Random thought of the day
-
@Zecc QuackQuackGo? Nah. Verbing didn't work for Bing either.
-
@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
@HardwareGeek said in Random thought of the day:
RTotD: The human intestine is not well adapted to being a high-pressure gas pipeline.
I remember one Mythbusters episode where they tested whether human stomach could explode from mentos and diet coke. Due to lack of human donors, they settled on the next best thing - a swine stomach. They sealed all holes, filled it with mentos and poured coke inside. It grew like ten times its normal size, but didn't burst.
I don't know if I told the story of when I was paralyzed and couldn't pass gas, and had so much gas built up that I looked very pregnant. But it's rather painful to have your intestines be significantly larger than normal even if you'll not die from it.
-
As you know, we have a tradition of marking troll remarks with icons containing the letter sequence
tr
, even ones not specifically created for that purpose. I have personally seen and used at least , , , , , , , , and of course .Random thought: is one such icon.
-
@Zecc said in Random thought of the day:
we have a tradition of marking troll remarks with icons containing the letter sequence
-
Where do human beings fit in the grand scale of large to small animals? If you arranged all the species from greatest to smallest mass of a typical adult individual, would we be closer to the end with the elephants and giraffes, or closer to the bunnies and pygmy shrews? Are we a big animal or a small one? Or if you break the range into three equal groups, are we small, medium or large?
And would limiting the range to only land animals, to only mammals, to only non-extinct species, or to other qualifiers change our classification?
Edit: put the t back in "extinct" where it belongs. Damn keyboard.
-
@da-Doctah I found a partial answer to one of those questions.
Fish are very diverse animals and can be categorised in many ways. This article is an overview of some of ways in which fish are categorised. Although most fish species have probably been discovered and described, about 250 new ones are still discovered every year. According to FishBase, 34,300 species of fish had been described as of September 2020.[5] That is more than the combined total of all other vertebrate species: mammals, amphibians, reptiles and birds.
But you have to remember that classification by species is quite arbitrary. Even the fertile offspring criterion isn't clear cut, as most pairings have never been tried, and even if they were, tradition almost always overrides new discoveries (IIRC neanderthals could breed with homo sapiens just fine?) Also, I'm pretty sure there are some big biases in how well the particular parts of the world are investigated, leading to a lot of unknown unknowns.
That said, mammals are generally on the larger side, and large mammals have very little competition from non-mammals. The only roughly human-sized bird is an ostrich, reptiles have some crocodilian species, some giant turtles, and a few snakes. And on the other side of scale - just think of all the different kinds of insects. So all in all, humans are definitely some of the largest animals (especially in USA ). As for how they rank among mammals - no fucking clue.
-
@da-Doctah said in Random thought of the day:
would we be closer to the end with the elephants and giraffes, or closer to the bunnies and pygmy shrews?
Depends on the nationality, I guess
Edit: 'd by Gaska
-
-
@error_bot xkcd serious putty
-
@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
@error_bot xkcd serious putty
Nine 5s uptime strikes again.
-
Some years ago I got roped into participating in what was then the latest productivity fad, called "Six Sigma".
I just realized that forty years earlier, I saw this movie at a drive-in that went the idea one better and didn't resort to the Greek alphabet to do it,
-
-
We need a term like Gell-Mann Amnesia for when we notice that a large number of people in our line of work are feckless muppets, but at the same time expect people in other industries to be hypercompetent and always make good decisions.
-
@GOG They would, but computers are now everywhere, so the sickness has spread
-
@GOG said in Random thought of the day:
expect people in other industries to be hypercompetent and always make good decisions.
We do? I thought we mostly expect everyone, everywhere to be incompetent. I do.
-
@da-Doctah said in Random thought of the day:
didn't resort to the Greek alphabet
What do you have against Greek resorts?
Note: There is text in the picture. Some of it is in Greek.
It took way too much effort to find a suitable picture to make this joke.
-
@GOG said in Random thought of the day:
We need a term like Gell-Mann Amnesia for when we notice that a large number of people in our line of work are feckless muppets, but at the same time expect people in other industries to be hypercompetent and always make good decisions.
Related: I always wondered how much truth is in the first two panels of this xkcd.
-
@Gąska See: 737 Max
-
@Applied-Mediocrity wait, wasn't that a software issue?
-
Would colour theory and the concept of colour spaces have taken longer to develop if human vision had been implemented with more than three colour receptors?
-
@Watson
Nah, the colour-matching experiments would just have needed four primaries to make a match rather than three. Four-dimensional linear algebra isn’t fundamentally different from three-dimensional linear algebra.
-
@kazitor Well, now I'm just picturing Goethe doing linear algebra.
-
@Watson
The crucial mistake here is conflating colour theory with colour science. Colour theory is age-old wanky art crap divorced from reality (and itself!); colour science is empirical, quantifiable and has practical applications (like cameras and displays, and the colour spaces that reliably connect them).Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had some very strange ideas about beams of light and dark interacting in various proportions to produce colour, which needless to say has no bearing on observable phenomena (darkness isn’t directly detectable).
