Mendel really fucked up by being an 1800s monk and not a medieval monk
he did, didn't he??
i don’t think this is exactly true, but from glancing over the wikipedia articles on the neocortex and the cerebellum, it sure looks like all of the vertebrates with a high encephalization quotient got there by taking the part of the brain devoted to the sense of smell and making it Big
what is it about the Nose that compels us to sentience
It seems that scientists are often attracted to beautiful theories in the way that insects are attracted to flowers—not by logical deduction, but by something like a sense of smell.
I was skimming parts of Cerebral Cortex: Principles of Operation, and one thing I thought was interesting is that it has this chapter
where it first goes through several pages about how visual processing works. This is all really fascinating, it drills down into the very components of subjective visual experience, the stuff of perceptual consciousness itself.
And then it switches to talking about the processing of taste. What a letdown, who cares about that?
Well, it turns out, it’s literally what we care about!
Like, you can trace the connection directly from the taste neurons to the utility function of the monkey.
Are you familiar with Basshunter? Seems like the sort of thing that might amuse you: /watch?v=bpRRVS1ci40
I’ve never actually listened to the original,
and I don’t recall the remix either, although it’s getting more familiar,
incredibly there’s a Crazy Frog remix I wasn’t aware of,
and I was going to post a nightcore remix of the remix of the remix which surely I must have heard but honestly.
why yes YouTube, I would appreciate the *checks notes* "Phav & Deliriouz Hardstyle Bootleg" remix of Wellerman set to random rave clips.
regularly think of all the tuberculosis patients over the centuries undergoing treatments that did absolutely nothing for them and think damn, sometimes admitting you don’t have a clue is the first step to improvement
international shipping is so wild because like instinctually your assumption is that it's probably catastrophically bad for the environment but the enormous capacity of the modern cargo ship and the extremely low resistance of being a boat means that even with all the chicanery around burning different grades of fuel in different jurisdictions cargo ships come out extraordinarily efficient per kilogram transported, I think they even beat out trains.
While there are situations where something locally produced or manufactured will have a lower transport carbon footprint than a long distance import, that's by no means certain, especially if you live near a bulk rail station that connects to the coast.
also easier to ship someone a bicycle than the iron ore and coal necessary to smelt the steel with which to manufacture a bicycle
yeah although usually this means we just ship the iron and the coal to China in the middle!
centralised mass production allows for capital intensive investment in logistics, like the AutoHaul trains that carry iron ore in Western Australia:
The autonomous train, consisting of three locomotives and carrying around 28,000 tonnes of iron ore, travelled over 280 kilometres from our mining operations in Tom Price to the port of Cape Lambert. It was monitored remotely by operators from our Operations Centre in Perth more than 1,500 kilometres away.
no human drivers!
In a manual system, every time one driver ends their shift and another comes on board, the train needs to stop. On a typical journey a train will stop three times, adding more than an hour to the journey. The trains that move iron ore from the mines to the port for shipping are 2.4 kilometres long.
"The time-saving benefit is enormous because the train network is a core part of the mining operation. If we can prevent those stoppages, we can keep the network ticking over, allowing more ore to be transported to the ports and shipped off more efficiently," says Lido.
"The other major benefit is safety," he continues. "We are removing the need to transport drivers 1.5 million kilometres each year to and from trains as they change their shift. This high-risk activity is something that driverless trains will largely reduce."
Freight rail companies will see a high capacity iron ore line and be like "is anyone going to push rail technology to the limits of its capacity" and not wait for an answer.
The Sishen-Saldanha iron ore line isn't autonomous but it's got one driver, one copilot, and a four kilometer long train
do you like the color of the train
I’m curious about the business as usual scenario for America under Trump.
How average could things get.
I think that’s basically Trump going around making appearances at rallies and gladhanding while Pence and the rest repeal Obamacare, do some tax/spending cuts and deregulate somewhat. That all assumes that nothing big happens overseas, which even without Trump is something that seems unlikely and make me thing that this presidency could be “un-average” regardless of the victor.
The dems might use the filibuster to stop that, but they’re more reluctant to do it and they have to deal with the budget process and independence of executive agencies, so they might be able to stop some of the above, but I’m not sure how much.
