Buzz Coastin

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"I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live?"

HD Thoreau, On Civil Disobedience

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Our Government Has Never Lied To US!

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[fandom]

We bless the rains on Cornelia Street.

Taylor Swift dropped her latest album, Lover, and none of us will ever walk down Cornelia Street again in solidarity. Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus premiered on Nickelodeon and was the blast from the past we all wanted and needed. The battle between Sony and Disney came to a head when Spider-Man was reportedly removed from the MCU. This is Tumblr’s Week in Review.

Taylor Swift

Good Omens

Marvel

Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus

Ineffable Husbands, Aziraphale & Crowley, Good Omens

Spider-Man | Marvel

Crowley | Good Omens

BTS

Tom Holland

Sony

Aziraphale | Good Omens

Minecraft

Critical Role

Disney

Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Artists on Tumblr

Tony Stark | Iron Man, Marvel

Boku no Hero Academia

Druck

Pokémon

P.S. Your weekly lists will be returning after Labor Day on Tuesday, Sept. 3rd, so the Fandometrics team can go to the beach. 🏖 

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For Shitz & Giggles

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Why a duck? Why a no chicken?

Well, I don't know why a no chicken; I'm a stranger here myself. All I know is that it's a viaduct. You try to cross over there with a chicken and you'll find out why a duck.

How ya gonna keep’em down on the pond?

Remember those parties you went to that had more dicks than chicks? Well recently we acquired four additional Muscovy duck hens because the four Muscovy we bought six weeks ago turned out to be three drake dicks and one hen, not a good male to female ratio even for a duck party.

The drake we originally thought was the only male was only mounting one of the three available hens and the other unmounted hens were bigger than the only drake. Then I saw one of the “hens” mount another hen and I knew we had a problem, or at least our one small Muscovy hen had a problem.

Once I became aware of the mismatch of dicks to chicks, I closely monitored the only hen and began to look for more hens for the flock. On observation it seemed to me that there was an Alpha drake and that he was protecting the only hen. The hen was always with him and usually within a foot of him. None of the other males were seemed to getting much action. Surprisingly there seemed to be no hostility generated by this situation.

One day I saw one of the unlucky drakes courting the lone hen. He was rubbing his bill against hers and hissing sweet nothings to her. The hen’s protector was right there too. Pretty soon the two drakes were having a heated discussion. Their necks were gesturing their heads back and forth and they were having a hissing conversation. (Muscovy ducks don’t quack and aren’t really ducks either but that’s another story.) There was no violence. There wasn’t even any wing flapping posturing one usually sees with chickens.

Within a day or two of discovering the more dicks than chicks dilemma, we were able to acquire four more Muscovy hens from another supplier. We thought this would quickly solve the problem and the ducks would live happily ever after. Little did we know the fun had only begun.

We released the new hens on the dock where our original flock of ducks presently reside. The new ducks immediately jumped in the pond and swam for cover. Then our original flock of three drakes and one hen swam over to great the new comers.

One of the males was ecstatic. I could see his head bobbing and gesturing to the others and he looked like he was grinning. I could even here him hissing rather loudly too. Then he began to chase and mount any of the new hens he could catch. 

The new hens weren’t impressed by him over enthusiastic welcome. It was at that time we realized that the Muscovy hens we bought were actually hybrids, since they were making very unMuscovy quacking noises.

We had also naïvely expected that the new ducks would quickly merge with the old ducks and were surprised to see the new ducks retreat into the woods. They spent the night in the woods and not on the dock with the old flock. The next morning I could count only three of the four new ducks cowering on the distant shore. I assumed a predator had had some duck for dinner.

The wife is an interventionist and suggested that we chase the remaining ducks out of the woods and try to catch them. I’m more of a Taoist and would have preferred to let things sort themselves out naturally. Nonetheless, I found myself flushing ducks out of the woods and into the pond.

Then the wife wanted me to get in the kayak and herd the ducks so that she could net them and then cage them for the night. Again I thought this was a waste of time and energy, but since she tends to go alone with a lot of my wacky ideas, I felt obligated to humor her.

