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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 24th, 2023

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  • N=15 is a normal size on FMRI studies. It is about the smallest size you can have and still make your significance cut offs while still detecting decently small effects. The time and cost is so much higher than other studies. Some of the bigger FMRI studies start to reach 30-40 ppl. Getting into clinical trial sizes of subjects is unheard of.

    The other thing with FMRI studies that most everyone doesn’t understand is that they aren’t actually looking at activity. They are looking at the BOLD response (blood oxygen level dependance) and that is then correlated to activity. Meaning You can only see blood oxygen uptake. You are not seeing neuron firing, just the metabolic side effect of oxygen use after increased neuron use. This is why you will never be able to see something like a “thought process”. You can only track structures/locations used.

    At the same time we know that no two brains are wired the same even for the smallest of tasks, but they will “structure” their wiring the same. There have been literally hundreds of studies that indirectly see that. Soeach other. Plot out cultural differences versus individual differences would be basically two variance plots on top of eachother.


  • Participants 120 We analyzed fMRI data from N = 15 (2 male, 13 female) participants aged between 22 and 35 121 years (mean: 25.5) who took part in a previously published fMRI study about color vision 122 (Bannert & Bartels, 2018). The participants were the subset from the prior study for whom the 123 cortical retinotopic representations of the visual field were measured along both the polar and 124 the eccentricity axis of the visual field. All participants had normal or corrected-to-normal visual 125 acuity and were tested for normal color vision using Ishihara color plates (Ishihara, 2011). Each 126 participant gave written informed consent before the first study session. The experiment was 127 approved by the local ethics committee of the Tübingen University Hospital.

    Ignore the numbers 120-127, those are line numbers.

    Doesn’t say. To be fair, you normally aren’t allowed to collect biographical data or any additional identifying data without a specific purpose tied directly to your research question. If they wanted to answer your question they would have to redo the study under a different IRB application. Interesting question, but I would guess you wouldn’t see a difference in an fmri. The voxel sizes for functional are normally 2mm while what you are eluding to is the difference of a few thousand neurons wired a little differently. That difference would be extremely difficult to detect with 2mm voxels. Even at 1mm it would be difficult. When it comes to brain structures there really aren’t significant different between races or cultures more than the variance that already exists between people.


  • Every person eating out of a dumpster is a failure of the system. How has our economy not incentivized creating a method yet to maximize the wealth we could be extracting from these people?? We could slap a simple coin op slot onto those dumpsters and operate them like an unregulated vending machine. We could come up with a subscription model to allow monthly access to eating out of them. We could even figure out some form of alternative decentralized money system to get around FTC regulations and pesky labor laws on how we pay and receive the money from these homeless people. Capitalism is the greatest economic system ever created and we need to find a place in it for the homeless to contribute their fair share to the shareholders.


  • I love a good impossible burger over a normal burger for the big reason of how I feel after. Eating a normal burger as I am getting older means that I feel full in a gross way after, like I can feel the fat from the burger slowing me down, and I feel tired both physically and mentally and I sometimes feel borderline sick for an hour or so after. But with the impossible burgers I can just feel full in a healthy way. I love it. I will admit to also getting it with bacon though for that extra flavor.

    I an pretty anti factory farm and love the idea of cutting out at least burgers from their industry. I also enjoy their sausages. Highly recommend them if you have not tried them. I try to cut out bulk meat eating for the environment and keep it to occasional, smaller portions, and even then it is normally chicken. Impossible meat helps scratch that itch if I want some meat but don’t want to commit to blowing my personal weekly allotment of red meat.


  • There are some great lists here. I am just going to add- put a whole home water filter on the cold water line of the kitchen sink. It has changed my life. I only need to replace the filter at most once a year, it is on the cold water line that is almost as good a fridge water dispenser would be, but with more pressure. And now when I make pasta, fill up the coffee pot, make tea, or whatever other random kitchen thing that needed water, it is filtered water. Not to mention the clean taste.


  • MrEff@lemmy.worldto90s Memes@quokk.auferngully
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    16 days ago

    You certainly were and are alive for Rocky Horror Picture Show’s original theatrical release because it is still on it. It has been continuously shown in theaters since it came out. It is the longest running release in movie history as well as most played movie in terms of numbers of showings in history. And it just had a 4k release for its 50th anniversary, also on its original theatrical run.


  • I use windows and have been since I was a kid in a very computer savvy home. Build my first computer at 8 or 9 years old with surplus 80’s parts, ISO slots and all. First OS install was dos with a shell GUI and have had every major windows iteration starting g with 3.1 and up. Of the more modern ones that followed the windows 95 esthetic, I loved windows 2000 pro, hated xp, then loved 7 pro, hated 8, and accepted windows 8.1. When it came to windows 10 I was already getting frustrated with the excessive bloat and OS level Spyware. Now with eindows 11 BIOS level Spyware and so much bloat even the most modern CPUs lag, this is now a bridge too far for me. I will not be upgrading to 11 and will instead be jumping over to Linux. I played around with Linux in the 2000’s and a bit with server stuff, but never took it seriously as a desktop replacement OS until now.

    So who are the ‘real’ people switching over? People like me. I don’t work in IT. 99% of my computer usage is for things I can do through a web browser, office suit, or gaming through steam, all of which is now very accessible through Linux. If this was Linux from 10 or 15 years ago, I don’t think you would have seen the shift happen, but where it is at now is more accessible for the common user than ever before.


