Up to the episode where Elisa gets turned into a gargoyle for a while....

[conuly]

Something I'd forgotten until this rewatch-binge is how very much TV back in the 90s harped on how dangerous things had gotten, how times had changed, especially in the big cities. In fact, as far as the crime rate goes, 1994 marked the start of a long-running downward trend in most American cities - especially NYC. The city wasn't getting worse and worse, it was getting safer and safer.

I love this episode, but I can only watch it in tiny bursts, a little at a time. I have feelings about it. First and foremost, there's the confirmation that yeah, Demona does know why she hates Elisa so much. And then Elisa is a gargoyle, thinks she's always been that way, and she's just so happy hugging Goliath. Aw. Now, Word of God is that she already consciously knew how she felt, but he didn't, so this was all very uncomfortably surprising for him. From my view, it looks like it comes pretty much out of nowhere, especially on his side. This is probably because the show could have really benefited from a longer first season, time to get all our emotional and character ducks in a neat little row. We're told that there's a month or so between episodes in that first season (though I'm not entirely convinced that the artists know how the moon works) but without actually seeing the character growth it's like "Oh, now Goliath and Elisa are starcrossed" and "Oh, now Lex is a mechanical/computer genius" and "Oh, now Hudson's blind buddy is a bona fide friend and not an acquaintance" and "Oh, now Matt Bluestone is worth paying attention to" and so on. They could have used a little breathing room, is all.

Also, Puck, you know darn well what Demona meant, but still, well played - and Demona, if you were a little more prone to careful thought you would have certainly known what he meant.

Also also, in the comics Elisa and Goliath finally get over themselves and the species difference, so yay. But then there's no more comics :(

********************************************

Researchers Discover a Pattern to the Seemingly Random Distribution of Prime Numbers (I don't understand this even a little, but I am so excited anyway!)

Hawaii’s Freemason Kings

Eat, pray, farm: U.S. churches turn faith lands into food

Why Don’t More Boys Read Little Women?

Dismantling the “West”

Facebook Accused of Allowing Bias Against Women in Job Ads

Microplastics may enter foodchain through mosquitoes

Millions of Americans still trapped in debt-logged homes ten years after crisis

It’s 2018 and Candidates Are Still Running Attack Ads Against Iraq War Protesters

There’s Nothing Natural About Puerto Rico’s Disaster

Parents face tougher rules to get immigrant children back

Slamming the door - How Trump transformed U.S. refugee program

'People will die': Obama official's warning as Trump slashes refugee numbers

Black Patients Miss Out On Promising Cancer Drugs

Murdered man's body found after tree 'unusual for the area' grew from seed in his stomach

When Prisoners Say #MeToo

Doctors Regularly Give Anesthesized Patients Non-Consensual Pelvic Exams — And This Needs To Stop (I... kinda don't want to believe this so I'm weighing heavily on the fact that I don't know enough but... idk anymore)

A Warning From Europe: The Worst Is Yet to Come

Shell and Exxon's secret 1980s climate change warnings

Bye bye bugs? Scientists fear non-pest insects are declining

Comments

[coyotegoth]

You're definitely making me want to check this show out.

[conuly]

You will not regret it.

[hudebnik]

If you "don't understand" the prime-number article, it's because there isn't enough substance there to understand. Somebody found a new way of visualizing the distribution of prime numbers that is somehow analogous to X-ray crystallography (it must be a pretty distant analogy, since physical crystals are 3-dimensional and the natural numbers are 1-dimensional), and found some kind of structure in that visualization that's both "fractal" and only apparent at large scales (which sounds like a contradiction, since "fractal" usually means something that looks similar no matter what scale you magnify it to). That's all I can make of it without reading the original journal article. I'll see whether I can make anything of the original journal article.

[hudebnik]

OK, the original journal article is behind a paywall, but the Quanta article is both free and more substantial than the Motherboard article.

The visualization picks out the sizes of differences between primes. All primes except 2 are odd, so almost all pairs of primes are a multiple of 2 apart; furthermore, there are lots of pairs of primes exactly 2 apart (it's been believed for hundreds of years, but is still unproven, that there are infinitely many such pairs), so this shows up in the visualization as a big peak at 2 and, in general, peaks at all multiples of 2. There are relatively few pairs of primes a multiple of 4 apart, but far more a multiple of 6 apart, so the peak at 6 and its multiples is bigger than the peak at 4 and its multiples.

As you look at more and more of these peaks, you see a consistent pattern in which big peaks have smaller peaks various fractions of the way in between them, those smaller peaks have even smaller peaks various fractions of the way in between them, etc. Think of a ruler that has big marks every inch, smaller marks every half inch, still smaller ones every quarter inch, etc. except that this is happening not only by halves, but also by thirds and other fractions.

