AbouBenAdhem

@AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does the ping between your eyes and brain increase when you're tired?⁩ ⁨⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  In the literal sense of the time it takes neuronal spikes to travel from your retina to your visual cortex, I doubt it.

  The more likely cause, I think, is the amount of resources your brain is devoting to the real-time modeling of your environment that those visual signals feed into, and that has to be processed before you become conscious of any changes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the equivalent of rose coloured glasses for always seeing something in a negative perspective?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  A jaundiced view?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who discovered/"invented" fire?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Dont say Prometheus

  Ok—it was Προμηθεύς.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the best way to respond to a family member who says the COVID vaccines are being used to depopulate?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Try Bayes’ theorem. Ask them to give percent likelihoods for the following:

  A. The odds that the government (or whoever) is trying to kill everyone, before taking the evidence of excess deaths into account
  B. The odds of seeing excess deaths for any possible reason, not just their conspiracy hypothesis
  C. The odds of seeing excess deaths if the conspiracy hypothesis were true.

  Then logically, the odds of the conspiracy being real given the excess deaths should be A*C/B. If you disagree on the outcome, you must disagree on one or more of the assumptions (probably A—if it’s B, you can find the objective odds by checking historical data).

  If you still disagree on the prior assumption (A), you can set aside the excess deaths argument and ask what other evidence led them to form that prior assumption. Then you can repeat the process until you either reach agreement or they’re left with an assumption with no evidence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does Dairy Queen sell food?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They’ve got to do something with the cows once they’re too old to milk.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is empathy based on a financial bell curve?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s more likely that you need to empathize with someone in order to be able to recognize when they’re being empathetic, and you empathize most with the middle class.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why do some people put a space before a question mark or exclamation point?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It was the standard printed style in the US and UK from the 1860s until the early 20th century, gradually phasing out by the 1950s.

  For printers with variable spaces, it was more usual to use a thin space before the punctuation and an em space after.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does anyone use a phone without a protective case?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I get the smallest phone available and don’t use a case because I don’t like the bulk.

  I also figure a smaller piece of glass is less likely to break when dropped, so the size is a sort of protection in itself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would having two hearts be better or worse for the human body?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Not absolute pressure, but pressure per unit of work (i.e., efficiency).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would having two hearts be better or worse for the human body?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Even if they were physically separated you’d want them to pump in sync, to maximize the pressure. So having them share electrical signals is just the optimal setup for two hearts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would having two hearts be better or worse for the human body?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s better, which is why we already do.

  Mammals have a double circulatory system, with the left and right ventricles effectively acting as separate hearts that happen to be physically connected.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what’s the difference between “he died” and “he’s dead”?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  And preceded by “it’s worse than that”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the ethics behind purchasing a book from an author you don't agree with?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Do most public libraries have holocaust denial works?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the ethics behind purchasing a book from an author you don't agree with?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Legally, you could buy a used copy if you could find one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That depends on whether angels are bosons or fermions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s Staten Island.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does the average person know markdown?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Most people are probably at least aware that there are contexts where you can use some basic, intuitive ASCII-based formatting (like asterisks for bullets) and it will get cleaned up to a prettier format when you post it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pedestrians Walking on Right or Left?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the general rule (that also applies on one-way streets, etc.) is that the pedestrian lane closest to traffic should face in the direction of oncoming traffic, so cars aren’t approaching from their blind spot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Iceland approved the 4-day workweek in 2019: nearly 6 years later, all the predictions made have come true.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There were fears of a drop in productivity, increased costs for businesses and difficulties in adapting to maintain service levels. However, the Icelandic experience has swept these fears under the carpet.

  I don’t think that metaphor means what they think it means.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If the entirety of the internet was a computer simulation how would prove it?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Look at phenomena that should be totally random, and look for evidence that they were produced by pseudorandom number generators.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can you read and understand this passage?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I believe so—but I grew up reading a lot of 19th-century novels.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s like when you get inoculated with a weakened form of a live virus so you can build up an immunity to more virulent forms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does Netflix, HBO and other services get their subtitles? Are they now using AI to help translate?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The voice-over is usually trying to approximate the lip movements and timing as well as the meaning.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the evolutionary benefit of loving a pet so much you melt into a puddle when they are around?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Even if every human on earth had their own pet since dogs were first domesticated ten or twenty thousand years ago, their ancestors were facing the stress of migrating into new and unfamiliar environments for several hundred thousand years prior to that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the evolutionary benefit of loving a pet so much you melt into a puddle when they are around?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Beneficial mutations are random, but the odds of them persisting are proportional to the frequency of the events in which they affect our fitness. And the proportion of stressful events in which pets were available would have been only a fraction of the total number of stressful events our ancestors experienced.

  If pets are available for 10% of the stressful events we experience, the selection pressure for stress reduction that doesn’t require pets would be ten times greater.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the evolutionary benefit of loving a pet so much you melt into a puddle when they are around?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a personal benefit, but it’s not necessarily an evolutionary benefit. If it were an evolutionary benefit, our bodies would generate that response spontaneously without needing an external stimulus that wouldn’t have been available to many of our ancestors.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How would you run a society?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Accept that there’s going to be political diversity and social change (for better and worse), and try to create an overarching framework to channel it into something other than violent conflict. One idea:

  Let societies do whatever they want, but institute a “risk mitigation’ tax (or other form of resource redistribution) based on size and similarity: if a social strategy is popular and widely adopted, it’s taxed at a marginally increasing rate until it reaches an equilibrium level; and the revenue is used to fund more experimental social strategies. This flips the historical dynamic on its head: instead of each society trying to forcibly convert the rest of the world to its own system, each society has an interest in discouraging others from following its example.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I snapped you back in time 650 years right this very second, how would you use your current knowledge to succeed?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I claw my way out of a few feet of soil, and walk about thirty minutes to where the local Olhone maintained a ceremonial shellmound from 800 BCE until the arrival of the Spanish in the 1700s. By all accounts the Olhone were chill hunter-gatherers, so my best bet would probably be to befriend and join them.

  They’d be more knowledgeable than me about everything in the local environment, so I don’t think I’d have much knowledge that would be of use to them. (They seem to have known of other nearby groups that practiced agriculture, but saw no need for it.) I might eventually consider traveling north or south along the coast, but many other groups in western North America practiced warfare and/or slavery, so I’d probably be best off staying put.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨With Tim Pool in the White House Press Pool, will we ever find out what's under that beanie?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So “Tim Apple” is CEO of Apple, and Tim Pool is on the White House press pool.

  Does Trump just believe in some kind of obligate nominative determinism? If I call myself “Tim General”, can I sit on the National Security Council?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are popes always really old?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s an emergent phenomenon—institutions will naturally behave in ways that increase their power without that being the conscious intention of any given member.