learning to trust my own data

grad school isn’t real, it can’t hurt you

[brungeons-and-bragons]

Welcome to The Locked Tomb! Our books are told through the point of view of

-jock stuck at a renn faire murder mystery party

-schizophrenic malnourished teenager granted unspeakable power

-a baby. Like an actual 6 month old infant.

Good luck!

[mindblowingscience]

These Sea Creatures Don't Need a Brain to Learn, According to a New Study

Learning is one of life's defining characteristics, and every living thing, from birds to slime mold, possesses this ability to varying degrees.

In the simplest of organisms, repeated exposure to the same stimuli can cause non-associative learning in the form of habituation or sensitization.

According to recent research, starlet sea anemones (Nematostella vectensis) are capable of surprisingly sophisticated learning, as evidenced by their ability to remember the connection between light and electric pulses.

“This is exactly what is called associative learning,” says senior author, University of Fribourg neurobiologist Simon Sprecher.

“Proof that even animals without brains are able to display complex behavior thanks to their nervous system.”

Animals with a lot of brainpower can easily link a stimulus to a response and change their behavior based on what they’ve learned and remembered. For example, if you were unlucky enough to find that touching a hot stove led to pain, you would hopefully modify your behavior to prevent a recurrence.

The ability to remember these things is thought to have come about as nervous systems evolved, regulating synaptic strength and plasticity in the brain.

Continue Reading

[1998aries]

check out literally just sitting outside if u can. the hobby of the summer

[leefi]

Source

[leefi]

i love when people tag this with some iteration of "who sat down and coded this?!" the answer is a dev. a dev of the game did this.

[knight-of-ashes]

@suzirya @starfoozle y'all need to see this

[gupdoo3]

Advice for people who are new to tumblr

whenever you say hi to someone next door, make sure you’ve never ever seen them before, because we don’t say hi to people that we know. to the people we’ve alrеady met, we say hi-ho

the tuna fish here is beyond belief; we catch those tuna from the place right there, it’s a private little reef. they taste real good but don’t eat too much; it’ll make you throw right up: when it comes to tuna, a touch is enough.

don’t climb up that big old tall tree: a woman lives in there and she is not okay! I know you gonna wanna climb it, but don’t you do it, don’t you try it: again, the woman is not okay! (and not like “not okay” like there’s something wrong with her, she’s totally fine, she’s just mean. maybe evil!)

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

You know in hindsight is is pretty obvious that the Nine Houses are that way not because of some metaphysical or magical reason, but because their whole society was worldbuilt by overpromoted millennials who had little to no idea how to rebuild humanity, so they just slapped something together and the Houses have spent 10,000 years trying to make his sorting quiz bullshit into an actual functioning society.

Like…the Sixth House is so inbred that you have four people on the planet you can pick for breeding and their military wing’s job is “go get laid by foreigners to give some diversity to the drying puddle that’s our gene pool”. The Fourth House is being slowly absorbed into the Fifth House because they can’t stop heroically killing themselves. The Ninth House murdered literally all of their children and destroyed their House’s future to make one super-necromancer because…..they wanted a super-necromancer. They have a house for sparking fashion trends and another for beautifully dying of cancer. There is no way this society should function and the only reason it’s lasted this long is that they’ve been patching up all the cracks with zombie magic.

Harrow tells John that her parents destroyed their House and John barely even blinks an eye before handing her a bunch of people he’s kept frozen. Has he done this before? How many times has a House been on the verge of collapsing in on itself and John had to go duct tape it back together?

[roach-works]

like every aspect of the series, this is both a nakedly obvious allegory for the inevitable follies of any imperial power and also incredibly fucking funny to think about

[with-my-murder-flute]

When the worldbuilding manual asked, “How does your society work?” Taz Muir just said “It doesn’t!” and laughed riotously all the way to ripping my heart out.

[miafeystits]

not to keep rambling about the mechanics of disco elysium’s thought cabinet, but i was thinking today about how this post came about via me trying to figure out why it seemed i was gaining xp at a much slower rate in my current run of the game (as a moralist) vs earlier runs (both times as a communist), and i had a bit of a realization

while i think having internalized kingdom of conscience instead of mazovian socio-economics (and thus not gaining that sweet sweet communist xp) is at least part of the equation, i’d forgotten about a key difference between my earlier runs and my current one– i’d always played as an art cop before, the second time around with conceptualization as my highest or second-highest stat (i can’t remember exactly) which, after internalizing actual art degree, translates into a not-insignificant amount of bonus xp:

which leads me to an interesting fact that i hadn’t really noticed before: while most thoughts do have some mechanical effect on harry, thoughts that grant extra xp to the player are pretty rare. in fact, there’s only four of them: jamais vu (derealization), mazovian socio-economics, actual art degree, and wompty-dompty dom centre

which. okay. i’ve already talked about mazovian socio-economics in a different essay, i won’t get into that again here. jamais vu? the extra xp makes sense– if we’re reading the acquisition of xp as a way of illustrating harry’s character growth through game mechanics, it tracks for jamais vu, a thought about harry trying to better understand the world around him and his relationship to it, to give a small amount of xp for making an effort to explore your surroundings (and also mechanically give you the opportunity to learn more information!)

