the moon will sing a song for me

26, she/her. chaos reblogger. memes, fan stuff, art, activism. ateez blog: mairewrites

[myspace]

The question remains:

Did they not have the budget to put a ball in the movie?

[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.

[brightlotusmoon]

[jellyfishforest135]

Activated them like sleeper agents

[linusbenjamin]

Silo 3.05, Memory

[pmamtraveller]

Ceramic sculpture "Narcissus" by Japanese artist Kenichi Nakaya

[metalmagdalene-deactivated20251]

Instagram is trying to get me to use threads by showing discourse too rancid for the worst parts of the tumblr

[trainedchimpanzee]

[trainedchimpanzee]

[supreme-leader-stoat]

[life-in-toontown]

:C

I’m so fucking sick of AI

[paintbynumbers]

[hannahbluish]

[penelopepennington]

It's the Royal Academy of Art Young Artist's Summer Show. One of my favourite exhibitions of the year. Like. Not only are the older kids insanely talented, the younger ones' artist statements will just punch you right in the face.

Jeffrey is my cat and he feels like my heart

Click [here] for the full online exhibition

[myriad-of-things]

my little brother tried to show me a "cool trick" where he entered my name and hometown into chatgpt and tried to get it to pull up my personal info like it did on all of his friends, then was absolutely shocked when it couldn't find anything on me

so. keep practicing basic internet safety, guys. it still works. don't put your personal info on social media, keep all your accounts on private, turn off ai scraping on every site that you can, enable all privacy features on social media apps. our info still can be protected, we have to keep fighting for control

[duallpa]

don’t talk to me unless it’s about baby jimothy

[goslinggf]

um...exsqueak me ?

[goslinggf]

um...exsqueak me ?

[mavigation]

this person has so many all timers it’s insane

[excitementshewrote]

[orteil42]

controversial stance but i do wish i could live forever. i certainly live like i'm going to live forever. i take my time. realistically however my lifespan is dreadfully limited and there are things i've "been meaning to do" that i will never get around to. the Emoji Movie came out almost 10 years ago. in all that time on any random day i could've decided to sit down and watch it, and i did not. how many more decades will slip by like this? conceivably, it could be all the decades i have left. watching the Emoji Movie would not be, after all, a crucial use of my time. much better things to do. i could easily postpone it over and over and over until my final breath where it may not even register to me that i never did watch the Emoji Movie. no great loss, certainly; and yet i find myself intrigued by Patrick Stewart's involvement