Tag: biology
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Blasphemy, LARPing, mandatory vaccination
Back in the olden days, when Lord of the Rings was new, my brother introduced me to LARP — live action roleplay — which in his case meant Fools And Heroes, a swords-and-sorcery themed game with foam-rubber weapons and vampires dusted with flour[0]. In Fools And Heroes, there is a pantheon of gods. My brother…
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Ohne Kaffee
As anyone who has spent any significant time with me will know, I have a genuinely problematic relationship with coffee. If I don’t watch myself I can drink nothing but coffee all day, sometimes even double strength — 4 cups is one thing, 2 litres of double strength is too much. Because of this, every…
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Alzheimer’s
It’s as fascinating as it is sad to watch a relative fall, piece by piece, to Alzheimer’s. I had always thought it was just anterograde- and progressive retrograde amnesia of episodic memory, but its worse. It’s affecting: Her skills (e.g. how to get dressed, or how much you need to chew in order to swallow).…
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You won’t believe how fast transistors are
A transistor in a CPU is smaller and faster than a synapse in one of your brain’s neurons by about the same ratio that a wolf is smaller and faster than a hill. Smaller. And. Faster. CPU: 11nm transistors, 30GHz transition rate (transistors flip significantly faster than overall clock speed) Neurons: 1µm synapses, 200Hz pulse…
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Why do people look by touching?
Every so often, I see someone get irritated that “can I see that?” tends to mean “may I hold that while I look at it?” Given how common this is, and how natural it seems to me to want to hold something while I examine it, I wonder if there is an underlying reason behind…
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Vision
Human vision is both amazingly good, and surprisingly weird. Good, because try taking a photo of the Moon and comparing it with what you can see with your eyes. Weird, because of all the different ways to fool it. The faces you see in clouds. The black-and-blue/gold-and-white dress (I see gold and white, which means…
Kitsune Software 