meh...

Hi, ill be honest, i got tired of editing my age here sooo... yeah I like soup and geology, sometimes i reblog funny stuff.

[pangur-and-grim]

my house is scary at night

[storyweavingspider]

Interpreted this initially not as shelves, but as your cat having erected defensive fortifications

[we-have-black-marble-at-home]

invited your shawty to my ziggurat, she said my glazed bricks more indigo than yours. my lambs more sacrificial, my shrines more ornate. it's over for you bro

[6qubed]

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

always some new bullshit in the ocean

[local-demon-in-your-area]

Why is it always orcas or dolphins

Why can't a salmon do some bullshit for once

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

worry not ☝️ they're doing coke

[kaijuno]

My morning glory doesn’t like the wind chime

[ikebanaka]

SHUT

[typhus-andronicus]

[parkchanwoohoo]

[psycosis91]

Visit Original Link

[rlyehtaxidermist]

one of the best academic paper titles

[rlyehtaxidermist]

for those who don't speak academia: "according to our MRI machine, dead fish can recognise human emotions. this suggests we probably should look at the results of our MRI machine a bit more carefully"

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I hope everyone realises how incredibly important this dead fish study is. This was SO fucking important.

[imightbeobsessedwithsocks]

I still don’t understand

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

So basically, in the psych and social science fields, researchers would (I don't know if they still do this, I've been out of science for awhile) sling around MRIs like microbiolosts sling around metagenomic analyses. MRIs can measure a lot but people would use them to measure 'activity' in the brain which is like... it's basically the machine doing a fuckload of statistics on brain images of your blood vessels while you do or think about stuff. So you throw a dude in the machine and take a scan, then give him a piece of chocolate cake and throw him back in and the pleasure centres light up. Bam! Eating chocolate makes you happy, proven with MRI! Simple!

These tests get used for all kinds of stuff, and they get used by a lot of people who don't actually know what they're doing, how to interpret the data, or whether there's any real link between what they're measuring and what they're claiming. It's why you see shit going around like "men think of women as objects because when they look at a woman, the same part of their brain is active as when they look at a tool!" and "if you play Mozart for your baby for twenty minutes then their imagination improves, we imaged the brain to prove it!" and "we found where God is in the brain! Christians have more brain activity in this region than atheists!"

There are numerous problems with this kind of science, but the most pressing issue is the validity of the scans themselves. As I said, there's a fair bit of stats to turn an MRI image into 'brain activity', and then you do even more stats on that to get your results. Bennett et. al.'s work ran one of these sorts of experiments, with one difference -- they used a dead salmon instead of living human subjects. And they got positive results. The same sort of experiment, the same methodology, the same results that people were bandying about as positive results. According to the methodology in common use, dead salmon can distinguish human facial expressions. Meaning one of two things:

Dead salmon can recognise human facial expressions. OR

Everyone else's results are garbage also, none of you have data for any of this junk.

I cannot overstate just how many papers were completely fucking destroyed by this experiment. Entire careers of particularly lazy scientists were built on these sorts of experiments. A decent chunk of modern experimental neuropsychology was resting on it. Which shows that science is like everything else -- the best advances are motivated by spite.

[sleepy-bebby]

[render94]

typewriter!

[theclockworkjudas]

I love the orchestra trying and failing to maintain a straight face throughout

[silly-jellyghoty]

Exactly. These people had to rehearse at least a few times all at once yet when it's nkt their turn to play they still look at that guy with the typewriter as if he was the most fascinating thing they have ever seen.

[ironwoman359]

My husband's wind ensemble played this song when he was in high school! you can do it with normal auxillery percussion, but it's so much more fun if you do it with a real typewriter

[alexseanchai]

now that is a writing mood

[whetstonefires]

they were really like, the only reasonable approach to this piece is to insert a clown at the center of the orchestra

[iconuk01]

If you're not playing Leroy Anderson's 1953 classic "The Typewriter" with an actual typewriter on stage... why would you even BOTHER?

From wiki

According to the composer himself, as well as other musicians, the typewriter part is difficult because of how fast the typing speed is: even professional stenographers cannot do it, and only professional drummers have the necessary wrist flexibility

[prismatic-bell]

If you're wondering how on earth it could be that difficult because it doesn't sound that fast, I'll explain:

You're used to laptop keys.

I learned to type on a 1980s typewriter from Sears. My grandmother, who learned on one of these 1950s models, used to say it was amazing how easy it was to push the keys on my beloved plastic monster.

I build a "replacing the keys" budget into my laptop maintenance because according to people who've only ever used modern keyboards, I type stupidly hard. Like "you don't have to shake the house slamming the door, you can just close it" hard. The keys are just too damn easy. Typing at a "recommended pressure" feels to me like I'm not doing anything at all.

(Yes, I know mechanical keyboards exist. Unfortunately I need my laptop to be portable, so they're a no-go.)

To go with that, depending on how old your old typewriter is, the stems that hold the keys (technically at this point they were called platens) can become tangled if you go too fast. This is probably one reason so many job ads that call for typing ask for such low speeds, if I had to guess--those are great speeds for the 1960s. I'd be very surprised if the sheet music for this doesn't have instructions on which letters to use for exactly that reason.

So you have to type at modern speeds on a machine that's very much not made for that, while maintaining tempo and rhythm, and you're slamming those keys like a businessman on coke?

Yeah, I'm not even surprised only drummers can keep up.

[olreid]

help

[catgirlhell]

[beardedmrbean]

[hannbl]

[chrollo-tw]

me after I eliminated 21,042 people

[yorgen-sh]

[winterweary]

This made me laugh out loud

[76ello]

Reblogging in honor of the first day of baseball season.

[ceruleanfuckup]

The pitcher that exploded the bird is a photographer now, this is his logo

[ayeforscotland]

I’ve been in absolute tears cry laughing at this for the past 15 minutes.

[analytically]

Can astrologers use astrological charts to understand people's character and lives? Our new study put astrologers to the test

Astrology is very popular — both Gallup and YouGov report that about 25% of Americans believe that the position of the stars and planets can

Astrology doesn't seem to work.

[intimate-mirror]

[performativezippers]

Some highlights:

Astrologers helped design the study

No one did better than random chance, even though they only included people in the study who are experienced with astrology and stated that they expect themselves to do better than random chance

They gave every astrologer a set of 50 things about a person and 5 birth charts to choose from. They weren’t even coming up with the chart themselves!

After taking the test, most thought they nailed it. Zero out of 152 did better than 5 out of 12. None nailed it

Astrologers who rated themselves highly experienced (“world class experts”) did the same or worse as those who said they have limited experience. Both performed the same as random chance

This is hilarious

[o-craven-canto]

That's got to be the funniest graph ever published in a paper

[guooey]

[transette]

[naradreamscape]

Serious explanation here: she's teaching them the instinct of being alert around enclosure openings! For example, if these were wild cats living in a bush, they'd run the risk of a larger predator running up to the opening and grabbing one of them. The mother cat is also only bapping them lightly without claws, so those slaps are more of an annoyance meant to get the kittens' attention, and to teach them to keep their eyes out for potential threats.

[glupbleepo]

also slapping him is fummny

[ramdomcitizen]

This post encapsulates everyone on this site

[vivecguccibelt]

Pokémon! It's you and me! [Tentacruel obliterates an entire fucking building] I KNOW IT'S OUR DESTINYYY