WolfLink
@WolfLink@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Game suggestions: Downvote any game you've heard of before 1 week ago:
Did you forget to unfurl your sails? I did that my first time… It’s definitely slow traveling between islands but “go make a sandwich” slow sounds like something is wrong.
Once you beat the first boss you can start putting engines on your ship, which make it faster and not dependent on wind direction. Also making your ship lighter helps too.
- Comment on Game suggestions: Downvote any game you've heard of before 1 week ago:
Lost Skies
It’s a co-op exploration, base-building, and survival game set among floating islands in the clouds. Unlike most base building games, you take your base with you, in the form on your airship, which you have a lot of freedom to design how you like.
The main gameplay loop involves exploring new islands, solving puzzles and fighting enemies to gather loot, and using that loot to upgrade your ship. When you feel strong enough, you challenge the region’s boss, which drops loot that will help you progress to a region of a higher difficulty tier. There are 4 tiers of region difficulty and many regions of each difficulty.
The game has had some drama regarding leaving early access well before it was ready, but the devs are continuing to put significant work into the game, and it’s in a good state now, but with a fairly small community.
Currently on sale 50% off (
$25$12.50) - Comment on #StopPayingGames 1 week ago:
Buy from GoG
- Comment on The President of the United States gave a speech today 1 week ago:
Off mute too
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
There were a couple details that mattered.
Whether you were aggressive vs friendly vs neutral at each stage had some consequences for all later stages. Creatures you befriend in the Creature stage could become pets in the Tribal stage, which could include the powerful lone wolf ones.
- Comment on Space 3 weeks ago:
The pressure isnt violently different (it’s only 1atm. Scuba divers can go up to 70atm with special breathing equipment). The issue is the boiling point of water is very low at that pressure, but on a cellular level the physics of that are going to be different.
Also space being “cold” is a bit of a misconception. Your body produces heat constantly, and it’s hard to dissipate heat in space, since you can basically only radiate it out as infrared light, which is a much slower process than being in physical contact with something.
In fact, we use vacuum chambers to insulate things such as in those metal thermoses that they tell you not to put in the dishwasher.
So being in space would actually be more like being wrapped in the thickest possible blanket than being cold.
- Comment on Space 3 weeks ago:
There’s enough microbes in any living thing that some decay will happen, for a while at least…
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
There is a playable MMO with an active playerbase: mmo-population.com/game/star-citizen
- Comment on What’s your favorite video game that most people didn’t like ?? 5 weeks ago:
I was a fan of No Man’s Sky on release. It played a lot like a 3D version of Out There, which was a game that I liked, so I found it fun.
- Comment on What’s your favorite video game that most people didn’t like ?? 5 weeks ago:
I’m a fan of most of Supergiant’s work but Pyre just felt so boring and repetitive to me
- Comment on wat 1 month ago:
Yes
- Comment on Dan 1 month ago:
Maybe the Danish are approximations of the Great Dane
- Comment on 1 month ago:
If you ever have the chance to take a college physics class, they often teach some of the history of how this stuff was discovered along with the math. I always found that part fascinating!
Also there are some pretty good resources on YouTube and some books intended for more casual audiences. Michio Kaku was one of my favorite authors for pop-sci physics when I was a kid.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Are radiowaves also electromagnetic fields
Radiowaves are basically a color of light that we can’t see. Technically “light” typically only refers to visible colors, and we call everything else “electromagnetic radiation”. Radio waves, microwaves, and infrared light are past the red end of the rainbow, while ultraviolet, x-rays, and gamma rays are past the violet end of the rainbow. All of these are self-propagating ripples in electromagnetic fields.
whether we actually consume or use the electrons themselves or simply reap the biproducts of some kind of manipulation that we do with them
It’s very difficult to actually destroy an electron. When I said the electrons are “depleted” in a transistor I meant they are pushed somewhere else. Electrons can be pushed and pulled by electromagnetic fields, so in a transistor one current makes a field that pushes electrons out of the region where they would need to be for the other current to use them.
In all cases it’s the electromagnetic fields that actually do the work.
If you want to know about electrons actually being destroyed, an electron will annihilate with a positron (antimatter electron) releasing some gamma rays. There are some medical applications for radioactive material that produces positrons which annihilate to produce gamma rays in this way, and then they can detect the gamma rays.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
This is a reasonable description of heating elements and incandescent lightbulbs.
