Ask HN: Teach me something new
A command line trick, a random factoid, anything that’s interesting to you.
I have chronic migraine. It sounds worse than it is; I rarely suffer attacks anymore, and when I do, they're usually mostly harmless, as in the case I'll describe below.
Contrary to popular belief, migraine is not a headache. It's something a little more like an epileptic seizure. Intense headaches are one common symptom, but there are a lot of others.
One common symptom of migraine is called *scintillating scotoma*. A scotoma is a blind or blank spot in the visual field. A scintillating scotoma caused by migraine is an area of the visual field that is temporarily replaced by a vivid visual aura. Its appearance is commonly the first symptom of a migraine attack, and is often followed by more unpleasant symptoms.
I've seen scintillating scotoma many times over the years. A few years ago I was reading and enjoying a good book, and my scotoma appeared. It was a humdinger: roughly triangular prisms of white light with utterly black zebra stripes moving along them kaleidoscope-style. It took up the lower left middle of my visual field, pulsing and radiating and turning, covering the book in my hand.
I was disappointed. I didn't want to stop reading. I was enjoying the book. So I decided to keep reading until the scotoma made it impossible to continue.
It never did.
It became so vivid that I couldn't see my hand at all, but I still had no trouble reading the book. I even started reading it aloud without any difficulty.
After a few minutes the scotoma faded. In that instance, it was not followed by any other symptoms (that's happened more and more frequently over the years since probably my forties).
I could now see the book again, and could confirm that what I had been reading was indeed what was on the page.
I thought about how to explain my experience. The best hypothesis I've come up with so far is that the neurological process of seeing and the neurological process of being consciously aware of what I'm seeing are not the same thing. They're independent processes. The scotoma prevented me from subjectively experiencing seeing the book, but did not prevent me from actually seeing it, nor from correctly interpreting what I was seeing.
This experience (and one two other odd experiences) has led me to adopt the working hypothesis that many of our cognitive experiences are more complicated than we tend to assume, and that they're often made up of several more or less independent processes. We usually benefit if related processes pretty much work together, so they pretty much do. Because they do, we experience them all together as a single experience, but that's an illusion that unravels if circumstances screw up their synchronization.
I hope someone finds that as interesting as I do.
The first migraine I remember was in my mid teens. It was extremely painful, with searing pain through my head and down through my torso. It felt as if someone had stuck a red-hot blade right through my head and into my body and was just holding it there.
Up into my early thirties, migraines continued to be very painful. Like you I often experienced both pain and nausea. Besides the knife through my body and the nausea, I often also experienced any kind of sensory input as painful. Hearing sounds was painful; seeing light was painful; tasting or smelling anything was painful; touching things was painful. During an attack I would generally just try to find a soft, quiet, dark, warm place to lie down until it went away.
Beginning in my late thirties, the painful and unpleasant aspects of the migraines began to diminish. By my forties, the attacks had become much less frequent, and when they occurred, they were much less painful.
The scotoma remained prominent, though. In my teens, it was generally a circular area of blackness surrounded by a rapidly-whirling multicolored aurora. It gradually changed over the years, going through several different shapes and color patterns. Most recently it's usually been brilliant white geometric shapes with rapidly-moving zebra stripes, turning slowly.
The scotoma has always been much more vivid than real vision. The shapes and colors are much much brighter, clearer, and more vivid than any real image I've ever seen.
Over the past fifteen years or so, the frequency is down to once every two or three years, and it's commonly just the scotoma for a little while, and none of the other symptoms, or perhaps a little minor discomfort in my torso and a little dizziness. Sometimes it's just a set of sensations that are really hard to describe--sort of just a hint of the feeling of falling, or a very faint experience of dizziness, together with an impression that part of my visual field is sort of starting to flicker randomly. Usually that flickering turns into the scotoma, but in some recent cases, I just have the flickering for a few minutes, and then nothing else.
In the incident I describe here, it was just the scotoma for a little while. (Sorry I'm not more specific about how long it lasts. I'd guess maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, but my sense of time is kind of screwed up during an attack.)
If you're younger, maybe the trajectory of my migraine offers some hope. Mine have gotten much easier to take over the years. Maybe yours will, too.
I have an anecdote that corroborates your observation that cognitive experiences are more complicated then assumed: I was once very, very sleep deprived. I became aware that my body was reacting to something, as if there was a jump scare in a movie, I unconsciously flinched and pulled away from something without knowing why, and then a perceptual moment later, I heard a loud noise caused by something falling to the floor.
It sounds like nonsense, of course, but that's because we naively assume that sleep and wakefulness are opposites--that they are mutually exclusive. What if we're wrong about that? What if instead each of them is a set of processes that normally work together, but that can be disrupted, and what if disrupting them makes the boundary between them more porous?
I have CFS, which boils down to having something screwed up in my recovery from fatigue. Nowadays it's not a big deal, as long as I follow some rules, but it took the better part of a decade to reach that point. For several years I used prescription modafinil and armodafinil to control when I was awake (because otherwise I slept eighteen to twenty hours a day).
With the modafinil I managed to reach a stable state where I could usually be awake for a fairly normal part of the day, but a couple of times a month I'd get so tired that I'd fall asleep even with a full dose of the stimulant in me.
Those naps were weird, though, in that I remained conscious through them. I mean I'd lie down, relax like normal falling asleep, and start breathing in that distinctive arrythmic way that tells you someone's asleep. I would just be awake the whole time, watching myself sleep. I experimented with trying to move when I was "asleep". Sometimes I could; sometimes I couldn't.
You can imagine that I really was asleep, and maybe the stimulant just caused me to dream that I was awake, watching myself sleep. The main problem I have with that explanation is that I have never in any other circumstance experienced dreams that were so much the same over and over, and without the usual fantastic elements.
Of course, you could argue that was the modafinil affecting my dreams, and that could be true.
But my hypothesis is similar to the migraine and scotoma blindsight thing: what if awake and asleep are not opposites, after all? What if they aren't actually mutually exclusive? What if, instead, they're just two complexes of cognitive and physiological states that don't normally happen at the same time because they interfere with each other? It's not useful for them to happen together, so our bodies and brains don't normally do that. But mix a strong CNS stimulant with extreme fatigue, and things get messed up.
If it was actually happening, and not some weird drug-induced dream or hallucination, then it strikes me as another case where our cognitive processes are a little more complicated and messy than we normally assume.
To give you some idea of how profound my fatigue was, let's start with the fact that I've been extremely sensitive to stimulants of any kind since I can remember. A can of coke past 8PM would keep me awake half the night. It's a trait that I apparently inherited from my mother and passed on to my daughter.
After I developed CFS, I could take a full dose of an amphetamine and sleep like a baby. I know because amphetamines were one of the alternatives my physician tried for controlling my sleepiness and attention problems.
Modafinil and armodafinil are the drugs that worked for me. By the way, please don't anyone assume that they'll do the same thing for you that they did for me. Everybody's different. Talk to your doctor, not some random internet storyteller.
I've found sugar to be way worse for my insomnia than anything else. Caffeine does play a role but excess sugar really revs me up ironically.
Not anymore, though; not since I developed CFS.
I've achieved a good adaptation to it, and my life proceeds mostly as if I didn't have it now, as long as I observe some rules: regular schedule, good nutrition, regular low-impact exercise. (If my exercise gets too high-impact then I cross into the kind of fatigue I cannot easily recover from.)
I do follow science and medical news related to it. The present state of affairs as I currently understand it is that it's still a syndrome rather than a disease, which basically means it's a big bag of symptoms without an agreed-upon underlying cause or mechanism. There's some evidence that ties it somehow to the Epstein-Barr virus (and, perhaps coincidentally, one of my kids had mononucleosis in the months before I developed the syndrome). There's also some evidence that suggests that susceptibility to it is heritable. Some researchers have hypothesized that it's an epigenetic disorder--that is, a genetic disease that is activated by an environmental trigger (such as a viral infection--a large fraction of CFS cases start with a viral infection).
Someone published some work that claims that folks with CFS have distinctively abnormal calcium metabolism, which might account for the difficulty recovering from fatigue.
There are still some people who think it's psychosomatic, or mostly psychosomatic, too.
That's about as much as I remember off the top of my head. As I say, I'm interested, but not urgently so. I seem to have found my accommodation.
It never happened, as far as I can remember, before I developed CFS. It never happened when I was not taking modafinil or armodafinil.
Both going to sleep and waking up I often notice this state; when going to sleep, I'll either stay that way long enough to actually get to sleep (usually only a few minutes I think, possibly 15-30 minutes at most on rare occasions) or unfortunately I often unintentionally wake myself up from that state (on those occasions it feels a bit like I have a fear of sleep). After I have slept for a while I am more commonly in that state for 15-30 minutes at a time and maybe sometimes longer, it is hard to remember (total time a day can be longer but I will fully wake up or sleep for a while in between). My memory for sleep related stuff is likely much better than most people due to the decades of insomnia, however it still isn't that good (nor is my memory in general after so much sleep trouble). I think my sense of time is fairly accurate in that state and it is often how I decide to consider it half sleeping or sleeping for my sleep log (I'll often look at a clock before it happens and if the next time I look at the clock it is a fair amount later than I expect then I was likely sleeping, although sometimes when near sleep I've looked at the clock and clearly seen a different time than it actually is so that might be the issue at times as well; the clock thing is not just lucid dreaming since it often happens when I'm standing up on the way to the bathroom). My understanding is the way sleep is defined it is possible at times to maintain awareness between being awake and in light non-REM sleep so I am also not 100% sure that "half sleeping" isn't technically sleep.
My understanding based partly on looking at some research (although I'm hazy in my memory at the moment so definitely look into any particular point if interested with the idea that I might be remembering incorrectly) is that there are a number of independent processes that are usually orchestrated fairly well into what we call sleep. There are a few parts of the brain that coordinate sleep and circadian rhythm, including a part of the hypothalamus. IIRC what we consider to be falling asleep may be closely connected to a state of the thalamus that is exclusive with being awake, but other parts of the brain can indepenently be more like being awake or more like the various non-REM sleep stages. This can happen the opposite way as well with "microsleep". When particularly sleep deprived I'll often involuntarily nod my head down a bit and microsleep in what feels like much of my brain while generally still aware of my surroundings. I think microsleeps may also cause the loss of working memory at times when sleep deprived and various other short term oddities. REM sleep is a different thing entirely with movement inhibition based in the brain stem and where the brain is otherwise mostly in its awake state. While dreaming is more common in REM sleep it is yet another independent mechanism that seems related to dopamine. The memory changes with sleep might be yet another usually connected but distinct mechanism. Sleep also isn't just neurally activated but there are a variety of endogenous sleep promoting and wake promoting substances. So definitely more complicated and messy than we usually think of it with a collection of sometimes mutually exclusive states none of which fully correspond with what we consider to be sleeping.
Of course, just because we both came up with similar hypotheses doesn't mean we're right, but I'll take it as a tentative working theory for now.
If you remember to try it, the results will be interesting no matter which way they turn out.
This sounds similar to the phenomenon of blindsight:
I’ve recently read “ A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence” by Jeff Hawkins and that is essentially what he argues. That our neo cortex had consists of millions of a similar structure and many of them fire up at the same time.
Fascinating book, would highly recommend.
what’s really interesting is after having heart surgery, I would have like 10 a day for weeks. Others in post-cardiac surgery message boards reported the same experience. It went back to normal frequency months after surgery, but definitely an unsolved mystery!
About 8 years ago, I had many migraines (a few per year but I would essentially be unable to do anything for a couple of hours). Many of those were the results of being in a noisy environment or high physical effort.
I knew whenever I was going to get a migraine because I got the auras (couldn't see in front of me, but if I remember correctly I still had my peripheral vision) and couldn't feel the very tip of my thumbs and my tongue (yes, apparently you can lose this, too). A few minutes after those feelings, sure enough I would get the migraine. When in that state, I have a big headache, can't see much, nausea.
Hopefully other people will relate!
For example, my wife and I worked overtime and through the weekends for three weeks before our anniversary, because we wanted everything done by then. We went to a resort for our anniversary, and sure enough, on the second day of relaxation I've had an episode.
After finishing my CompSci degree I was bored and did some first year psychology degree courses and that was also one of my main takeaways (I don’t mean it was an original take, just one of the main takeaways I remember from these courses).
See for example split brain individuals[0] where the connection between the two hemispheres is severed/damaged - up to a point this was a common surgery to treat epilepsy a decade ago.
Patients seemed fine on first glance, but ultimately there were interesting incongruences [1]. I’m probably doing injustice to the description of the experiment so please read the linked page, but essentially they created a situation where each eye saw a different image (e.g. one related to chickens and another to snow) and then asked to choose with different hands from a set of pictures the picture most related (e.g. an egg or a snowman). The right hand (connected to the right hemisphere and thus the left eye) chose one thing connected to what the left eye saw and the right hand chose another.
Let’s say the left eye saw snow and the right saw chickens. The most interesting part is when the patients were asked about their choices, since only the left hemisphere can talk (the speech center). So they explained why the left hand chose something correctly, but made up some unrelated explanation about their right hand choices (“eggs are white like snow”)! In other more horrific terms, the right hemisphere had some level of thinking/reasoning going on but could not speak since it now had no mouth.
So, in healthy individuals there’s definitely syncing between the two hemispheres and different centers going on, but as any complex system I’m sure there are hiccups.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain
[1] https://physics.weber.edu/carroll/honors/split_brain.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41tIxqieC0c
I couldn't find any illness associated to the condition of not being able to hear yourself/the notes disappearing while playing, but what you are describing, losing yourself while reading as the world closes around the words in a kaleidoscope-style prism, sounds really similar.