I guess, to answer the original question… human tetrachromacy or more might have made the heavy reductionism of traditional colour theory harder to get away with – for instance, “hue” would have to be a continuous two-dimensional surface rather than a single closed line. Under those circumstances, perhaps it would have been easier to develop an empirical understanding of colour?
-
@kazitor said in Random thought of the day:
The crucial mistake here is conflating colour theory with colour science. Colour theory is age-old wanky art crap divorced from reality (and itself!); colour science is empirical, quantifiable and has practical applications (like cameras and displays, and the colour spaces that reliably connect them).
Hey, it had to start somewhere. My choices there were Goethe or Newton, and it was funnier to use Goethe. Actually my first thought was Munsell (and so-called "Munsell color theory") and trying to build one of those little models in more than three dimensions.
-
@Watson said in Random thought of the day:
Would colour theory and the concept of colour spaces have taken longer to develop if human vision had been implemented with more than three colour receptors?
Just ask some species of lizards or insects which have four types of color receptors. But be prepared that you might not be capable of understanding their answers.
-
@BernieTheBernie said in Random thought of the day:
Just ask some species of lizards or insects which have four types of color receptors. But be prepared that you might not be capable of understanding their answers.
I could ask them, but I'd just get in response…
-
@BernieTheBernie said in Random thought of the day:
Just ask some species of lizards which have four types of color receptors.
All I hear from them is "blue is our trademark color", "please disable your ad-blocker", and "all your data is belong to us."
-
@BernieTheBernie said in Random thought of the day:
@Watson said in Random thought of the day:
Would colour theory and the concept of colour spaces have taken longer to develop if human vision had been implemented with more than three colour receptors?
Just ask some species of lizards or insects which have four types of color receptors. But be prepared that you might not be capable of understanding their answers.
I had a parrot (four receptors) for some years. When we were watching TV I'd think how drab the picture must have been for him. I asked him about it but he'd just tell me he was a "clever boy".
-
Which species? I love those birds.
@Watson said in Random thought of the day:
When we were watching TV I'd think how drab the picture must have been for him.
And they can see hundred of "frames" per second, so TV probably looks very choppy to them.
-
@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
Which species? I love those birds.
Alexandrine. He was a difficult photographic subject because he'd insist on coming over and checking himself out in the camera lens.
"Watcha doin'?"
-
@topspin said in Random thought of the day:
@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
@error_bot xkcd serious putty
Nine 5s uptime strikes again.
Yeah, my ISP has really been letting me down lately...
-
@Watson said in Random thought of the day:
@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
Which species? I love those birds.
Alexandrine. He was a difficult photographic subject because he'd insist on coming over and checking himself out in the camera lens.
"Watcha doin'?"Had a friend who had birds. She said her African grey used to try to pick up objects that were just photos in a magazine. I'm guessing something to do with the lack of binocular vision and the resulting depth perception; those pictures looked solid to her.
-
@Watson: awwww, so cute
-
@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
And they can see hundred of "frames" per second, so TV probably looks very choppy to them.
So can humans, but it also doesn't take much to convince a brain that it's seeing continuous motion rather than rapidly changing frames. Some cheaply made cartoons have been known to use as few as 4-6 fps and still look ok.
-
True, but IIRC their vision is significantly faster than ours.
-
@hungrier said in Random thought of the day:
@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
And they can see hundred of "frames" per second, so TV probably looks very choppy to them.
So can humans, but it also doesn't take much to convince a brain that it's seeing continuous motion rather than rapidly changing frames. Some cheaply made cartoons have been known to use as few as 4-6 fps and still look ok.
Not to mention the film industry has deliberately chosen to stay at 24FPS forever, and the end result is that to most people, smooth motion looks fake.
@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
True, but IIRC their vision is significantly faster than ours.
Random thought: I wonder how good a parrot could be at Counter-Strike.
-
I think they prefer other kinds of video games:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-moF89GwVw
-
@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
True, but IIRC their vision is significantly faster than ours.
Would they find LED room lighting really annoying?
-
As far as I know, non-dimmable LED lights don't have significant flicker (except maybe junk-quality ones), so it should be fine.
It's possible that dimmable ones may annoy them if the PWM frequency is low enough.
-
@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
I think they prefer other kinds of video games:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-moF89GwVwI don't know much about the technology behind touchscreens, but I'm a bit surprised it works with beaks.
-
@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
IIRC their vision is significantly faster than ours
They might be able to respond to changes in visual stimuli faster, but actual vision doesn't work in terms of frames or anything like that. Eyes are not cameras, not at all.
Also, we have some receptors that are very fast at responding, but which don't handle colour or fine detail, and others that are better at colour and detail but which take longer to respond. I don't know enough about avian physiology to say whether their eyes use a similar neural architecture. But they probably do for the fast monochrome parts; that's got all the hallmarks of being a truly ancient biomechanism.
