チラ裏 ~nothing of import~ @pirotess - Tumblr Blog

happy 2nd anniversary to this scene that has not at all ruined my life or anything of that sort

I kinda can't believe I got in, but I'll be at the Parramatta Zine Fair this month! Please come and say hi if you're around 🥰 You can buy all my art that I can't post on Tumblr!

#parramatta #zine fair #i haven't tabled at an event in years lolol

27 days to go until the new Devil May Cry series arrives!! I'm pleased to be part of the fan countdown 💕 Thanks @dmccountdown for organising!

#dmc countdown #my art

Happy birthday Jin!

#jin kazama #tekken #my art

5-and-a-half-acres

This needs a caption

pirotess

#birb

razerathane

oh to be young again and on the early 00's internet on forums making signatures freely sharing art or fics playing silly little word games without worrying about severe privacy breaches and unethical digital labour theft

ad-wills

#thank god for exchanges

hayyie

“The Lion of The Rebellion”

#art by op #lars alexandersson #Tekken

ampervadasz

Unmute !

cryptidkitten57

@thefeathercollective

#birds

amygdalae

Vegetables.

#delicious in dungeon #dungeon meshi #vegetables

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.

king-in-yellow

This is a great explanation for this study and the broader problem with cognitive neurosci studies involving fMRI, with two small additions:

This study was in functional MRI (fMRI), not the standard sort of brain MRI - perhaps a detail only nerds notice, but I don't want folks to worry that a normal MRI they may have had is junk science, and fMRI itself is not junk science either, but your scientific conclusions are only as good as the your understanding of the data collection methods.

After the test was done, they ate the salmon.

#science #“naughty salmon” is the best two word sentence