None of this tells us anything we didn't already know about primes, but it's an interesting pattern of peaks that hasn't shown up before in other phenomena that have patterns of peaks. A perfect physical crystal has peaks a consistent distance apart, like a ruler with only inch markers. A "quasicrystal" has higher peaks and lower peaks, but the lower peaks are irrationally spaced between the higher peaks, as though you had a ruler with big marks at 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. and smaller marks at sqrt(2) ~= 1.414, sqrt(3) ~= 1.732, pi ~= 3.1416, etc. This pattern, with lower peaks spaced at fractions between higher peaks, is somewhere in between -- less orderly than crystals, but more orderly than quasicrystals.

Does that help?

[conuly]

So, one of the reasons I'm not homeschooling through high school is that the areas of math I'm proficient in don't go past high school.

So that helps a little, but possibly not as much if I knew more about the subject.

[hudebnik]

The cool thing about number theory is that a lot of the questions can be explained to somebody with a high school math background (although the answers usually can't).

For example, the famous Twin Primes Conjecture says that there are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by 2 (like 3 and 5, 5 and 7, 11 and 13, 17 and 19, etc.) That only requires high school math to understand, and to be flabbergasted that it's been an open question for 200 years or so. Understanding the recent research that has made substantial progress on it, on the other hand, requires more mathematical background than I have (my Ph.D. was in other areas of math). One such result, dated 2013, shows that although we don't know whether it's true for 2, there is SOME number less than 70,000,000 (yes, really!) such that there are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by exactly that number. Subsequent research reduced the 70,000,000 to 246; if they could reduce it to 3, they would have proven the twin prime conjecture. I have no earthly idea where the 70,000,000 or 246 came from; those are just the sorts of bizarre things that happen in number theory.

Anyway, if you know what "odd", "multiple", "prime", "fraction", and "irrational" mean, and have read my summary above, you now know approximately as much about this research as I do. "Peak", in this case, simply means something like marks on a ruler.

[calimac]

It's clear to me, and I never got that far in school math either.

[rhoda_rants]

Our library annual manga/anime/comic fest had a panel on 90s animation, and Gargoyles was on it. Made me think of you. :) I really need to watch this show...

[conuly]

Yes, you do.

[rhoda_rants]

...and after reading a couple of the linked articles: Okay, I want to read Little Women again now. I did have to read it in school, but that was my second time with it, and at the end of the year we watched the 1933 movie which introduced me to Katherine Hepburn. <3 Then I read it at least two more times. (And watched the 1994 movie with Winona Ryder twice.)

The article from the prison is really sad. It's both encouraging that the #MeToo moving is actively changing hearts and minds, but really depressing that so many "ordinary" people still struggle with the concept.

[greghousesgf]

I was one of those girls who was always reading and so were my friends but none of us read Little Women. Maybe it was a generational thing because most of our moms and grandmothers had read it?

[rhoda_rants]

Dunno. I might've been in the last generation that had it assigned in class, because I know my brother didn't have to read it. I have no idea whether my mom read it as a kid or not, but that probably wouldn't have have made a difference. We share all our favorite books still.

Little Women

[hudebnik]

As it happens, I downloaded Little Women to my phone and started reading it a month or two ago. I usually only read it while I'm underground and don't have cell signal, so I haven't used it up yet.

One point in the article struck a chord with me: Laurie is on the outside looking in, sometimes invited in as a guest but always aware that he's a guest, just as female characters and female readers have been for many years to male-oriented fiction. I can sympathize with Laurie because, reading a book about a self-sufficient household of five women, I feel some of the same thing. Then again, I've frequently found myself in that situation in real life: the only man in an SCA household of half a dozen women, the only straight man at an SCA costume workshop, the only man at a dining table full of women at Kalamazoo, etc.

I guess the other thing that strikes me is how un-self-conscious and un-cynical the girls are about Trying To Be Good And Pious. In the first chapter or two, my impression was "they really are insufferable prigs, aren't they?" but as the book goes on, it becomes clear that this really is the way they sincerely think about duty and morality... and that they spend a lot of time thinking about duty and morality.

[wpadmirer]

The story about the fig tree is both sad and wonderful.

The MeToo and the prisoners - well, shit. Yeah.

[mindstalk]

Leaded gas! (crime)

[conuly]

YES! I FULLY BELIEVE IN THE LEAD-CRIME HYPOTHESIS.

[nocowardsoul]

I am surprised and delighted by all the men who liked Little Women!

When I was a child I never by my own choosing read a book about a boy. Only female MCs or mixed ensembles like the Bailey School Kids.

[archangelbeth]

Of course cities get safer when you get a gargoyle flock there!
O-:>
(Halo onna stick)

[conuly]

I wish.