amatic

I thought so too, but it makes more sense to me that "stop desiring things" is a koan, and not a literal instruction. A koan is like a little paradox, a word problem that a student needs to solve before being allowed to the next "level". The solution is that you cannot stop desiring. Even if you try very hard, you will still have, at the very least, the desire to stop desiring. Source: I've been listening to Alan Watts

E.T., Flight of the navigator, Ender's game,

It's not the shell that produces random walks, it's the larva of a moth living inside the bean. The larva cannot see the environment, it can sense the temperature, so jumping in a random direction is a means (or a strategy) of the larva with the goal of achieving optimal temperature. It works well in their environment, because the temperature rises if they are exposed to direct sunlight, and a few jumps in a random direction might just get them to shade to a lower temperature. In the shade, they stop jumping.

Jumping randomly(edit:in a random direction) when it is too hot is a strategy. And apparently good enough for survival of this species. The bacterium e. Coli uses a similar, or identical strategy of turning("tumbling") in a random direction when the environment conditions are not favorable, and then running straight while the conditions are good. You can guide a blindfolded person to a goal of your choosing just by telling them "hot" or "cold".

Maybe the name of the strategy should be "directed random walk".

Another interpretation of the name "analog computers" is that they compute by analogy - by simulating the problem in a different medium. When analog computers were created, the there were no digital computers to make the distinction between analog (continuous) vs digital (discrete). There were mechanical computers that used gears and shafts, and angular speed as the main variable; electronic computers that used voltages, there is a famous hydraulic computer that used water levels and rates of flow to represent variables, etc.

You start by examining your problem in mathematical terms and write down the differential equations that describe it. For example, you have a model of a car suspension with parameters for spring stiffness, damping etc. You put the model into the computer, and play with the parameters to see how things work. Not that different from modern simulations. The one advantage over modern simulations is that you might get a better "feel" for the system - or so the proponents of the analog used to say, before digital computers replaced them.

The problem is not N=17. If the effect (difference between skipping breakfast vs dinner) was large enough, it would be obvious and significant even in a small sample. The effect seems to be very small.

I agree that what is missing is to measure skipping meals for a longer time period, like a month, at least.

I couldn't get jonesforth to compile correctly. Not sure why. I found a python and a javascript implementation, not sure if I like them. Any recommendations?

Shouldn't the reverse happen? Marijuana trade was a big chunk of Mexican cartel money. Now when it is grown legally in most of US and Canada, the cartels are losing money. The illegality of drugs is keeping the drug gangs in power, because the high price and huge markets are giving them huge profits.

>It would be nice to be able to basically write an equation and have it evaluate. Even a pretty complicated one…

I heard mathpix is basically that, math via ocr to solution (haven't used it personally).

> I fail to see the helpfulness of describing or defining something we do not understand in terms of something related we equally do not understand,

That is a great way of putting it. I feel like most if not all the consciousness research is in that category.

I thought he was Finnish, judging by the last name, but according to Wikipedia, "Pääbo was born in Stockholm and grew up with his mother, Estonian chemist Karin Pääbo."

Also interesting, "His father was biochemist Sune Bergström, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Bengt I. Samuelsson and John R. Vane in 1982"

Congrats Svante Pääbo! I saw his lecture in person a year or two ago, it's really fascinating how the new genetic analysis tools revolutionized the study of human evolution and migration.

For me, the fact it comes from the backreaction blog was enough background information. She is always going on about particle physics.

Arm and hand control via visual and proprioceptive feedback. I've been testing one of the theories in that area for my PhD.

Classic. I've been using similar methods for measurements of transmission delays in the research on different human-controlled variables (though, I've found difference equations more intuitive and easier to represent in code than Laplace transforms). It looks like different controlled variables have different transmission delays, where, eg. the spinal loops are very fast, brainstem-spinal longer, and cortico-spinal even longer, as if the nervous system was split into discrete layers.

Sounds great! Any literature recommendations for an approach like that? Online course?