but like. actual art cop and wompty-dompty dom centre? why? why those in particular?

well, imo, the reason that both of these thoughts are able to offer so much xp is the same thing that ties them to each other thematically: they’re thoughts about art.

and even though both of the thoughts are textually quite critical of the art world and the culture surrounding it (the wompty-dompty dom centre describes the art crowd as the “unholy symbiosis of esthetics and tax optimization,” and the solution to actual art degree is literally just a bunch of ways to call something mediocre lmao) the mechanical benefits to both of these thoughts indicate another underlying argument: that not only is it still worth it to engage with art, but that engaging with art and trying to (as the description for conceptualization puts it) “see Art in the world” gives harry more tools and opportunities to improve as a person

because that’s what a skill point fundamentally is, right? it’s a new opportunity for harry to grow, either by leveling up a skill or by learning something new about the world or himself (via unlocking more space in the thought cabinet). internalizing these thoughts does what good art can do– they make the world a little bigger, and make that world a little easier to survive

[guerrillatech]

[ramavatarama]

They are finally catching up 😌

[duranbong]

[glumshoe]

The top button on a button-up shirt is THE most important button of all.

Do I actually button it? No—of course not. But it HAS to be there so that everyone knows I made the choice to leave it opened halfway down to my navel. Women’s shirts that just leave the top button (or three) off absolutely do NOT understand this.

[pasunepipette]

Hearing my mom give a lecture over Bb collaborate about the ancient Greek number system in the background while I try to listen to a pre-recorded lecture about the evolution of new genes is how I’m doing, thanks

[campmiasmas]

Let’s all pray we don’t wake up.

Catherine O’Hara as Moira Rose in Schitt’s Creek Season One

[cruellesummer]

I See You (2020), Phoebe Bridgers

[wodneswynn-deactivated-deactiva]

Tag urself I'm Tiddy Skittles

[dontthinkitsknowledge]

Guys I found the FUCKING article have it

Ashley, F. (2019). Surgical informed consent and recognizing perioperative duty to disclose in transgender health care. McGill Journal of Law and Health, 13(1), 73-116

The author is transfeminine themselves and this bit was in a FOOTNOTE. They had NO OBLIGATION to give this information and they are the funniest person on this fucking planet

[takamasa]

[sharkpunks]

Ohhh, hog

[horsecrash]

[kristina100000]

[1dietcokeinacan]

Huge news

[fridgebride]

and?????? as he should

[glumshoe]

I don’t think “internalized [bigotry]” is really the right term for when powerful figures, especially politicians, actively support bigoted legislation and serve as spokespeople for hateful ideologogies against demographics that they themselves are secretly members of. I think being in a position of power over lots of other people elevates it to something distinctly different from the everyday internalized bigotry of regular folks. Like, it’s one thing to be a homophobe who struggles with your attraction to the same gender and acts like a dick because of it; it’s another to spearhead an anti-gay political movement to strip other people of freedoms and rights while simultaneously attempting to ensure that you can engage in the same acts you condem without consequence.

[glumshoe]

See, that’s what I’m not sure about.

I think there’s a difference between internalized homophobia in the form of “I do not want to want what I want; I am bad and disgusting for wanting this, so I will repress it and become hateful and bitter and cruel out of self-loathing” and the pattern of outspokenly anti-gay politicians getting caught having sex with men.

I’m sure sure I believe that the latter examples think that what they are doing is wrong or have any degree of self-loathing. I don’t think their homophobia is “internalized” so much as it just… doesn’t apply to them. It’s like when anti-abortion activists rail against the immortality of abortion in public but privately ensure that their own wives or mistresses can abort and don’t see anything truly wrong with that.

In much the same way that men hate women for being sluts while simultaneously expecting sex on demand, I think anti-gay politicians who secretly have sex with men are possibly motivated more by a desire for power and control than they are by actual hatred of homosexuality.

I have a degree of pity towards people who have repressed themselves and suffer for it. There is no excuse for abusive behaviors, but I recognize the factors that lead to internal torment, self-denial, and toxic mindsets. I have no shred of pity towards those who see themselves as above the very laws they write.