Connor Harris @Connor@schelling.pt

@mattparlmer if you stopped posting on Twitter I’d lose one of the few things that still keep me logging in there occasionally (though I’ve firmly resolved no longer to participate in discussions)

When I'm reading or using a computer, I also try to keep my eyes just far enough back that focus is slightly difficult (though this has been a habit for a bit).

Results so far are promising. I've checked my binocular vision with a vision chart every morning in a bright room. I've gone from struggling over the 20/50 line to getting most of a 20/40 and 20/32 lines this morning. I can also look at objects a meter away without blur, suggesting my myopia is down to 1 diopter.

Update to reading glasses experiment (https://schelling.pt/@Connor/105560944173150582). For four days I've been going without my contact lenses (-1.25 diopters) and wearing +2.75 reading glasses almost constantly, including for distance vision (except for watching TV). Theoretically, this means I can't focus perfectly on anything more than 1/(1.25 D + 2.75 D) = 25 cm from my face. I also go on frequent outdoor walks where I try to focus on distant sharp-edged objects as best as I can through the reading glasses.

CNN inauguration coverage rn is revoltingly propagandistic, laying on the West Wing schmaltz so thick you could stand a flagpole up in it

Has to be proto-Slavic because the cognates show a standard sound correspondence in which vowel+liquid becomes liquid+vowel (in West and South Slavic) or vowel+liquid+duplicate vowel (in East Slavic) - see also Pol. mleko and Russian молоко "milk" (both from a Germanic borrowing), or the Russian cities with names in -град (Old Church Slavonic borrowing) or -город (native East Slavic form).

TIL the usual Slavic words for "king" (e.g. Russian король, Polish król) come from a borrowing into Proto-Slavic of the name "Karl," as in Charlemagne.

Still have not seen any cogent argument that we shouldn’t have just let people buy experimental vaccines in February

@max Navalny has earned the right to be cringe, give him a break

@Navertal yeah. TBH this is the best way to appreciate all pre-1800 music—the early masters were working with a tiny vocabulary of harmonies and instrumental textures, and the leap from Mozart to even a very conservative early Romantic like Mendelssohn is enormous if you’re attuned to it.

Someone please tell me that learning Russian, Chinese and Arabic simultaneously is a bad idea.

I’ve been waiting for something like this

https://mobile.twitter.com/YearCovid

@Navertal As one example, I took a college music theory course that was 80% Italian Baroque music (which is usually pleasant but a bit cliche and repetitive). After spending three months listening to it intensively and doing exercises like composing in Baroque style, I had internalized the musical idiom enough that the genre's cliches just made sense in an incredibly satisfying way, and the little innovations in works by more adventurous composers like Bach actually sounded revolutionary.

@Navertal I've noticed this for music genres

I’m bewildered by the continuing prevalence of the idea that STEM people need humanities courses to be ethical, when so many of the worst decisions of the past year come from bureaucrats applying bad received ethical theories while the techbros (among others) screamed at them to stop.

@DCLXVI oooh, I like this

@roguewpa oh, one mobile client has “awoo mode” that changes all occurrences of “toot” to “awoo.” I guess that’s the default on some other clients

@roguewpa lol did you turn on awoo mode in your client?

Roscoe is unironically one of the top entries on my shortlist of names for my hypothetical son tbh