I normally just take a break from whatever I'm doing and go for a walk. The first time it ever happened to me was the first day of a literature class--that was an awkward event, explaining to my teacher that I couldn't read at the moment.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Scintillating_scotoma.gif
It's a common misconception. What you're calling "ocular migraines" are more accurately referred to as "migraines with aura without headache", sometimes called "silent migraines". You can get actual ocular migraines as well, but those affect the eye (or optic nerve), and as such, are limited to the eye. Scintillating scotomas caused by migraine auras are visible with your eyes closed, and look the same in both eyes.
Sometimes with accompanying headache, sometimes without. That picture is a great representation of what I see. Although I would say its usually more silvery and shiny. Dunno what triggers it, I've had it sitting watching TV, tryjng to work on computer (which becomes impossible) and just sitting in a restaurant eating lunch.
Normally lasts half an hour or so. Also sometimes I can be left feeling fuzzy and foggy for a day or so after.
Like you say reading just becomes impossible!
Have you found any good medication that helps when they trigger?
These links are closer to what mine look like:
If it's actually an ocular migraine (which takes place in the eye) rather than a scintillating scotoma (which takes place in the brain), that's a possible explanation for why I could continue reading. The UK's NHS says they tend to happen in just one eye, so if I was having an ocular migraine, it might have left my vision unobstructed in the other eye.
On the other hand, if that's the explanation, then I would sort of expect to have consciously experienced seeing the book while I was reading it, and I didn't--or if I did, that's not the way I remember it.
Of course, memory is untrustworthy, and it's also possible that the vividness of the ocular migraine might have persuaded my brain to tell me I couldn't see the book even though I could.
So ocular migraine is a solid alternative candidate to explain my experience. If I have another scotoma, I'll see if I can figure out a way to determine which thing is going on. Maybe closing one eye and then the other.
In general, when this occurs, I stop doing whatever I'm doing, take a ibuprofen pill and go to bed for 20 minutes. After that, I have a massive headache but no aura.
What was odd is that the very next day, I got the same migraine, again! This rarely occurs to me (two days in row).
It was later that I realized that the screen light was low and that might be an explanation about why I got two migraines in two days.
Hopefully it can help someone else here :)
Migraine auras suck, but are pretty fascinating. Depending on which part of the brain they affect, different symptoms can manifest. Visual auras à la scintillating scotoma are probably the most common, but slurred speech can happen as well, or reduced sensation in half the body, probably other things as well ..
And almost without exception, the visual auras are followed by immense headaches, so I personally would not say I like then very much :D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphene#Mechanical_stimulati...
Or is it quite different?
There are very interesting differences between certain lesions in the left side of the brain, and in the right side. For instance there are some people that are blind, but do not believe that they are, and vice versa, which lines up with your experience.
Oh, I've had those - though not as lasting or opaque as they sound for you. I always thought it was one step prior to the "blinding" pain level I'll get from different nerve compression syndromes and injuries I have/had; for obvious reasons I try to manage my life to limit agitating the nerves and to not reach the blinding pain level - where for at least a few moments I can't see or don't experience anything but the pain; quite the short circuit mechanism to grab one's full attention.
It touches upon the composite nature of sight and other senses and functions.
It's ultimate goal is putting forth a theory of how self naturally arises from the composite.
I've had the migraines mostly while sitting an the computer or reading, but it seemed impossible to me to continue to read since the zig zags were right above the letters, and frankly quite distracting. Because of that, I've never really tried to continue.
It seems weird to say that, but I'm almost looking forward to the next migraine solely to test if I can still read if I really try. That would be awesome! Thank you for your description!
My N is 1; I've never yet had the chance to test it a second time. I'm actually looking forward to my next scotoma for that reason!
> our cognitive experiences are more complicated than we tend to assume
I arrived at the same conclusion from different experiences. In my late teens and early 20s I worked for several years as a professional magician doing close-up slight of hand magic in nightclubs, restaurants, bars, parties, trade shows and corporate events. I performed for a lot of different types of people in different contexts and noticed how people would describe an effect they'd just seen me do to a friend who didn't see it. Their memory of something they'd just seen moments before was substantially different than what had actually happened.
This is unsurprising because my performance was carefully designed and rehearsed to create that misperception. What is surprising was the extreme detail and certainty of erroneous perceptions even from highly intelligent expert observers who were 100% focused on my every action with maximum effort. I found this super interesting and spent quite a bit of time exploring it with various experiments and pondering the implications which led me to the same realization you had about our conscious perceptions being less accurate and more variable than we internally experience them to be. In short, our memories can seem like a video recording to us but that's just a very convincing self-illusion.
In recent decades psychologists like Richard Wiseman have published research documenting this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3iPrBrGSJM
I did later learn another set of similar skills, though, and owned a business in that field for a while: martial arts.
Some martial arts are like stage magic in that they work in part by training yourself to do things that most people find surprising because they don't know how you do them or what training it requires to pull them off.
Not all martial arts use techniques like that, but some of them do, and some of the tricks of the trade make pretty good party tricks.
One example of a party trick that I've witnessed (and even learned to reproduce, poorly):
I know a guy who can take a dart in his hand, hold it with his arm fully extended, and, without bending his elbow, stick it in a dartboard from normal playing distance. It looks like magic: the dart flies across the room and sticks in the board.
If you have the relevant kind of training, then you know exactly how he's doing it (although, simply knowing it doesn't make it easy to reproduce!), but if you don't, then odds are you don't believe it's even possible.
A funny but related story: I was visiting Paray-le-Monial where there's a diorama about the visions of Saint Margaret-Mary ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mary_Alacoque ), who is at the origin of the current cult of the "Sacred heart of Jesus".
In fact from the descriptions, it's very clear that the brilliant, shimmering lights that she related as her visions and revelations of the "Sacred Heart" were simply scintillating scotoma from her migraine, then followed with terrible access of headaches that she interpreted as her mystical ordeal from God.
> It was disappointed. I didn't want to stop reading. I was enjoying the book. So I decided to keep reading until the scotoma made it impossible to continue.
I do the same thing now. I had one come on recently when I was lifting weights. I just decided to power through it. It was perhaps the most intense aural disruption I've experienced but the typical after effects (which, in my case, tend to be very bad and render me useless for 2-4 hours following an "attack") were almost completely subdued. I recall that I felt like I had a slight hangover and was able to fully function after it passed.
It leads to a lot of out of body experiences and dissociation. As a weird side effect I also mostly only have lucid dreams now.
One thing I found odd is that there's entire groups of people who chase this kind of mental state. Usually through a state of psychedelic drugs to induce a state of altered mind. It's really odd to me because I hate the feeling myself, being forced into it. Though I suppose it's like anything, where if it's in small doses it's a fun novelty for some.
Anyway, my epilepsy has greatly affected my perception of my own perception abilities.
Mine used to happen a bit when playing sport so I always associated them with dehydration, but it seems like that’s probably not it.
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scintillating_zigzag...
Not quadratic, and not regular in a geometric way, more like leaves, roughly the shape of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhombus
It starts as something like a fast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyout within about a second, two at most, and then I'm having this 'screensaver effect' for about 30 seconds to a minute, or so.
Most fields are just scrambled into random positions, sometimes even jumping into others, while about a few dozen are impossible blacks or grays with vertigo inducing feelings, because they seem to jump back and forth between infinity and back. Really hard to describe.
Anyways, this absolutely messes with my orientation, and I shiver or even shake slightly.
However, I do not fall. One time this happened to me while carrying a cup of coffee on a saucer from the coffee machine in a conference room back to my seat. The cup clattered on the saucer because of my shaking, but I managed to put it down on the next table with a loud clack, and drop myself into some spare chair next to the wall.
Without spilling a single drop!
Witnesses described my moves as something like an industrial robot on fast-forward. Not fluent, but in fast and small consecutive steps. But I couldn't see!
Havn't had one of those for years now, also no debilitating pains, those came first. Thing is, I mostly had these when I felt under (time)pressure, stressed, angry. (I think)
For instance, bicycling fast somewhere to be there as arranged? Happened several times, full brake!
Bicycling fast, really pushing it, but just for fun? Never happened. (So far)
Really, really strange!
Funny thing is, MRIs decades later show nothing. According to the radio- and neurologists there arent even traces of something bad, and my brain has exceptionally good blood circulation.
Oh, back to language! At the time this happened I had trouble speaking in several ways. First to find words, then to form/speak them. But only in German, which IS my native language.
Not so in English!
Also I didn't really notice it at first, because I tend to not 'think in words', but mostly visual in pictures, movies, abstract mashups of these.
I also had ataxia, but not one-sided as usual, but right arm, and left leg.
Really, really strange. But mostly gone now.
Except for losing temper fast.
That stayed.
Can't have a better defence against BS though! :-)
It's probably totally unrelated to any of this, but I also think primarily (though not entirely) nonverbally, and expressing myself always involves translating nonverbal thoughts into words.
And, for what it's worth, I'm a native English speaker trained (but horribly out of practice) in German (and Latin and Mandarin and Tibetan and Hungarian and Greek and Esperanto and Lojban --don't ask me to communicate in any of them without several weeks of remedial practice!).
Latin and Greek would be good too, of course. For the classics, or classical education I didn't have. Went totally technical early on.
"Fachidiot", so to speak ;-)
In my defense, I've had some decent fluency a couple of time in the past. I ran into a German couple in Athens once and we had a nice conversation. They said nice things about my German :-).
But now in all those languages except English I'm just a dabbler.
At least I know that I can acquire some fluency; I've been able at different points in the past to carry on basic conversations in German and Hungarian and Mandarin, and read some of the easier classical texts in Latin and Greek and Tibetan.
The idea of improving my skills in any of them (or all of them!) is appealing enough for me to occasionally work on them (especially on Latin and Greek), but my attention inevitably gets captured by my numerous other interests, and my language skills fade again.
Worse, there's a long list of other languages that I think are really interesting, and that I would no doubt acquire if only it were quick and easy enough. As it is, though, I mostly just read about languages because they're so interesting. Well, and construct them. Conlanging is a hobby, too.
Btw., the English lessons I had in school were rather boring and uninspiring. I didn't really learn it that way, that happened when I had to read Neuromancer by William Gibson, and didn't get it. So I bought a small to middle dictionary from Langenscheid and read it again with the dictionary at hand. Then it somehow clicked for me.
That worked for reading, hearing not so much. That came later by watching movies, news(BBC/CNN), listening to radio(BFBS), and having at least some fluency in speaking even later, because of work.
Nowadays I'm only caught slightly off guard when someone is unexpectedly speaking to me in English in daily life, like people asking for the way, to some location, or things like that. Sometimes I need one to two seconds until it registers what they said, or asked. Sometimes not at all, instantly.
Oh, and under stress my German is getting worse, I'm at a loss for words, have to really 'search' for them, while I could speak it in English without any problem.
So strange...
Should be "I had that interest when I was younger, but not anymore."
I thought you might like the correction; forgive me if I'm wrong. In my experience, differences in the idiomatic use of verb tenses is one of the more difficult things about learning languages.
If you hear a native English speaker say, "I've been younger," then what they're saying is, "I'm old."
Good night :-)
I lost, temporarily, the connection between what I wanted to say and the words that would come out. It was crazy.
As these patterns were explored, they were found to be even more systematic and pervasive than they had appeared. In some cases, one sound would systematically change into another sound from language A to language B.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law
These patterns helped reveal historical connections between most languages of Europe, Central Asia, and South Asia, showing that those languages had descended from the same ancient sources. (Note that this isn't true of 100% of languages in this region -- there are other unrelated families that turned up -- but it's true of a significant majority.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages
The languages that turned out to be related this way included the Germanic family (like German, English, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages), the Romance family (like French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Catalan), the Celtic family (like Irish and Welsh), the Slavic family (like Russian, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian), and also Farsi and all the Central Asian languages related to it, and Hindi/Urdu and all the South Asian languages related to it. Oh, and Greek.
If I tried to list all the languages and language families that were linked up to this family tree, we would probably be here all day, because they go on and on. Just under half the people in the whole world have one or another of them as a native language today!
These languages changed quickly enough in history that most people no longer noticed, or remembered, that most of them were related to one another, yet slowly enough that it's been feasible to deduce an enormous amount of information about the history of particular languages and particular words, once many of the rules and patterns had been identified.
A Grimm's Law example is that the h sound in Germanic languages usually corresponds to the k sound in Romance languages (note that this can be stated much more technically and accurately). So, it turns out that "hundred" and "cent"/"cento"/"centum" actually share the same origin. And "heart" and "cœur"/"corazón"/"καρδία" (origin of "cardiac") (also "cordial"; the root in Latin sounds like "cord-"). And "who" and "que"/"quoi"/"qui" (and similarly for other wh- questions in English and qu- questions in Romance, which were originally hw- sounds in English and kw- sounds in Latin).
Some other examples are t to d ("ten" and "decem"/"diez"/"dez", plus some of the examples above that have a t in English), and f to p ("foot" and the Latin and Greek words from which we get "pedestrian" and "podiatrist", and Romance "pied"/"pie"/"pé"; and don't forget about "father" and "padre"/"pater"/...).
Those are just a couple of the phenomena that people noticed in the 1800s; while the exact development of these patterns gets much more complicated, they've proven to work over and over and over, for hundreds of languages and hundreds of thousands of words!
(... Also, the Grimm from Grimm's Law is one of the Brothers Grimm, from Grimm's Fairytales!)
https://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Encyclopedia-Language-David...
(For example, I recently mentioned in these pages the terms for the "sky" as spawning from ideas of "covering", which also spawn terms for "colour" and "concealing".)
> The languages that turned out to be related this way included
...I see you have left out no less than Italian, the post-Latin at the epicenter!
