This is the twice-weekly hidden open thread. Occasionally, there is talk here about machine learning. Anybody else attending NeurIPS? Or otherwise in Vancouver this week? Interested in meeting up for lunch, a beer, or whatever?
Usual disclaimer: anybody is welcome to get in touch, no particular competence, interest, level of extraversion, or political leaning required.
The old definition of an A-list movie star was someone that could carry a movie. That is, it would do at least okay regardless of anything else if it had that star in it. Does such a thing even exist anymore? Jennifer Lawrence comes to mind.
Vin Diesel is squeezing the last out of a few franchises. In fiction paricularly science-fiction and fantasy , kingdoms and hereditary monarchies can be good or bad, but empires are almost always evil. There have been various attempts to explain this trope, but I have a hypothesis that this is just another case of the victors writing history. The countries that went out of this war with the most damage to their reputation and territory where the large multicultural empires of Austria-Hungary, the Ottomans, and Russia which was on the entente side of the conflict but was prematurely forced out of the war.
Germany was more advanced in the process of nation-building, but the millions of Poles and other minorities living within it and being largely excluded from the project of the German nation effectively made its sitution similar to that of other Empires. Of the central powers, only Bulgaria really ressembled a modern nation-state at the time. By contrast, France, Italy, the UK, Serbia, Romania and the US were all well engaged in a process of cultural uniformisation and centralisation to various degrees, some more agressively than others, and WWI itself was a factor in this β originally French batalions were region-based and soldiers in them tended to communicate using their local dialect, but after these batalions were severely decimated in the early stages of the war, the soldiers found themselves mixed together in reconstructed batalions and from this point had to use French as a common language.
