It activates the same chemicals in your brain as cocaine! 
Well, yeah, there are only three[1] a few neurotransmitters. That’s not saying much.
You know what else activates those chemicals? Practically everything. When scientists breed “knockout” mice without dopamine, the mice just stand there until they die of thirst, because there is no reward for… living.
It contains more germs than a toilet seat! 
Germs like moist surfaces. We don’t want germs on our toilets, which is why we make them out of porcelain, which is hard, dry, non-porous, and easy to clean.
If it had more germs than your colon, then I would be concerned.
@Neuromancer49@midwest.social corrected me ↩︎
What if you could use 100% of your brain?
:seizure:
This one tilts me the hardest. It’s like saying a 3-ligjt stoplight only uses 33% of it’s lights.
THERE ARE THREE LIGHTS
I use 69% of my brain like a true gooner
Yeah, this is just one of those weird occult things that worked its way into common thought
Like, this is why science fiction always has people doing telepathy or telekinesis because humanity was going to “”““evolve””" into being able to use more brain
Like, this is why science fiction always has people doing telepathy or telekinesis because humanity was going to “”““evolve””" into being able to use more brain
oohhh, I’ve wondered about that. like huh, why is this form of magic so common in sci-fi?
So, this actually comes from our favorite psuedo-scientific psychologist, Carl Jung. It stems from his idea of the gestalt, or world-conciousness. In a similar way that Freud hypothesized the unconscious and subconscious mind that has radical influences on our behavior, Jung hypothesized an ‘over-conciouness’ from which all conscious beings draw behaviors from. Jung believed that the gestalt explained why migratory birds who were never raised with others of their kind knew to fly south in the winter, or why all humans have myths about floods and snakes, even when there are no floods or snakes present in their eco-system. It is considered mostly horseshit with some interesting philosophical implications, but it still has a dominating presence in the fictional writing world, with ‘The Hero’s Journey’ story type being created from a student of Jung’s.
As for science fiction writers specifically, they were in particular obsessed with the idea that we would eventually be able to evolve to communicate within the gestalt itself, thus being able to communicate through thought alone. This kind of thinking, which slotted neatly in with the previous fictional fad of Spiritualism, which also had these elements, but present within a supernatural context, dominated science fiction writing to the point that most authors don’t even really know what they are referencing anymore, as the results of extrapolations on this idea (telepathy, clairvoyance, extra-dimensional beings) are larger than the original idea itself.
fantastic writeup, thank you
see also, the noosphere?
This was very interesting, thank you
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I am not super-well versed in Jung myself, but my general understanding is that God would be the prime-mover of things, while the gestalt is created by us existing and being conscious. Think less Christian mythos and more like how the Warp works in Warhammer 40k.
The gestalt doesn’t have ‘a plan’ it is just the shared psychic world (literally this is where the idea of a psychic world comes from) that both is influenced by and influences conscious beings. Basically, enough humans are afraid of snakes that even humans that have no experience with snakes tell myths of snakes, because enough psychic energy has been generated by those that do, while it probably has more to do with all mammals originating from small burrowers and having an inherent fear of snakes was evolutionary beneficial, but that is evo-psych which is just as non-scientific. We just aren’t sure why.
To be blunt, I am not arguing for the existence of the gestalt, I am arguing that the idea of the gestalt has been extremely influential to fictional, and especially science fictional writing, and is, along with Spiritualism, the basis of ideas such as telepathy and clairvoyance.
Kinda like an engine firing on all cylinders… Simultaneously
Seizures do, in fact, light up your whole brain, I believe.
i can’t believe they made a whole fucking movie based on this premise
You talking Lucy? There are very few movies I get angry about having watched and that was one of them.
Limitless too I think.
Yeah, that’s fair, but Limitless didn’t piss me off as much because
spoiler
they didn’t turn him into a USB stick.
Like Limitless is kinda fun if you just look at it like a fantasy of how you wanna feel when you do Adderall and think you’re super smart, when in reality you’re just cleaning your house and doing the shit you’ve been putting off for the last 6 months.
I had a great time seeing that, but I think it was because i was with friends and had been given free acid
Lol, I downloaded it for free and I was still so angry.
What if you could use 100% of your brain?
just smoke some crack
it’s one atom away from being a deadly toxin!
