Something as apparently benign as a list-sorting algorithm could also solve problems in rather innocently sinister ways.
Well, it’s not unsorted: For example, there was an algorithm that was supposed to sort a list of numbers. Instead, it learned to delete the list, so that it was no longer technically unsorted.
Solving the Kobayashi Maru test:Another algorithm was supposed to minimize the difference between its own answers and the correct answers. It found where the answers were stored and deleted them, so it would get a perfect score.
How to win at tic-tac-toe: In another beautiful example, in 1997 some programmers built algorithms that could play tic-tac-toe remotely against each other on an infinitely large board. One programmer, rather than designing their algorithm’s strategy, let it evolve its own approach. Surprisingly, the algorithm suddenly began winning all its games. It turned out that the algorithm’s strategy was to place its move very, very far away, so that when its opponent’s computer tried to simulate the new greatly-expanded board, the huge gameboard would cause it to run out of memory and crash, forfeiting the game.
In conclusion
When machine learning solves problems, it can come up with solutions that range from clever to downright uncanny.
Biological evolution works this way, too – as any biologist will tell you, living organisms find the strangest solutions to problems, and the strangest energy sources to exploit. Sometimes I think the surest sign that we’re not living in a computer simulation is that if we were, some microbe would have learned to exploit its flaws.
So as programmers we have to be very very careful that our algorithms are solving the problems that we meant for them to solve, not exploiting shortcuts. If there’s another, easier route toward solving a given problem, machine learning will likely find it.
Fortunately for us, “kill all humans” is really really hard. If “bake an unbelievably delicious cake” also solves the problem and is easier than “kill all humans”, then machine learning will go with cake.
Why is it that your family gathers on Christmas in order to celebrate peace? Why not Eid? Why not Rosh Hashanah? Why not a million different holidays from the literal thousands of existing religions?
The reason you’re celebrating on Christmas of all holidays is because you’re culturally Christian. It’s not something to be ashamed of – you just need to be aware of it.
Huh. I’d never thought about it that way.
I know, right?
To be honest, I hadn’t either, not on any bone-deep level, until I started seriously considering converting, and it was only when I started realizing it on a personal level. But, then, I am also lucky in that we live in a school district where Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah and several other non-Xian holidays are given days off, which is just not the norm anywhere but in those gosh darn liberal enclaves on the coast. 😛
This feels really relevant to me too. I stopped being Xian over a decade ago, and I felt…annoyed, honestly, that I was still expected, by family and friends both, to celebrate all of the major Xian holidays even despite being at that time an atheist/pagan. And that’s only increasing my discomfort now that I’m converting to Judaism.
I don’t even know if I can keep having conversations about religion with my parents anymore, our views on faith and holidays and deities are so different now.
My parents basically just ignore the fact that @dadhoc and @mistresskabooms and I all converted. I hoped right up until the last second that they would show up to our Adult B’nai Mitzvah, especially knowing I was giving the sermon, but, welp, they didn’t.
Our class has gotten close though so it was okay. My mispacha was there, and one of the other converts in the class, her dad came, so that was good.
Off topic, so anyway.
I’d also like to add (for the fellow Gentiles out there) it’s NOT just the “obvious” things like Celebrating Christmas, either.
It is so, SO many “little things” that you don’t realize ARE Christian-influenced, that you might not even if you stopped and thought about it, because they’re SUCH a part of “secular” culture that you just assumed That’s The Way It Is For Everybody.
I had no idea for example, that the idea you had to have a witness in order for a marriage between two people to be “valid” was something not all religions and systems shared, until a Jewish person over on the NaNoWriMo forums corrected me and said “actually, you can do it just by the two agreeing if they’re above a certain age, in Judaism; it’s still considered religiously valid”.
In the USA, for a marriage to be LEGALLY recognized by the State?
It HAS to have both an Officiant (not necessarily a Priest or Pastor of your own religion; sea captains, judges, and anybody who gets the right piece of paper, can do that), and a Witness. I know this, because I am Legally Married and it was part of the process; I had to get a friend to Officiate and a second friend to sign off as Witness on the paperwork.
And I knew on some level this was partly from “religions” “traditionally” requiring it…but I had NO IDEA this was really a Gentile thing, a Goy thing, in specific!
