• they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)


not even eight bits! only seven, because seven bits suffice to represent an integer percentage.

I've been thinking about this a while but I was sharply reminded by today's news about the "Bored Ape NFT" event where they apparently flooded the audience with ultraviolet light (why, it's not clear to me) and sent some attendees to hospital with skin and eye burns. https://archive.ph/ctdW7

never fear: "Yuga Labs, the blockchain company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT project, says it’s aware of the situation and taking the reports seriously." what a relief! but Yuga Labs publicist Emily Kitts hastened to reassure The Verge that the injuries were negligible anyway—after all that's an important part of a publicist's job, trying to make their client's crimes look as small and trivial as possible. thus Ms. Kitts comes out with this very telling statement:

Based on our estimates, the 15 people we’ve been in direct communication with so far represent less than one percent of the approximately 2,250 event attendees and staff at our Saturday night event.

less than one percent. gosh, that's practically nothing!

"techno-optimist" nerds are hopelessly in love with numbers and statistics—without quite understanding how either numbers or statistics actually work—but they especially adore percentages partly because of this simple trick. "one percent" becomes roughly equivalent to "nothing", or at least "nothing worth worrying about", depending upon context. any percentage less than one percent is definitely equivalent to "negligible", and used rhetorically in such a manner. 0.1% of the American population is still about three hundred thousand persons, for instance, but never mind that—no "free-thinking" geekbro is going to worry their heads about fractions of a percentage point.

there's another side to this coin: because 1% of a very large number is still a large number, ambitious entrepreneurs and other such persons like to sling about small percentages when doing handwavy calculations and projections about how much money they're bound to make from some get-rich-quick scheme of theirs. Dan Olson's famous documentary about blockchain scams features a particular amusing quote from an NFT grifter optimistically talking about how there's a multibillion dollar "addressable market" of comic-book fans who might be interested in some ridiculous "NFTIT" scheme (featuring crude pixel art of boobs) and if they only capture one percent of this market, then they're all gonna be rolling in money! the near-triviality of 1% now serves to make the projected riches ("THIS IS A CASH FLOW!!") seem like a conservative prediction. imagine just how much richer you'll be if you get as much as TWO percent of the enormous heap of money.

and if you really want to sound impressive while abusing percentages in this way, you call them "p-values" instead. why say "1%" when you can say "p = 0.01"? it's more scientific.

~Chara


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