Then you have enantiomers and they’re the same amount of atoms but just arranged different and you’re boned.
H2O2 = hydrogen peroxide, you will die if you drink it
H2O = water, you will die if you stop drinking it
“Margarine is one molecule away from plastic”. Dog, please read an organic chemistry textbook once.
“This organism hasn’t evolved in millions of years!” has the added bonus of giving (bad) arguments to creationists.
There are millenia in which decades of selection pressure is exerted on a species, and there are decades in which millenia of selection pressure is exerted.
The immortal science of Marxism-Leninism-
Lysenkoism-DarwinismDon’t make me go on a Lysenko rant
Darwin thought that each part of the body generated tiny particles that carried information on heritability to the sex organs
Darwin predicted DNA?
No comrade, Lamarck predicted epigenetics! /s
In reality they were all wrong to a significant degree and also usually contributed significantly to some aspect of what is taken for granted as the ‘correct’ scientific knowledge
For example, it’s been known Mendel must have faked his data for almost a hundred years, but that doesn’t make Mendelism wrong (after you strip out the stuff that is wrong)
For example, it’s been known Mendel must have faked his data for almost a hundred years, but that doesn’t make Mendelism wrong (after you strip out the stuff that is wrong)
“Fisher’s analysis gave rise to the Mendelian paradox: Mendel’s reported data are, statistically speaking, too good to be true, yet “everything we know about Mendel suggests that he was unlikely to engage in either deliberate fraud or in an unconscious adjustment of his observations”.[71] Several writers have attempted to resolve this paradox.”
Does Wikipedia have a license to peddle copium of this purity?
Not exactly, the only thing that he was correct about in that regard was the existence of a material carrier of heritable information. Literally everything else he conjectured about it was wrong like thinking that it would be continuous rather than discrete and so on.
you should, I want to hear the Lysenko rant actually
Very briefly, you’ll often see references to
- Vavilov being pushed out because of Lysenko
- Lysenko being responsible for the 1930-33 famine, despite not being responsible for leading agricultural research like Vavilov actually was at the time
- Stalin supporting the ideological aspects of Lysenkoism, even though there is a draft copy of the speech that Stalin cut to bits (including something mocking like “haha, and what is the class character of Darwinism??”)
- zero reference to all the racist eugenists whose work was underpinned by genetics of the day
- Lysenkoism being described as pseudoscientific even though, from what I have read it is not a radical interpretation of some of the experimental findings
- aspects of it are quite correct (like young crops responding better to winter by exposing them to colder environments - which increased expression of a few genes that influence cold adaptions)
Don’t get me started on the claims about the Lysenko influence on China’s great famine
You read something simple that says China banned the use of chemical fertiliser following Lysenkoism, then read an article from 1958 that suggests China was pretty keen on fertiliser
maybe the organism 1 million years ago had racing stripe and went faster, you can’t know that 😤
fastest animal on the planet, they’re just modest about it (and too busy being stinky)
They’re stinky because they’re not running to their full potential as you pointed out so they’re constantly running rich. They don’t burn off all the fuel they’re designed to so their exhaust stinks!
Dopamine does a lot in the brain. Much of its function depends on where it’s active. When released in the ventral tegmental area, it causes reward and happiness. In the basal ganglia, dopamine helps us coordinate movement.
Since I’m already on my soapbox, I’d like to point out there’s more than 3 neurotransmitters. These are the basic ones:
- Dopamine - reward and muscle movement
- Acetylcholine - motor neurotransmitter
- Glutamate - primary excitation transmitter, important for memory and overall function
- GABA - primary inhibitor transmitter
- Glycine - inhibitor in the spinal cord
- Serotonin - the other happy hormone, involved in a lot of complex stuff like sleep, depression, and hunger
- Norepinephrine - fight or flight, adrenaline
- Epinephrine - the other fight or flight hormone
- Oxytocin - the nipple clamp hormone
Oxytocin - the nipple clamp hormone
obviously. But for the people who don’t know this, unlike me, maybe you could explainm this one
Sorry, that was maybe too pithy for a science post. https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3339
no, it’s fine, as I am a scholar. But I am also a communist, and as such I think of the poor and uneducated a lot. I think your comic will help them. Not me though, I knew this.