I just….assumed that since verifying it happened was “logical”, all religions would naturally require at LEAST an Officiant OR a Witness if not both, “though I could be wrong” I (very thankfully) admitted. Which in hindsight, is a big Assumption, thank goodness I left myself open for correction lol.
And see, I wasn’t even RAISED going to Church; my parents were ~liberals~ who basically raised me Agnostic.
But I was raised by a dad whose parents were Protestant, and a mom who went to Catholic school as a kid. I grew up in the American South. I grew up in America, and America is so darn Christianized, that it doesn’t matter that such things aren’t a requirement in Judaism, because they’re a requirement in Christian practice, so they become a requirement in the secular realm as well.
Even the very definition of “religion” is often mistaken for REQUIRING a “belief in the supernatural or a literal higher power” – not because this is in any way anthropologically accurate (not only does Judaism technically allow for the opposite, so do some variants of Hinduism; There’s posts on that blog that covered it better actually but you might have to dig for them; at least those both mention it), but – ding ding!
That’s still how many people in the West think it’s “defined” because that’s the requirements of the Christian religion. A belief in a literal higher power.
Like, I have seen Culturally Christian atheists INSIST that you cannot possibly be “religiously Jewish” AND an atheist/not believe in a literal higher power, only to be corrected by actual Jewish people that “uh, no? That’s not how it works, you’re thinking of CHRISTIANITY?”.
Because they were so entrenched in the Christian Definition of Religion, it never even occurred to them that there was such a thing as a “religion” that did it differently than that.
Because even “secular” society in the West usually defines it that way, because Christianity does.
Heck, the idea of “Judeo-Christian” is…heh, well. Ask a Jewish person or two and if they have the energy you’ll probably get a nice rant on why that term is a serious misnomer; but it’s VERY common to treat Judaism as if it was just the “precursor” to Christianity, as if Christianity is just an extension of Judaism with an extra set of Books, and it’s…it’s not. It’s REALLY not. That thinking stems from Christian cultures trying to simultaneously erase actual Jewish culture (where it actually differed from theirs), and pretending that theirs ~supplanted~ it and ~took its place~ like the New and Improved version, which… of course, being that most Christian sects insist that Christianity is The One True Religion, of COURSE they did.
Even the idea of weekends is pretty much derived from the habit of most Christians to make Sunday a Sabbath and “day of rest” (some Christians do actually use Saturday instead – much like Jewish folk do – but Catholics and a majority of Protestant sects use Sunday).
Even some Really Big “little things” are more Christianized than you think though.
There’s…I mean off the top of my head, that’s it, but there’s definitely more I’m not even remembering and I’m sure quite a few that I’m not even personally aware of yet.
Personally, I’ve found that the more I learn about other cultures, religions, history, etc, the more I realize how very insular and Very Specific and perhaps even culturally weird in the grand scheme of things, my own upbringing was. That’s not a bad thing though! As far as I’m concerned, it’s just helping me learn what my biases and assumptions are, so A+ 10/10 recommend expanding your awareness of this stuff. ❤
I’ve noticed this in the way people talk about assassinations. They say Martin Luther King “died for our rights.” I don’t know what that means. He lived for civil rights, and then someone killed him. The idea of a savior’s death causing salvation for all generations thereafter is alien to me. That concept is a result of growing up with a religion where it’s the core of the faith, but to me it doesn’t make logical sense.
“Loving To Survive” by Dee L.R. Graham, “Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them” by Susan Forward and Joan Torres, and “Why Does He Do That?” by Lundy Bancroft changed my life and the way I saw my experiences and truly helped me with the healing process so much
I just wanted to thank all the queens who have not been in this situation reblogging these links for women who have overcome or are still living with abusive men and/or for wanting to read them yourself to better understand what/how/why abuse happens and how to support women in abusive relationships and say to every queen reblogging this who has been in the same situation as i have or is still in it that u are so strong and brave and wonderful and i wish u healing, happiness, and love because u are worth all of those things.
Le Sommeil [The Sleepers], which depicts two women entwined in a post-coital embrace, caused a stir when it was first shown in the 1870s. The police were called in, and the painting was not shown again until the 1980s. But its brief showing had an influence on a number of contemporary artists, and helped challenge the taboos associated with lesbian relationships. For modern audiences it’s a good reminder that people in the 19th century were not ignorant of lesbian relationships, as we tend to believe. And it’s pretty damn sexy, don’t you think?
