AnarchoEngineer

@AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Use this science wisely.⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  If you ask Walter Freeman he’d tell you to go through the eye

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I saw what you did there⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think the second bucket would be all that useful.

  If the blade is cutting down into the wood like it’s supposed to, most likely the blood would go down into the primary bucket or go all the way around and start turn the walls and ceiling of the garage into a Jackson Pollock painting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Intelligent Design⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m an engineer with a CS minor and ADHD; this kind of research is what I do with my freetime lol.

  To be fair this is kind of a shared hobby project/topic between me and my friend (who is a biophysics major now in med school).

  Anyway, point is that you don’t need to have a real “purpose” in order to be curious. I work in a robotics/medical lab at my university and my friends is trying to be a surgeon, yet we’re constantly in debates about astro and quantum physics to the point we’ve gotten career physicists to weigh in on our arguments.

  No relevance to our majors or our work, but super fucking interesting and full of gaps where there are more theories than facts. Plenty of room for new perspectives.

  Normalize doing research for fun!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Intelligent Design⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  SNNs more closely resemble the function of biological neurons and are perfect for temporally changing inputs. I decided to teach myself rust at the same time I learned about these so I built one from scratch trying to mimic the results of this paper (or rather a follow up paper in which they change the inhibition pattern leading to behavior similar to a self organizing map; I can’t find the link to said paper right now…).

  After building that net I had some ideas about how to improve symbol recognition. This lead me down a massive rabbit hole about how vision is processed in the brain and eventually spiraled out to the function and structure of the hippocampus and now back to the neocortex where I’m currently focusing now on mimicking the behavior and structure of cortical minicolumns.

  The main benefit of SNNs over ANNs is also a detriment: the neurons are meant to run in parallel. This means it’s blazing fast if you have neuromorphic hardware, but it’s incredibly slow and computationally intense if you try to simulate it on a typical machine with von Neumann architecture.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Intelligent Design⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I actually came across this for the first time when I was doing research into the visual pathway for the purpose of trying to structure a spiking neural net more closely to human visual processing.

  The Wikipedia page mentions cephalopod eyes specifically when talking about the inverted retina of vertebrates.

  The vertebrate retina is inverted in the sense that the light-sensing cells are in the back of the retina, so that light has to pass through layers of neurons and capillaries before it reaches the photosensitive sections of the rods and cones.[5] The ganglion cells, whose axons form the optic nerve, are at the front of the retina; therefore, the optic nerve must cross through the retina en route to the brain. No photoreceptors are in this region, giving rise to the blind spot.[6] In contrast, in the cephalopod retina, the photoreceptors are in front, with processing neurons and capillaries behind them. Because of this, cephalopods do not have a blind spot.

  The Wikipedia page goes on to explain that our inverted retinas could be the result of evolution trying to protect color receptors by limiting their light intake, as it does appear that our glial cells do facilitate concentrating light.

  However, the “positive” effects of the glial cells coming before the receptors could almost certainly be implemented in a non-inverted retina. So that’s the evolutionary duct tape I was mentioning.

  It would be difficult to flip the retina back around (in fact since it originates as part of the brain we’d kind of have to grow completely different eyes), so that’s not an option for evolution.

  However, slight changes to the glial cells and vasculature of the eyes is definitely more possible. So those mutations happen and evolution optimizes them as best it can.

  Evolution did well to optimize a poorly structured organ but it’s still a poorly structured organ.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Intelligent Design⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly, it was pretty hard for me to find a source which has made me a little skeptical of my own statements.

  I was able to find two case studies in which patients with liver damage that caused them to have low levels of vitamin A exhibited night blindness. Both were treated for vitamin A deficiency and saw symptoms improve.

  The strongest evidence of my original claim is the fact that one of the patients had otherwise healthy eyes and vision, only having extreme trouble seeing at night. After receiving treatment for vitamin A deficiency, her night vision improved. This suggests that dark adaptation is dependent on vitamin A in the blood which is regulated by the liver.

  However, I’m now somewhat skeptical and curious myself considering these two studies were almost all I could find on this topic. If I have more time I’ll try digging deeper. For now though, I’ve edited my comment with links to the studies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Intelligent Design⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I was able to find two case studies showing direct links from vitamin A levels (and liver damage) to night blindness. I’ve edited my initial comment with the links to them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Intelligent Design⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Bro myopia is the least stupid part of our eye design problems. Our retinas are built entirely backwards for no other reason besides evolution making a mistake and then duct taping over it too much to fix it later.

  If your retina was the right way around (like cephalopod eyes) you would have:

  • No blind spots
  • Higher fidelity vision even with the same number of receptors since the nerves and blood vessels wouldn’t interfere like they do now
  • much lower likelihood of retinal detachment since you could attach it for real in the first place
  • possibility for better brightness/darkness resolution since blood supply could be greater without affecting light passage
  • possibility for better resolution because ganglion nerves can be packed more densely without affecting light passage
  • The ability to regenerate cones and rods because you could, again, ACTUALLY HAVE SUPPORT CELLS WITHOUT BLOCKING LIGHT TO THE RETINA

  Our eyes are built in the stupidest way possible.

  Another fun fact: retinol is regenerated by your liver. Not your eyes, not some part of your brain, not some organ near your head like your thalamus which could probably get the job done if it tried, your fucking liver. Your eyes taking a while to adjust to the dark has basically nothing to do with your eyes; it’s because of the delay in adjustment by your fucking liver to produce more retinal, dump it into your vascular system and wait for it to hopefully reach your eyes. Why are we built like this?!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I fast-forward through the songs...⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Futurama had a couple bangers both Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back and, of course, The Devils Hands Are Idle Playthings

  Destiny has cheated me by forcing me to decide upon

  The woman that I idolize, or the hands of an automaton

  Without these hands I can’t complete the opera that was captivating her

  But if I keep them, and she marries him, he probably won’t want me dating her

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kakapos⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I do love that Aotearoa has incredible avian diversity.

  On one hand, we have Kea parrots who are smarter than most of the human tourists they like pranking and stealing from.

  And on the other side of the spectrum we have the kakapo: literally the dumbest bird in existence.

  Such amazing biodiversity lol

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UwU brat mathematician behavior⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m a mechanical engineering student with a math minor and I’m a switch so yeah, I’d take either side of this

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨High Fashion⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You could always make a gigantic super absorbent polymer bead and wear that to a similar affect

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wake up babe new shape just dropped⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Perhaps this is just a projection of a square from a non-Euclidean space in which the lines are in fact straight and parallel.

  I think the 2D surface of a cone (or double cone) would be an appropriate space, allowing you to construct this shape such that angles and distances around geodesics are conserved in both the space itself and the projected view.

  This shape in that space would have four sides of equal length connected by four right angles AND the lines would be geodesics (straight lines) that are parallel.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You can do it. It's an easy one⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “I ate sigma pie and it was delicious!” Sounds like something that’d show up on my university’s YikYak, alluding to eating out a sorority chick from Sigma Pi lol

  Idk if that’s a legitimate sorority, but I know that regardless of the sorority mentioned someone would reply something like “wait till you try a pi phi 😜” and/or someone would say you’re going to get an STD from that particular sorority

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Purge⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No no no

  Snack the keeps, booze the purge

  That’s what they meant

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who remembers alt.fan.tonya.harding.whack.whack.whack ?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Lloyd Braun, I just wanted serenity

  But you had to go testin’ me, gave me suicide tendencies