OT: BTW, Seth, thank you for Let's Encrypt! (Maybe this is also something that OP did not know?)
https://www.openculture.com/2015/06/the-tree-of-languages-il...
wódr̥ (PIE) → udōr (Proto-Italic) → unda (Latin) → undulātus (Late Latin) → undulate (English)
wódr̥ (PIE) → watōr (Proto-Germanic) → *watar (Proto-West Germanic) → wæter (Old English) → water (Middle English) → water (English)
In fact, I'm now noticing that the t in the Proto-Germanic line corresponds to the d in the Proto-Italic line, just as you said.
The Proto-Uralic *weti "water" looks like it could come from IE *u̯ódr̥, *udén- "water", but that etymology is problematic because of irregular sound substitutions[0]:
- why would Uralic have *e when it's not present in the IE original?
- why would Uralic drop *r or *n at the end?
[0] Simon, Z. (2020). Urindogermanische Lehnwörter in den uralischen und finno-ugrischen Grundsprachen. Indogermanische Forschungen, 125(1), 239–266. https://doi.org/10.1515/if-2020-011
As for irregular sound substitutions, well, water IS a very common concept & word, so I would think that anything goes.
It's not unusual that an affix can have a form with a vowel that gets lost or added, or that cognates can have different morphemes in addition to their shared morphemes. (For the latter case, when writing about Grimm's Law above, I re-learned that although "hundred" is cognate with "centum", the "red" part is a separate Germanic morpheme meaning 'count'. For that matter, the "um" part is a separate Latin morpheme that is a neuter noun ending.)
But "människa" is a noun. It's pronounced "menisha" but it doesn't mean "manish". In Norwegian, the word for humane is spelled "menneskelig" literally "menneske-like". (In Norwegian the 'k' is hard.)
As I can gather, the literal meaning in sanskrit of "manusha" = "born of Manu" = human. Manu is a god.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic...
It's just that that etymology has become opaque to modern-day Germanic language speakers.
etymonline.com is a nice way to rabbithole time away with fun
English is interesting in that it has been mixed up with so many different branches of the tree, Saxon, Scandinavian, Latin, French, etc during different periods. Sometimes it has synonyms coming from eg Norse and French, where the PIE root is the same but the words are quite different, and carrying different connotations.
I absolutely love how you use rabbit hole as a verb here :D.
A very quick Google suggest Esperanto doesn't:
https://indo-european.eu/2008/05/esperanto-other-invented-la...
- English (well)
- Russian (ответ : ответственность)
- German (Antwort : Verantwortung)
- Scandinavian (svar : ansvar)
There's likely more! Even though the modern words have diverged completely, the concept behind the construct is the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque
In these cases, people who knew both languages consciously adopted the structure of a foreign word by translating its components (morphemes). For example, German has a lot of calques from Latin compounds.
That is to say that it's not always a coincidence or an indication that people inherently think of the concept in the same way; sometimes it's an indication that people thought a foreign word for a concept was awesome, and wanted to borrow it by translating it literally.
For a pill that can be digested, often it will be the case that the pharmaceutical compound needs a lot of buffer space, sugar or something else to prevent it from being absorbed too quickly. So if a pill says "Do not break in half" or "Do not chew", this is because doing these things increased the pill's surface area and the rate that the drug gets absorbed, when optimal rate of absorption has already been calculated.
Is it also true for cocaine and other similarly ingested substances? Are coke users walking around with garbage in their lungs?
The other ones are piperine from white pepper and MSM which promotes nutrient digestibility.
What looks like a simple pill is actually a tiny machine that delivers the medicine at a precisely controlled rate over a period of hours.
I knew very little about music when I decided to play the harmonica. I looked for an instrument that required little maintenance, were easy to transport and easy to play everywhere. So I decided to learn to play the harmonica by myself. It's easy to start with it, but it gets challenging when you try to learn those techniques mostly because you can't see inside people's mouths to see what they are doing and you aren't used to force your tongue to do those specific movements. When you see what people can do with it, it can be jaw dropping. I'm still a beginner at it but it's so rewarding after practising a lot to get your first bending, to reproduce songs you have learned just by muscle memory, to sound a little bit closer to those blues masters... definitely something worth to try in my opinion.
In particular, there’s a live performance of no woman no cry that has John Popper alongside Ziggy Marley. Mind blowing. Watch it. You won’t regret it.
I don't play the harmonica, and I don't have any idea about music. However, I do like the harmonica as an instrument whenever I hear it in some songs.
I find that usually the harmonica always plays multiple notes together, and to my untrained ears, this always makes me feel that it can never hold the stage like maybe, a saxophone can.
Then I came across the video below, and honestly, I was extremely impressed. It felt as if each note was being played by itself and the artist had complete control over the instrument.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIss2Qmmc5k
Editing to add:
The artist, Indiara Sfair, also has a complete course on her website.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIROXLCXiQw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MGEqk6P3AM
There is also the similar size ocarina:
Only thing you need for this is:
1. An idea and some knowledge about electronics
2. An EDA software where you design the schematic and the PCB (Horizon EDA, KiCAD, Eagle, ...). This software will give you the Gerber files needed to manufacture the PCBs and the BOM (Bill of Materials) and a Pick-and-Place file which is basically just a CSV telling the manufacturer which part goes where and in which orientation.
3. Using the BOM you find corresponding parts the manufacturer has and put create a CSV that matches their format requirements
4. You order (e.g. I ordered at jcbpcb)
The electronics knowledge is the hardest part.
Back when I was in school, our introductory electronics class had us make a PCB for a PICmicro programmer on our first day. We got a handout of the schematics. We had to transfer its negative to a copper coated plate using some chemical, used UV light to fixate it, then dissolved the rest of the copper in acid. Finally we got to drill the holes for through-hole soldering points.
Next class we soldered all components. And by the end of two classes, everyone had their own functioning (or not ...) programmer, which we used the rest of the year on a variety of electronics projects. Great fun.
The parent comment is a good introduction, watch some KiCAD videos on designing circuits, the process is pretty foolproof if you design the schematic correctly, and then you basically "export Gerbers", upload them to the fab (JLCPCB), and you have PCBs in a few days.
Here's a small PCB I designed, together with Kibot project files that will error-check and export the Gerbers automatically:
https://gitlab.com/stavros/manual-fc
Install https://github.com/INTI-CMNB/kibot, run `kibot` in the directory of the designs, and you'll get files that are ready to upload to JLCPCB. Edit the designs etc to make your own thing, that should help you get started.
Now all I need is an idea worth spending the money on. 8 )
The company is using a new L. B. Stanza programming language created as one of the co-founders Ph.D thesis [1].
Most modern music chords patterns are easy to find out on piano.
Start on any of the white keys, and play 7 white keys left to right. That is called a mode: a series of notes separated by certain intervals to compose a song.
Different modes have different vibes. Atmosphere of the song ( sad or happy) is directly correlated by how "willing" the notes are to resolve to the mode root (the first key of 7 you hit).
Now, take a 1-3-5 grip on the white keys (press one key, skip one, press one, skip one, press one). That is called the first chord. Move one to the right, and do it again. That is the second chord. One more to the right is the third etc.
Most popular songs are composed by using mostly the same repeating chord patterns:
- 1-5-1-4 (first, fifth, first, fourth)
- 1-4-5
- 1-5-6-4
If you experiment a little bit with this, you will instantly recognize a lot of songs, although they might be pitched higher or lower.
One step further, is learning different chord fingerings: we started with 1-3-5 which mostly results in a major or minor chord in a mode.
- 5th chords are 1-5
- 7th chords are 1-3-5-7
- sus2 is 1-2-5
- sus4 is 1-4-5
- etc
Now, the next thing you need to learn is to transpose: move songs up or down one or more keys to the left or right, but also taking into account the black keys when moving up/down. This will allow you to play along with a song in the perfect key (starting note of a scale)
There's other things (like modulating modes in songs), but this should give you a headstart.
[1] https://youtu.be/g7oA1-y0EJE
Edit: layout and some extra clarification
My favorite way to confound beginners -
1 3 5 - five (fifth) 1 3 - three (third) 3 5 - three (third) Therefore 3 + 3 = 5.
Once they get that, the rest is easy, especially explaining b13 notes etc.
I suspect someone may reply to this with "it'd be harder to keep track of what notes you're on if keys were uniform like that", but I don't think we actually rely on feeling the keys to know where we are. Would be willing to be proven wrong on that. But I suspect simply coloring/shading each fifth and octave differently should do the job, maybe also texturing them differently for the blind.
https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/linnstrument
As a longtime guitarist myself, I found it quite easy to learn.
You can think of each row as a guitar string. In the default setup, each row is a perfect fourth above the row below. The green lights are the white keys on a piano; the unlighted keys are the black ones. The blue lights are C natural.
Skip a square diagonally up and to the right for an octave.
Chord shapes are uniform across the whole surface.
Keys are sensitive to pressure, left-right movement, and top-bottom movement. In the default configuration, rocking left and right yields vibrato and moving top-bottom controls some other MIDI parameter (usually filter cutoff, but it's configurable).
Sliding finger pressure to different keys to the right and left gives portamento. Sliding to the next row up or down gives legato.
Once you get used to these parameters, it becomes super expressive.
It's a MIDI controller, not a complete instrument, so you need a MIDI-controllable source of sounds. It's an MPE instrument, so, if you want the full experience, you want some kind of MPE-capable source of sounds (MPE is "MIDI Polyphonic Expression", and it means that multiple MIDI channels are dedicated to the instrument in order to give full, separate expression to each of several voices). MPE is a relatively new MIDI development that is not supported everywhere yet, so you have to pay attention to which sound devices support it if you want the full experience.
I have one; it's my favorite electronic instrument that I've ever tried. I also have an Eigenharp Pico, and I like it, but I like the Linnstrument better. (It doesn't look as cool as an Eigenharp, though :-).
When I decided to get one, I discovered that they're a bit hard to buy. Not very many places have them, and when I was looking, even Roger Linn didn't have any available. I eventually found one for list price at Detroit Modular (https://www.detroitmodular.com/).
It does, though, seem to demand that the player look at the keyboard. For an instrumentalist, this may not be a big deal. For a performer accustomed to connecting to his audience with his face, as do many singers, it seems like a big drawback.
That said, color me amazed.
I've only had mine for a few weeks, but the need to look at it seems to be slowly disappearing. Now, the surface does feel really uniform, which is not so helpful for that. As you probably expect, there's not much on it that you can use to orient your hands by touch. Still, I do seem to be gaining some ability to know where my fingers go without looking. Partly it seems to be just acquiring a feel for how far apart the keys are (and you can feel the boundaries between keys). Part of it is starting to know which keys I'm touching from the pitches it's producing.
The second thing is that I've seen videos of players who attach a guitar strap and sling it over their shoulders (it comes with the attachments for that), playing it flat against their chests.
Taking those two things together, I'm fairly confident that it's possible to learn to navigate the keyboard by feel.
I haven't tried the over-the-shoulder thing, myself. So far, I play it on a table like a piano, or like a lap steel guitar or dobro.
I find it easy to learn, both comfortable, and expressive, and it's quickly become my favorite MIDI controller. I prefer it over both piano-style keyboards and MIDI guitars.
There's also the ergonomic aspects of key size and hand width.
Isn't that better than your suggestion, where you're locked into one fingering?
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_temperament
Be sure to check out the "See Also" section if interested.
I have one, in the form of a Chromatone keyboard (https://chromatone.jp/chromatone/index.html, no longer available). The uniformity does make it harder to play by touch, but it otherwise has a lot of advantages. I have been experimenting with different colours and tactile markers (little rubber feet intended to stick on the bottom of things) but I haven't settled on anything yet.
I have commented on this a few times before: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Others have too, and jacquesm has even built a Janko keyboard retrofit.
I think the physical size of pianos is why the first decent design "won"; you don't take your own piano to where you're playing, you play whatever's there. In the electronic age there's a chance for Janko to take off, as that's not universally true any more, but I'm not holding my breath.
As an aside, I find c major a horrible key to play in, again I think the uniformity makes it harder and less ergonomic, but the same thing makes it easier to teach to beginners hence why everyone starts there.
Another data point: I play the organ, which involves playing a large keyboard with your feet (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedal_keyboard). The structure of black notes is crucial to being able to play without looking (which is important because you’re simultaneously doing various other things). Concretely, I couldn’t imagine playing the organ without being able to slam my foot into the right hand side of a B flat in order to know that my foot is on top of the B. If you watch an experienced organist’s feet you’ll see them do this all the time.
I also find C major horrible.
The general principle is called ‘isomorphic keyboard’: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphic_keyboard
I've heard this explanation many times before, and I still don't understand how notes can be "willing" to do anything, or how a note can "resolve" to the root. Can someone ELI5?
Note 'resolution' is basically going from dissonance to consonance, providing a pleasing sense of stability.
What is considered consonant and dissonant can change with time and culture, so it's not a completely solid relationship, but overall a general pattern (like the notion of 'Major' being happy and 'minor' being sad is not a universal association).
When you hear a musical line that resolves, it sounds finished. When you hear one that doesn't resolve, it sounds like there's another note that needs to be played to finish it.
Different people emphasize different ones of these factors in their theory of how this works, but one thing we can mostly agree on is that different arrangements of notes played together or in sequence convey different moods or emotions in a way that is fairly predictable, at least within a given cultural context. So composers can intentionally write happy or sad or suspenseful songs or whatever using music theory.
The musical modes can be thought of as a single pattern of note intervals across an octave, but starting on different notes in the sequence. The standard way to lay out the modes is to start with a scale that is called the Ionian mode, the diatonic scale, or the Major scale.
