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  3. ↪ Kyle Mahan: my dad always calls this “primacy and recency”, but apparently it’s Serial position effect

    @kyle_wm interesting, hadn’t heard of Serial Position Effect! And I like your dad’s terms. But what I was getting at (and inevitably didn’t communicate well) was not exactly that the items at the ends of a series are given greater mental weight, but that the relative orders of items at the ends is more emphasised than relative weights in the middle.

    E.G. in the example on that wikipedia page, of “smart, diligent, critical, impulsive, and jealous”, I suspect that the differences rank differences of (smart and diligent), and (implusive and jealous) are seen as more significant than of (diligent, critical) or (critical, implusive). Not sure if science backs this up (how would that even be measured?), but it’s something I’ve noticed.

  4. ↪ Feminist Frequency: I won't be speaking at any Utah institution again until such time as firearms are prohibited at schools. I encourage others to follow suit.

    @femfreq as a Brit it astonishes me that anyone wouldn’t ban guns in schools (or indeed in any other public place). Keep up the good work :)

  5. ↪ Kyle Mahan: Did you start with pineapple juice instead of water? IIRC, that’s what the Bread Baker’s Apprentice recommended and no matter how many times I diluted it, it stayed really fruity. Never could get it very sour though, I blame San Diego for not having interesting enough bacteria.

    @kyle_wm hmmm interesting, I’ve never heard that before! I just used tap water, maybe the idea with fruit juice is that it includes sugar which would feed the yeasts?

    Did you try using rye flour? AFAIK it has more variety of natural yeasts in than other flours, so you might have a better chance with that.

  6. Took a friend’s advice and abandoned my sadly gone-off sourdough culture. The new one has started very different in character to any of my previous cultures — not very bitter, quite fruity, and lots of bubbles. It might be due to this one being a lot wetter in consistency, whereas previous cultures were very thick.

  12. IE doesn’t upload csv files with text/* media type. Content-type cannot be trusted, the only way of telling if data is of a particular type is to see if it parses successfully.

  13. I started the hundredpushups.com challenge last week. Unexpectedly, I found myself in the hardest of the three categories, but sailed through the week 1 without much of a problem. Just finished the first day of week 2 and OUCH this is getting more difficult now.

  14. Turns out there’s a difference between actual rest and “not doing anything because you’re burnt out”. Won’t be making that mistake again (hopefully).

    Diagnosis tip: both often involve not doing very much. Actual, voluntary rest feels good. Being burnt out feels bad.

  15. ↪ LouLouK: Intensely enjoyed Countryfile feature on mediavel musical instruments. I know want a harp. I was supposed to be learning to fiddle :0)

    @loulouk a harp is probably perfect for someone with “hyper extendy fingers” :) If you want to go fully medieval, get one with bray pins for extra buzzing. You’re in London, right? There’s an Early Music Shop outlet there, IIRC they have a bunch of harps and would probably be delighted to let you try one earlymusicshop.com/London.aspx

  20. Opinions about icelandiconline.is as a place to learn Icelandic online? Been working through the lessons on-and-off over the past few weeks and, despite atrocious UI design and hilariously bad videography have found it adequate for a free resource. The fact that it’s completely in Icelandic is also nice.