TheVat

Apparently this question was not considered, mainly in deference to an earlier study by a Liverpool group which determined that "you can get a tan, from standing in the English rain." One of multiple hypotheses formulated as part of the Eggman project. It seems unfortunate that a result confined to England would inhibit research across the globe.

A recent paper in The Albanian Journal of Atmospheric Physics and Wicker Cultivation has falsified the hypothesis that thunder only happens when it's raining, in a classic Popperian "black swan" disproof. The paper offers a definitive rejection of earlier results published by the Fleetwood Mac research group in 1976 in an obscure British meteorological journal (then released the following year as a song). The FMRG had also conducted a test of the hypothesis that players only love you when they're playing, which did not survive peer review due to methodological concerns over how players were defined as a distinct cohort and what specific behaviors constituted play.

You seem unfamiliar with forum rules here. Topics are not two-way conversations and any member may participate and request clarifications and supporting citations for any claims made. If you can be courteous and tell us what a "Narcissists Supply Three" and "psychologically gay" refer to, you will help advance the discussion for everyone. Clarity and definition of terminology is of vital importance to all chats here.

No one wants bored intestines.

Humans are living beings not androids designed by a crack team of engineers who carefully debugged them. Natural selection (assuming that's even in play here) sometimes results in messy flawed solutions in the brain, especially the brain of hominins who ran a gauntlet of environmental pressures and tripled their brain size in a couple million years. And then had to deal with extremely rapid change and elaboration of social structures in only a few millennia. We might have a Google translator glitch here. Can you explain what that means? Before we look into that, can you tell us what that means and offer some supporting research for it. I really have no idea what you're talking about.

That college students really do do better if you ban cellphones from the classroom. And they actually like it, once they're used to it. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/opinion/mobile-phones-college-classrooms.html (I'd already had a sneaking suspicion....)

Yes, similar answers from several of us on genetic diversity and multiple axes of fitness. My conjecture along one such axis would be that a lot of us do now have more robust immune systems which arose from that shift of human populations from widely dispersed to urban concentrations.* Cities, especially crossroads type cities with lots of international traffic and frequent bursts of new pathogens, were likely crucibles of intense selection that favored a fairly "multilingual" immune system. I would say that modern times, if anything, are amplifying that selective effect, especially in teeming metropolises of developing nations where there are now both "efficient" (from the microbial perspective) global conduits for rapid introduction of exotic pathogens and higher infant/juvenile mortality. The millions living in and sometimes circulating out of crowded refugee camps also face these Darwinian pressures. This painful reality in no way argues for perpetuating such conditions, but it does suggest that we humans are continuing to have selective pressures towards fortifying "close quarters" immune systems. But it seems to me likely that rural life, especially in the third world, also offers selective pressures from the incursions of novel zoonotic pathogens. * festering warrens in my own family tree include ports like Belfast, Odessa and Karlshamn, and a nod of thanks to these grimy petri dishes for their contributions to a pretty tough immune system.

CERN gave us the Web. The United States DoD gave us the Net, specifically through their Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), later DARPA. Sorry, bit of a nitpick.

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!"