Ben Webster

@[email protected]

[Ben Webster @bwebste]

@Maryamization @TimHenke9 Lrf, vg'f AL, AW naq Pbaarpgvphg.

[Ben Webster @bwebste]

@DiracDeltaFunk As they say, take it seriously, but not literally.

[Ben Webster @bwebste]

@DiracDeltaFunk I mean, I think you are taking this too literally; it’s normal to copy definitions to make sure you don’t mess them up. But, if there's literally no change you want to make, you should just cite the other paper.

[Ben Webster @bwebste]

@TimHenke9 I believe that's called a quarter-life crisis.

[Ben Webster @bwebste]

@miclugo @NoahJSnyder It's suddenly become strategically important because if Harris wins PA, MI and WI, but loses AZ, NV, GA, and NE-2, then it's an electoral college tie.

[Ben Webster @bwebste]

Emblematic of this is that 2008 was the only competitive presidential primary where I voted for the winner.

[Ben Webster @bwebste]

I'm not that invested in the specific argument here, but it got me thinking about how weird the 2008 primary was. We've never actually had another primary that competitive in the post-'68 system. What other election would give you a map like this?

[Noah Snyder @NoahJSnyder]

@firasd @mattyglesias Whereas with her Iraq positioning, absolutely not. And it’s why I didn’t vote for her in the 2016 primary, even though there I didn’t particularly like the other candidate.

[Ben Webster @bwebste]

@NoahJSnyder @firasd @mattyglesias It’s easy to forget now how deeply liberals despised Bush by 2007. Clinton’s vote for the war tied her inextricably to the most salient reason for that.

[Ben Webster @bwebste]

@NoahJSnyder @firasd @mattyglesias It also gave Obama a specific issue where he could differentiate himself from Clinton. It was key to his ability to attract attention, and all the things that flow from that (money, volunteers), even if that specific issue didn’t move *that* many people.

[Ben Webster @bwebste]

@LibWanderer @mnolangray @StatisticUrban Um, except for Canada, which is the most culturally similar to the US (Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver are all similar to London).

[Ben Webster @bwebste]

@TimHenke9 @heuristics @focusfronting The capitals give it feeling of Seriousness, and it has some familiar English features (using “ck”, writing “ie” instead of final “i”, no diacritics or weird things like “ij”). The number of j’s is probably a key reason Dutch looks strange.

[Ben Webster @bwebste]

@TimHenke9 @heuristics @focusfronting Right, I mean the point I was making was about spelling anyways. Something about the conventions in those languages that make them look kind of funny to English eyes in a way that, say, German doesn’t.

[Ben Webster @bwebste]

@TimHenke9 @focusfronting This is hard to explain, but something about the spelling of Dutch (and Skandanavian languages) just looks silly or childish to English speakers. The fact that words in those languages often look like badly spelled English words is definitely partly why.

[Ben Webster @bwebste]

@PowerStiering @StatisticUrban It also doesn't account for what the "uncomfortable" days are like. At least for some of us, uncomfortably cold is much more bearable than uncomfortably hot (essentially because of the second law of thermodynamics).

[Ben Webster @bwebste]

@PowerStiering @StatisticUrban The dewpoint setting is way too strict here; the Midwest has a lot of summer days which are perfectly pleasant, but maybe a little muggy by CA standards and this marks them as "uncomfortable."

[Ben Webster @bwebste]

@TimHenke9 @eigenknight Another way to say the same thing is that [1:z] and [z;1] are copes of C=R^2, and they are glued together by the map z-> 1/z, so it’s gluing two disks to make an S^2.

[Ben Webster @bwebste]

@TimHenke9 @rob_heighton Indeed.

[Ben Webster @bwebste]

@Quasilocal It’s actually gotten much worse. I’m the third result that’s an actual webpage, but there’s a bunch of non-webpage stuff mixed in:

[Ben Webster @bwebste]

@Quasilocal Depends a lot on how common your name is. This is the first thing I see when I Google myself.