TheVat

It's an hour to go, until lunch here, and am not sure I'm going to make it. For me, one thing that distinguishes pan-based cakes or crepes from breads is that the former usually depend on chemically generated C02 for their fluff rather than yeast. (though some breads like Irish soda bread (bliss!) don't use yeast)

There's a latke to be said for recognition of cultural variations in naming!

Another problem that seems to get amplified by the habit of uncritically reposting on SM: fake quotes attributed to actual people. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/08/ai-inventing-quotes/683888/?gift=43H6YzEv1tnFbOn4MRsWYt38pP4xu_vyI28uKimfg_A&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share John Scalzi is a voluble man. He is the author of several New York Times best sellers and has been nominated for nearly every major award that the science-fiction industry has to offer—some of which he’s won multiple times. Over the course of his career, he has written millions of words, filling dozens of books and 27 years’ worth of posts on his personal blog. All of this is to say that if one wants to cite Scalzi, there is no shortage of material. But this month, the author noticed something odd: He was being quoted as saying things he’d never said. “The universe is a joke,” reads a meme featuring his face. “A bad one.” The lines are credited to Scalzi and were posted, atop different pictures of him, to two Facebook communities boasting almost 1 million collective members. But Scalzi never wrote or said those words. He also never posed for the pictures that appeared with them online. The quote and the images that accompanied them were all “pretty clearly” AI generated, Scalzi wrote on his blog. “The whole vibe was off,” Scalzi told me. Although the material bore a superficial similarity to something he might have said—“it’s talking about the universe, it’s vaguely philosophical, I’m a science-fiction writer”—it was not something he agreed with. “I know what I sound like; I live with me all the time,” he noted...

Har! He who walks in front of a car gets tired. He who walks behind a car gets exhausted.

The conjecture of a personal God includes man being given free will. So why couldn't we also be doomed WITH a personal God, if we insist on being belligerent apes with nukes and/or being eco-destroyers swarming over the planet like a swarm of locusts? I don't see how the existence or nonexistence of a God changes the potential for doom, unless the God happens to be big on intervention in self-destructive behavior. I'd say any number of situations in history and right now (Gaza, for example) suggest that any hypothetical God is not big on intervention.

Salve, homo jocabundus! Nolite te bastardes carborundum.

Just found this thread. Quite the meander! Indeed, I feel like I've stumbled upon an encampment of Meanderthal man. About bacon: I stopped believing in it as my personal path to salivation.

You stripped all context away from three words I wrote. This makes discussion of my real point quite difficult. And then you write... Which seems to me an unreasonable request, and which blocks you from any growth as a person. You've said it at least twice now, so I'm just going to wish you well and move on from a discussion that feels shut down. I would strongly urge you to seek professional counseling before you decide on any actions that would "self-reincarnate."

Dear Mr Turnip, Thank you for being more open in your profound delusion that you deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. It offers a sharper focus on your ongoing psychosis which involves Ukraine being willing to abandon one fifth of its sovereign territory and NATO membership. I see today that the EU, in the sort of verbal dance that only politics can engender, had a discussion (per Reuters) of extending a NATO-style guarantee to Ukraine. "NATO style" - what a brilliantly polished clod of obfuscation. Perhaps you can polish that further, putting your grifter skills to work...."NATO Lite" perhaps? Or maybe NATO, Putin Accessible: NATOPA?

I'm trying to figure this out. Does Dim mean some science fictional dystopia where we keep medically helping people with deleterious mutations live to reproduce? Is he picturing everyone in the future having Huntington's, Cystic Fibrosis, HLA-DR/DQ (T 1 Diabetes), Tay-Sachs, Spina bifida, etc? I thought we had explained how that's not likely to happen, but maybe he has articulated some worst case scenario to himself that is not being articulated to us.

Your analogy actually underscores that new layers of knowledge do not make obsolete the older layers. Before antibiotics, fresh air was actually helpful to tuberculosis patients. Not a cure, but it could help patients recover by promoting better lung function and putting them in a location where there was less spread of disease. The realistic goal is to make friends with those darker parts of who you are and grow in this way, not to reject your self or erase personality. (This would result in something akin to the vacant and lobotomized Jack Nicholson at the end of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest") And we humans need regrets - they help us become better and more grounded, as we understand everyone is flawed and may need forgiveness. Forgive yourself for being clueless but don't discard yourself. Someday you may find you can laugh tolerantly at your younger self.