They called the police on this lesbian painting.
The best part is, the lesbian embrace isn’t even the biggest thing that made the painting so controversial, it was the art style. People in the artistic community at the time were wholly familiar with sapphic relationships being portrayed in art, but were used to these scenes being portrayed in the ‘academic art’ style, which consisted of smooth, simplistic, idealised versions of the nude female form. This often went hand in hand with the depiction of Roman & Greek allegories to illustrate certain ideals (think Cabanel’s Birth of Venus). Courbet’s journey into realism was met by heavy critique from the academic movement, as the women he painted were, well, more realistic. Leaving in details such as the rolls of fat around the ribs acted as a blunt reminder to the audience that these were not euphoric goddesses caressing in ecstasy, but ordinary women having a nap together after making love. Other realist paintings suffered the same controversy, Manet’s Olympia is a perfect example, where the problem was not that the painting depicted a nude woman in an erotic pose, but the fact that she was just an ordinary courtesan, given an identity & portrayed in a place of power & control. Realism humanized the female form in art, & removed it from its previous role as a representation of the ideal.
So what disgusted people about the painting wasn’t so much that Le Sommeil depicted two women, but rather that it depicted two ‘real’ women.
Why do my interests in canning, couponing, and homesteading overlap so often with blogs with titles like ‘The Obedient Housewife’?
Like, I’m like, “I want to learn to make soap and farm,” and suddenly I see 500 “traditional family” motherfuckers like no you are mistaken. I am just a simple lesbian anticapitalist looking to limit my consumerism as much as possible.
‘these fun crafts will keep your kids occupied until your husband gets home!’ no i want a clothespin crown for me
As a nerd who homesteads, let me share the data I have gathered!
First is my megalist of homesteading-related links I’ve gathered over the years. I’m a mod over at r/homesteading and this is where I’ve put a lot of good sources (not all, admittedly some are still sitting in my bookmark folder waiting to be added). The search function at reddit is wretched, but there’s also been lots of good things I’ve shared there too. Please note that many of these sources are not actual webpages, but PDFs. That’s not an accident, PDFs are where you find the really good in-depth stuff.
Many of my sources are from the Extension Service. They won’t try to relate to you based on your lifestyle or sexual identity or religion or whatever, but due to that, they also won’t be alienating you either.
The Cooperative Extension Service (US only) exists in all 50 states and in most counties. It is taxpayer funded. The Extension Service exists to help people become more self sufficient, for farmers to be more successful, for people to be healthier, for kids to be well adjusted, to figure out how to grow the best plants in your area, etc. Some county offices even offer cheap classes in things like gardening, canning, soap making, and they’re taught by people with training in these areas (I once heard a great talk on composting from a soil scientist that way). Do you want to know what type of plant something is? Do you need help figuring out a plant disease or pest issue? You can now contact them online and get great info.
I HIGHLY recommend checking out your state’s extension service website, because they do offer different types of information, depending on what is grown/raised where you are (and how well funded they are). My county extension puts out a monthly gardening newsletter, which includes a helpful ‘this is the time of the year to do —-’ part.
Here’s an example from New York – they have a calendar at the bottom, showing how they have things like hydroponic and urban agriculture workshops coming up.
Interested in raising animals? Penn State Extension is really really good. They have tons of free materials and courses available online, some I pulled for my megalist at the top of this.
National Center for Home Food Preservation – they cover the important aspects of food safety, and also have some recipes. Many state Extension Service websites will have lots more recipes.
If you have kids, check out4-H programs for them. It’s part of the local public school system here. If you’re homeschooling, you can also purchase their science-filled educational and self sufficiency materials (materials are divided by age ranges – Cloverbud Member: ages 5-8, Junior Member: ages 9-13, Senior Member: ages 14-19). One of my coworkers is in 4-H, she’s still in high school, and last year she raised an award-winning heifer.
Congress grants the money for funding these programs, and they’re connected with various universities. There’s a level of cutting edge scientific knowledge and academic rigor you don’t find in blogs or even most books. There’s LOTS of homesteading books filled with outdated information like ‘till the earth every year’ hell I still have older coworkers who do it and I’m trying to figure out how to gently tell them that they’re destroying their soil that way, and that there’s better methods now, methods grounded in science.
whitemanning critical 