Only looking at northeast Ohio, the population and income maps you show are high along the Cleveland-Akron-Canton corridor, where the voter purge is west of there - Wooster & Mansfield.

fd00:: is the new 192.168

I got a PIN assigned by my bank back in the 1980s, and it is in that range. I always assumed it was random, because how easy is it to generate a 4-digit random number? But maybe they gave out PINs more like safe combinations. I don’t think you could change them back then, either.

Even if you ignore all the neuromodulatory chemistry, much of the interesting processing happens at sub-threshold depolarizations, depending on millisecond-scale coincidence detection from synapses distributed through an enormous, and slow-conducting dendritic network. The simple electrical signal transmission model, where an input neuron causes reliable spiking in an output neuron, comes from skeletal muscle, which served as the model for synaptic transmission for decades, just because it was a lot easier to study than actual inter-neural synapses.

But even that doesn’t matter if we can’t map the inter-neuronal connections, and so far that’s only been done for the 300 neurons of the c elegans ganglia (i.e., not even a ‘real’ brain), after a decade of work. Nowhere close to mapping the neuroscientists’ favorite model, aplysia, which only has 20,000 neurons. Maybe statistics will wash out some of those details by the time you get to humans 10^11 neuron systems, but considering how badly current network models are for predicting even simple behaviors, I’m going to say more details matter than we will discover any time soon.

“We tried this and got nothing,” is not really knowledge that can be built on. It might be helpful if you say it to a colleague at a conference, but there’s no way for a reader to know if you’re an inept experimenter, got a bad batch of reagents or specimens, had a fundamentally flawed hypothesis, inadequate statistical design, or neglected to control for some secondary phenomenon. You have to do extra work and spend extra money to prove out those possibilities to give the future researcher grounds for thinking up that thing you didn’t try, and you’ve probably already convinced yourself that it’s not going to be a productive line of work.

It might be close if the discussion section of those “This project didn’t really work, but we spent a year on it and have to publish something” papers would include their negative speculation that the original hypothesis won’t work, or the admission that they started on hypothesis H0, got nowhere, and diverted to H1 to salvage the effort, but that takes a level of humility that’s uncommon in faculty. And sometimes you don’t make the decision not to pursue the work until the new grad student can’t repeat any of the results of that first paper. That happens with some regularity and might be worth noting, if only as a footnote or comment attached to the original paper. Or for journals to do a 5-10 year follow-up on each paper just asking whether the authors are still working on the topic and why. “Student graduated and no one else was interested” is a very different reason than “marginal effect size so switched models.”

I can’t tell you how many times I had some exciting idea, dug around in the literature, found someone 10, 20, even 30 years ago who’d published promising work along exactly the line I was thinking, only to completely abandon the project after one or two publications. I’ve come to see that pattern as “this didn’t actually work, and the first paper was probably bullshit.”

It’s really hard to write an interesting paper based on “this didn’t work,” unless you can follow up to the point where you can make a positive statement of why it didn’t work, and at that point, you’re going to write a paper based on the positive conclusion and demote the negative finding to some kind of control data. You have to have the luxury of time, resources, and interest to go after that positive statement, and that’s usually incompatible with professional development.

I do wonder if not having to ‘hear’ words changes the rhythm of reading.

Hadn’t thought of this…what’s your take on poetry, especially meter-forward? Like, Robert W Service or Robert Frost, I feel would be less interesting if they didn’t have their beat.

I don’t do voices or accents when I read. Everything is in the same ‘voice,’ which isn’t quite the same as my spoken voice. My internal voice enunciates much better and slightly lower pitch. It’s more like the voice I wish I had than the voice I do have. :)

No, that’s the way the fediverse is supposed to work. It would be sockpuppeting for both of your accounts, say A@A.social and B@b.social, to have a conversation with each other on a third instance, say !politics@c.social, with which both a & b are federated.

This wasn’t the Nordstream pipeline. This was a Finland-Estonia pipeline and telecoms in Oct 2023.

My usual drinking vessel is a souvenir cup from the 1992 Miramar Air Show. I still use a “boom box” style radio and clock timer from 1985 as an alarm clock. The tape player on the radio is long expired, but it still plays radio.

If you make it to 62, your life expectancy is 21 more years. that mean 21*0.7 = 14.7 years worth of social security payments. Full benefit at age 67 gets you 16 years worth of payments. If they’d raise full retirement age to 70, you’d only collect 13 years of payments.

In the US, social security is a tax on poor people earning less than~$160k. That’s the bottom 90% of earners.

The top 10% of earners collect about half of the country’s personal income. Each of them does have to pay SS tax on the first $160k of earned income, but clearly there’s a huge pool of income that doesn’t pay into social security.

I don’t know about proper induction cooktops, but the hot plates all seem to use mechanical relays to switch power, so they’re limited to far less than 16 MHz. Most seem to use regular, industrial controls that operate at more like 1-0.1 Hz.

I honestly don’t think you’d want to use anything but a mechanical relay to switch 10-15 amps. Do that with a solid state relay, and you’re going to waste 15-25 W in a small package that will have to be radiated somewhere.

This is why it’s so important to have (and use) a hood that vents to the outside. These used to be standard features in homes, but it’s increasingly common just to have a recirculating hood with a grease filter. If you’re in one o those kitchens, open a window.

I got an induction hotplate for around $50. Took one of the burners and grate out of my gas stove & put the hotplate there. It’s great for day-to-day, and the other burners are still there if I want to make a production.

I kinda want to see if we can post enough screenshots from DayZ and Left 4 Dead, calling them photos from our neighborhood to get the AI media to report on a global zombie virus.

I would do perimeter^2/area, to avoid biasing toward small countries. Divide one circular country into two circles with the same total area and p^2/A goes from 4 pi to 8 pi. Divide a square country in two and p^2/A goes from 4 to 6.

Your router knows it’s in trouble when you call it by its government name instead of its 192.168.street.name

And does it apply only to verbal, podium speech, or also to written books and speech by people in [drag] costume.

Numpy won’t tell me what ln(74000000000000006.7/74000000000000000). Ran into exactly this problem for individual calculation

Trouble is that 74000000000000006.7/74000000000000000 ~ 1.000 000 000 000 000 1 and double-float precision is 0.000 000 000 000 000 2. Needs a 96 or 128 bit float. The whole topic of estimating one’s personal contribution to global phenomena is loaded with computer precision risks, which is part of what makes me skeptical of the final result, without looking far more closely than my interest motivates. Like calculating the sea level rise from spitting in the ocean - I believe it happens, but I’m not sure I believe any numerical result.