content note: discussion of biological sex and a binary classification thereof
Update: Maybe one point warrants a bit more clarification: I indeed believe that people use definitions as weapons. Especially definitions about sensitive topics. And this definitely is one. I also think that quite a few people who commented on this thread seemed to take this as a ‘gotcha moment’ to validate sometimes very problematic opinions regarding trans people. I do not endorse this – … more
A powerful testimony to the advances AI has made in the last years: thispersondoesnotexist.com
Make sure to check out the “How it works” links that appear in the bottom right of the page after a while.
I came across an interesting article titled The Greatest Privilege We Never Talk About: Beauty. My favorite quote:
I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future we use deepfake technology to make criminal defendants’ looks homogeneously beautiful (or ugly).
The Atlantic has an interesting opinion piece called College Sports Are Affirmative Action for Rich White Students. In the US it is quite common for colleges (also including elite universities like Harvard and Yale) to admit a significant portion (often around 20 percent) of their students based more on athletic performance than on academic achievements. Even if you don’t subscribe to the racial perspective taken by the article, it becomes fairly evident that this highly advantages those who have … more
Most people think of aging as something inevitable. But not all agree and the research into aging and how to reverse it has become more and more prominent over the last couple of years. Most attempts to slow or reverse aging have of course been conducted in rats and mice. They focused, for example, on giving older animals blood or plasma concentrates from younger animals or simply replacing some of the old plasma with albumin.
Covid-19 has stirred up a lot of discussions about the ethics of science. I have written before about experiments on humans to learn more about the virus and help speed up the development of a vaccine. If you are interested in this, you might want to have a look at 1 Day Sooner. They advocate for a quick introduction of human trials, arguing that speeding up the development of a vaccine could help save thousands of lives. Some of … more
I really wasn’t aware of that for a long time, but for anyone who is using R, these R Cheat Sheets can prove tremendously helpful. They have a short overview for functionality in many packages. There is one for ggplot2, one for working with times and dates, one for package development, even one for doing maps in R, and many more.
It was only today that I learned that China, in effect, has two different currencies. I’m not even trying to get the nomenclature right, but the relevant terms are Yuan and Renminbi and they both somewhat overlap in meaning.
What makes China’s system a dual currency system is that they have a separation between onshore currency (that can only be used on the mainland) and offshore currency (used for international transactions, but not on the mainland). The exchange … more
In 2016 Alexandra Elbakyan was listed as one of the top 10 people who mattered in science by Nature. And indeed, her impact on science was and is profound. Elbakyan is the founder of Sci-Hub.
Sci-Hub is a platform where you can download millions and millions of journal articles for free. These articles are taken from journals that restrict access behind a paywall and are made available to users. Technically, this is not legal, but the … more
Apart from doxxing bloggers, the New York Times is known for their rich visualizations. The one in this article on the average tax rate paid by the rich in the US is not disappointing.
The gist is this: tax rates for the rich have fallen while tax rates for the poor have risen. We all know this. But seeing it with your own eyes, is quite a different thing. What is especially puzzling is that we all take this … more