These names all refer to the same pattern of intervals. Counting semitones, this pattern is 2-2-1-2-2-2-1.
(The "2" means two keys on a piano, or two frets on a guitar, for example.)
If you play that pattern, you will hear the familiar major scale in the key that is named by the first note you play. If you start on C, it's C Major.
The other modes are the same pattern, but starting on different notes. If we continue to use the notes of the C Major scale, leaving the pattern where it is, then starting on D instead of C gives us the Dorian mode (in the key of D). Its pattern is 2-1-2-2-2-1-2 -- in other words, exactly the same set of intervals as the Ionian mode, but shifted by one.
If you keep moving the starting note up by one, you get each of the other modes: Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Locrian.
Each mode has its own mood or emotional character. The Aeolian mode, for example, is the same sequence of intervals as the Natural Minor scale, and tends to sound melancholy or wistful.
A simple trick for hearing what a mode sounds like is to sit down at a piano, find the first note of the mode you're interested in, and play the first note against each of the other notes in sequence up and down the scale. It's easiest to do if you start with the Ionian mode in C, because it's simply all the white keys on the piano, starting with C and going up to the right. So, to hear what the Ionian sounds like, play C, then C and the white note immediately to the right of it at the same time, then the next white note, then the next, all the way up to the next C (and,optionally, back down again).
If you repeat this exercise, but start on D instead of C, you'll hear that the scale has a different character. Keep going, and you get a nice sense of what each mode sounds like. Dorian's cheerful; Aeolian's melancholy; Phrygian's a little exotic; Locrian is just weird and never seems to resolve.
Way too many to list.
Look up roman numeral notation for this next bit.
A V-I is called a perfect cadence in the major scale, and pretty much any other mode in which those chords naturally occur. The most important tones are the major 7th, which is one semitone away from the root and has a strong desire to resolve up, and the perfect 5th, which is a very stable sound that wants to fall up a fourth or down a fifth to the root. As such, the third can be major, minor, omitted, or replaced and the function of the chord remains pretty much unchanged. This is called modal interchange, since we are borrowing from a different mode for the root, in this case any mode other than Ionian (major). Mode changes the strong and weak cadences, however, so be mindful your alteration doesn't make a progression fall apart.
My favorite is ii7, iio7, and Imaj7. Another topic thats fun is tritone substitution, but that would make this a borderline blog post.
o in this context is a diminished chord, which also means that 7 is double flat (bb) because theory.
It can get crazier, there's tons of YouTube videos that explain it better. But
By the way, pianists use the term "fingerings" for which finger is placed on which key. For example your C-E-G chord which you wrote with 1-3-5, the standard way of playing this as a beginner is the 1-3-5 fingers (1 being the thumb etc). More advanced players often play it with the 1-2-4 fingers. That lets you quickly change to the C-F-A chord with 1-3-5 fingering, which is essentially the F-A-C chord. By moving the hand one key to the right, you get D-G-B with 1-3-5 fingering, and voila, you got your first chord progression:
C-E-G (1-2-4 fingering) C-F-A (1-3-5 fingering) D-G-B (1-3-5 fingering) C-E-G (1-2-4 fingering)
Etc etc.
Scale/size can seemingly be taught accessibly young... we just don't. Nor use size as an organizational frame to catalyze understanding of the physical world. Asking first-tier medical school graduate students how big red blood cells are... goes surprisingly poorly. But there seems lots of fun to be had.
(I wonder what existing structures you could paint.)
Magic school bus uses "zoom you", rather than "zoom objects". Tradeoffs, but one advantage of "objects", especially for chunked-zooming and AR, is you retain your environment to use as a size reference. Eg, "the red blood cell is M&M sized, and a grain of salt is cardboard-box sized, therefore the table, room, and playground are...".
Fwiw, my fuzzy recollection is someone wrote a simple VR zoomer in unity some years back. Re dioramas, you might find some inspiration from http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/Atoms (very slowwwwly loading page - wasn't intended to be public). I did outreach with a few 1 m diameter tables, each with assorted objects. Pool-noodle floats for hairs, Goodsell's molecular bio illustrations in nanoview, etc. Thought about how one might design a larger exhibit.
But I never did manage to find a community interested in this kind of thing, aside from scattered folks at MIT and Harvard. Size/scale is occasionally taught done down towards primary, and is taught in most every science and engineering curriculum. But knowledge of size/scale is rarely then used to teach other things, so there's little incentive to teach it successfully. With "well, that shouldn't come as a surprise, but oh my, yipes" outcomes.
A downside of 1000x steps is objects can end up inconveniently sized. 2 um zooms as either 2 m or 2 mm, often inconveniently large/small. Different zooms are good for different things. The small toy car scaled nicely for making roads, vs the larger toy car with moving doors; the small doll scaled nicely for making rooms, vs the larger doll with brushable-not-painted hair. Here, the 1000x step zooms are good for remembering and interconnecting sizes, but for then playing, you'll often want some other zoom.
Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliet, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu
Gotta spell anything over a voice line? Use it. No more screwing around with "B.. like Bryan, and then U, like .... under". s-c-r-o-l-l-a-w-a-y: sierra charlie romeo oscar lima lima alpha whiskey alpha yankee.
I learned it when I was 14, and I genuinely used this a TON in the decade and half since.
Amazing how many terms for 'foreigner from <place>' or 'random man' all resolve to variants of the same common name.
Johann -> Johannes -> Hannes -> Hans
It's hugely valuable for removing ambiguity and confusion in phone calls. While most people don't know the phonetic alphabet well enough to spell words using it, everyone understands when a word is spelled to them using the phonetic alphabet.
(I'm whining, but I do think this is cool.)
This is why your manager believes that engineers are too conservative and always pad estimates, while projects are always late. Indeed, they can learn both these things from observation without realising that they are contradictory. Because humans learn by the most common observation, which is represented by the median, but outcomes can be dominated by the less common, which affect the mean but hardly affect the median.
That being said, I remember learning that and always wondering why I needed to know what “mode” was haha
There was an article posted here, one or two years ago, that explained how mean and median are very similar, as they are the values that minimize residuals or the squared of residuals.
I'm sorry I can't find it right now, I hope some other user knows which article I'm talking about and can link it down here, because it is, in my opinion, an excelent read.
But numerically, they are not too wildly different! The difference between the mean and the median is at most one standard deviation. If the distribution is unimodal, then the difference is at most sqrt(3/5) standard deviations.
In this physics thought experiment, a Boltzmann brain is a fully formed brain, complete with memories of a full human life in our universe, that arises due to extremely rare random fluctuations out of a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. Theoretically, over an extremely large but not infinite amount of time, by sheer chance, atoms in a void could spontaneously come together in such a way as to assemble a functioning human brain. Like any brain in such circumstances (the hostile vacuum of space with no blood supply or body), it would almost immediately stop functioning and begin to deteriorate.
By one calculation, a Boltzmann brain would appear as a quantum fluctuation in the vacuum after a time interval of 10^10^50 years. This fluctuation can occur even in a true Minkowski vacuum (a flat spacetime vacuum lacking vacuum energy). Quantum mechanics heavily favors smaller fluctuations that "borrow" the least amount of energy from the vacuum. Typically, a quantum Boltzmann brain would suddenly appear from the vacuum (alongside an equivalent amount of virtual antimatter), remain only long enough to have a single coherent thought or observation, and then disappear into the vacuum as suddenly as it appeared. Such a brain is completely self-contained, and can never radiate energy out to infinity.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
Urgh.
Then again, does it matter? Probably not.
Looking back, this realization became a feeling and this feeling became the backdrop for much of my growth as a person. Sometimes I was filled with fear. Sometimes I would shed all responsibility because it didn’t feel real.
At the best times, it fills me with a profound sense of agency, balanced with responsibility. It’s like teleporting into someone else’s body. Some things you choose to play along with, taking care of “his” mother. Other things you abandon, changing direction in your life as you need, despite what anyone might say.
Now you are blessed with the incredible gift of spontaneously coming into existence, plus a vast treasure trove of inherited experience (both good and bad) that you can explore and try to understand, and of inherited skills and knowledge that you can put to use however you choose.
that is not such rare fluctuations are ephemeral. they are ephemeral because the dynamical system is reversible, for the same reason that the molecules in a box of gas dissipate immediately after they happen to coalesce in the corner
Or how about the much lower odds needed for a copy of Shakespeare’s plays translated to Klingon inscribed on a giant sheet of titanium to appear spontaneously? Far more likely to happen than a Boltzmann brain, right? So should we not have found an item or two like that?
> so shouldn’t we see the occasional Earth-sized badger through the Hubble?
Take another look at the time-frame on the GP's comment and remember that the Universe is ~10^13 years old.
I recall first hearing about this by being introduced to it via the "giant marshmallow hypothesis"†: it's somewhat equally likely that a giant marshmallow spontaneously and briefly form in a void. A Boltzmann brain is then merely a different arrangement of atoms and stuff.
† I don't think it has a specific name.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Minor edit: adding missing 'take' (in 'take that')
Japan barely had any inflation for a while because their QE program was temporary, and when it looked like inflation might go above zero, BoJ immediately hiked rates, contracting the economy(2000, 20006). This is how you achieve no inflation.
By the way, recently they've began trying a more expansionary policy once again. Using QE. It is working, so far. It might stop if they dive their head back in the sand!
I think QE usually doesn't lead to inflation if your employment drops at the same time or your population size is shrinking (i.e. Japan). In such a situation consumer demand decreases, balancing out the additional money supply. As evidence of this notice how QE in the US did not lead to high inflation until employment started picking up.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/the-fed-s-corporate-bond-portfo...
As has been famously said, there are only three types of economies: Japan, Argentina, and the rest of the world.
So, next time, pick an example from the rest of the world.
Is there many where QE did not lead to inflation?
There is no such thing as "inflation" in general.
There are different types of inflation, such as the rise of the valuations of stocks, the rise of real estate price and day-to-day prices such as food. And monetary inflation.
QE has led to various effects in various countries at different times. There is no absolute correlation "always and everywhere".
The funny thing is that a rise in stock market is always interpreted as a positive thing - despite everybody knowing that bubbles happen very regularly.
Otherwise, inflation is seen as bad - which is ridiculous since the extraordinary low interest rates kept by the FED for years ("printing money") has sustained the economic growth and avoided recession.
Economists are historians of the economy. They are able to explain what happened - and if they agree on the general picture, they disagree on many points. Which is normal, that is a research field, so there are debates.
Some say lessons should be learned from History... well, for sure, all other things being equal, stuff tend to repeat, but as time goes by, the other things are not equal at all - or only to a certain point.
I majored in History but historians are not my first sources to predict the future. Despite having repeatedly failed at predicting anything, we can't help but ask economists to be oracles and ask them to set-up policies.
So it's not a closed loop - it's just printing with more steps.
Likewise now its destruction with the removal of these reserves.
This is a legacy of the base 20 numerical system used by the Celtics thousands of years ago before the modern Romance language drove it out. The hybridization with our current base 10 system came with the Roman conquest of the Gaul.
Another example of the base 20 in use is the Quinze-Vingts National Ophthalmology Hospital in Paris, where Quinze-Vingts (fifteen twenties) refers to the original capacity of 15*20 = 300 beds available when built in the Middle Ages.
That should also be introduced when teachers explain hexadecimal :-)
Btw, in the spirit of the title of this thread, in English you would say "as a French person". In the past, "Frenchman" was used but it's understandably out of favour these days.
"French" can be used as an adjective but not a noun in this context. It's a very common error, I suppose since "français" can be used as an adjective or a noun en français :)
In fact in informal Quebecois French, it's also used as a verb, with the same meaning as in English.
As in "J'ai Frenché ma blonde" --> "I Frenched my girlfriend"
My uneducated guess is that at the time, it was easier to keep the base 20 to visualize a higher number. Just like we say "a few dozen eggs" to get an overall sense of the volume, it made more sense to keep it that way instead of a more arithmetic approach. Not sure why it never evolved, tho.
Logical according to whom? Why is base 10 more logical than any of the other bases? I'd argue it's not, it's simply that it's what we're used to so we think it's more logical.
But I was more going on to the fact that 'base 10' is somehow more logical than any other base as a chosen one for natural languages. I see no reason why that is so.
The names of days are the equivalent of Day 1, Day 2 etc. (except Sunday which is Sunday/Skyday), and months are Month 1, Month 2 etc.
There's also all sorts of languages that have non-base 10 counting systems. Some use 3, some use 12 and some have even more exotic ones. One in Papua New Guinea even originally has a base-27 counting system!
I thank you. I'm here all week...
Originally from literal score in wood made as a tally mark when 20 items were counted.
Plus, dozens (and gross).
And base 60 becoming standard for time and degrees of a circle.
Minute (unit of time) comes from "minute (smaller part)", and second from second minute (small part of the small part).
Example:
7-22-11-34-17-52-26-13-40-20-10-5-16-8-4-2-1-4-2-1-4-2-1...
Any positive integer you take, you end up in a 1-4-2-1 loop.
It's not proved yet but there's no number found yet that satisfies otherwise. That's the Collatz Conjecture or the 3n+1 problem.
Probably the easiest conjecture to explain to someone.
Good day/night!
(Obviously a subjective question in practice, so chances are you might need to add a bit of qualification)
https://twitter.com/badamczewski01/status/142826257042792857...
I'll take the even ones. Who works on the odd ones?
An odd number is a number that ends in 1, 3, 5, 7, or 9.
- ends in a 1: times 3 + 1: it now ends in a 4, which is even, and thus reduces to the even case.
- ends in a 3: tomes 3 is 9, + 1: ends in a 0; even again.
- ends in a 5: ×3 ends in a 5 again, +1: ends in a 6; again even!
