Really good study, but it looks like the only things with a stronger correlation than attention control score and resting pupil size was caffeine and nicotine.

And it’s concerning so many participants couldn’t verify nicotine/caffeine consumption when those are the biggest connections when they disclose their sample was “moderate”.

We’d also have to get into how nicotine/caffeine would be “performance enhancing” for these kinds of tests, yet would make the pupils contract. They should have tossed the participants who couldn’t report nicotine/caffeine instead of including them.

But ideally it would have just been participants who had abstained from either for 24 hours. Good luck with that tho.

Yeah, it just seems like its measuring engagement during the testing.

Would have been better to take measurements at “rest” as well, then compare them.

It’d be a lot easier to believe there’s a larger increase in pupil size when concentrating than permenantly.

That being said both my parents had blue eyes, and looking at my DNA I should have blue eyes. But they’re green, which can be explained by pupil dilation causing an increase in pigment density. Like how David Bowie has one eye that’s permanently dilated so looking at a picture it looks like he has heterochromia when he doesnt.

https://slate.com/culture/2016/01/the-story-behind-david-bowie-s-unusual-eyes.html

Shits interesting, but there’s going to need to be a lot of follow up studies to rule out confounding variables.

Interesting, but I think it has more to do with focus and/or adrenal response…

That being said, I’ve taken the Wechsler IQ test, and scored higher than can be measured reliably.

I’m super light sensitive, had some optometrists refuse contact prescriptions because my pupils “dilated too much”, and had to pay like a $200 licensing fee when I got LASIK because they had to use some special attachment because it had to be done wide than normal Lasik due to pupil size.

So maybe there is something to this? I still think there’s a middle step in there and not direct correlation though

But wouldn’t the microwaves also warm the heart?

If it’s pointed at it…

But you know what heats a cold heart faster than blood from another body part?

Direct exposure to microwave radiation…

That’s what I mean, there’s a safe temperature differential to warm the body, and even stuff as conventional as a warm bath or hut tub can be too much.

If we shoot microwaves at a heart, the heat increase is waaaaaaaay above the safe limits.

So if someone was in a situation where the only method was microwave radiation, it wouldn’t result in an increase in heating without running serious risks.

There’s just no benefit and it introduces insane risks if you tried to do it slow enough.

Bruh, it’s the heart that’s the issue…

The thermal stress is too great. Microwaves would heat the blood up, which within seconds would go into a cold heart

It’s why they won’t use a warm bath to hear someone up who’s dangerously cold.

Slow and steady is how you do it. So even if you used microwaves, it would be limited to pretty much the same delta temp as other methods.

It’s all risk no reward

Microwaves work by exciting water molecules.

Put an empty bowl in and it comes out cool to the touch.

A bowl of soup and the bowl is crazy hot, because the soup warmed the bowl.

Heating a person with a microwave would make us pop as the water inside heats up faster than everything else. And blood is pretty fucking similar to water…

You could try it with an incredibly low dose, but you’d have to do it in carefully measured bursts. Even for hypothermia, warm baths are dangerous because the increase in body temp is too sudden and can fuck up the heart.

So there’s a whole bunch of risks and you’re still limited to what won’t freak out your heart. Warming just one part warms up the blood that’s there and send it through the cold parts. Like how you’re not supposed to immediately add water to a radiator after a car overheats. The thermic shock can cause massive problems.

So we could…

It just wouldn’t make any sense to do it

I don’t know why we’re still federated with troll instances like this…

I always like the theory that the entire Starfleet is just a relief valve for people who can’t be satisfied in a post scarcity utopia

They could stay on Earth and cause problems, or they can boldly go far the fuck away from an ideal society.

A high turnover of senior leadership due to stupid risks means that there’s room for promotion and ambitious people stay in the fleet.

Otherwise they’d return to Earth and fuck up society.

Historically, every society needs some kind of relief valve like this or domestic issues develop. Once it’s an entire world government, they need that relief valve to vent off planet. And that’s what Starfleet is.

Yeah, I think that was the reasoning.

But they forgot that life finds a way and the hybrids wouldn’t just stay where they put them.

They not only outcompete European hives, they’ll straight up raid and destroy other hives stealing their young.

Because their African half evolved in a resource scarce environment. If they run across other bees they view it as a direct threat on their resources. Pretty sure it also causes them to establish new hives much further away than European bees. Which is why they keep spreading so fast.

I’m just glad no one’s tried to crossbreed honey badgers with wolves to combat the hybrid bees yet.

Workers and queens are female.

A young female when given royal jelly triggers it becoming a queen and reproductive organs instead of a stinger.

The males are drones. They have male reproductive organs instead of stingers, and they just hang out and try to bone the queen.

But the worker bees are the ones that actually, you know, do the work.

So that’s why European bees won’t “swarm” someone and all sting them. You get a few warning shots and a chance to retreat, just moving away is enough for it to stop.

Meanwhile, African bees had to deal with shit like honey badgers. And as we’re all aware, the honey badger gives very little fucks about anything.

So they don’t half ass defense, they send out a shit ton of bees that won’t stop until the threat is chased away and keeps running away. If they didn’t the honey badger wouldnt even notice.

Then some genius decided to cross breed the species, and we get “Africanized killer bee” that treat everything they come across as a honey badger.

When the stinger gets pulled out of the bee, the sac with the venom comes out too, still attached to the singer

Attempts to remove it injects more venom.