Words that I live by.

My mistake, sorry. I reread a later passage (in the no paywall version) which misled me to think these were not hydrocephalus cases. I am starting to think this article needed a bit more editing before publication. This time around, I opened the Lancet link and cleared up my misconception. I will note that reference to "without a brain" were placed in quotes, a nod to journalistic excess in popular press coverage. And the author did clarify that this meant having only a thin sheet of cortical tissue. I do see where this can also mislead readers, in that it fails to mention that brains also include a stem, thalamus, cerebellum, etc, and that such were not missing. I have six week old kittens crawling on me a lot of the time now, which seems to be throwing distraction into almost everything I do lately. Hopefully, as the adoptions move forward and we get down to just one, I can resume something like normal cortical function. Have a good weekend. - Paul

I posted the article given that Michael Gazzaniga, one of the world's foremost cognitive scientists, was lead author, and that some of the cases seemed to be cranial spaces with very unusual wiring - it was not clear to me if some of them had anything beyond a brainstem (pretty much essential to basic life functions) and a thin layer of cortical tissue. If there is a thalamus anywhere in some of those mini-brains, this article (oriented towards a general audience) did not much clarify that. I would think they do have an intact thalamic nexus, but it would be interesting to follow up and see some of the most dramatic cases mentioned in more detail. Given the importance of the thalamus (no one disputing that here, just trying to offer avenues for further developing your ideas, okay?), and in particular the role of the mediodorsal thalamus in thinking, I think it's important to see if neural plasticity in any of these normal functioning minibrain individuals allows for such functions to be assumed by other tissues. For example, could the reticular activating system assume a wider function if the thalamus does not develop normally? If you read the whole article, I think it's clear that the cases referenced are not arising from hydrocephalus. As Gazzaniga takes pains to note, these individuals have normal fluid pressure and circulation, and cranial volumes. The author, Michael Gazzaniga, makes all of this quite clear and is no way seriously saying that they have "no brain." I have to wonder if you read any of this article. Been there, done that. This is not my first rodeo.

Our genomic load of recessive lethal or sterilizing alleles is pretty much on a par with other eukaryotes... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4391560/ The effects of inbreeding on human health depend critically on the number and severity of recessive, deleterious mutations carried by individuals. In humans, existing estimates of these quantities are based on comparisons between consanguineous and nonconsanguineous couples, an approach that confounds socioeconomic and genetic effects of inbreeding. To overcome this limitation, we focused on a founder population that practices a communal lifestyle, for which there is almost complete Mendelian disease ascertainment and a known pedigree. Focusing on recessive lethal diseases and simulating allele transmissions, we estimated that each haploid set of human autosomes carries on average 0.29 (95% credible interval [0.10, 0.84]) recessive alleles that lead to complete sterility or death by reproductive age when homozygous. Comparison to existing estimates in humans suggests that a substantial fraction of the total burden imposed by recessive deleterious variants is due to single mutations that lead to sterility or death between birth and reproductive age. In turn, comparison to estimates from other eukaryotes points to a surprising constancy of the average number of recessive lethal mutations across organisms with markedly different genome sizes.

Agree. Expanded eloquently on what I covered in only a cursory way. A pathology of the digital age is imagining there's a shortcut or quick download for every challenge. The mind has much greater plasticity than we used to believe. This is one of the big steps neuroscience has made in the past few decades. You will find your hard work is rewarded, often in ways you didn't expect. Effort and will are like muscles that grow stronger as they are more used. Even if you may fall short of this goal or that goal, you will still have grown in strength and character. Nobody on their deathbed looks back and says, "Crap, I wish I hadn't made such an effort or taken all those risks!"

I also recommend this. And, for an interesting look at people who have very little brain tissue and yet lead normal lives and manifest normal intelligence, I recently read this. https://iai.tv/articles/is-your-brain-really-necessary-for-consciousness-auid-3280 This, again, shows the holistic nature (using a clever musical analogy) of consciousness being generated throughout the nervous system.