Microphones, generators, speakers, and motors typically involve an electromagnet and a permanent magnet. For speakers and motors, electrons moving in a circle generates a magnetic field, which pushes against the permanent magnetic field of the permanent magnet. For microphones, and generators, it’s kinda the opposite: a permanent magnet moving near a coil of wire generates a magnetic field.
Transistors, which are the basis of modern CPUs, rely on the need for loose electrons to be around for an electric current to flow. In a carefully crafted setup, you can end up with a current flowing along one path depleting the loose electrons needed for a flow along another path to form. This creates a kind of “electric switch”.
Heat is generated in all of these processes, but it’s generally an unwanted but unavoidable byproduct, similar to heat produced by friction in a mechanical system.
I’m not sure what you mean by “EFFECTS of electron flow” vs “electricity”.
What tends to matter is the electromagnetic fields and how they change. Often we use electrons flowing in a piece of metal because they are easily influenced by electromagnetic fields, but also when there is an electron flow in a wire, the shape of that wire can result in different electromagnetic fields. However, I think it’s worth mentioning that electrons and wires are just convenient for controlling the electromagnetic force. It’s possible to have electromagnetic effects without either (for example, lightning and static electricity are electromagnetic effects that don’t involve conductors, and light is an electromagnetic effect that doesn’t rely on electrons).
I’m happy to answer more questions, I’m trying not to launch into a whole physics lecture lol but I sure can if you like.
- Comment on What is a game you can’t understand why its so popular ? 1 month ago:
Any game where just grinding is the main thing you do
- Comment on We are so close 1 month ago:
thirst principles
- Comment on 60% of PC gamers have no plans to build a new PC in the next two years — AI pricing crunch on RAM and other components paralyze enthusiast market 1 month ago:
Mine is about 7 and I keep forgetting it’s not “current gen”.
- Comment on Talk like an 👽 2 months ago:
Sure, but to get the communication started you would start with facts you’d agree on, like the positions of stars or basic chemistry.
- Comment on Talk like an 👽 2 months ago:
The model we currently have for the universe goes well beyond anything we could learn with our natural senses and the way we intuitively think about the world because of those senses.
It’s true that we keep refining our models an it’s ver possible that an alien would have slightly different models, but at the end of the day, we are trying to describe the same universe and those models are going to overlap a lot because of that.
- Comment on Talk like an 👽 2 months ago:
First of all, there has been a lot of research into what the minimal set of assumptions you need is to reproduce what we consider “basic math” and also what happens if you tweak those assumptions.
Second of all, the main goal for science and the type of math we use for science is to effectively model the world we live in.
Any aliens that live in the same universe are subject to the same physics, and any civilization advanced enough to detect our messages will know some basic universal facts about the world, and those facts are what we hope to use as the basis for starting communication.
- Comment on I left YouTube two years ago. Time to come back. [Tom Scott; 1:40] 3 months ago:
If you haven’t heard of this guy before look up his old stuff on YouTube.
- Comment on Nvidia Announces DLSS 5, and it adds... An AI slop filter over your game 3 months ago:
There are specular highlights on the eyes in the original, they are just much more subdued.
- Comment on Nvidia Announces DLSS 5, and it adds... An AI slop filter over your game 3 months ago:
It also seems to change the lighting on faces as if they are lit by a studio ring light.
- Comment on Nvidia Announces DLSS 5, and it adds... An AI slop filter over your game 3 months ago:
Use AI to do cool stuff instead of trying to automate the soul out of artwork.
I also work in tech btw.
- Comment on What’s the endgame? 3 months ago:
Previous admin was pro-Ukraine but this admin is pro-Russia
- Comment on Attention! 3 months ago:
You can tell because there’s only one camera instead do the 3-6 on a modern phone
- Comment on Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts? 3 months ago:
Yes, there are difficulties in the design of experiments and studies sometimes. Things like control groups and placebos are designed to rule out certain very common confounding variables. If you cannot have a placebo, you might still be able to get useful data by other means. For example, sometimes comparison to an existing drug is used instead of comparison to a placebo.
Ultimately it all comes down to statistics. Typically, you start with “assuming” the “null hypothesis” (basically that you are wrong). For example: that your medicine doesn’t work and/or has bad side effects. Your goal is to find evidence to reject that null hypothesis with sufficient confidence. This can be done by any means, but statistics should be your guide, and you have to be careful about bias and confounding factors, and standard study formats and advice are tried-and-true reliable methods to avoid common issues. But if those don’t work for some reason, it is ok to get creative, as long as your math checks out.