  • MrEff@lemmy.worldto> Greentext@lemmy.mlHe took it literally
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    17 days ago

    Actually, there was a Supreme Court case about this. If you just sit there and say nothing after they give you your Miranda rights, they can make assumptions about things or simply continue for as long as they want. The case concluded with- you must declare that you understand your rights in some way and that you are invoking that right.


  • I’ve been writing a 175k word One Piece fanfic for about 6 months.

    Imma pause you right there. I’m in the middle of writing a dissertation and from the bottom of my heart struggling to find the words- fuck you. 175k in 6 months? I have good days writing 175 words. Fuck you. I wrote a scifi book that is around 75k words and it took about a year to get the draft done.


  • This guy is so dumb. India said they would do that when the war started. They had a whole moment where they came out and very publicly even layed out all the cards and said what they were going to do, and now he is mad that they have done and continue to do exactly what they said they would do. India has high energy needs with their billion plus people and transitioning to a more energized population. For as much green energy India is installing, they can’t keep up with the growing demand and see this as a cheap stopgap. And as much as he is trying to claim that India is just buying cheap Russian crude oil and simply reselling it at a markup as a middle man to skirt the sanctions, they are not. India runs one of the world’s largest refineries. They are raking Russia over the coals because they are now the only bulk buyer and have forced the lowest price because of it. The Indian PM is making smart moves for the good of his people, he doesn’t care about the war in Ukraine, if anything he wants it to drag out as long as possible.



  • MrEff@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldBuilt to last
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    3 months ago

    I want to start an appliance company that offers 10 year warranties with an additional 5 year replaceable parts availability promise. The designs will be simple, functionality simple with minimal quality of life improvements, and all repair manuals will be published on the website along with tutorial videos, while also banking on building a product that simply lasts longer.

    I’m willing to bet that if that is what you advertise on, the longevity of the product at a minimal price, then the company should do fine.


  • MrEff@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldBuilt to last
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    3 months ago

    Everyone always talks about speed queens and I always have to chime in. The cost isn’t worth it. As shitty and consumerist as it sounds, it has been far cheaper to replace every few years than buy a speed queen. For one SQ washer I could buy 3 of my Samsung washers, and for one SQ dryer I could buy 4 of my Samsung ones. I got both my washer and dryer used. The washer was bad within the first year and replaced with a near new referb and it has been good for 5 years. The dryer is still working After the 6 years I have had it. They cost me a fraction of the SQ price even with the extra washer purchase and still work. Even if they both broke every other year and got replaced, my 10 year cost is still less than buying a SQ. The price just isn’t worth it.


  • MrEff@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldNYC has fallen
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    3 months ago

    It shouldn’t. Older mags with poor tolerances and poorly designed followers used to have this issue and that is where people got into the habit of saying/doing/teaching that. Newer mags with better openings and followers no longer have this issue. This is true for both the AR and the AK platforms, the two most popular platforms in the world.


  • MrEff@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldIsn't this racism?
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    3 months ago

    I did human intelligence. It was literally my job to interact with the people. And we did. And not just to hear what they say to our face, but to get sources and find out what people say behind our backs too. I can, with high confidence, say that close to 90% of the population wanted the taliban gone. It was the other 10% that were the issue. And they were the very loud minority that news stations loved to interview just to claim “accurately showing both sides”.

    Under taliban rule Afghanistan was economically devastated and the second poorest country in the world. They had one of the lowest literacy rates in the world. And they had no healthcare system to speak of other than what was gifted to them from Iran or Pakistan depending of what half of the country you were in. No to mention their lack of infrastructure with the not even completed one highway ring around the country.

    That all changed under ISAF and the people noticed. And now their past is about to become their future.


  • MrEff@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldIsn't this racism?
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    3 months ago

    Lol. I did two tours over there. The people loved us. They loved the government. They loved the schools for women. The problem is culturally, they didn’t see a need to fight for it because of apathy. They figured “ISAF was always going to be here, so why need to fight for ourselves? And is ISAF isn’t here anymore, then we can’t support our selves, so why try?” As far as the schools go, they are voluntary. There are no truancy laws. They don’t even take attendance at most of the schools. It was completely up to the family if they wanted to send their boys OR their girls. Under pre-ISAF taliban the literacy rate was about 15% and at the time of withdrawal it was almost 40%. The people wanted to go to school, the taliban just didn’t let most of them or the schools that they did keep open were so severely limited in what they could teach.

    The biggest red flag of this post, to me, is the use of the word Afghani. Any time someone says it with an ‘i’ at the end, you know they don’t know what they are talking about. Afghani is a currency, Afghan is a person.





  • While I understand the resentment of saying an institution is a person, and I agree- they still have constitutional rights. To say that private institutions don’t have a right to free speech is the same as saying that the government is allowed to dictate what companies can and can’t say. Authoritarians would love for you to push that idea.

    Under your same thinking (Harvard isn’t a person and has no right to a first amendment? OK): Then Harvard resisting against the trump administration is illegal and we find it treasonous to be funneling in possible spies from adversarial countries under the guise of education. We need to lock up anyine who works at any higher ed institution unless they can swear loyalty to America (trump) because they might be complicit in this spy ring. And don’t forget, the universities can be searched at any time for evidence and assumed guilty without trial because they aren’t a person and don’t have constitutional rights! Can we charge the university entity with state laws or federal laws? Both! They don’t have rights to protect against double jeopardy!