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endoblaston TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale

>Never said that the little guy is going to get it right, or that it’s easy to wield this power.

It's worse than that. For instance in the UK the Establishment itself is dominated by people who regard themselves as victims in one way or another. As victims they are the de facto little guys and act with impunity.

endoblaston 'Exploding' Tunnock's teacakes cleared by tests to fly again

Well the consumable confectionery items cost about £1.15

https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/254923832

Except, no, there are eight teacakes, so they must have bought at least two packets.

Wonder who ate the other four?

endoblaston The mysterious flow of fluid in the brain

Agreed. For me turning over in bed during a lie-in also feels immensely refreshing and I now do it quite consciously. It may be nothing to do with cerebrospinal fluid but I do like to attribute it to the brain's wash cycle.

endoblaston The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

Well I agree, and I myself supplement with D3; however the mainstream advice is to avoid sun exposure, for example:

https://www.skincancer.org/skin-cancer-prevention/

Clearly more research is needed.

endoblaston The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

My goodness, 42 years of sun bathing at the same latitude as Tunisia. Should he have got skin cancer or did he benefit from all the naturally produced Vitamin D?

endoblaston Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)

Where it gets complicated is that one can know how to do something without being able to explain it to oneself let alone teach it to others.

endoblaston Barcoding brains

>scientists hope to better understand how neural circuitry dictates and predicts the activity of individual neurons

Not circuitry. This is a metaphor which has passed its sell-by-date. It obscures rather than enlightens.

endoblaston How many ants live on Earth? (2022)

Apologies, to clarify I meant a leg full of ants per person.

endoblaston How many ants live on Earth? (2022)

However, at 5 milligrams each the 2 million ants are only about a leg full.

endoblaston How many ants live on Earth? (2022)

20 quadrillion. That's 20 million billion. So given there are roughly 10 billion human beings on earth then the ants outnumber us by a factor of two million.

endoblaston Oliver Heaviside and the theory of transmission lines (2021)

https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Heaviside/

>His neighbours related stories of Heaviside as a strange and embittered hermit who replaced his furniture with 'granite blocks which stood about in the bare rooms like the furnishings of some Neolithic giant. Through those fantastic rooms he wandered, growing dirtier and dirtier, and more and more unkempt - with one exception. His nails were always exquisitely manicured, and painted a glistening cherry pink'

Genius confirmed.

EDIT: one of the traits of creative genius according to Hans Eysenck is psychoticism which includes an indifference to social norms:

https://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Impur...

endoblaston Take the pedals off the bike

Lowering the seat also helps a bit because the lower your center of gravity is the easier it is to balance.

endoblaston Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

What six real castaway boys did in 1966:

https://www.newsweek.com/real-lord-flies-true-story-boys-isl...

>The boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination

endoblaston Chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen rejoins tournament he quit over wearing jeans

>appropriate jeans matching the jacket

Double denim?

endoblaston One way to fight loneliness: Germans call it a Stammtisch

I think you've hit on the solution for most people going forward: prioritise getting married and starting a family while you're young. Don't leave it to chance or assume it's impossible. It's not the burden that our culture is making it out to be whereas loneliness is a large and growing problem.

endoblaston The tech utopia fantasy is over

Not know-how, it's to do with one's fundamental metaphysical assumptions and intuition. These can't be updated by evidence, they determine what counts as evidence. For example, women are having fewer or no children; modern art is intentionally ugly. To me, these seems like signs of decline, but to another they may be explained differently.

With the decline of Christianity people of the West are now more demotivated than at any time in their history. Our religion was never about knowledge but it did guard the conditions under which the growth of knowledge was possible. Not saying traditional Christianity is the answer however we've thrown out the baby with the bathwater.

endoblaston The tech utopia fantasy is over

Optimism or techno-optimism is the idea that we can fix things with the right know-how. It's a psychological strategy to avoid noticing that there are dark forces which aim to control, destroy and sow despair, perhaps conveying temporary advantages to those who ally with them. Some take a religious or supernatural view of these things; others think they are facets of consciousness which spread virally from brain to brain.

Whatever you believe it seems clear that one's experience of life and the world is dominated by inner experience and mental well-being, not by luxuries or technological convenience. One could live in a palace, drive flying cars and so on but still suffer dreadfully.

