I have the distinct impression that we could use most American "sci-fi" TV series (which seem to have a kink for post-apocalyptical scenographies) as a diagnostic tool for the autism spectrum.
For a moment, let's leave aside the tons of right-wing propaganda "hidden" in plain sight, and their excessive reliance on boring & worn out tropes (religious & cultish bullshit, irrational lack of communication & excess of anti-social behaviour, all vs all, ultra-low-iq characters*, psychotic & irrationally treacherous characters*, ultra-inconsistent character development used to justify "unexpected" plot twists, rampant anti-intellectualism...).
What could be used as a diagnosis tool is the incredible amount of strong inconsistencies that we can find in them**. It throws me out of the story every single time; and I suspect that it takes a certain kind of "uncommon personality" to feel that way about it, because otherwise these series wouldn't be so popular without real widespread criticism beyond cliches like "too slow", "it loses steam towards the end of the season", etc.
Many of those plots start in a gold mine of potentially powerful ideas... yet they consistently provide us with dirt & clay instead, while side-lining the "good stuff" as if it was too complicated for the populace.
Do you feel strongly about it? Do you feel like you can't verbalize it without being criticised as "too negative", or "too picky", or an "unbearable snob"? Do you wonder why it seems like nobody around shares your discomfort with these stories?
* : I feel this is a bit like the chicken & egg problem. Has the media conditioned part of American society to behave like dumb psychopaths as if it was something "natural", or is the media reflecting what was already there? Also, could we use other societies as models for these stories... just for a change? Please?
** : Just a tiny example: a "brilliant" engineer who builds a bridge out of fence parts and who doesn't bother to perform the most basic tests before trying it in a real setting and suffer the consequences: the bridge failing and her falling into the void. Bonus points for anyone who knows what I'm talking about.
Quantum State Recovery via Direct Sum Formalism Without Measurement Outcomes
Taiga Suzuki, Masayuki Ohzeki
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11066 https://arxiv.o…
It is another finished-a-book-and-can't-determine-what-type-of-book-I-want-to-read-next day. This is most challenging when I really enjoyed the book I've just finished, because usually I'm hoping to recapture the feeling of it with the next book and have to hunt for something that will match up to it without being so similar that it gets them jumbled in my mind.
Constructing crowded Hausdorff $P$-spaces in set theory without the axiom of choice
Eleftherios Tachtsis, Eliza Wajch
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11935 https://
For #Caturday, a reminder that Widget remains available for adoption in the NYC metro area. She would prefer a calm house without kids (we are not a calm house). She's super affectionate! #CatsOfMastodon
"Fixed Crust King Khann sometimes falling out of bounds during entry, when fought on low-end systems" must be the funniest patch note I've read in a while!
Imagine beating all 38 waves of the Coral Tower gauntlet (which, since you're playing on a low-end system, will likely lag and stutter) without finding the shortcut after the third arena, entering the boss arena and then... he just falls out of screen! 🤣
Collapsibility and Near Universality for Vertex Minimal Paper Tori
Peter Doyle, Richard Evan Schwartz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12623 https://arxiv.org/pd…
Rome Odunze not fretting over dad's shots at Bears following WR's catchless game vs. Bengals https://www.nfl.com/news/rome-odunze-not-fretting-over-dad-s-shots-at-bears-following-wr-s-catchless-game-vs-bengals
Austria's privacy regulator finds that Microsoft violated EU law by illegally tracking students through its Microsoft 365 Education software (Suzanne Smalley/The Record)
https://therecord.media/microsoft-violated-eu-law-austria
The Venn Diagram of Perceived Loneliness...
Just came across this again in my archives — it so brutally & succinctly expresses the feeling our cultures & social connections seem to have turned into... Even though we should know that it isn't like that at all, two decades of exploitative commercialized social media (not the only reason; pandemic, tech, politics being others...) have conditioned & segmented people to believe it, experience it to varying degrees, and then …