I didn't know if the truck thing had been mentioned. If it was, then this can be closed or merged or blended or whipped into a colloidal suspension - whatever mods think best. I almost posted it in Lounge, alongside other amusing bloopers. Actually this could be expanded into a science blooper thread, which could be fun.

Seila is another affirmation of Federalism and the unitary executive. And the guy who got that stupid ball rolling is the much lionized Hamilton. And the guy who shot him seems to have been smeared by popular history, in spite of his progressive views some quite ahead of their time. Burr defended immigrant rights, the equality of women, and the limitation of executive power, as well as setting high standards for conduct in the Senate and crafting the procedures of impeachment. If he'd fired his dueling pistol into a tree and mustered a bit more charm, he would probably have gotten the hit Broadway musical.

State of the PlanetWas It an Alien Spacecraft—Or a Delivery Truck?A Harvard astronomer says a meteor came from beyond our solar system. A new study questions whether his data includes a more obvious explanation. While even the U.S. Space Command agreed the object was probably interstellar, many scientists doubted that Loeb had really found its remnants, much less that it was something made by aliens. Among them: a group of planetary scientists led by Benjamin Fernando of Johns Hopkins University. They decided to look into not the spherules themselves, but the earthquake record. For this, they recruited Göran Ekström, a seismologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory known for studying unusual seismic events. The group reported their results at the March Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. And a ruckus ensued in the scientific community and in media. In the seismic station’s records, Ekström found the purported meteor-inspired signal right where it was supposed to be. Then he looked further and found that the records contained hundreds of other tremors in the weeks before and after, and many of them looked similar to that of the meteor. They were not characteristic of the small earthquakes that commonly shake this region, located on the Pacific Ring of Fire, where tectonic plates are constantly rubbing shoulders...

Not a strong analogy. Mental health issues, especially where personal growth is involved, are generally calling for considerable effort from the person as well as the therapist. While I can't contribute to my heart surgery, working with a therapist towards mental health is a cooperative venture where the therapist or counselor guides the client but cannot do all their work for them. Developing empathy is never going to be effortless, and will require various kinds of effort to reach out to others and engage with them. I am sorry to inform you of this. There is truly no magical pill or device when it comes to interpersonal relations.

There's been recent research that a smallish exposure to sun is overall healthier because it stimulates the immune system to protect better from various forms of cancer and also some autoimmune diseases and depression. The risk mitigation of those outweighs the skin cancer risk, apparently. There was a SciAm article a couple months ago on this topic - or the autoimmune aspect, anyway. I link that, not fully recalling its conclusions. (Always took the moderate approach myself, which my Millennial children are appalled by, though one has softened a bit in response to new data suggesting that a life slathered in sunblock may not be optimal for overall health) Scientific AmericanSunlight Might Hold the Key to Treating Autoimmune DiseasesSunshine may hold healing rays for a variety of autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis. Scientists are turning this surprising discovery into treatments

Some citations on this would be helpful. Given that many human behaviors are complex and come from holistic brain function, I have some reservations about neuromodulation increasing empathy. Empathy, even for neurotypicals, is some work, incorporating social experiences and exercise of the imagination.

I remember from a college philosophy course that the Coventry bombing debate was a classic example of consequentialist ethics v deontological ethics (with Churchill selecting the consequentialist path because of the immense strategic importance of not revealing the Enigma project breakthrough). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism

Still getting a whiff of eugenics from the ethical side here insofar as some medical technology does help people with genetic conditions live longer and increase the option of having a family. @CharonY pointed out that eliminating some deleterious alleles as some sort of gene pool optimization could reduce genetic diversity and leave a shallower gene pool. But even if we were to focus on quite harmful alleles only, say, Tay-Sachs or cystic fibrosis, what would actually be accomplished? Frederick Chopin is now believed to have had CF - should his mother have been required to abort him? Are we going to force someone who is autosomal recessive for Tay-Sachs not to have children, even with a mate who is a non-carrier? What if they are otherwise robust and have immune systems that are particularly well adapted to a world of pandemics and toxins? Really, I think the only path is a humane one going forward, where we improve screenings for the truly awful conditions that result in babies who live and die in great pain for a few weeks or months. That really is pointless suffering.