Surprisingly I could wrangle the ducks from the kayak. I was able to catch up to them and use the bow of the kayak to steer them. This went on for about an hour and we eventually netted one of the three I was chasing but it was becoming dark, it was raining and I was getting tired of sprinting with the ducks who were obviously not getting as tired as I was.

For another four days the three remaining new hens were fleeing the horny males who were in pursuit of their duckiness. Our original flock was not discouraged nor deterred by the new hens shyness and they continued to court the new ducks with ebullient enthusiasm, but to no avail. The new flock looked like it was going to set up a separate home in a different location in the pond.

On day five I noticed that the missing new hen was alive and back with the four new ducks. Later that day I noticed some of the new ducks were swimming with the older flock too. Pretty soon both flocks were flocking together and the new girls were visiting the bachelor pad on the dock. Finally things were settling down and coming together.

On day six I noticed that now one of the males was missing. This was and is very odd, since this male was one of the original crew and seemed well acclimated to the pond. However, it certainly solved our problem of male to female ratios, since we now had only two males to five females, but not the way I thought it would be solved, which was by us eating the extra drake.

It’s possible that the missing drake will turn up again someday. Since it’s not unusual for Muscovy to disappear and reappear over a period of days. But for right now things have settled down on the pond and everything is ducky again.

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From: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/25/mannheim-steamroller-christmas.html

Magnetic tape maestro Randall Taylor, aka Amulets, takes an old Mannheim Steamroller Christmas cassette in a totally different direction... a totally different dimension.

Just when you thought you were going to listen to some sweet christmas music it turns into a weird 7 minute ambient drone rework that no one wants to hear at your family/work/friendmas/holiday party! Give the gift of your obscure musical taste and Mannheim Steamroll your loved ones today!

   GEAR USED:    - Custom Tape Loops    - Tascam Porta 02    - Library of Congress Tape Player    - Memorex Walkman    - Behringer Micromix    - AC Noises AMA    - Strymon Blue Sky

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The Effects of Legalized Pot Start to Show

New York City to Rename Streets After Notorious B.I.G., Wu-Tang Clan, Woody Guthrie

Is Wreckx-n-Effect  Ave Next?

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/nyc-streets-notorious-b-i-g-wu-tang-clan-woody-guthrie-772493/

“I’m happy that NYC officials are finally giving the city’s indigenous ‘Hip Hop’ music the respect and recognition that it deserves,” cultural advocate says

The New York City Council voted unanimously Friday to officially honor three of the five boroughs’ most revered artists – the Notorious B.I.G., the Wu-Tang Clan and Woody Guthrie – with streets named in their honor.

The Brooklyn block where the Notorious B.I.G. grew up – located on St. James Place between Fulton Street and Gates Avenue – will be renamed Christopher Wallace Way after the rapper’s birth name, while Staten Island’s Vanderbilt Avenue and Targee Street will tentatively be called Wu-Tang Clan District, Gothamist reports. In November, the Brooklyn Community Board 2 voted to approve the re-naming petition of Christopher Wallace Way, setting the stage for Friday’s vote.

Additionally, Woody Guthrie Way located at Coney Island’s Mermaid Avenue between West 35th and West 36th marks the section of Brooklyn where the folk legend lived in the early 1940s.

Although the New York City Council voted 68-0 to approve the street name changes, the measures are pending until Mayor Bill de Blasio signs off his approval.

In 2013, Brooklyn’s Palmetto Park was renamed Adam Yauch Park as a tribute to the late Beastie Boys member.

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Thailand legalises medical use of marijuana, in ‘new year’s gift’ to the people

Lawmakers voted to amend the Narcotic Act of 1979

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/2179464/thailand-legalises-medical-use-marijuana-new-years-gift

Thailand approved marijuana for medical use and research on Tuesday, the first legalisation of the drug in a region with some of the world’s strictest drug laws.

The junta-appointed parliament in Thailand, a country which until the 1930s had a tradition of using marijuana to relieve pain and fatigue, voted to amend the Narcotic Act of 1979 in an extra parliamentary session handling a rush of bills before the new year’s holidays.

“This is a new year’s gift from the National Legislative Assembly to the government and the Thai people,” said Somchai Sawangkarn, chairman of the drafting committee, in a televised parliamentary session.