Breastfeeding babies. Moms get a happy hormone from it.
direct from wikipedia
Oxytocin is a peptide hormone and neuropeptide normally produced in the hypothalamus and released by the posterior pituitary.[3] Present in animals since early stages of evolution, in humans it plays roles in behavior that include social bonding, love, reproduction, childbirth, and the period after childbirth.[4][5][6][7] Oxytocin is released into the bloodstream as a hormone in response to sexual activity and during childbirth.[8][9] It is also available in pharmaceutical form. In either form, oxytocin stimulates uterine contractions to speed up the process of childbirth.
In its natural form, it also plays a role in maternal bonding and milk production.[9][10] Production and secretion of oxytocin is controlled by a positive feedback mechanism, where its initial release stimulates production and release of further oxytocin. For example, when oxytocin is released during a contraction of the uterus at the start of childbirth, this stimulates production and release of more oxytocin and an increase in the intensity and frequency of contractions. This process compounds in intensity and frequency and continues until the triggering activity ceases. A similar process takes place during lactation and during sexual activity.
I didn’t know hormones and neurotransmitters overlapped like that; I always separated them in my head. TIL.
Why do I frequently see the neurotransmitters narrowed down to dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin? Are they the most important ones?
That’s a surprising statement to me. Honestly, those aren’t even the most important. Glutamate is the most common neurotransmitter in the brain. But dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin are responsible for some very “classic” bodily functions like reward, adrenaline, and sleep.
Now, hormones are typically separate from the brain - there’s a barrier between neurons and your circulating blood maintained by astrocytes. This is the so-called blood-brain barrier. I do not know if there are examples of Oxytocin and Epinephrine crossing the BBB, as I did not study it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood–brain_barrier?wprov=sfla1
I’m not sure where I mislearned that then.
maintained by atrocities
War crimes keep my brain healthy?
Ducking autocorrect strikes again. Astrocytes
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Although I’ve never thought much about it I would think that neuropeptides that are produced in the brain would likely have local activity. Orexin is an endogenous neuropeptide that can be administered in an inhaled form with a very potent effect. I listened to a talk on it once and apparently you can be going on 20+ hours awake and barely able to keep your eyes open to immediately awake like you slept for 12 hours. He said that the air force uses it for B-2 pilots and other extremely long range missions.
This explains the irresistibleness of gabagool.
I have successfully negotiated with a two-year-old about not eating that toy
The one that annoys me is in astronomy when someone describes a star as being X times the size of the Sun. Diameter? Volume? Mass? What’s being compared here?
I always assumed volume, def not mass, but what is it actually?
we don’t know becuase they never say! It’s usually words from a scientist, then someone writes a press release, then someone writes a pop-sci article on the topic.
knowing what I do about astronomy I’d guess it’s usually mass since that’s a fundamental descriptive quality of stars which determines the rest of their qualities. but we can’t directly measure mass we measure brightness, the spectra, and estimate the distance. these are used together to estimate the mass.
Length and only length
In physics, it’s usually the mass.
Scientists don’t know how something something
usually they have at least 2-3 plausible theories, and they just can’t make or design an experiment which will eliminate the wrong ones. Moreover, even having one theory doesn’t mean they know-know ™ something, at least not in the sense of knowing the truth, they have a model which fits all the currently known outcomes/experiments, which might be the truth. It creates distorted image of scientific knowledge as something absolute, which seemingly implodes every century, instead of a process
(e.g. maxwell derived his equations thinking aether was an actually existing thing (and the equations reflect it), the equations are still fucking stellar 150 years later, aether was thrown out in 50)
*obviously, one can take this to absurdity by saying science doesn’t know shit, let me roll coal or whatever the fuck, but i still think nuanced understanding of science would be more positive, with having gradations of “not knowing” and “knowing” over both ontological truth and predictive truth, while the former is elusive and slowly approaching reality (in some philosophies), the latter is likely in firmly “knowing” category
also scientists basically love it when current science can’t explain something bc it means they can debate and design experiments and try to coax out new theories of how the world works. like the Hubble tension. Dumbasses will be like “omg arrogant scientists are ignoring this huge hole in their theory about the origin of the universe”, but actually most cosmologists would be sorely disappointed if it turns out their current theories of the Big Bang can explain it after all and there isn’t new physics to be discovered there.