If they can see a significant effect is a small number of participants, that is good - it means they didn't need to search for the effect of UV light, it was obvious. The reason to have a big sample is usually to control for side-effects in drug testing. Often, the big sample size will mean that even very, very small effects are statistically significant.

No, they also have human participants:

> To further explore the difference between the response of men and women to solar exposure, we asked volunteers (n = 5 men and n = 5 women; age 18–55 years) to expose, for about 25 min, to the sun on a bright sunny midday (2,000 mJ/cm2 UVB). [...] Our data demonstrate that, while both sexes increase their response to environmental cues and decrease their extracellular vesicle pathways, in terms of the immune system and metabolism, men and women react in the distinct manner

> Plato(?)

Yep, in Plato's Phaedrus. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439

Plato wrote the story, attributing it to Socrates. The story is about the egyptian inventor Theuth who showed his inventions of numbers, leters, etc. to the god Thamus (Ammon). The god liked the numbers, but for writing said:

> "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

I used to think loosing weight was easy, and maybe it was when I was a skinny 20-something. Now at 35+ I'm skipping meals, reducing sweets and alcohol, and doing light exercise every day and it is still hard to just maintain the current weight, let alone drop a few kg. The thing that seems to help is fasting for a few days here and there.

In some cases it might be bs, and I think there could be a test for that. The idea is from Feynman, of all people, who once discovered that his colleague counts in "visual" numbers while he counted in "auditory", or maybe I mixed them up.

The idea is to simultaneously do two tasks that would interfere with each other if they were of the same kind, and would be performed successfully if they are different. So, give a person a text to read out loud and make them perform a cognitive task that requires, in your opinion, verbal reasoning. If they can read and still solve the task in the same time as "normal" people, they could probably reason in non-verbal terms.

Computational archeology sounds great, what do you do? Is there more demand?

That hope that is true. All of this plastic might just be inert and not cause any damage. Who knows how long have people been having microplastics in their bloodstream. Decades? It is just that no one tested for it.

> Or until someone can reverse engineer a mouse brain. If we can get to low-end mammal performance, there's hope.

Yep. C. elegans worm, and the drosophila larva and fly are good intermediary goals, too.

"Dan Davis History" youtube channel, very well written. The bronze age, indoeuropean expansion, horse domestication, chariot warriors, mythology.. https://youtube.com/c/DanDavisAuthorChannel

I also like stefan milo https://m.youtube.com/c/StefanMilo

north02 is good,

For the full experience you might also need some touch feedback. Maybe vibration gloves or some sort of pressure actuator to mimic touch.

> housewives feeling guilty

Or maybe the cake mix with dried egg powder didn't taste as good.

The multiplicative inverse, or reciprocal, or the inverse of a number, is a function acting on a number, 1/x, or x^-1.

>science in principle shouldn't treat them any differently than results about "regular" subjects.

That's the whole problem, as I understand it. If we are going to treat ESP research the same as research in other fields, we either accept ESP as real, or reject both ESP and other fields as deeply flawed.

Personally, I'm leaning heavily toward the second option. The methods in ESP are identical to methods in psychology, social sciences, etc, but not physics or chemistry. I'm just wondering where to draw the line. Maybe the whole method of statistical inference needs to be flushed? Maybe it cannot be saved by preregistration, publishing all the data, transparency and other bells and whistles.

>How might we measure it?

That is a good question. A desire is a term of the mind, and it is not easily connected to the brain and physiology. The only one I can think of is the conscious desire to breathe - iirc, it is directly correlated to the amount of CO2 in the blood (not O2, the first suspect). We don't yet have strong correlates to hunger, for example, so it might take a while for other desires, but I would bet there would be some correlates. On the other hand, behavior can reveal a lot. Some economists would say we can find the strength of one desire by comparing it to another. How much of A are we willing to give in order to get some exact amount of B? It is not exactly measurement of desire, but we can end up with a list of priorities.