- ends in 7: x3: now ends in a 1, +1: ends in a 2; even yet again!
- ends in a 9: ×3 then eens in a 7, +1 thus eens in an 8: even again!!
So all that's left is the cases for @someweirdperson ;-) @someweirdperson
This approach, like every other approaches, did not yield any significant result.
The funny thing is that it fits right in the P=NP problem: easy to verify, hard to solve :)
The cantata is a chorale cantata based on the Lutheran Hymn "Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme", the opening movement is a chorus that is based on this tune. The tune is in Bar form, the first 3 verses are repeated, followed by 6 verse which is sung once through (3x2 + 3x2), and Bach's chorus mirrors this structure. Bach decided to set the piece in E-flat, which is a key signature with 3 flats. He also decided to make the time signature 3/4, so each bar has 3 beats. There are 3 groups of musicians involved (not counting the obligatory basso continuo): 1) vocal forces, 3 parts (Soprano + Alto + Tenor, the bass mostly doubles the basso continuo and is not independent); 2) strings, 3 parts (violin 1 + violin 2 + viola); 3) winds, 3 parts (oboe 1 + oboe 2 + alto oboe). Also, the opening melody of the chorale outlines the 3 notes of the tonic triad of E-flat (E-flat, G, B-flat), while later on, Bach being Bach, there is a miniature fugato where the three lower voices open with the same 3 pitches in a different order (G, B-flat, E-flat).
I'm usual sceptical of most other numerological readings of Bach's music precisely because when Bach wished to make a point with numbers, he makes it damned obvious, as in this case.
Also see:
* BACH Motif: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BACH_motif
The letters of his name, B, A, C, H encoding a melody.
$ mkdir hi
$ cd <alt+.>
I would have referred to this using !$, which is one of the Bourne shell history substitutions. Like
$ mkdir awesome
$ cd !$
An advantage of the way you mentioned is that you could actually see the history item displayed on the command line before running the command!
sudo !!
Another example could be
echo "!!" > myscript
The generic form is !n:m for n-th last command line and m-th argument, with an omitted n being a shortcut for the last line.
Not sure if all of this works the same in bash.
sudo !!
cd -
https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/readline.3.html
All engineers working with the command line (even after 35 years) really, really should open and read
man bash
man readlineto make sure you don't end up with something like urxvt-readline(1)
There are several other ways to do this sort of thing too. See e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4009412/how-to-use-argum...
$ grep blah *
$ ^r
(reverse-i-search)`g': grep blah *
https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/report.html
Caution: that’s hard, explicit, distressing reading.
I wonder what aspects have gotten worse over the years and how the dynamic has shifted, if at all. Or maybe it doesn't matter this was from 20 years ago? :<
You wouldn't get that impression reading the news.
This is often demonstrated with the two hypothetical headlines "Dog bites Man" vs "Man bites Dog".
One is expected based on its ubiquity, and so a poor headline, where you want some emotional reaction to hook readers.
I can't see where the suffering of men would be silenced because of their gender.
On the contrary, at last, more and more often men express their suffering, which is great because the "silent strong" man used to be the reference. Men as warriors don't ever complain etc.
There are more and more often in the news men stating their feelings: veterans with PTSD, Johnny Depp courageously telling how he has been abused by his partner, men denouncing being on verge of burning-out at work etc.
As a man, I consider that yes, there is still plenty of men suffering in silence. And that needs to come out. The more men are able to get over the silent strong man figure - John Wayne! - inherited from the past, the more the media will talk about it.
Nobody is silencing the suffering of men ; the men need to reconnect with their feelings and learn to express them. Most women are more able to express their feelings and they are indeed "silenced" - even if less and less so.
An example? The "mental load". In many modern heterosexual couples, the woman is still in charge of the general on-going of the home, and the man goes to work without that load. When he comes home, he waits to be asked or just does the minimum.
If you have ever been in charge of a project at work and your colleagues are only participants, you know very well the difference. Being in charge of the general coordination, ensure that everything is done when required, is quite a load.
Things are improving. Slowly.
Oh, 80% of homicides are of men? How about "men kill xyz thousand women every year?"
There are therefore around 3 times more people incarcerated in the US than in UK, proportionally.
As rapes are very frequent in the US jails (as this terrible report points out) and most of the jail population are men, then indeed, what can conclude that - statistically speaking - that most rape victims are men.
But if you take apart the population in jail, most rape victims are women.
Of course, one can argue that prisoners are human beings like others: they are. But the gendered statistic on rape is turned upside-down by the totally abnormal proportion of people in jail in the US, when compared to comparable countries, PLUS the totally despicable jail system where rapes are numerous.
Note that rapes are very common as well in jails of comparable countries. I have no information about this, but I can't see why rapes would be more frequent in American jails rather than British jails - all others things being equal. But maybe the US jail system and/or the US jail population may lead to more (or less, why not) rapes: I have no clue about this.
I'm not saying that they are in jail for no reason, but that the US society is ... dysfunctional. That analysis may appear outrageous in the US, but it is something obvious to many other countries.
But from saying "dysfunctional" to point out why it is so, there is a huge leap where political inclinations are bound to express themselves. In this case, these are not biases, because politics is precisely about how we live together in a society. And indeed, people don't live in the same world, in the sense that their interpretative frameworks are so diverse.
That's why I find the formulation of that figure problematic. I would find it less click-bait-y and trolly to say: "Rapes of men in the US jails are incredibly numerous" - maybe adding "to the point of outnumbering the rapes of women".
Why is it problematic? Because it echoes a large incel, masculinust, far-right discourse against feminism. Each time women (and "woke" men, to use their vocabulary) denounce something, there are always troves of righteous men pretending that the issue is true for all sexes alike (since in their views, sex and gender are the same thing).
The formulation "Most rapes victims in the United States are men" is a way of saying that all genders are equally victims of rapes in general. But they are not. In the world, and probably in all countries except the US, rape victims are overwhelmingly women and girls. The US exception is not related to a gender equality but to the abnormal rate of incarceration.
I don't know if there was an intention in the formulation or not. Maybe not, so I'm not at all in an accusatory mode. I'm just saying that this formulation offers ground to misinterpretation.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/prison-population-f... https://www.statista.com/statistics/203718/number-of-prisone...
> The US exception is not related to a gender equality but to the abnormal rate of incarceration.
It’s related to a gender inequality. The US incarceration system has gender inequality built into it, so more incarceration means more inequality.
You could say indigenous people didn’t really have a childhood sexual abuse problem, but an abnormal rate of state-mandated religious schools. Sounds pretty gross, right?
Which is also why prisons are segregated by sex, to avoid women prisoners being sexually assaulted, raped and impregnated by deviant men. If prisons had no such sex segregation, it would overwhelmingly be the women being raped, not the men.
It does make me wonder if penectomy and castration should be the standard punishment for rape, not just incarceration. Otherwise they're just being given access to a new set of potential victims.
Time is a straight arrow: call it t.
The guitarist plays, and their guitar pickup records a signal. At any time t, measure the value of this signal's waveform: call it x.
That signal can go into a pedal that maps each value to create an output signal. Call it f(x, t).
The pedal is a linear system when it satisfies f(x1 + x2, t) = f(x1, t) + f(x2, t). In English, you can blend two guitar signals going into a single linear pedal, and it will sound the same as if you used a separate pedal for each guitar.
The pedal is a time-invariant system when it satisfies f(x, t1) = f(x, t2). In English, a time-invariant pedal does not warble over time.
The magic happens when a system is both linear and time-invariant. These systems are so special, we call them "LTI" for short. Feed an LTI system a single, really loud, POP! Something like a clap, or a gunshot. Record the sound of this gunshot, and call it "impulse_response.wav". This file characterizes EVERYTHING about the system. If you know how the system responds to an impulse, you will know how the system responds to any other sound. All you have to do is convolve the sound with the impulse response, i.e. use the contents of impulse_response.wav as a set of weights and pass the sound through it.
The echoes you hear when you speak in a large room is a real-world example of an LTI system. People will go to a cathedral, an open field, or a large tunnel, set up a microphone, and fire a blank pistol. They can go home, convolve the sound of their guitar or voice or whatever with the impulse response, and it will sound exactly like they're in that space! There are whole communities of people making and sharing impulse responses out there, and I just think it's the coolest thing ever.
For any guitarists reading this, I'll bring this back to the pedalboard. Another cool thing about LTI systems is that when you chain multiple of them together, the order does not matter. Reverb, delay, EQ, and wah are all LTI effects. If you've ever wondered why pedal ordering sometimes matters and sometimes doesn't, this is why.
Delay and reverb may be LTI in your definition, but they very much do matter what order they are in, every time.
Delay before reverb is going to give a more staccato sound, whereas the reverb before delay is probably just going to wash the whole thing out if you’re not careful on your settings.
Great comment otherwise!
The math doesn't work, assuming scalar f, x, t1, t2 as implied by their description. For a delay the x passed at t1 has no correlation to what f calculates to. It needs vectors F(X, t) and X I think.
[0]: https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=107337&sid=44...
While many use "fact" and "factoid" interchangeably, they are (by original definition) inherently two entirely different things.
Did you know that time-travel is a modern concept but in the Indian scriptures, which dates back to thousands of years already mentioned about it. It is a story about King Kakudmi, who sought a husband for his beautiful daughter, Revati. They both had travel to Lord Bhrama's(Creator of the universe) place which was apparently very far from our planet to seek advice. Lord Bhrama then explains them that time moves very differently on his plane of existence and the people they knew on their planet are already dead as it's been 116 million years that has passed in last 20 minutes of Bhrama's time.
They then travel back to Earth after seeking the advice.
Hindu scriptures mentioned a lot of "modern-day concepts" thousands of years back. Isn't it fascinating?
There’s a publication called “Date Panchang” that gets a new version for every new Hindu year. The first few pages talk about time and how Brahma experiences time.
If you can read sanskrit/Marathi, it’s page 5 here: https://pdfcoffee.com/qdownload/date-panchang-2020-pdf-free....
It talks about how long Brahma’s life is and where I’m his life he is right now. Not sure how they calculated that but it’s pretty wild to think about.
Even more fascinating for me is the concept of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb in the context of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimana s
Imagine they had a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterial which would have enabled that. I mean withstanding 22.000°C while being transparent to hard ultraviolet. And some sort of 'ultravoltaic' cells behind that...
...while at least some texts speak of those things as full of crystals and mirrors as part of their engines and on board power plants.
Look at your choices and try to find an independent entity making a decision.
You will likely notice your conditioning and preferences, beliefs, emotions, thoughts, physiological and psychological state in the moment, your environment, habits, trauma patterns, all collaborating toward one thing or another.
“Free will” is a shortcut for all these forces we have mo control over. Even when we explicitly feel we’re in control - usually the goal this control serves is not in our control. We don’t choose our preferences, tastes, morality, desires, or thoughts.
Paradoxically, in this complete absence of “choice” as we understand it, lies freedom.
What is "we" in this context?
“Who am I?” Is one of the common pointers used to investigate.
Observing and unpacking one’s choices is another.
Yea I also noted that, I always thought, I like red meat, but it was not my decision to like red meat. Sure I can control the urge or desire to have it or not have it. But I never "decided" to like red meat !
It’s like that all the way down, as far as I’ve been able to see. That, and automations/patterns/habits.
Beyond story or thoughts.
Suggesting that there’s more to it to the thinking mind.
Double-clicking and dragging selects text word-by-word.
Triple-clicking selects the whole paragraph.
Middle-clicking a link opens it in a new tab.
Middle-clicking a tab closes it.
Middle-clicking in general often has useful functionality!
I may or may not use this with my laptop dozens of times a day (it's how I copy/paste out of xterm).
(Fun bit of trivia, my old EliteBook 8470p has a trackpad+trackpoint setup with two independent sets of buttons, and while I don't seem to be able to middle-click with the trackpoint buttons, I can send a middle-click by pressing both trackpad buttons, keep them held down, and then independently send left and right clicks (press-release) using the trackpoint buttons as much as I want. I somehow doubt that was an accident. Engineering archaeology is fun :D)
Ctrl+Arrow keys navigates through whole words at a time
Ctrl+Shift+Arrow keys can be combined to select whole words
Ctrl+Backspace can be used to delete whole words
In code-editors tripple selects a line (hold to select multiple). When moving/deleting lines this is much more semantically clean (and faster) than manually dragging from the previous line's line end to the next lines last character before the line end.
When I wrote about the double-click-drag thing, I thought triple-click-drag might logically also be a thing, but it doesn't work for me. (Firefox, KDE, Linux)
Ahh I used a Magic Mouse and trackpad for so long I forgot about this. It makes me a little sad. On the other hand panning and gestures are worth the loss.
1. How can I OW objectively OW tell oww the difference ow where being seriously jarred (ow) ends and being significantly injured begins?
2. As a person ages, is it possible to train in this way without ending up seriously banged up with long-term ramifications? Or is this more of a "don't use a skateboard" type of thing with no leeway?
2. You can practice at low risk of being seriously injured. Again, you need a partner who is sufficiently knowledgeable and skilled to help you without hurting you.
Grappling arts that emphasize groundfighting give you more practical experience of fighting usefully with lower risk of injury. Because you more often start out on the ground, you're much less likely to be injured in a fall. Because you strike less, you're less likely to injure yourself either by striking something or by being struck.
If you want to get past the non-useful reactions to being struck, though, then you probably also want to do some striking artor sport with contact--boxing, kickboxing, muay thai, et. al. Just be sure to use safety equipment and work with someone who has both skill and empathy.
With a slight /s
Nobody I've met even knows what they are. I came across them years ago in the shaving section, and was blown away by their utility.
They are solid pieces of some saltlike material that are super effective at stopping bleeding. We don't even have bandaids in our house anymore, the pencils are way more useful.
