@intentionallylostinspace - Tumblr Blog

Gotta love tumblr’s broken search function… yes, why not make me create a post so I can tag it to find things I’ve posted and tagged before… 🤷‍♂️

#me #personal #anon #answers

eloiscbridgerton

HACKS 5.06 – Quik Scribbl

manny-jacinto

HAPPY MAY THE 4TH! ✨ TRUST ONLY IN THE FORCE | Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

mollybeenoel

screenshotsofdespair

vodkasucio

ask me

k250966-deactivated20181231

Gabriel Garbow

hgedits

The Artemis II crew naming two previously undiscovered lunar craters (one after Commander Reid Wiseman's late wife).

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.

dragon-in-a-fez

90% of "teen brain" science is based on MRI bullshit also. these fish just disproved "brain stops developing at 25", as if it needed disproving again. well done fish

thevaultoftheatomicspaceage

Alan Bean

seraphica

For those unaware, Alan Bean was an astronaut before he was a painter. He was part of the Apollo 12 mission, and the fourth person ever to walk on the Moon. Paintings like this one reflect some of the wonder he personally felt, echoing through for decades after.

goldengirlsgifs

THE GOLDEN GIRLS 2.05 — Isn't It Romantic? — 08.11.86 Betty White as Rose Nylund Lois Nettleton as Jean

shipperwolf1

1986!!

dovewithscales

Golden Girls was so incredibly progressive for its time and not even slightly afraid to be loud about it. They talked about queer people, about race, about ableism, and they made it central and overt. They talked about things that mattered, and they never punched down, and they were allies off the stage too.

dovewithscales

Reblogging this again to add some context for anyone who may not know. In the 80's, being outed as gay could get you blacklisted in Hollywood. It ruined people's careers.

Bea Arthur and Betty White both suffered damage to their careers for standing up against racism and homophobia. Back in the 50s Betty White hosted a variety show that was canceled because she featured a black dancer and doubled down when they told her to stop.