my tech aura comes and goes

i once tried to log into a microsoft account for 10 minutes, and it only let me in once i took the laptop to my coworker and tried to show how it wasn’t working

and then one of my other coworkers tried to restart a camera multiple times, and it only worked when i pressed the button

::O

and where is the galaxy taking us then?

important note:

placebo is caused by a strong belief, even if logically you know it’s not real it can still work

but

you first need the strong belief. how do you get such a strong belief? with a ritual of course. not necessarily one with bubbling cauldrons during the full moon (though if you believe in that kind of magic that’d work as well) but one that has you going to a place you associate with health, and talking to a person in a special outfit that you believe will fix you, then going to a secondary health place, and getting the health potion pills from someone in a special outfit. also called - going to a doctor and picking up meds from a pharmacy.

this entire process sets up the right environment for strongly believing you’re going to feel better now, and then the sugar pills supercharged with placebo will work like magic.

they will also work if at some point either the doctor or the pharmacist whispers to you “btw that’s just placebo”. that’s because the belief you’ve already established is much stronger than your logic

but if you just go out and buy tictacs at a gas station then chant to yourself “this will cure my headache this will cure my headache” it won’t work, because you didn’t have an opportunity to establish any emotional belief about them ie. you didn’t manage to convince the emotional part of your brain that it’ll work

this is also why homeopathy, essential oils, charging crystals, and other purely belief bases approaches work despite the thing itself not doing anything. the rituals surrounding those things simply manage to build a strong enough belief that causes the placebo effect

the same is true for the opposite - nocebo - if you strongly believe something is going to make you feel bad - it’s going to

yes :)

well you see, there’s science next to the meme. just like in the words “science meme” science is next to the meme there too, therefore, science meme

/s

it blew my tiny mind when i found out that there are multiple dwarf planets in long solar orbits in our system

they might be small and enjoy solitude but why are we forgetting about them???

and now apparently there’s also a dwarf planet in the inner solar system that nobody talks about??? rude

iirc it linked me to some paper someone wrote in Cardiff T–T

turnitin once highlighted my page numbering as plagiarism

vegetable flavoured water? thinnest of broths? realistically, we call it nothing because what would you even do with something that’s 15% vegetable puree and 85% water? my only idea would be to add more vegetables to make it into something, or to use it as i’d use regular water to boil other vegetables or make pasta in it

seems accurate. if i had bucket of water and there was a single pea and a lone noodle floating in it i sure as heck wouldn’t call it soup, or even think that its intentional

a cheap phone today is better than a digital camera from 15-20 years ago. but neither can stand up to analogue cameras that use film. we can extract 4k video from footage shot on film in the 80’s (any film footage really, but i mention 80’s because the music video for Last Christmas available on youtube in 4k is a wonderful example)

how is it physically possible to fit a 120mm lens into a phone?

depends on your definition of novice.

a novice that is incredibly passionate and has been absorbing knowledge and experience at a fast pace? sure

a novice that just got a camera who’s shooting in .jpeg and has yet to hear of lightroom? (or alternative photo editing software) no

i’m guessing it was a brain shortcut for a “digital zoom lens”

the same way racism ended in 1964?

it doesn’t know what it was doing, it just writes something vaguely plausible

am i AI?

i mean, we have the solutions to a lot of problems already

traffic? public trains

hunger? just like, feed people

global warming? reduce fossil fuel usage and stop poisoning the oceans

homeless? literally so many empty homes, put people in them???

and we’ve had many smart people create step by step plans for all of these!

the thing is… i guess rich people want a solution that doesn’t involve them paying for something that’s good not just for them but for others? so all those plans fail at step 1 - have empathy

they do indeed, and us humans invented ways to describe them with maths

natural laws of the universe can be described with our maths. but i’m pretty sure the universe didn’t go “ah yes, 1+2=3 i can work with that! let there be light”.

the numbers, the symbols, the equations - they’re all human made, an attempt to describe things in a way that can be understood by us. but is this how they are? of course not. no wave or particle would describe itself the way we describe them, in fact they wouldn’t describe themselves at all - they simply are