2021-06-21
Worthy
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David Eagleman: ‘The working of the brain resembles drug dealers in Albuquerque’ - Taipei Times
One of the big surprises of neuroscience was to understand how rapidly these takeovers can happen. If you blindfold somebody for an hour, you can start to see changes where touch and hearing will start taking over the visual parts of the brain. So what I realized is, because the planet rotates into darkness, the visual system alone is at a disadvantage, which is to say, you can still smell and hear and touch and taste in the dark, but you can’t see any more. I realized this puts the visual system in danger of getting taken over every night. And dreams are the brain’s way of defending that territory. About every 90 minutes a great deal of random activity is smashed into the visual system. And because that’s our visual system, we experience it as a dream, we experience it visually. Evolutionarily, this is our way of defending ourselves against visual system takeover when the planet moves into darkness.
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But the mythology of Neuralink is that this is something we can all use to interface faster with our cellphones. I’d certainly like to text 50 percent faster, but am I going to get an open-head surgery? No, because there’s an expression in neurosurgery: when the air hits your brain, it’s never the same.
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Horseshit
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Texans regret opting into power plan that remotely raises thermostat temps
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Pandemic Progress – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
There are echoes here of the self-serving arguments proffered by business executives who profited massively from moving jobs abroad: look at how much life improved for billions of people (particularly in China)! It’s a complicated argument because it is, objectively speaking, true; the human race as a whole is in a far better place today than it was forty years ago, thanks to globalization. At the same time, who believes that human betterment was the goal, as opposed to corporate profits? And what costs were incurred, both to middle class Americans and to America’s industrial capacity, in the meantime?
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Amazon destroys millions of unsold products, most are brand-new
celebrity gossip
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By contrast, I am sitting in my study despite being sentenced to eight months in jail. I am at liberty while the Supreme Court decides whether to hear my appeal. My lawyers believe, from their contact with the court administrators, that it is entirely possible that the Supreme Court will decide on whether to take my appeal, within the four week suspension of my jail sentence granted by Lady Dorrian. This is because otherwise I might be imprisoned.
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Douglas Coupland on Generation X at 30: ‘Generational trashing is eternal’
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Petitions To Keep Bezos From Returning To Earth Next Month Signed By Over 45,000 People
Culture War / Re segregation / Identdoctrination
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The obesity wars and the education of a researcher: A personal account - ScienceDirect
Our article attracted attention because it appeared to be inconsistent with the dramatic conclusions of the 2004 Mokdad et al. article.8 I fielded dozens of press calls as soon as our article was published. To my surprise, after the first few hours, many of the journalists who called me had already spoken to a professor, Walter Willett, (let's call him Professor 1) from a prestigious school of public health (PSPH). He was not a statistician and had no expertise in estimating the number of deaths associated with obesity. Our article was not intended to have anything to do with his work. He had apparently begun pre-emptively contacting the press, inserting himself into the discussion, positioning himself as an expert, and providing negative and antagonistic comments on our article before reporters had spoken to me. He used strong language to disparage our article, describing it as “really naive, deeply flawed and seriously misleading”.9
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Campus Reform | Chapman University hosts racially segregated 'cultural graduation celebrations'