Although my personal disposition is fairly sunny, verging on the manic, my model of how the world and how my life works is not one of optimism but rather a series of defeats occasionally punctuated by an unexpected victory. Sort of like the fall of the Berlin Wall or how Gollum accidentally destroyed the ring. Eucatastrophe was Tolkien's name for it.

endoblaston What is the origin of the lake tank image that has become a meme? (2021)

Don't know the origin of the image but I wonder if it formed the inspiration for this iconic hostile emergence from the River Thames:

https://shorturl.at/yGKOg

endoblaston Air traffic failure caused by two locations 3600nm apart sharing 3-letter code

We all need to stop using abbreviations, in my opinion.

EDIT: I mean the point of abbreviations is to facilitate communication. However with the world wide web connecting multiple countries, languages and fields of endeavour there are simply too many (for example) three letter acronyms in use. There are too many sources of ambiguity and confusion. Better to embrace long-form writing.

endoblaston Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

Yes, all one take :-) However there were many trials to get there with less than 20% chance of overall success I would estimate.

e.g. the bit where I hide behind behind a headstone in the graveyard is by no means reliable (maybe 80%?)

Thanks to HN the view count on YouTube has increased dramatically! If it gets past 1000 I'm going to have to record and upload the final section with the combine troops.

EDIT: assuming that is still possible: Valve have made some changes for the twentieth birthday which I noticed today.

e.g. there's more grass and bizarrely the lift button has switched to the other side of the elevator

endoblaston Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

I think I went off to make a cup of coffee IRL which is why I stayed in that room longer than needed ('Now brother step into the cart!')

endoblaston Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

Thank you. There was a lot of repetition and problem-solving. The headcrabs were the worst. Well, and the fast headcrabs/spiders. The final segment from the exit of the mine to the end of the level is also done however that posting is waiting for a rainy day.

endoblaston Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

My claim to fame on the 20th anniversary (84 views thus far) is to have completed Ravenholm without inflicting any deaths or receiving any injury:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_XN_RwjnqM

endoblaston Care Doesn't Scale

Thank you mrmooss, good luck with your ongoing journey. In my experience we are hurt most when we return evil for evil, which is something that evil tries hard to get us to do.

Regarding the gospels, yes, and to my original point, in John's gospel there is "the disciple whom Jesus loved", implying that Jesus didn't love them all equally.

endoblaston The Roots of Fear: Understanding the Amygdala

Yes. My knowledge of neuroscience is derived mainly from articles like this and popular science books where many things are left vague.

If someone has a hippocampus or amygdala damaged or removed it's rarely specified whether its the left one, the right one, or both. Presumably it matters!

Both the above structures seem mysterious but I understand they both evolved from older cortex which sort of curled up over evolutionary time. 3-layer cortex rather than the 6-layer of the neocortex. I'd be glad to be corrected here.

The amygdala is associated with fear but it's concerned with desire too. Unwanted desires can be just as inconvenient as unwanted fears.

A classic source of confusion for me is the ubiquitous phrase 'brain circuits'. Is this a metaphor drawn from electronics, or what? 'Circuit' implies a loop but I assume they're just pathways.

endoblaston Touchscreens are out, and tactile controls are back

Or lick the back of your hand and then moisten the finger on that. More discreet and more hygienic (well, hygienic for you at least).

endoblaston Care Doesn't Scale

I'm not claiming that we can only love one person, it's just that the nature of love is unique to each dyadic relationship; they're not commensurable.

Yes, I may show empathy and respect to strangers, patients or clients, trying hard to deal with them fairly and conscientiously. Well said.

But this only operates in the short term.

It doesn't mean I can love them all, or at all, or love them equally, or anything like that. That would be meaningless. We don't know what love is exactly, but it does seem to include a sustained form of attention. It provides a space in which the other person can grow.

Such attention is always specific, by its nature; it latches onto a subject, something recognised yet new in the other. It can't be served out like soup. Yet increasingly businesses, bureaucracies and government pretend that it can!

endoblaston Care Doesn't Scale

>We’re pretty limited when it comes to care. In any given moment, you can only really care deeply and individually for one person.

Absolutely. Society tends to assume that people are interchangeable units and that 'care' is a commodity which can be dispensed evenly as if from an industrial nozzle in a food factory. So we have 'care homes', 'daycare', 'care packages'. We are enjoined to be more 'caring'.

But the reality is that love, which is what we're really talking about, is dyadic.

i.e. between two individuals. That's how it works and how it effects its magic.

A patchwork of dyadic connections is what we may hope for and build.