That said, they are cheap enough for everyone to have their own if that's a concern for you.
Otherwise you risk spreading virus and bacteria between people - this is hygiene 101.
For shaving cuts, typical knife cuts, paper cuts, etc, noticed nothing really.
I'd read the Army used to pack wounds with basically a crushed version of the same thing.
(Spray antiperspirant might be, too, but spraying myself in the face has never sounded particularly appealing)
It’s not designed for this purpose, and you’re putting this substance on an open wound, so try at your own risk.
Cyanoacrylate (also known as "Super glue").
I've been using it to cover some small clean cuts. I think today there's even variants approved for such use.
Yeah, look up ‘Vetbond’ and ‘Dermabond’. They are not strictly superglue, but longer chain cyanoacrylates, which confer them some properties such as higher flexibility and bacterial growth inhibition.
https://www.wombatfoundation.com.au/team-view/peter-nicholso...
https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/the-secret-life-of-w...
https://www.abc.net.au/austory/the-wombat-boy-march-25,-2002...
I don't maintain the Wiki.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov_bread_basket
In 1939, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, claimed the Soviet Union was not dropping bombs on Finland, but merely airlifting food to starving Finns. The Finns sarcastically dubbed the RRAB-3 cluster bomb "Molotov's bread basket." Consequently, the improvised incendiary device that Finns used to counter Soviet tanks was named the "Molotov cocktail", "a drink to go with the food."
Put another way, it was my impression that IPA was coarse grained enough to permit at least some different accents to be represented by the same IPA "spelling".
Oh, and neutron stars have mountains: height differences on their crust of a few centimeters or less. Scaling that height difference takes more energy than scaling Mount Everest. Gravity is weird.
(Armchair interest in astrophysics; this is roughly correct but I'm sure others can point out nuances better).
Another great Forward read is Rocheworld.
Forward was a physicist, and created settings that only a physicist would be likely to think of.
I'm working on some Nim modules which will be Open Sourced soon. This will provide a web framework with an ORM. It will be a batteries-included framework.
It will also easily plug-in to a Flutter powered front-end engine which can use Nim defined back-end UI code (not just Nim actually). Also to be Open Sourced soon.
The landing page with a wait-list you can sign-up for: https://nexusdev.tools
which actually converges because the norm has the negative of the exponent.
pari/gp has a native p-adic calculator, where you can type 1/2 + O(3^5) and get the first p-adic digits.
I don’t know why this impresses me, but it is probably because there are just two ways of extending the rationals, and the p-adic numbers are like the lesser known brothers of reals. I feel, I should have known this for ages. And no, I don’t know if there are known applications, outside number theory, but still, its cute.
Users with 100 or more followers can often be business owners, well known employees from FAANG companies and the like.
Users with 1000 or more followers tend to be specialists in lesser used technologies who have created open source technologies used widely in that specific domain.
Users with 10000 or more followers tend to be luminaries who have created technologies most people in the industry are familiar with, like say coffeescript.
[1]: https://github.com/andrewmcwattersandco/github-statistics
Solution:
- Bose QC 35
- Earplugs
Now the earplugs don't get pushed in and don't aggrevate the tinnitus. The bose QC 35 gets pushed onto whatever is directly outside your ear, which is a bit uncomfortable but fine.
This is my new earplugs setup and it works.
Also if you’re a regular earplug user, you can get something like: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00W3DE3BO
I have these and cut off the stalks. They’re easy to take out and don’t get pushed in.
Finally, there are (more expensive) “concert earplugs designed to retain the auditory experience while reducing loudness only. Worth checking out if you like your hearing but are often in loud environments.
https://www.gillibrand.senate.gov/news/press/release/gillibr...
Soft disclosure has happened already via the USS Nimitz encounter. If UAPs are true, then the floodgates are open and will lead to a forced re-evaluation of other high strangeness phenomena (telepathy, ESP, etc).
I wanted to believe and there is a serious subreddit for UFOs but most are debunked. There exist ~2 truly mysterious UFOs and most of their mystery has been explained.
> Folie à deux ('folly of two', or 'madness [shared] by two'), also known as shared psychosis or shared delusional disorder (SDD), is a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief, and sometimes hallucinations, are transmitted from one individual to another.
https://mobile.twitter.com/the_cholla/status/151875157360987...
I would provide credence to the above flight path as witness testimony from the pilots themselves attest to it, while West's claims of it being just glare are on the data alone.
Nevermind West's continual assertions of it being glare when we have witness testimony that it's a fleet of objects moving together, including the Gymbal.
Obviously it's because when the aliens want to talk to the authorities, they go to the Supreme Democratic Leader of Earth.
(·) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080836/mediaviewer/rm391993728...
And besides, the floodgates will not open, that isn't how the scientific method works. If the little green men arrive, the evidence we have showing everything is mumbo jumbo doesn't cease to exist.
Even in the Manhattan project, in the unclassified public work there is active research in nuclear physics. Nothing of the sort is happening here wrt gravitic propulsion/warping of space time.
Floodgates open because in many of UAP encounters, witness testimony relay of telepathic communication initiated by the beings in the craft.
It actually is how the scientific method works. If something that is very unlikely is now true, the likelihood of linked events predicated on this should be re-evaluated because the priors have changed.
[1] http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/hoax/bluebeam.htm
[2] https://secretsun.blogspot.com/2010/11/project-blue-beam-exp...
as proposed by this person:
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serge_Monast
:-)
But I would encourage you to suspend disbelief and approach the topic methodically, there genuinely appears to be something deeper here.
(install with 'sudo install cw')
*angry pedant noises*
Extremely handy in rental cars.
Example: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/know-instantly-which-side-you...
https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/web/assets/pictures/20120...
Back in the 00's an Irish heritage group in Canada bought a chunk of land in Ontario and managed to get it designated as a Gaeltacht.
So officially, as of today, Irish is the common vernacular in several small-ish regions of Ireland and a .25km^2 chunk of Canada.
Bit more info here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_North_American_Gae...
Today I was going to go for a walk to collect some Agaricus Campestris but the river near flooded the place where they grow.
This (particular type of broad) gauge is known as Irish gauge, and is also used in Ireland and Australia.
We can't simply just "move" to a different location like other animals.
I beg to differ when most wealthy and well-off Americans get affected by drought, fires, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, freak snow storms... and still stay in the same place all year round trying to tame their environment.
Nature is amazingly powerful
Ctrl-T does the same in emacs, and also in readline based programs like bash, as well as everywhere on macOS.
I always thought the fact that Vim had automatic buffer copying and forced me to use "0p instead of p was really annoying. Looks like there is an actual reason for it after all :)
Not specifying a register (e.g. "0) just means the commands, including x and p, will use the " register, aka the unnamed register. By itself, p is equivalent to ""p.
:reg shows you all the registers and their current contents.
This seems like a good description: https://www.brianstorti.com/vim-registers/
Edit: Oh I guess you are saying it was unexpected that delete or change commands clobber yanked contents of the unnamed register.
C-r will search backward in your history allowing you to type partial matches (like, "I know I compiled foo.c, but what options did I use?" type `C-r foo.c` and repeatedly type C-r until I find the compiler command I used).
https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Bindable-... - for a lot more options
You can switch to vi keybindings with `set -o vi`.
(Never used macOS. Welp. Guess I have a lot of relearning to do.)
In theory, there's no difference between the theory and the practice.
In practice, there is.
Here is my favorite mental-model for problem solving (and my favorite analogy)
So I have this problem:
I love eating scramble eggs, I hate cleaning up the pan and have been trying over the years many different techniques to make sure the egg's doesn't stick to the pan. (No I don't want teflon thanks).
So I tried different oils, temperatures and techniques, all with the goal of getting those delicious eggs not to stick in my pot/pan afterwards.
Then one day it hit me, I'm solving the wrong problem. The problem to be solved is not "EGGS NOT STICKING TO PAN", it's "FINDING A BETTER WAY TO CLEAN" the pan !
And I have found it, it's using a different type of plastic-scrubber. It looks like steel-wool, but it's all plastic.
So whenever I'm stuck on a problem for too long, I try and model the problem as an "eggs-in-pan" problem statement.
First I put oil in the pan and let it heat up. Once it is hot, I pour the scrambled egg on it. Use my spoon, fork, whatever to distribute and turn. then I tip over the pan get the eggs onto my plate.
My pan has a nice feature to make pouring it out easier.
Usually nothing has stuck to the pan.
It is key to heat the pan and the oil first.
If something sticks, whilst still hot, pour some water on it. It will result in a satifsying bubbling that usually will get any residue out.
Dry with a (paper) towel or whatever else you use.
I usually drip a little oil in the pan before I put it away.
If that sounds complicated it realy is not. Once you do it a few times it takes up little time and is fairly reliable.
Another good tip is make sure you use the right oil. Use oil that is mean for high heat.
.
sin(30) = sqrt(1)/2.
sin(45) = sqrt(2)/2.
sin(60) = sqrt(3)/2.
sin(90) = sqrt(4)/2.
You probably knew all of those, but may not have seen it set out in this fashion before.
The Taylor series comes to mind immediately. There may be (probably are) better methods.
I'm 40 and overlap with all of the 100 verified oldest women and 100 oldest men, save for one.
On Linux, you can usually left-click-drag-release to highlight some text, move your mouse cursor to a new location (in any window), and middle-click once to paste the text you highlighted there. No explicit keyboard or right-click copy and paste required.
At this point, AWS has updated the API to allow querying for the region as one would expect. See my answer on the afore-footnoted question[2].
[1] The number and variety of answers on the topic is both hilarious and terrifying: https://stackoverflow.com/q/4249488
I personally cannot deal with the alt tab style switching between all windows this app to app switch works much better for me and I use it constantly.
The support is excellent as when you have multiple cursors, all other standard key combos, like Ctrl+arrow work for all at once. It's also great for selecting a list of aligned text and pasting it elsewhere.
You can also use it when you select something, what you selected becomes the token
More: https://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/guide/tips/multi-cursor/
One workflow is to git clone mirror the main repo and use that as a shared read-only source of historical references when cloning a new repo. You can also hardlink or reference those objects to save disk space (though some file systems will do that transparently for you).
It feels like this could be done entirely transparently to the user, for a free speed boost but it's not quite there yet and still needs some thought and setup. Some big services use this behind the scenes though so it's presumably robust.
So worth looking into if you are spending time waiting for clones.
Worktrees let you have different branches from the same repo checked out to the file system at the same time, without needing seperate repos.
The clone --shared --reference-if-able and -dissociate options let you have multiple repos with less of a space hit.
They almost certainly can be used at the same time, though I've never heard of anyone doing so.
The limit of only having at most a single copy of each branch checked out, which makes sense for development purposes, made worktrees unsuitable for my use, which was mostly (ab)using git as a deployment tool.
The word derives from the Venetian phrase "s-ciào vostro" or "s-ciào" (schiavo/sciavo) literally meaning "(I am) your slave"
This greeting is analogous to the medieval Latin servus which is still used colloquially in parts of Central/Eastern Europe or the antiquated English valediction "Your Obedient Servant." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciao
In Italy you say ciao both when you meet somebody, and when you leave, while in other countries (e.g. Brazil), you say "Ciao" only when you go away: if you use it when you meet somebody sounds sooooo weird :) :)
It will relaunch the last command you used with sudo before. Example:
$ apt upgrade Could not open lock file ... $ sudo !! sudo apt upgrade [sudo] password for ...:
Betty White was born before Anne Frank.
Hitler and Wittgenstein attended the same school even
The Wittgenstein family also had all of their funds invested in America before the outbreak of WW2
These times we are living in are not the most important. Or, of they are, then everyone everywhere is at everytime living at the same importance.
Now, there is something called the hinge of history that some mathematicians have looked into the chance of "well right now is most important, people in the past and future are delusional". The chances are very very low.
Think of this the next time you hear someone appeal to urgency as political motivation.
I don’t know what’s more important than that.
Either it’s the most important or unimportant.
Logic of natural language does not work that way. It's paraconsistent: statements are attributed a value within
T(A)^T(¬A), T(A)^F(¬A), F(A)^T(¬A), F(A)^F(¬A)
However, our generation is the first to be capable of totally destroying human civilization. That makes us somewhat special. .
A wonderful nostalgic way to play the game.
If I look at modern cards they don't feel like the same game. Digitally generated art, strange creatures "Social Climber"? and most of the cards has long complicated texts and many using complicated mechanics.
Compare those new cards to old classic cards like Black Knight: https://scryfall.com/card/leb/95/black-knight
Maybe it is nostalgia, I don't know. But for me the essence and spirit of Magic as a game is with the 93/94 cards.
Excluding lands, of course.
This means that we are not simply connected to the past by cause and effect -- we're also coupled to the future. For any specific end to come about, our experiences must be constrained.
In differential equations, we use the boundary conditions to solve for the dynamical behavior in the time interval between them.
In analysis, we use the existing conditions in a process called 'analytic continuation' to recover the whole process.
In fractals or the physical theories surrounding them (AdS/CFT correspondence), the boundary determines the bulk. So if you have only the frame/margins of an M.C Escher tesselation, the entire inside foreground (the bulk) can be recovered by gradually painting in what's missing.
So we are more of a continuation of both the past and the future than simply a remnant of the past.
While the past may have pushed us, the future attracts us.
We must recognize that war is common, strife is justice, and all things happen according to strife and necessity. War is father of all and king of all; and some he manifested as gods, some as men; some he made slaves, some free.
Conflicting powers of opposites, including those of elemental bodies, make possible the world and all its variety; without that conflict we would have only lifeless uniformity."
http://dtrace.org/blogs/wesolows/2014/04/10/libsunw_ssl-or-h...