Irks me, too. It’s life changing if you figure out those “holes” in existing theories. Einstein did it when quantum physics replaced Newtonian physics, which was already a major accomplishment. That’s why everyone on the planet knows who Einstein and Newton are. It’s the holy grail of science to find such concrete answers.
Some chud will think he’s smarter than people doing actual research because they’re willing to say “I don’t know. Nobody does.” You see this a lot with evolutionary biology and climate science.
The history of mathematics and later physics is insane because you have some very complicated thing being discovered in 1500 when nobody knew about boiling the water before drinking it else death because Pasteur is from the late 1800
i do think they knew about boiling water, but mainly they’ve had beer which preserves without sealed off containers; and modern surgery (with accompanying sterilization) was invented due to mass armies, i think?
The doctor who realized washing their hands between surgeries was a good idea probably got to watch television
Seems wiki (at least) attributes it to lister in 1860s roughly, so might have dodged tv, but probably caught radio (died in 1912)
(Could have been a podcaster bro, can’t know that)
I despise understanding physics. Should have never chosen that shit for my undergrad. Pop science, sci-fi, and most movies are just miserable to watch the moment they bring up physics in any capacity. Granted I do history now and it isn’t much better.
I HATE UNDERSTANDING
The physics in The Expanse is far better than the average sci-fi show, but even they believe that blowing up an orbiting satellite will make it immediately rain down onto the planet’s (or moon’s) surface like an airplane that’s lost lift, instead of simply turning into orbital debris.
The worst part of having studied physics is the that everyone and their dog had an opinion on physics.
I spent 4.5 years studying, I know a good bit about some really specific interactions of electrons at middling energies with condensed matter. A little crystallography and band structure stuff, a bit about surface energetic structure and some models we have for explaining surface chemistry.
I do not have an opinion on the structure of space time, and I very much strongly doubt that some fucker who’s spent a few hours reading the Wikipedia pages without even taking notes understands anything useful about the standard model.
People don’t do this about biology, nobody is like “haha Golgi bodies am I right? Have you every wondered about whether RNA is every incorporated into cell membranes?” it’s always physics.
End my suffering.
There is this great video by Angela Collier about how American billionaires love to pretend to understand physics. There is just something about physics in American society that makes it extra attractive for charlatans
She is a treasure, after I read about that moron talking about “vibe physics” I really needed someone to spend an hour enumerating all the specific ways they were being stupid.
Wow buddy, a machine designed to emit affirming text emitted some text that said “who’s a smart boy? You are, yes you are!” and it broke your fucking brain in twain.
The billionaires piss me off especially because they have the resources to poach the greatest teachers of our age and just like hang out with them in some tropical paradise getting totally immersed in a field. No pressure to produce useful work, just the ecstasy of following pure curiosity in the company of genius. But nah, even that is too much like actual work for them.
PS It’s not just seppos, that shit is everywhere. People think knowing some silly stuff about what a wavefunction is makes you into some sort of god. I got hired to a bunch of jobs I could not do on the basis of being a physics knower and my bosses often wanted me to affirm their dumb Deep Thoughts.
brain in twain
sick band name, what kinda stuff do you guys usually play?
I am a solo act, doing some pretty avant garde stuff. Tends towards screaming based chants at the news and spoken word anti-LLM multi-hour long screeds.
Angela Collier mentioned
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
People don’t do this about biology
antivaxers, biohackers, supplement salespeople, the list goes on
I studied biology and biopsychology and now my job is vitamin supplement salesman. I like having a bullshit office job but that extra layer of pretending to go along with bullshit is maddening. Someone asked me if we had anything for whooping cough and like holy shit dude you need a doctor and antibiotics not a dumbass college dropout that barely knows excel.
Ok yeah fair cop. Guess we’re all blinkered by our own experiences.
i could’ve done physics but i became a billionaire instead
I’m sure it happens to most who specialize in something.
I’m an industrial electrician. I roll my eyes to the back of my head every time a video game tells me to like “reset the fuse for the town” or whatever. The verbage characters use is always just a hodgepodge of random ass electrical words, and the equipment is always illustrated not even close to real life.