The life of the bee is worth less than the increased deterrent to animals attacking the hive.

The life of a handful of bees really isn’t worth much at all to the hive. So even when there’s no longer giant ass bears going after hives, there’s not a lot of pressure for the bee to lose the barb.

Edit:

It’s also important to remember that evolution isn’t just competing against predators/prey. It’s competing against competitors too.

If one hive of bees has barbs and worse stings than the one next to it, the one without barbs is gonna get attacked.

So the barbs don’t have to be enough to convince predators that honey is never worth the sting, just that this honey is more painful to get than that honey.

Overtime the less painful honey may be pushed out of the local ecosystem. At which point it’s just barbed bees, and the cycle might start over again with another way stings are more painful.

It’s cheaper to prevent than treat…

But in an ultra capitalist healthcare system, cheap is bad.

There’s more profit in no preventive treatment so you can bankrupt people later.

The system is working exactly as intended, they’re making as much money as they can.

Which is why even with Dems controlling the White House, Senate, and House for two years…

None of them even talked about healthcare.

Neither party wants to change it, because they get donations for not changing it.

The intensity and the wavelength of light influence entrainment.[2] Dim light can affect entrainment relative to darkness.[15] Brighter light is more effective than dim light.[12] In humans, a lower intensity short wavelength (blue/violet) light appears to be equally effective as a higher intensity of white light.[11]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_effects_on_circadian_rhythm

For anyone else, I won’t try to change your mind.

You’re talking genetic variation, I’m talking phenotype variation…

Like, 1 in 200 people is colourblind, or something?

…

Again, you’re talking genetics, where it is clearly broken down in 2,3,4.

However like pretty much everything else, it’s not that clear cut just because the plans were.

Two people with the same amount of different types of cones are not guaranteed to have the same rod/cone ratio. Even when they have similar genetics for the ratio, things rarely go according to plan as a human develops.

Like, you know that’s why facial symmetry is attractive right? It shows that things on both halves went according to plan. Which especially for women is a huge bonus for reproductive health.

Especially for something made up of a whole bunch of small things like rods/cones, it’s not even perfect for identical twins.

…

A specific wavelength may effect you…

That wavelength is not present in moonlight/starlight, which is not “full darkness”.

For the vast majority of human evolution, “full darkness” wasn’t safe, and wasn’t even really possible.

I understand what you and OP are trying to say. And you both kind of have the general idea but none of the details.

Like how you got taught basic things in 6th grade, but by 12 grade you’re learning what you thought was the whole truth, was just a general overview.

Which wouldn’t be bad if you recognized it, but loads of people want to insist the short summary the learned as a child is as deep as it gets

Cats are traditionally thought to be dichromats, as well.

And humans usually have three, but sometimes it’s two, and even rarely 4…

With that much variations (including other ways) it’s hard to say human eyes are optimized for any condition.

There are very few examples of things in nature that are truly optimized for all of its environment.

Humans are just too widespread with too much variation to say we’re optimized for anything.

We just have too much in species variation.

The experience of people working the night shift, who use blackout curtains to sleep during the day, would disagree.

Wow, I didn’t know my own experience disagreed with me…

Or that during my childhood when my dad was swing shift, he was apparently a freak of nature too…

But that’s for a relatively highly regimented sleep cycle. If you slept and worked completely at your leisure, you might end up with one shorter sleep period at night, and one even shorter nap during the day. And without any day-night cycle at all, some people naturally adopt cycles of varying lengths.

Again, human variation is a big thing.

But an individual will change their sleep schedule as they age, which is another supporting point for what I’m saying.

Evolutionary biologists hypothesis that it was so out of an entire tribe of early hominds, at least some members were likely to be awake. It wasn’t an inate guard duty rotation. But kids and middle age went to bed early, teens went to bed super late, and by then the elderly were waking up.

If something happened, someone screamed and everyone woke up. And the fires stayed lit all night.

A healthy human can still pick out something small way better than a goat

Sometimes…

Depending on if you’re talking about motion, color, or lowlight.

But since when is “optimized” just “better than a goat”?

Like, cats easily blow everything else out of the water.

I feel like I’d definitely break an ankle if I tried sprinting otherwise

Yeah, we played paintball even, but stopped because one guy ran straight off like a 6 foot mini cliff. A couple of us were chasing him and he just disappeared. Was freaky as shit like that scene from LotRs.

I also have to account for the fact that there was some light pollution

Yeah, I’m talking really hillbilly stuff, zero light pollution.

but in the darkest conditions that happen at sea apparently you can’t see your own hands.

A ship gives off a lot of light pollution, but even without that, between the water reflecting and nothing blocking light, it’s brighter out there unless there’s heavy clouds cover. And even then it’s gotta be a lot of clouds and rough waves or else the light would still be refracting some.

Now a watertight compartment on a ship with the light switch on the outside?

Yeah, that’s complete darkness. It’s not just “can’t see your hand in front of your face”. It’s the absolute and complete absence of light. That’s total darkness.

And it fucks with you very quickly.

“Full darkness” isn’t even a real thing in nature.

And

It’s not like climbing into a cupboard, shutting the door, and sealing all the cracks with duct tape.

So I thought it was pretty clear I meant that to get “full darkness” where you really can’t see, requires extra steps to intentionally make it happen. Just that for the vast majority of human evolution, we weren’t really capable of it, and would have no reason to even try.