And as social media has taught us, humour and irony get lost very easily. I have to wonder how much of history we misunderstand because we didn't understand the tone.
Humans look symmetric on the outside but have stark asymmetries on the inside Thus, we have a spleen on the left but not the right. Our left lung has two lobes, but our right lung has three. Our heart and stomach are shifted left of center, our liver is shifted right of center, and our intestines meander throughout our abdominal cavity with no regard for the midline at all.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/quirks-of-human-ana...
I had this thought while walking down the street in a foreign country. And I remember it having quite a profound effect on me. What a marvelous thing it is, our hand!
(It even applies to many things we would call „nature“, such as woods or meadows.)
1. "cat foo.json | python -m json.tool" pretty print on console.
2. "cal" pretty prints current month on console. "cal 2022" pretty print current year.
> interesting to you
1. Bank of England one of the earliest banks to issue paper money was establish to finance war expenditure.
2. Federal reserve is holding (and hence funding) ~$2.7T worth of mortgage backed securities[1]. It started out as a stop gap measure to cushion 2008 crisis but they are yet to discontinue it.
* cal -3 shows the previous, current, and next month
* ncal -C shows the current month with today’s date highlighted
* ncal -C3 is equivalent to cal -3 with highlighting
1. Other than a gag mannequin or few.
I know Snowden is highly-revered around here, but he's not all-knowing, and I'm fairly certain he did not have access to the entire US IC store of intel.
This image is taken from the wikipedia article mentioned below. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EarthsOrbit_en.png
$ awk 'BEGIN {srand(); t = srand() ; print t}'
1651247949
1. srand if not provided with a seed will use the current unix epoch as seed
2. srand will return its previous seed in a new initialization (and we assign it to t)
3. we print t
I learned this via a "Systems we love" talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfhMUed9RSE)
(: > f;echo "$((0$(pax 2>/dev/null -x ustar -wd -- f|dd 2> /dev/null bs=4 skip=34 count=3|tr -d '\0')))";rm -f f)
also, if you're actually targeting POSIX, you should make sure you've set PATH="`getconf PATH`" to guarantee you get the POSIX version of utilities.
date +%s
indeed, that's the cool thing about it!
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20201202084055/https://pubs.open...
cat > epoch.c
int printf(const char *__restrict, ...);
unsigned int time(unsigned int *tloc);
int main(){printf("%u\n",time((unsigned int *)0));}
^D
c99 epoch.c
./a.outI find this community very knowledgeable, smart and down to earth. It was impressive to see a 40+ year old body builder (he is no Arnold, but has impressive physique for an amateur) doing so well on this diet.
If someone is interested, spend some time googling this topic. It is well worth your time.
Eating raw is not a panacea. But it is a solid step in getting and maintaining a healthy body and mind, especially as one ages.
In my personal experience practicing self awareness has helped with this. I understand that there are factors outside of our control, but what goes on within us can be controlled to some extent with effort and time.
We have a subjective impression of control, but that too is only the result of physics.
Really? You can choose to believe something? I'm really not sure I can. If you really think that you can, try an experiment like this:
1. Look closely at something familiar--maybe your car or your house, for example. Identify what color it is, or what colors predominate.
2. Now turn the other way so that you can't see it. Choose to believe that it's a different color.
3. Turn at look at it again. Are you surprised by what you see?
On a serious note, Sam Harriss essay on free will is a good read, nihilism and existentialism too.
A point I'd like to make is that surrendering and accepting to things you don't control can bring you short term peace but will crush your long term peace. I personally don't care if I have or don't have free will, there are things about myself and the world around me that I cannot control but will never stop trying to fight against it. Hurting people, for one. I think that's my definition of free will.
Someone else made a point that free will could be similar to the god of the gaps theory, where free will is in the gaps.
And the number two is even crazier, being roa in Malagasy and rua in Rapanui, so this word is shared from Madagascar all the way to Easter Island.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rima#Rapa_Nui
Addie Joss threw the fourth perfect game in MLB history, in 1908.
If you use Spotlight search to look up a word in dictionary, you need to hit down arrow repeatedly to select the word, or click on the word. Instead, you can:
- Command + L to jump to the word
- Command + D to open Dictionary app with that word
If you'd known this, you'd have given some idea of your background. Therefore, the above is the only thing that we can know is new to you. :P
and any four-legged table that wobbles can be rotated to a position so as not to wobble (assuming the floor has no cliffs or other topological oddities in its unevenness)
https://www.unitedbsd.com/d/308-moritz-systems-bsd-tips-and-...
You often hear that it was next to impossible to calculate with Roman numerals. That's not true at all. People developed a very ingenious scheme to do additions and multiplications using pebbles. Since the word for pebble in Latin is calculus, we now call calculus calculus.
How did it go? You represented the digits of a number by a pebble. You drew some lines in the sand, some rows and columns. The rows represented the digit magnitude (I, V, X, etc). The columns were for the operands. Two columns for a number. Why two? Because Roman numerals sometimes use negative digits.
Let's see a concrete example. You want to do the addition 28+44. That is XXVIII + XLIV.
You first draw the lines and put the pebbles in the corresponding squares. Note that XLIV has two negative digits (44 = XLIV = -10 + 50 -1 + 5). So the pebble for 10 and the one for 1 are put on the left side.
The first number does not have any negative digits, so no pebbles in its left column.
———————————————————————————————
L | || | o
X | oo || o |
———————————————————————————————
V | o || | o
I | ooo || o |
———————————————————————————————
———————————————————————————————
L | || | o
X | o || |
———————————————————————————————
V | o || | o
I | oo || |
———————————————————————————————
Now we just move the pebbles from the fourth column to the second column.
———————————————————————————————
L | o || |
X | o || |
———————————————————————————————
V | oo || |
I | oo || |
———————————————————————————————
————————————————
L | o ||
X | oo ||
————————————————
V | ||
I | oo ||
————————————————
Multiplication can be also performed, and it's quite a lot of fun. I'll explain it in the post below.
Multiplication of Roman numerals.
Here we need 3 columns, one each for the multiplicands and one for the result.
Our example will be 12 * 61 = XII * LXI. I chose this example so that we don't need to use negative digits; negative digits can be handled easily, but you can get the idea without them.
We start with the operands on the first two columns. 12 has one pebble at the X row and 2 at the units row; 61 has one pebble at the L row, one at the X row and one at the I row. The column for the result is now empty.
D | ||
C | ||
———————————————
L | o ||
X o | o ||
———————————————
V | ||
I oo| o ||
———————————————
Step 1:
D | ||
C | ||
———————————————-
L | o || o
X o | o || o
———————————————-
V | ||
I o | o || o
———————————————-
D | ||
C | ||
———————————————-
L | o || oo
X o | o || oo
———————————————-
V | ||
I | o || oo
———————————————-
D | || o
C | || o
———————————————-
L | o || oo
X | o || oo o
———————————————-
V | ||
I | o || oo
———————————————-
Ctrl+[ is the same as escape, which I like more than reaching for the esc key.
It's fun to blow people's minds by cutting/copying/pasting _in the shell_ without touching the mouse and using Ctrl+u to clear password inputs when you make a typo.
(Similarly, "brain" and "mind" are not the same.)
Otherwise, the intended general idea is that found e.g. at the beginning of Arthur Schopenhauer's Welt als Wille und Vorstellung:
> "The world is my representation": this holds true for every living, cognitive being, although only a human being can bring it to abstract, reflective consciousness: and if he actually does so he has become philosophically sound
What do you mean? (Outside the detail that "hues" are electromagnetic frequencies, while colours are compositions - there I just simplified.) Which colour is not such?
They aren't. For example, put a card of color A in front of a background of color B; now move it in front of a different background of color C. You will experience color A as being a different color (especially if colors A, B, and C are chosen to maximze the effect).
The electromagnetic spectrum returned by card A isn't different, but the color perceived is. Thus, electromagnetic spectrum is "out there", but color is "in here".
Oh, nobody said they overlap.
The original post claimed that «Colors don't exist outside of your brain»: such statement, while true, is false, as its negation is true (we have mentioned paraconsistency in this very page): "colours" do exist outside your brain, as their nature also is, in a way, being electromagnetic phenomena, function of frequencies.
While such ontological property is pretty common, it is just summoned with some force when someone claims "[fuzzy] is [strict]".
> Thus, electromagnetic spectrum is "out there", but color is "in here"
Of course. That just depends on what you want colour to be. If you put it conceptually near "electromagnetic spectrum", then the distinction emerges.
For that matter, not even "pinkish grey" is defined by simply a frequency (the hue is, the colour is not): the definition for this purpose was meant to be concise, not literal.
That was not the point, and said counterexample is not such (also magenta is, in a way, "electromagnetic frequenc[ies]"). Impossible colours - virtual colours - do go more towards the counterexample, though up to a certain point as they refer to the mental phenomenon of colour and leave the physical nature of colour untouched.
But finally I get what you meant when you stated: «not all colors are electromagnetic frequencies». True ("not all perception is produced by a direct influx of"). But also false, apparently (to the best of my), as objectivized hybrid colours are compositions of electromagnetic ranges; objectivized virtual colours are as well etc.
> Color is a complex phenomenon that cannot be reduced to electromagnetic frequencies and their composition
Yes, and nobody ever stated the opposite - no reduction was never implied, no «overlapping» (as written in the other post): the point was expressed, nearby, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31217999
Let me describe what I mean.
When we want to describe a structure, for example the natural numbers with their usual arithmetic (addition, multiplication and so on), we first decide on a language to use. Our language should contain the symbol 0 (so we can identify the first element) and symbols for the functions S (successor function), + and *. We also introduce variables such as x, y, etc.
Then we write down a list of axioms for the structure, i.e. logical statements that should characterise that structure. Such statements in first order logic are built out of the symbols we introduced, together with equality (e.g. 2+3=5 is a statement, where 2 is an abbreviation for S(S(0)) etc.), logical connectives such as "not", "and", "or", "implies", etc. (e.g. not(1 = 2), or "1 = 1 AND 2 = 2") and importantly quantifiers, "for all elements" and "there exists an element such that" (for example: "for all x, x = 0 OR there exists a y, such that x = S(y)").
A structure for a specific language is nothing more than a set of elements together with an interpretation for all the symbols. So, for our language we may just take the natural numbers with the usual interpretation of +, * etc. But we might just as well have chosen the single-element set {aardvark}, where 0 is interpreted as aardvark and all functions evaluate to aardvard no matter their arguments, i.e. aardvark + aardvark = aardvark. That's silly, but allowed. The natural numbers with their usual interpretation of symbols satisfy all the sentences I introduced above; we say that this structure is a model of that set of sentences. Our aardvark-structure is not a model of these sentences, since not(1 = 2) is not true in it (remember that this is just an abbrevation of not(S(0) = S(S(0))) and in this structure, this evaluates to not(aardvark = aardvark), which is false).
We can now take the set of all statements which are true in the natural numbers, a.k.a. the theory of natural numbers, Th(N). This set is clearly infinite (for example, it contains the statement "n = n" for all n), but that doesn't bother us. Clearly, the natural numbers are a model of Th(N). But are there other models of Th(N)?
Well, in a sense trivially. I can just define the structure {aardvark0, aardvark1, ...} where, for example, aardvark2 + aardvark3 = aardvark5, and so on. That's also a model for Th(N), but if that feels like cheating it's because it is: these structures are exactly the same except for the names of their elements. We therefore call them "isomorphic" and treat them as the same.
But are there models of Th(N) not isomorphic to the natural numbers? Yes, there are.
Let's introduce a new symbol to the language, call it c. Then add to Th(N) the infinitely many statements not(0 = c), not(1 = c), not(2 = c), etc. There is no way we can interpret this symbol c in the natural numbers and make all these statements true: eventually there has to be some natural number which c is equal to.
But now comes the kicker: By the compactness theorem of first order logic, whenever we have a set of sentences so that all finite subsets have a model, the original set has a model. Now, for any finite subset of Th(N) plus the infinitely many statements involving c, we have a model, namely the natural numbers (since the subset is finite, there is a biggest n for which not(n = c) is in the set of statements; then interpret c as n+1). But then, by compactness, the original set of sentences has a model.
So there must exist a structure that makes all statements true that are true for the natural languages (i.e. that is a model for Th(N)), but that also has some element c that is bigger than anything that can be "reached" by applying the successor function arbitrarily often to 0. What does such a structure look like? Well, it turns out that such an element must live in a so called Z-chain, a set of elements that "looks like the (positive and nonnegative) integers", but is totally disconnected from the natural numbers (this is because in Th(N) every number that is not zero has a successor and a predecessor); so in essence this structure contains the natural number and, disconnected from it, a copy of the integers. In fact, we may have more than one copy of the integers.
Compactness is a really powerful and weird theorem. It can be used to prove that any set of statements that allows for infinite models has infinite models of arbitrary cardinality (i.e. "as big as we want"). It can be used to construct an extension of the real numbers that contains "infinitesimal", non-zero elements (smaller than any positive real number), which is what motivated so-called nonstandard analysis (and makes Newton's and Leibniz's original intuition of "infinitesimally small quantities" precise). And so on.
If we want to actually describe the natural numbers uniquely, we have to turn to a stronger logic, such as second-order logic. In second-order logic we can't only quantify over elements, we can also quantify over sets (or, equivalently, properties). We may for example say "for any set, if it is not empty, it has a least element" (a statement that is true for the natural numbers if we introduce the usual ordering). We can then in second-order logic formulate the principle of induction, which suffices, with some other axioms, to describe the natural numbers uniquely (up to isomorphism, of course).
