Peri Dwyer Worrell

Biomedical copy editor, novelist, poet. Retired chiropractor boarded in pediatrics and certified in acupuncture. Pilot. Grandma.

[FilmLadd @FilmLadd]

Can't stand it when something in the news pops the Gell-Mann amnesia bubble for me.

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.”

[Peri Dwyer Worrell @dcperi]

@metroadlib No, silly! That will only happen for another year or two.

After that, the AI will start rewriting your words as you type, automatically, with no opt-out.

[Peri Dwyer Worrell @dcperi]

@RockChartrand I do have sympathy for people who are corralled into taking out enormous student loans at the age of 18 with the naive self-confidence of youth.

[Peri Dwyer Worrell @dcperi]

@kevinnbass If you hadn’t been educated, though, you wouldn’t even know how academia is failing to live up to its ideals.

[Peri Dwyer Worrell @dcperi]

@shagbark_hick Look up the origin of the words “jukebox” and “juke joint” some time. Many stereotypes of rural southern people are based on impressions of rural New York in the 19th century.

[Jonatan Pallesen @jonatanpallesen]

An important article. The historical success of Irish and Italien immigrants depended on large scale remigration.

https://t.co/pBXAgGHnu6

[Peri Dwyer Worrell @dcperi]

The cognitive dissonance is striking.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

Every generation thinks it's living through the darkest period in history. Most of them weren't saying it while holding a supercomputer with air conditioning, antibiotics, clean water, and food delivered to their door.

[Scott Hickle @ScottHickle]

The Affordable Care Act caps insurance profits at 20%

Sounds reasonable, right?

NO! Not at all!

In practice it means that insurance companies would rather pay a sticker price if $1000 than $100, because their profit is $200 instead of $20 for the same service.

They’re incentivized to pay more, and obviously the hospitals are happy to charge more.

It’s sinister!!

[Peri Dwyer Worrell @dcperi]

@DisaffectedPod Innumeracy

[Chris Martz @ChrisMartzWX]

“Science” may say one thing.

But the evidence says another.

El Niño events have become weaker and fewer over the last four decades. There has been a tendency toward a more La Niña-like base state, which was not what was originally predicted.

🔗 https://t.co/sDskDRUMtT

Some modern research suggests there could be greater oscillation between the two phases of ENSO, but observations thus far suggest that is not the case.

[Peri Dwyer Worrell @dcperi]

@DocPriyamMD I remember in the 1990s when I was practicing pediatric chiropractic, there was a fad for pediatricians to prescribe PPIs to newborns who spit up “too much.” Hope that practice is discredited!

[Peri Dwyer Worrell @dcperi]

@BozoProzo That’s a horrible basis for morality! The unavoidable corollary is that everything that needs to be done must be done by everyone. 🤪

[Peri Dwyer Worrell @dcperi]

@MrDanielBuck Common sense for centuries.

[Peri Dwyer Worrell @dcperi]

@Favwontmiss I was 32 when I was telling a therapist about things my parents had done to me and she said, “Were you abused?”
I said “No. It wasn’t abuse. It was just…”
And then I realized there was no other word for it.

[Peri Dwyer Worrell @dcperi]

@prieurdp @theBackSheep351 If you have bigger problems, you especially don’t want to get stuck by idiots also trying to leave who won’t let you back out!

[Peri Dwyer Worrell @dcperi]

You have to back up at some point—either entering or leaving the space. So you inconvenience other drivers when you back out, and people are less likely to notice you’re moving when you start from a parking place than when you start from the lane of traffic.
Now that most cars have backup cameras, backing in helps people park centered and straight in the spot.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Every annoying password rule you follow, the capital letter, the number, the symbol, changing it every few months, came from one man at a US government office in 2003. He was mostly guessing. Years later, he went public and apologized to all of us.

The password is older than that rule, and it was a mess from day one. It was born at MIT in 1961, when a scientist named Fernando Corbató built one of the first computers many people could share at once. Since everyone shared that one machine, he needed to keep each person's files separate. His fix was the password. He never meant it as serious security, just to stop casual snooping.

It didn't even do that much. Every password sat in one plain file anyone with access could read. In the spring of 1962, an MIT student named Allan Scherr hit his four-hour-a-week limit and wanted more. One Friday night he asked the system to print that file, then grabbed the whole list Saturday morning. He logged in as other people and passed the list around to friends. The password was about a year old, and it was already broken.

The man behind the rules you hate was Bill Burr, and in 2003 he wrote an eight page guide on building a password. He told everyone to add a capital letter, a number, and a symbol, and to switch to a new one every 90 days. Banks, schools, and offices copied it word for word. That is why your login still wants a symbol and a number you can't recall. He had almost no proof any of it worked. He leaned on a paper from the 1980s, before the internet existed, when almost no one had studied what made a password safe.

In 2017, he came clean. He told the Wall Street Journal, "Much of what I did I now regret." Forcing a new password every few months just taught the lazy move, bumping Rosebud1 to Rosebud2 to Rosebud3, which a computer cracks in seconds. So the same office threw the rules out. The new advice is to skip the symbols and forced changes and use a long, plain phrase. A cartoonist named Randall Munroe ran the numbers. A phrase like "correct horse battery staple" would take a computer about 550 years to crack, while a rules-style password like "Tr0ub4dor&3" falls in three days.

People have leaned on spoken passwords for roughly 3,000 years. Roman soldiers had a code word for the night guard, and during Prohibition you needed the right phrase to get into the bar. But there was only ever one of them, just for that night. The same brain that once held a single code word now has to track 120 of them, each with a capital and a symbol, half guarding accounts you forgot you ever made. So no, the human spirit was not built for this. One man's shaky guess in 2003 just made it hurt a whole lot more.

[Peri Dwyer Worrell @dcperi]

@ChrisMartzWX I think you’d find yourself contracting for a lot of things you now take for granted. And slums would get super slummy because their residents couldn’t afford to contract for those services.

[Community Notes & Violations @CNviolations]

So they follow rules where they are enforced