While countries from Colombia to Canada have legalised marijuana for medical or even recreational use, the drug remains illegal and taboo across much of Southeast Asia, which has some of the world’s harshest punishments for drug law violations.

Marijuana traffickers can be subject to the death penalty in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia.

But in Thailand, the main controversy with legalisation involved patent requests by foreign firms that could allow them to dominate the market, making it harder for Thai patients to access medicines and for Thai researchers to access marijuana extracts.

Green gold rush: Thailand, Malaysia race to legalise medical marijuana

“We’re going to demand that the government revoke all these requests before the law takes effect,” said Panthep Puapongpan, Dean of the Rangsit Institute of Integrative Medicine and Anti-ageing.

Some Thai advocates hope Tuesday’s approval will pave the way for legalisation for recreational use.

“This is the first baby step forward,” said Chokwan Chopaka, an activist with Highland Network, a cannabis legalisation advocacy group in Thailand.

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The Brain’s Autopilot Mechanism Steers Consciousness

Freud’s notion of a dark, libidinous unconscious is obsolete. A new theory holds that the brain produces a continuous stream of unconscious predictions

By Steve Ayan on December 19, 2018 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-brains-autopilot-mechanism-steers-consciousness/

In Brief (Abridged from the original)

Research on the unconscious mind has shown that the brain makes judgments and decisions quickly and automatically. It continuously makes predictions about future events.

According to the theory of the “predictive mind,” consciousness arises only when the brain’s implicit expectations fail to materialize.

Higher cognitive processing in the cerebral cortex can occur without consciousness. The regions of the brain responsible for the emotions and motives, not the cortex, direct our conscious attention.

The Real Mastermind

Many people stubbornly cling to the old distinction between the instinctive unconscious and rational consciousness, with a preference for the latter. But, as I have shown, this view is untenable. Unconscious processes greatly control our consciousness. Where you direct your attention, what you remember and the ideas you have, what you filter out from the flood of stimuli that bombard you, how you interpret them and what goals you pursue—all these result from automatic processes. Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia considers this reliance on the unconscious to be the price that we pay for survival as a species. If we were forced always to consider every aspect of the situation around us and had to weigh all our options about what to do, humankind would have died out long ago. The autopilot in our brain—not consciousness—makes us what we are.

The real mastermind that solves problems and ensures our survival, then, is the unconscious. It is understandable that people tend to distrust the unconscious, given that it seems uncontrollable. How are we supposed to be in control of something when we do not even know when and how it influences us? Nevertheless, the arrangement works.

John Bargh of Yale University, who studies priming, compares the human mind to a sailor: To steer a boat from point A to point B, a sailor needs to know the destination and be able to make course corrections. Such abilities are not sufficient, however, because, as is true of the unconscious, uncontrollable factors such as ocean currents and wind come into play. But expert sailors take them into account to arrive at their destination.

We do well to treat our unconscious similarly—by not getting in its way. And that is really what we do day in and day out. When I put a picture of my loved ones on my desk to fuel my motivation for work or when I take the stairs instead of the elevator, I am steering my unconscious mind, recognizing that its desires for leisure and rest do not serve my best interests at the moment. And the fact that I am able to do this shows that the conscious and the unconscious are partners rather than opponents.

This article originally appeared in Gehirn&Geist and has been reproduced with permission.   Rights & Permissions More to Explore

Consciousness without a Cerebral Cortex: A Challenge for Neuroscience and Medicine. Bjorn Merker in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 30, No.1, pages 63–81; February 2007.

Medial Prefrontal Cortex Predicts Internally Driven Strategy Shifts. Nicolas W. Schuck et al. in Neuron, Vol. 86, No. 1, pages 331–340; April 8, 2015.

Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Andy Clark. Oxford University Press, 2015.

How and Why Consciousness Arises: Some Considerations from Physics and Physiology. Mark Solms and Karl Friston in Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 25, Nos. 5–6, pages 202–238; May/June 2018.

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Daniel Kahneman: Your Intuition Is Wrong, Unless These 3 Conditions Are Met Saleha Mohsin, Lananh Nguyen and Jennifer Jacobs | December 24, 2018 https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2018/11/16/daniel-kahneman-do-not-trust-your-intuition-even-f/?slreturn=20181124085553

Can intuition play a role in investing? According to Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Memorial Prize-winning behavioral economist, no.

