You ask for good news to help you feel better and then when I try to offer some you criticize it? You’re certainly not one of the helpers. Mr Rogers would not be proud of you. Go back to doomscrolling then.
MacKenzie Scott giving away billions over the years, most recently this: https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/19/business/mackenzie-scott-donates-640-million-open-call/index.html
4k80 has issues. It’s been harder for them to track down good prints and get the color correction right: https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k80/
I got a pair of these when they were on sale for $39 last year, and I liked them so much I bought a second pair for when they bite the dust.
My pleasure, I’m always down for nerding out on stuff like this.
Another fun example of the early visual processing is feature detection. The parallel processing allows us to instantly find a green square in a sea of red squares, as it jumps out at you.
But when you combine multiple independent features together (find the green square in a sea of red and green squares and circles) now we have to tediously look around the whole image. That integration of multiple features forces the work higher up in the visual system and takes more time, attention, and effort. Thats why Where’s Waldo is hard.
Psychophysics is the study of the relationship between stimuli and perception. A lot of it is perceptual thresholds, so how much sound or light is needed for someone to hear or see something (fun fact: people can reliably detect a single photon in a dark room at better than chance). Thus much of the experimental protocols boil down to asking “can you hear this?” after playing a sound which is what the Verizon ads always made me think of.
The other half of the discipline is figuring out the wiring on low level perception. For instance we have massive parallel processing in the early visual system that does things like highlight lines and edges, which is what makes the Mach dot/band illusions work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_bands
It’s what I studied in undergrad as it was a nice overlap in my interests in cognitive science, psychology and computer science. I basically just like knowing how everything works :)
More info:
I knew a very smart manager who quit smoking but still used to go hang out in the smoking area just to stay in touch with everything. I’ve learn more in 10 minute conversations while smoking with coworkers than entire week long seminars.
Reminds me of reading the print version of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, where you needed one bookmark for the novel and another for the endnotes, which made up like 20% of the book. Hopefully e-readers make that easier now.
Metformin. No other changes. Guess the better blood sugar levels make a difference. Still drinking coke and eating whatever I feel like and dropped 10lbs. The only reason I noticed was because my pants kept falling down.
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They’re deeply troubled that it got out.
It took me a long time. As a kid just read the funny stories that started each chapter, but then got stuck into it while I was in high school. It’s so dense that you can read a chapter and then take weeks to digest it all.
GEB by Douglas Hofstadter
Fusion. I think it’s our only hope of making it through climate change without massive losses.