I know I probably shouldn’t expect much close to realism but it’s when they try to make it sound real I always get a good chuckle
Like no one ever in the history of the field walks up to a sparking electrical box, “resets” a fuse, and it’s all good now.
makes me irrationally angry when people misunderstand schrodinger’s cat
I’m not even sure I get it. Isn’t he just saying that it’s silly to imagine a cat being alive and dead therefore the Copenhagen interpretation must be wrong?[1]
'cause you know, armchair reasoning about the world works great and if we know one thing it’s that the universe is preordained to make sense to one species of planes ape ↩︎
Isn’t he just saying that it’s silly to imagine a cat being alive and dead therefore the Copenhagen interpretation must be wrong?
yup
I studied applied physics. We did the “just shut up and calculate. Do you want to build an electron microscope or have an interesting debate?” interpretation of the wavefunction.
Anyone intending to write a movie set in space should be required to play 1000 hours of Kerbal Space Program
With just one semester of physics I watched Prometheus and everything science related is so bad that you almost don’t notice how stupid the plot is
imagine if media’s secondary job (after its role in cultural hegemony) was to inform instead of to generate profits via engagement
“Germ” is also a vague term as it can cover practically any single-celled organism or virus. But all of those aren’t necessarily bad for humans. So a light switch might have as many germs on it as a toilet seat, but they’re not going to be the same kind of germs.
it make petri dish cloudy tho
They did the toilet seat one on mythbusters. Iirc a kitchen sink had far more bacteria than a toilet seat, but the sink bacteria was mostly harmless while the toilet had some harmful bacteria.
Any extant remains of any kind of ancient mechanism at all being written about as "did archeologists just find ancient computer???"
This is pretty cool though (right?).
Have you seen Clickspring’s reconstruction project? He’s been working on it for the better part of a decade, including a two year pause to publish a paper about it and a side series about making the tools that the original artisan could have used.
It’s such clickbait, because even something like an abacus is indeed a digital computer. But still not the most remarkable bit of technology even in ancient cultures
My favorite things they’ve found though are mechanisms geared towards portraying an earth centered astral system. Incredibly complex mechanisms dedicated to an incredibly complex model of astral movement. It reminds me that even if a mechanism is complex, that doesn’t mean that the model that it generates is an accurate interpretation of events.
The word “hypersonic” and “hypersonic weapon”, or “impossible to intercept hypersonic missiles”, used in pop science publications and news reports. No one knows what this means, and just thinks that any ballistic missile is a hypersonic weapon that’s impossible to stop, which is not the case. The US and the Soviet Union hit hypersonic speeds with ballistic missiles in the late 1940s based on V-2 missiles captured from Nazi Germany. The Bell X-15 was a manned hypersonic rocket aircraft in the 1960s. The US deployed maneuverable medium range ballistic missiles capable of hypersonic speeds in the Pershing-II in the 1980s. The Soviet Union had mass produced air launched ballistic missiles capable of hypersonic speeds, the Kh-15. None of these were considered hypersonic weapons. And none of their modern day contemporaries, like the Russian Kinzhal or maneuverable Iranian ballistic missiles, are technically hypersonic weapons. That doesn’t mean that they’re bad weapons systems (in some use cases they are superior to hypersonic weapons), just not in the hypersonic class.
Hypersonic weapons aren’t just about speed, but a class of weapon, to do with achieving hypersonic speeds within the earth’s atmosphere on a non ballistic trajectory for the majority of their flight. Such as the Russian Zircon hypersonic cruise missile, US Dark Eagle hypersonic glide vehicle, China’s DF-17/DF-ZF hypersonic glide vehicle. It’s about flying within the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds.
Very informative, but also
Dark Eagle
“most accidents happen within 15 miles from home”
Most people don’t drive more than 15 miles in their daily commute.
Ahacksthuasdfasdfasdfasdfweofhawioehfallly (
) isnt the toilet seat made of plastic? (istg the plastic toilet seats in school were so bad they were porous)Yeah, plastic or wood.
I guess porcelain would shatter? Otherwise it would be ideal for the seat too.
whatabout metal toilet seats?
Never seen them at my local hardware store.
I wonder why, I’ve seen them in some train videos on youtube
it’s probably not economical to sell aluminium toilet seats at a competitive price with the other materials (assuming thats what theyve done for weight on a train)