During a speech given at the World Business Forum in New York City, Kahneman explained when people can trust their intuitive judgement and when they should be wary of it.

“Intuition is defined as knowing without knowing how you know,” he explained. “That’s the wrong definition. Because by that definition, you cannot have the wrong intuition. It presupposes that we know, and there is really a prejudice in favor of intuition. We like intuitions to be right.”

According to Kahneman, a better definition — or a more precise one — would be that “intuition is thinking that you know without knowing why you do.” By this definition, the intuition could be right or it could be wrong, he added.

Because, according to Kahneman, intuition can often be wrong. To show an example of this, Kahneman had the crowd guess the GPA of a college senior he called Julie. He told the crowd one fact about Julie — that she read fluently at a young age — and then asked them to judge how good of a student she had been.

From research, Kahneman, who wrote The New York Times bestseller “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” said that most people guess that Julie has around a 3.7 GPA.

“You might think that this is a good answer,” he said. “It’s a terrible answer. It’s an intuition, and it’s absolutely wrong. If you were to do it statistically, you would do it completely differently. Actually, the age that people read is very little information about what student they will be 20 years later.”

According to Kahneman, this is an example of an intuition that is generated automatically with high confidence, and it’s wrong statistically.

“In general, confidence is a very poor cue to accuracy. Because intuitions come to your mind with considerable confidence and there is no guarantee they’re right.”

There are certain times when intuition can be correct. For instance, Kahneman explained, chess players and married couples generally have accurate intuition.

“Intuitions of master chess players when they look at the board [and make a move], they’re accurate,” he said. “Everybody who’s been married could guess their wife’s or their husband’s mood by one word on the telephone. That’s an intuition and it’s generally very good, and very accurate.”

According to Kahneman, who’s studied when one can trust intuition and when one cannot, there are three conditions that need to be met in order to trust one’s intuition.

The first is that there has to be some regularity in the world that someone can pick up and learn.

“So, chess players certainly have it. Married people certainly have it,” Kahnemen explained.

However, he added, people who pick stocks in the stock market do not have it.

“Because, the stock market is not sufficiently regular to support developing that kind of expert intuition,” he explained.

The second condition for accurate intuition is “a lot of practice,” according to Kahneman.

And the third condition is immediate feedback. Kahneman said that “you have to know almost immediately whether you got it right or got it wrong.”

When those three kinds of conditions are satisfied, people develop expert intuition.

“But unless those three conditions are satisfied, the mere fact that you have an idea and nothing else comes to mind and you feel a great deal of confidence — absolutely does not guarantee accuracy,” he added.

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Anthropology: The Long Lives of Fairy Tales Mark Pagel, Current Biology https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)30124-5

Summary Anthropologists, borrowing techniques from evolutionary biology, have demonstrated that some common fairy tales can be traced back 5,000 years, or more, long before the development of written traditions.

"“Near a great forest there lived a poor woodcutter and his wife, and his two children; the boy’s name was Hänsel and the girl’s Gretel. They had very little to bite or to sup, and once, when there was great dearth in the land, the man could not even gain the daily bread….” Hänsel and Gretel, Grimm’s Fairy Tales"

When we read our children the story of Hänsel and Gretel, the names give away that it is a story of German origin. Or is it? Although Hänsel and Gretel is recorded in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, versions of the story exist in Baltic countries and in France. It’s been suggested that the story might have its origins in the 14th century great famine that struck Europe, or even earlier as a rite-of-passage tale in proto-Indo-European society. The prospect of oral traditions dating back thousands of years is startling. But now, a new study by Sara Graça da Silva and Jamshid Tehrani suggests that some common fairy tales can indeed be traced back to the origin of the Indo-European language family

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On Having No Head: Cognition throughout Biological Systems František Baluška1 and Michael Levin Frontiers in Psychology, July 2016 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4914563/

Abstract:

The central nervous system (CNS) underlies memory, perception, decision-making, and behavior in numerous organisms. However, neural networks have no monopoly on the signaling functions that implement these remarkable algorithms.