If you can’t run a standard study, you should try coming up with a creative study. If you can’t come up with a way to correct all the issues, you might try studying related topics. If you really can’t gather meaningful information about your topic, that’s tough but I absolutely reject the idea that you should take something as true without true evidence just because it’s too difficult to get that evidence.
In your specific example of corpus callostomy, I would bet that 100% of cases where this surgery was performed were well documented, including follow up visits. That’s fantastic for your statistics, and means you don’t have to worry about a lot of sampling issues that you would otherwise have to correct for. You might not be able to perform experiments or new studies on the topic, but you can certainly learn from the documented cases, and you can look at studies on related topics like brain injuries, or experiment with animals (the ethics of that is a whole other debate).
An example of how this kind of reasoning works (note that I’m making up the specifics here): 100% of people who got this surgery had a post-surgery event where left-and-right hands fought. It seems like this is related to the surgery, but we have to be sure it’s caused by the surgery and not just some confounding factor like the symptoms that cause people to get this surgery in the first place. So we do a study of people who have symptoms that would have qualified them for the surgery, but instead get a different treatment or no treatment. If none or very few of those people have left/right arm fights, then we can say we have sufficient evidence that this symptom is caused by the surgery.
This is very different from the NDE topic, in which a huge number of people suffer near-death situations, and only a tiny fraction of those end up with supernatural experiences. We want to prove these supernatural experiences are real, but the incidence rate is so low it could just be statistical noise. To show evidence of the supernatural you’d need some way to demonstrate that it’s not just statistical noise or other “mundane” / “null hypothesis” explanations.
I want to mention a more science-y topic that fits into this pattern I read about the other day. If you are interested let me know and I’ll try to dig up the sources.
There is a significant amount of neurons throughout the body (outside the brain). One particularly large collection of those is in the heart. This is sometimes called the “brain of the heart” and is in charge of controlling the heart muscles with only high-level instructions from the brain. There was a hypothesis that some other behavior might happen in that heart-brain such as storing memories. This idea came from a couple case studies where a heart transplant recipient would seem to gain memories or personality traits from the donor. These cases sounded a lot like the typical “paranormal knowledge” story. Two particular cases were someone liking a food they didn’t like before but the donor did, and a child avoiding a toy that donor had with them when they died. Personality change is common after transplants in general, presumably because of the immense stress and changing life habits related to the situation. So a study was done, where they interviewed a selection of transplant recipients of both the heart and other organs and recorded any personality changes to see personality changes in general, or if some specific types of personality changes, were more common among heart transplant recipients than others. The results showed that the only statistical difference between the heart and other organs was personality changes related to sports or exercise, which has the much more mundane explanation of being a result of the symptoms of having an y healthy vs healthy heart.
Disproving ideas is just as important as proving them. That’s the whole reason for the scientific process: to make sure what we accept as fact is very likely to be fact.
- Comment on me btw 4 months ago:
I should try it on anime. I was using it on phone videos.
- Comment on Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts? 4 months ago:
A “case study” is more formal than an anecdote, but still has the same issues.
Here’s a quote from the end of the “Limitations” section of the Wikipedia article on “Case Study”:
As small-N research should not rely on random sampling, scholars must be careful in avoiding selection bias when picking suitable cases. A common criticism of qualitative scholarship is that cases are chosen because they are consistent with the scholar’s preconceived notions, resulting in biased research.
Another quote from earlier in that section:
The authors’ recommendation is to increase the number of observations … because few observations make it harder to estimate multiple causal effects, as well as increase the risk that there is measurement error, and that an event in a single case was caused by random error or unobservable factors.
The “Uses” section of that article starts with:
Case studies have commonly been seen as a fruitful way to come up with hypotheses and generate theories. Case studies are useful for understanding outliers or deviant cases.
Lower down that section has:
Case studies of cases that defy existing theoretical expectations may contribute knowledge by delineating why the cases violate theoretical predictions and specifying the scope conditions of the theory.
Case studies are used to guide experimental and quantitative research, but are not a replacement for that part of the research process.
Applying that to case studies that appear to involve the supernatural, sufficient convincing case studies should lead to theories about the conditions for supernatural events, which should lead to experiments or quantitative studies to test those theories.