etage3

I'm not sure, but the grand-parent might be drawing from Hakim Bey's distinction between Net and Web. This is from TAZ, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991):

We’ve spoken of the Net, which can be defined as the totality of all information and communication transfer. Some of these transfers are privileged and limited to various elites, which gives the Net a hierarchic aspect. Other transactions are open to all — so the Net has a horizontal or non-hierarchic aspect as well. Military and Intelligence data are restricted, as are banking and currency information and the like. But for the most part the telephone, the postal system, public data banks, etc. are accessible to everyone and anyone. Thus within the Net there has begun to emerge a shadowy sort of counter-Net, which we will call the Web (as if the Net were a fishing-net and the Web were spider-webs woven through the interstices and broken sections of the Net). Generally we’ll use the term Web to refer to the alternate horizontal open structure of info-exchange, the non-hierarchic network, and reserve the term counter-Net to indicate clandestine illegal and rebellious use of the Web, including actual data-piracy and other forms of leeching off the Net itself. Net, Web, and counter-Net are all parts of the same whole pattern-complex — they blur into each other at innumerable points. The terms are not meant to define areas but to suggest tendencies.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-...

I think itake understands this and was making a point (an important one at that). Douglas R. Hofstadter made the same point (perhaps more eloquently) in "A Person Paper on Purity in Language"[0], which might be another avenue if you wish to understand what the parent comment was pointing at.

[0]https://www.angelfire.com/rebellion/personpaper/

Portugal decriminalised drugs in 2000 and this is regarded as a better solution. Drug use is treated as a health issue rather than a crime issue, and the results are better. See here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal

It also appears to be similar to Jakobson phatic function (checking if the channel is working).

Please, we can discuss art theory without political dimension.

Bourdieu discusses this very point in the Preface of The Rules of Art.

"(...) countless are those who forbid sociology any profaning contact with the work of art. (...) I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why they are so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational, understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the 'work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence."

A scientific understanding of art doesn't or negate or lower it. On the contrary : "(...) scientific analysis, when it is able to uncover what makes the work of art necessary, that is to say, its informing formula, its generative principle, its raison d'être, also furnishes artistic experience, and the pleasure which accompan­ies it with its best justification, its richest nourishment. Through it, sensible love of the work can fulfill itself in a sort of amor intellectualis rei the assimilation of the object to the subject and the immersion of the subject in the object, the active surrender to the singular necessity of the literary object (which, more often than not, is itself the product of a similar submission)."

It's a short but dense 5 page read.

The excessive detail is a necessity and a precaution. Researchers need that information (textual genetics or any art history for instance, maybe future archeology). A message can't be separated from the form it embodied; you need both to understand how an artwork has been received. Besides, you always want to preserve more information than what is needed today, just in case new ways to exploit data appear later. That's what archeology does when it refuses to exploit some sites and preserves them for later : maybe the current techniques destroy data, so we save some sites for later - just in case.

I use Scribus. It can be rough around the edges, but I've made everything with it (magazines, pamphlet, art books...). https://www.scribus.net/

French Guyana (1) (=part of the EU) requires a 10 day old yellow fever vaccination on entry.

(1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_fever#Compulsory_vaccin...

Speaking for France, but I suspect it is the same elsewhere: back in the day, the license exam was to build your own radio and operate it in front of an inspector, so it might be a remnant of that era. You also need to know this stuff to set up antennas.

Science is faith based for the non-scientific. As you put it yourself, it is about trusting studies and the institutions that produced it (including whatever in them creates the incentives for p-hacking).

I only ever look for old links in my mailbox (I either save them or send them to someone). So I use the Linkdrop add-on : one click, and it sends a daily e-mail with the links. Everything ends up being centralized and searchable in my mailbox, I'm happy with it. https://www.linkdrop.co/home

Another study on homemade masks: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258525804_Testing_t... "Both masks significantly reduced the number of microorganisms expelled by volunteers, although the surgical mask was 3 times more effective in blocking transmission than the homemade mask. Our findings suggest that a homemade mask should only be considered as a last resort to prevent droplet transmission from infected individuals, but it would be better than no protection."

Somewhat connected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21818730

Bloomberg received a release from vinci.group instead of vinci.com according to Le Monde's article. https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2019/12/16/l-agence-...

Galileo being right or wrong is not really pertinent for PG's argument. See this piece of his text appearing as a html comment: "When you suppress heresy, you silence not just your opponents but also everyone who contradicts you unintentionally. And because ideas are so interconnected, you're almost certainly silencing more people than you realize. "

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."

Aldous Huxley had a similar intuition in his essay, The Doors of Perception: the body perceives everything, and environment (including culture, traditions etc.) teaches the man to close some doors lest he be overwhelmed. Mescaline and other entheogens are a way to open most of the doors. Artists (such as Van Gogh) are people with a different set of doors open/closed.

r/woke is a flavour of r/thathappened focused on parents embellishing their kid's achievements. That said, it is interesting how we imagine (maybe expect) the next generation avoiding what we see as traps we fell in. Almost as if they were to save us from ourselves.

Common baguette is regarded as a low quality, industrial version of "real" bread (in France). Some traditional bakeries still use ancient methods (and flour and yeast), the bread is good to eat for more than a week.