It is often forgotten that neurons optimized cellular signaling modes that existed long before the CNS appeared during evolution, and were used by somatic cellular networks to orchestrate physiology, embryonic development, and behavior. Many of the key dynamics that enable information processing can, in fact, be implemented by different biological hardware.

This is widely exploited by organisms throughout the tree of life. Here, we review data on memory, learning, and other aspects of cognition in a range of models, including single celled organisms, plants, and tissues in animal bodies. We discuss current knowledge of the molecular mechanisms at work in these systems, and suggest several hypotheses for future investigation.

The study of cognitive processes implemented in aneural contexts is a fascinating, highly interdisciplinary topic that has many implications for evolution, cell biology, regenerative medicine, computer science, and synthetic bioengineering.

CNS neurons do not embody cognition due to any magical, unique property. Their computational powers derive from the dynamics of networks of linked elements that propagate and integrate signals, and the ability to alter connectivity among those elements (network topology) based on prior activity. In fact, these basic properties are present in biological systems at many complexity scales (from subcellular protein networks to coupled tissues).

Might they too underlie some aspects of cognitive-like information processing? Indeed, neurons did not invent their special tricks – they merely optimized them for speed to drive adaptive behavior. These functions, and the molecular mechanisms that implement them – ion channels, electrical synapses (gap junctions), and neurotransmitter molecules are all ancient (Goldsworthy, 1983; Baluška, 2010; Brunet and Arendt, 2016; Moroz and Kohn, 2016).

Neural networks evolved from far older signaling pathways that orchestrated development, physiology, and other cellular functions long before the CNS arrived on the evolutionary scene (Buznikov et al., 1996; Levin et al., 2006; Keijzer et al., 2013).

Already simple cells of bacteria enjoy sensory systems feeding into cognitive-behavioral circuits and showing many other neural features (Miller and Koshland, 1977; Koshland, 1980; Lyon, 2015). Electrical long-distance signaling and information exchange via spatially propagating waves of potassium is synchronizing bacterial biofilms (Beagle and Lockless, 2015; Nunes-Alves, 2015; Prindle et al., 2015). Integrated bacteria within the biofilm community appear to act as some kind of ‘microbial brain’. Obviously, the neuronal communication has bacterial origins (Baluška and Mancuso, 2009).

Conclusion

How does biological matter give rise to decision-making, memory, representation, and goal-directed activity?

Implementation-independence is a core principle of computer science: an algorithm does what it does regardless of what kind of medium is implementing the steps. However, in the biological sciences, the study of memory and other cognitive functions has largely been the province of neurobiology, which studies the information processing and computational functions of one type of system: collections of neurons.

Instead, we have surveyed a broad range of systems at various scales, from molecular to organismal, which have their own distinct ability to process information, make decisions, and achieve specific goal states.

Neural-like computation, decision-making, and memory have been reported in sperm, yeast and plants, using ubiquitous mechanisms like cytoskeletal elements which appear to be also involved in neural information processing.

It is clear that neural networks have no monopoly on such functions. Remarkably, it is not only the positive (adaptive) cognitive functions that are widely conserved: some of the same illusions to which advanced brains’ perception and rational reasoning fall prey are being found in systems from slime molds to multi-animal colonies.

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Opinion Test Your Knowledge of American Incarceration By Sahil Chinoy and Ash Ngu https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/21/opinion/first-step-american-incarceration.html

The criminal justice reform bill known as the First Step Act, which President Trump signed into law on Friday, has been lauded as a sorely needed instance of bipartisan lawmaking. The law will reduce sentences for federal prisoners while seeking to balance public safety needs.

It is a bright moment in a highly partisan time. The title claims it is the “first step” of further reform, but this legislation follows a growing number of state-level moves that are gradually undoing decades of tough-on-crime policies that caused the nation’s prison population to swell.

Here, you can check your knowledge of the American criminal justice system and how the First Step Act fits in.

Who is affected?

In the United States, people are locked up in correctional facilities under the jurisdiction of federal, state and local authorities. The First Step Act applies only to some federal prisoners.

As of 2016, the share of people incarcerated in the federal system was…