On the edge of “average” there’s things like the Ryan budget, medicare voucherization, maybe even social security reform that I’m not sure if they can or want to pass.
davidsevera said: Oh, typical stagnating incomes, typical new unwinnable wars, typical skyrocketing partisan rancor
it’s going to be interesting – and by interesting I mean super dull – to see how closely reality tracks these predictions.
well I guess the global pandemic blew that out of the water.
no new wars though, and Obamacare relatively unscathed?
curious what you’d tell people to expect back in 2016, and how they’d take it.
the notebook in Death Note does not actually allow you to do anything impossible, merely improbable, and since the shinigami could be merely a shared hallucination (except for Ryuk’s apple eating, damn him!) one could interpret the entire story as just an incredible coincidence involving no supernatural activity whatsoever.
the other possibility is that it shunts you into the branch of the multiverse in which whatever outcome you requested takes place, given that the outcome has to be one that could have taken place and thus in some branch it actually did, although since that wouldn’t prune any of the other branches it suggests that the notebook appears to be a regular notebooks for almost everyone who picks it up except for one incredibly lucky/unlucky person who finds it always works.
what if everyone you got mad at instantly died, not because of you but just because of an incredible series of coincidences
when a popular post goes around it typically has a few comments attached at the bottom like “omg” or “I’m screaming”; these are the Tumblr laugh track
injygo
holy shit
yeah just like that.
did you know that because most terrible tumblr replies were made in the 1950′s so almost all those bloggers are now dead
deactivated but not forgotten.
imagining what kind of terrifying scenario could actually result in someone being “lost in the sauce”
You know those cases of entrapment in grain silos? Like that, but some kind of massive vat of liquid. Bonus points if it is somehow chaotic and turbulent.
I was thinking of the Boston molasses flood meeting the Boston vinegar flood and creating the Boston bbq sauce flood
"reluctantly crouched at the starting line" is such a great line to start a song, I mean why reluctantly? which asshole is forcing these guys to race??
Perhaps the reluctance is not to race, but to crouch specifically. Perhaps they would rather be moonwalking (wouldn’t we all).
also the song appears to be describing a car race...
Well, traditionally at Le Mans all the drivers had to sprint to their cars at the start of the race
should be first come first served, whoever gets to the car gets to drive it
some people are still moved by “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!” even after everything that came afterwards in the same way that some people are still moved by “Blessed are the meek” even after everything that came afterwards, but I think it’s another thing entirely to be moved by “War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it” once you’ve seen the aftermath.
some people are still moved by “I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was…”
Imagine how much better cultural criticism would be if people would just let themselves say, “I find this aesthetically repugnant and I don’t feel like working backwards to make a whole ideological structure to justify that feeling”
conversely “I enjoy this and feel no need to claim that it’s feminist”
Anonymous asked:
i don't get how evolution is incompatible with not-strictly-materialist metaphysics. like, obviously it does not *require* them, but afaict neither does it require their absence. e.g. to go back to the buddhism ask anon: what about reincarnation makes it incompatible with evolution?
I'm not sure if the Buddhist position on reincarnation is coherent enough to even critique, but its social function is clearly the same as every other afterlife concept: an attempt to rescue the Just World fallacy from the obvious observation that many people have miserable lives who don't seem to deserve them, when the universe in general and evolution in particular obviously has no concept of anyone "deserving" anything, and why would it.
so sure, you can say that "you" are having a shitty time of it because some prior aspect of the vague pattern of humanity committed immoral acts in the past and this is karma, but you run into two immediate problems:
- how far back into prehistory do you have to go before either nobody was suffering or the immoral acts don't count because they're all unicellular creatures?
- if everyone stops being immoral tomorrow is cancer going to just magically disappear?
the only way to make any of this stuff work is to say that it's advice on living a good life or mental tips for reducing suffering, like thinking of reincarnation and karma as ways of understanding processes that actually have nothing to do with this, but that's a roundabout way of saying it's bullshit but possibly helpful bullshit.
some irony in the religions denying evolution being more evolutionarily successful than those that don’t, though.
and of course even a cursory examination of chimps and gorillas would suggest they are more closely related to humans than say, shrimp, and unsurprisingly the DNA evidence backs that up; I suppose you could square that by explaining it away as “microevolution”.