-
@dkf said in Random thought of the day:
actual vision doesn't work in terms of frames or anything like that. Eyes are not cameras, not at all.
Here's a "random thought of the day" that actually came out because of this ongoing discussion: remember when we were all told that digital sound was so much better, before someone decided that analog was "warmer" or some such intangible?
On one level, the eardrum is an analog device. On a deeper level, hearing perception involves whether the movement of the eardrum does or does not trigger specific neurons. And neurons fire "all-or-nothing"; there's no such thing as a "slightly more powerful response". So on that level hearing is digital.
It all comes down to how many levels you want to dig through.
-
@da-Doctah said in Random thought of the day:
And neurons fire "all-or-nothing"; there's no such thing as a "slightly more powerful response".
https://www.salud.carlosslim.org/english2/our-brain-is-not-digital-it-is-analog/
-
@Zecc said in Random thought of the day:
I don't know much about the technology behind touchscreens, but I'm a bit surprised it works with beaks.
Capacitive touchscreens don't work with beaks, but if you look closely, you'll see he's using his tongue.
-
@da-Doctah said in Random thought of the day:
On one level, the eardrum is an analog device. On a deeper level, hearing perception involves whether the movement of the eardrum does or does not trigger specific neurons. And neurons fire "all-or-nothing"; there's no such thing as a "slightly more powerful response". So on that level hearing is digital.
The inner ear has lots of specialized hair cells with hairs of very particular lengths; as you go deeper into the cochlea, they get shorter. This acts as a frequency analyser, with the rate of firing at a particular frequency being approximately the intensity of the sound at that frequency (the frequency response is fairly narrow, but cells do overlap with their neighbours). This is also emphasised by the shape of the cochlea itself. At a particular frequency, there are several such hair cells, some of which take more energy to activate than others; the easily activated ones also “get tired” easily. This latter mechanism (mix of exact cell types and frequency of firing) is how we detect volume. When the cells activate, they pass a signal to the nerves nearby. I can't remember if there's local cross-suppression in the ear like there is in the eye.
Spikes (i.e., synaptic activations) are essentially binary due to the way that ion channels work, but don't necessarily trigger the soma to fire (i.e., the message to get passed down the axon to other neurons). But there is one key way in which they are highly analog; their timing. Because of what amounts to leakage currents, timing and temporal correlation are absolutely critical in understanding the behaviour. It's really complicated, and very few people have done good treatments of it in higher level theory. The problem is that, spurred by research done mostly on motor neurons (which really are simple), the theoreticians and lab scientists both assumed that spike rates were the only important thing, and put many decades of research into this (artificial neural networks, the things that machine learning is based on, are spin-outs from this). But it turns out that's BS: it's the spike patterns that matter. Doing it the other way with just rates is like saying that the only information worth considering in binary data is the number of set bits per word. So, leading research now is mostly on the patterns and ways in which they can work; it's a complex area, but has all sorts of interesting things (such as learning not needing time to be rewound) that will have deep impacts on future computation.
@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
https://www.salud.carlosslim.org/english2/our-brain-is-not-digital-it-is-analog/
Dendritic computation very much is a thing, particularly in cell types that have complex self-interacting dendritic trees. (The brain builds these randomly, but prunes the configurations that don't do anything useful and strengthens the ones that are helpful. The process is random, but the observable effect of the outcome is not.) This sort of behaviour is especially common in the cortex, and is why proper simulation of even small cortical cross-sections is still basically an open field; we're still trying to comprehend what a tractable real-time model would look like in software terms. (I was told what the main components of the model would have to involve a few months ago, but I cannot remember. I do remember that there's information flowing in several directions at once and that it is really complicated.)
But most neurons in the brain aren't as complicated as that. They're not doing higher computation, just correlation detection and stuff like that. (There are all sorts of feedback networks, but they mostly work to make everything maximally sensitive to input changes. That seems to be the actual basic function of brainwaves. That's important, but it's not thought; it's more like a DRAM refresh signal. But isn't; that's a bad analogy of course.)
-
Grocery stores sell lots of "boneless, skinless" chicken pieces. Why don't they sell the skin?
-
@boomzilla said in Random thought of the day:
Grocery stores sell lots of "boneless, skinless" chicken pieces. Why don't they sell the skin?
They might. There's a Thai restaurant near me that has fried chicken skin on their menu as an appetizer.
-
@boomzilla said in Random thought of the day:
Grocery stores sell lots of "boneless, skinless" chicken pieces. Why don't they sell the skin?
Some people don't like it, and are too to remove it themselves.
-
-
@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
@boomzilla said in Random thought of the day:
Grocery stores sell lots of "boneless, skinless" chicken pieces. Why don't they sell the skin?
Some people don't like it, and are too to remove it themselves.
I think the question was why don't they sell the skin separately, not why they remove it.