However, second-order logic has significant downsides. In particular, there exists no proof procedure in second-order logic that is both sound (it only proves true statements) and complete (it can prove all true statements). That means that, in practice, it's often not all that useful. We do have well-behaved proof procedures for first-order logic and that's why we usually stick to it.
Relatedly, in central and south America, _sapote_ is the native american term for (roughly) "edible fruit". The word has nothing to do with the taxonomy of these plants. European colonists made the mistake of adopting the word "sapote" for various different tree species ("what's this called?"; "sapote"), which has led to a lot of subsequent misunderstanding. If you google for "sapote" you'll find some results which naively attempt to give a latin classification to the unqualified "sapote". Now we have fairly useless english names for a variety of these regional fruits, such as (read "sapote" as "edible fruit" in these examples): "green sapote", "white sapote", "black sapote", "yellow sapote", "sun sapote", "south american sapote", and so on - although many of them also have more distinctive names (such as "canistel" or "chupa chupa"), which are much less ambiguous and should be preferred.
The company United Fruit was formed by the merger of two companies in 1899. One half of the merger was originally founded by an american railwayman, who obtained a 99 year lease of 800,000 acres of land from the Costa Rican government in exchange for constructing and operating a railway from the capital city to the carribean port of Limon (during the construction of which, thousands of laborers died from tropical disease). Once the railway started operating, usage was insufficient to pay back the debt on the loans that he'd taken out for construction, and so he pivoted to banana exports; the story goes that he had planted bananas along the tracks during construction as a cheap means of feeding his workers (which doesn't quite make sense given that bananas take 14+ months to fruit), and so he doubled down by increasing the density of planting over the area of the land that he owned, of course clearing more primary tropical forest to do so. The United Fruit company (today Chiquita) became heavily involved in politics in the countries that it was operating in, with the most famous example being its significant role in instigating the CIA backed coup in Guatamala in the 1950s that overturned the democratic government and installed a violent dictatorship, and led to 4 decades of civil war in which at least 140k people died, and which set Guatemalan economic development back by decades or more. So yeah, bananas.
Oh, and finally, there are dozens of varieties of bananas. The one that's exported most commonly (Cavendish) is relatively large and travels well, but is far from the most flavorful. There have been rumors of a killer fungus for many years, which hasn't had a significant impact on availability (yet); however, there are many varieties of bananas that aren't impacted by this fungus, so in the next decade or two we could see one of the other varieties replace Cavendish as the most widely consumed.
This is fairly common with Asian or any "exotic" language. The Japanese word sake means "alcoholic drink". If you walk into a Japanese bar, the bartender may ask you "Osake wa?", or "what would you like to drink?" (My favorite sake to consume in Japanese bars was a rum and coke, which is called a "Cuba Libre" outside the USA.) The fermented-rice beverage we know as sake is called in Japanese nihonshu, which simply means "Japanese liquor".
* your neurons are not in your "brain" 90% of your neurons are not in what you generally denote by brain. They are in your cerebellum. The cerebellum has a distinct neural architecture, that difference is in fact clearly visible with the najed eye. A very poor simplistification would be to call it our GPU.
* the spinal cord is huge and is structurally a contiguous extension of your brain.
* your brain is mostly not filled with blood but with the transparent cerebrospinal fluid Btw there is a liquid almost twice as much more present in the human body than blood, the white lymph. It's unclear to me why we don't see lymph on dissected bodies. (possibly because of microvascularisation?) also anyone know how is lymph pumped? I don't think the heart pump lymph so is it stagnant?
* opiods,nicotine, and cannabinoids are endogenous neuroreceptors. They have the name of exogenous drugs because it happens they bind on those ligands but that also means that the brain generate similar but slightly different analogues itself.
* in terms of neurotransmitter s, types of receptors and even patterns of activation of brain regions per stimulus, humans are not much different from rats or other mammals and this apply for surprisingly high levels cognitive tasks such as e.g ADHD.
* the problem of consciousness/qualias If qualias are supraphysical then how can it be created from a physical process? Moreover where are you?! Where are you qualias located in your brain? And more remarquably, how many are you? Our two hemispheres are highly (but not that much though) symmetric, we might have one consciousness per hemisphere. Or not? But then what about those people that have their hemispheres crosstalk surgically cut? They behave normally (mostly), and have two independent brains. However the best proof might be e.g dolphins, which have a mono-hemispheric alternating sleep. So if one hemisphere dream, the other day it's the other hemisphere. Hence two distinct qualiesque brain in one dolphin brain.
I have a close friend who is working on getting certified as a massage therapist. Skeletal, muscular, and vascular anatomy make up a big part of the required knowledge for the certification.
Two interesting things I learned from them:
1. The lymphatic system is massive and runs alongside our vascular system. For example, there are many lymphatic veins that run through the head and face that empty out just near our clavicle, where they’re the picked up by large vascular veins to the heart, and then on to the liver for filtration.
2. The lymph system is not attached to our heat, and movement of fluid in those veins is purely driven by mechanical motion of our bodies. This is often why paraplegics or folks with other forms of paralysis end up with swollen feet—lymphatic fluid gets trapped in the extremities and collects whoever gravity dictates.
Fascinating stuff. Gave me a much greater appreciation for the level of knowledge and skill to be a massage therapist.
BTW bugs do not have vascularisation their body is one single flask of stagnant fluid. And their brain is distributed..
As tattoos have become hugely popular in the last couple decades I wonder if we’ll start seeing more health problems associated with the chemicals used in inks.
So it is not that surprising to find it in lymph nodes whose very purpose is to accumulate foreign things in the body and possibly make them “meet” with immune cells. Also, tattoos are not completely static structures, they are tiny ink droplets that do get collected by our body — we are just unable to handle a certain size of them. Tatto removal works exactly by breaking up the ink to smaller pieces which our cells can handle.
Personally, even wounds heal faster now that I took biking again. Digestion too.. we're really made to move on a regular basis.
I don't see how one could boil down the staggering complexity of the field in the one-bite popsci factoids that leave a layperson with any useful model of the brain. People certainly try though (ahem, Andrew Huberman...).
Here are some facts though: you have some neurons, they do things sometimes. we have some vague ideas about what different bits of brain do in very specific context. we have absolutely no idea how it all fits together, and are decades away from such an understanding. the fruit fly visual cortex, which is several orders of magnitude smaller than mammalian cortex, has been exhaustively studied for 40+ years, and we are only recently starting to build a circuit level model of the computation in the first layers. Here is your fact: brains are the most complex objects in the known universe
You have a failure of appreciation, yet those facts are potent and surprising.
>constructive to a larger understanding
Yes they are not, who cares? Teaching neuroscience is of course a non-goal of my comment, what an irrelevant thing to say..
>analogizing the cerebellum to a GPU is naive and misleading to the point of being insulting.
Exactly, but if you had allocated a few neurons while reading my comment you would have seen I said "a poor simplist-ification" akin to only transmitting the idea that it is the place in the brain with the most compute power/parallelism.
>working neuroscientist don't think about consciousness, we look at neurobiology,
Such a useless thing to say. It is a truism that scientists mostly focus on what can be studied by the means of metrology/empiricism and indeed for now, qualias are low-studiable. Saying this has no more value than saying water is wet.
Your shallow dismissal is just a pretext to your layman explanation of what is the brain. Explanation with btw zero level of detail. I have read over 1000 papers in neuropharmacology and there are in facts a lot of things we understand about brains. But, the C.elegans ~150-300 neurons, which is much simpler than the fruit flies, is as of now unexplained in terms of neural code, despite having an almost complete connectome of its neuroreceptors. But no the C.elgans is not one of the most complex thing in the universe. This is a fallacy that make seems progress seems impossible. The truth is, C.elgans has a relatively reasonable complexity, however we lack real-time datasets and we lack accurate instruments to observe and retroengineer the while system.
wrong again. whole brain 2p imaging is routinely performed in c elegans ( and drosophila for that matter) for a number of years now. in fact whole brain ephys in c elegans is feasible, although it would be an experimental tour de force. c elegans does not have '~150-300 neurons', it has precisely 302, and the complexity therein cannot be underestimated. it wasn't a layman explanation for I am not a layman, and you are missing my point, which is that reductive facts about such staggeringly complex things are neither interesting or useful. it's the feynman magnet explanation, but grumpier
"we expect our work to aid in these endeavors (Bargmann and Marder, 2013; Brennan and Proekt, 2019; Kaplan et al., 2020; Kato et al., 2015). A richer set of network responses, even for simple chemosensory inputs, has broad relevance in understanding sensorimotor processing"
"The application of NeuroPAL to whole-nervous-system activity recording is mainly limited by nuclear localization of the GCaMP activity sensor, as this may fail to capture highly localized events in axodendritic compartments. This limitation, combined with potentially incomplete or variable anatomical synaptic annotations, may have contributed to the lack of correlation we observed between functional activity and synaptic connectivity."
Neuropal is an extremely recent advance (2021) https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)31682-2?_re... it is the first to allow a complete mapping of GABA receptors (except mitochondria GABA translocator) however complete maps for other receptors, such as mGLURs, NMDA, kainate, ampa, etc are LACKING, as I said. Let alone realtime data that take into account the individual variances over multiple worms. (they should study genetic clones btw) real time data are rare, nowhere near big-data https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=B4gNamS8Ars and when they exist, they lack the complete information (receptor locations, precise neurostransmitter density per axon, etc) C.elegans might be trivial to understand, without a complete map of axons and recpetors, it would still appear generally un-studiable.
As for the 150-300 neurons it is a matter of debate. IIRC the paper I linked refer to ~150 neurons in the head, the rest would be the PNS, not the CNS. But I'm not sure of the exact CNS/PNS ratio besides this paper.
and no it is not a matter of debate, there are precisely 302 neurons
oh yeah well done completely avoiding the PNS question, so according to you neurons in the tail are relevant to worm cognition? spoiler except for tail local stimulus (e.g. tactile, heat) I doubt it
i am dissappointed, although not surprised that someone who relies on appeals to authority when arguing a point is of the mindset that in an organism so finely optimized that it uses biomechanical feedback in gait generation where larger organisms use central pattern generations involving larger number of neurons that some neurons are more important than others. neurons are expensive.
guess you had better read some more papers.
Those are sufficent to asses we are bottlenecked on data. We lack theories especially because we lack data. Yes of course we have a lot of data, which is useless without a complete picture. try debbugging a complex software with only partial, limited logging, the task become easily intractable. But it seems you are more interested in a clash than in sharing knowledge. My argumentation is sound and valid, which make it cogent, authority is unecessary to come to an agreement.
FWIW that's not how you argue, that's just letting all the air out of the balloon.
As for your arguments, IMHO humans are fundamentally wanderers, and we stumble on discoveries and accidental solutions to problems as much (if not more often) than we intentionally set out to understand or achieve something. Given the expanse of the brain, the theoretical paradox of a scanner trying to scan itself, and the post-discovery nature of how we structure and organize things, I think we'll only make progress once we fully let go a bit.
Not to a stupid extreme, of course - unhinged conspiracy theories are as useless as trying to build load-bearing insights from drug experiences, IMHO - but just scientifically accepting that we'll never truly understand how we tick until we accept the wild nature behind it. We are not nearly there yet.
I liked the GP comment.
We don't know about that.
> without weights between them it We don't know where are located the weights but yes probably. We know for sure that individual neurons and axons do not reduce to a single floating point though. They have action potential memory and many dynamic modulators. Basically I believe the idea that neurons are mostly doing linear regression (which is what neural networks are) is very broken. I have read papers about neural coding and neurons are able to encode information in the spike timing frequency and in the strength (weight) but non of those two mechanisms even begin to explain how the system works.
Anyway to answer your comment you have a tentative point but mostly unknown. It is unknown how much percent of human axons are in the cerebrum vs the cerebellum. I would be surprised if the cerebellum would have less since I expect some kind of neuron/axon proportionality. Especially since the main neuron type in the cerebellum are highly branchial.
what. an axon is a component of a neuron
are you referring to glia?
Excuse the dumb question, but what's in the brain then? Or are you meaning to say that the cerebellum has a much higher density of neurons than the brain?
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/10/scientist...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190724133649.h...
In particular:
- visual perception of self - visual perception of others
and the somatosensory aspect of those points, how do i represent your emotions and body in my head, my own body / image / emotions too; and how do they relate.
if that means anything to anybody, comment down.
Thanks in advance
These are called Rydberg atoms and exist because the electon bound to the nucleus of the these atoms has climbed up to very high excitation levels, a state that is very unstable as any collision with another particle or interaction with electromagnetic fields will cause it to collapse down to lower energy levels. The extreme emptiness of interstellar space allows such atoms to persist for long periods.
The density of interstellar hydrogen clouds is much lower than what can be achieved with the best vacuum systems on Earth, but laser cooling techniques have now made the production and maintenance of such atoms possible, to the point where they can be used as delicate sensors, and have possible applications in quantum computing.
It was a picture of a tree, and it took eight hours to expose.
Cancer? PNC-27 + thymalin
Ageing? Skq1 + Epitalon
Quantum gravity? https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/9706055.pdf
When something is really solved (a solution exists without negative side-effects; and this fact has been verified several times), they should indeed look for new problems.
I (non-scientist, applying Occam’s razor and the principle of “if it seems too good to be true, it surely is”) conclude there is probably a fundamental flaw, like, perhaps, after a few years of “improvement” people suddenly shrivel up into a husk.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?linkname=pubmed_pubmed&from...
By becoming a meta-researcher like me, you observe how beautiful and futuristic the world could be. And you also observe that the revolution people are waiting for has been discovered in the 90s and that it will never be used.
As an aside, may I suggest to you that in a forum with many Americans, use of the word “retarded” will usually get you a very strongly negative reaction and obliterate consideration of any other points you may be making.