• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • icosahedron@ttrpg.networkto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRule
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    17 days ago

    my parents were understandably pissed because i had deleted at least a few hundred gigabytes of photos and videos from the last decade. iirc i was banned from touching the computer for at least a year, which was funny because i was literally the only one who used it


  • icosahedron@ttrpg.networkto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRule
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    17 days ago

    growing up my family had a mac desktop that i had access to while really young. eventually realized mac is a little terrible, so i tried bootcamp to get some proper use out of the computer. i successfully installed windows, but somehow fucked up and formatted the mac partition. all for windows to also suck









  • i’d agree that we don’t really understand consciousness. i’d argue it’s more an issue of defining consciousness and what that encompasses than knowing its biological background. if we knew what to look for, we’d find it. also anesthesia isn’t really a problem at all. in fact, we know exactly how general anesthesia works

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2908224/

    and Penroses’s Orch OR theory was never meant to explain anesthesia. it’s a more general theory concerning the overall existence of consciousness in the first place. however, anesthesia does relate to the theory, in that it could play a role in proving it (i think? not a primary source but it’s where i found that info)

    besides that, Orch OR isn’t exactly a great model in the first place, or at least from a neurological standpoint. even among theories of consciousness, Orch OR is particularly controversial and not widely accepted. i’m no expert and i could be misunderstanding, so please correct me if i’m missing something that would indicate Orch OR is considered even remotely plausible compared to other consciousness theories. this paper certainly had some things to say about it in the context of the validity of theories of consciousness (see V.1 class I).

    other theories seem more promising. global workspace theory seems particularly well supported by neurology. its criticisms mainly focus on how GWT fails to truly explain the nature of consciousness. but is that an issue any theory can resolve? again, the problem lies in the definition of consciousness.

    then we have integrated information theory. it’s a more mathematical model that aims to quantify the human experience. but you know what? it’s also controversial and highly debated, to the point that it’s been called pseudoscientific because it implies a degree of panpsychism. it’s clearly not a perfect theory.

    point is, you’re right. we don’t really get consciousness. we have some wild guesses out there, and penrose’s theory is certainly one of them. genius as penrose is, Orch OR isn’t empirically testable. we don’t know, and maybe can’t know - which is precisely why neuroscience searches elsewhere




  • decomposers turn organic material from corpses into simpler nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. for example, proteins are broken down into amino acids, which then decompose into ammonium and nitrates. these nutrients are absorbed into soil and consumed by plants

    tldr: plants eat corpses after decomposers turn them into nutrients





  • not op but i think your skepticism is justified

    this seems to be where the image originally came from. the author explains the challenges with making speculations about historical populations in that post. the demographers, toshiko kaneda and carl haub, estimated 117 billion people have lived over the last 200,000 years. here’s the explanation given on the original post:

    The majority of them lived very short lives: about one in two children died in the past. When conditions are so very poor and children die so quickly then the birth rate has to be extremely high to keep humanity alive; Kaneda and Haub assume a birth rate of 80 births per 1000 people per year for most of humanity’s history (up to the year 1 CE). That is a rate of births that is about 8-times higher than in a typical high-income country and more than twice as high as in the poorest countries today (see the map). The past was a very different place.

    i think this is fairly reasonable, but original source is necessary. i think this is a more original source, and kaneda and haub are listed as the authors. their methodology seems to rely a lot on guessing, which makes sense. the 117 billion is probably not entirely accurate, but i’d say it’s a good attempt at estimating given what we know. there might be a more detailed paper somewhere but i didn’t really look too hard

    edit: also lot of hostility from other people here… lemmy gone downhill. i think there’s nothing wrong with being skeptical of data or science, even if it’s coming from qualified experts. unless there’s a detailed paper that explains EVERY step of their process, you can’t be entirely sure where their numbers are coming from. that said, i agree with those other guys that there’s not a lot of room to be skeptical in this particular case, since the authors explicitly say it’s a rough estimate. based on what we know, it’s as accurate as we can get. but still, nothing wrong with asking for sources!


  • mahler’s instrumentation is consistently massive but usually has normal instruments. i think only the sixth is particularly strange with the hammer, and the next weirdest symphony might be the seventh with its mandolin, guitar, cowbells, etc. his fourth could also be considered weird since it’s scored for an unusually small orchestra, especially for a mahler symphony. pretty sure he never used a bag of sticks, but yeah mahler can still be crazy. only really rivaled by strauss imo. strauss’s Alpine Symphony is probably the most insane thing i’ve ever seen performed, for me beating mahler 2 and 3 (though i still like them more overall)