@[email protected] was talking about tornadoes and it was really interesting, figured I’d see what other cool things we all know
If you split the connection between the left and right brain hemispheres as has been done to some people suffering from seizures you can then by using clever methods interview each side separate from the other and discover that they do not agree about most things.
What’s ever more interesting is that you can give tasks to one side and let the other side observe you do these tasks and when questioned it will come up with lies about why it did this despite this not being the actual reason.
Split brain experiments if you want to google more info.
They’re absolutely incredible and proof that we’re not singular people, but instead basically two people crammed into a single skull together forced to communicate.
My takeaway is not that instead of a single person we’re actually two but rather that self as we think about it doesn’t actually exist. It’s convenient for our lives to think about ourselves that way but I bet if you could actually understand the inner workings of brain and how matter gives rise to subjective experience you’d discover that there actually is no one in control. The only thing that makes us separate from the rest of the universe is that it feels like something to exist.
This book digs deeper into that sort of stuff:
The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity https://a.co/d/fZhHVrG
Worth a read
We only have this data because the corpus callosum is easy to split, it needs to be done to treat some cases of epilepsy, and both hemispheres have nearly the same set of inputs and outputs. For all we know, you could separate out any other part of the brain and that section could be a whole person by itself.
We are a complex, interwoven system of decisions being made, most of which we don’t directly control. And we, the collective of that system, tell ourselves stories about who we are and why we do what we do.
there are at least two minds in your brain, and they mostly disagree.
@shootwhatsmyname Two parts, the easier to chew is that Microphones are basically just speakers wired backwards.
The second part is Solar Panels are basically just LEDs wired backwards.
(In both cases there’s a lot of design work around them to make them better at one task than the other, but the technology is still the same)
And electric generators are electric motors wired backwards.
@Murdoc Oh yeah! And that’s how “regenerative braking” works!
Lego is the largest tire manufacturer (Oddly, even if it’s my favorite fact it’s not related to my SI)
Would that be in number of tires only or in volume too?
Gary Oldman is younger than Gary Numan.
The contact patch of a railroad wheel on the rail is only about the size of a dime
I always thought it was cool how the design of the rails and wheels are designed to allow the train to stay on the track around curves.
There is no method in our current stock market to reconcile every share issued by the corporation to make sure there are no fake shares.
That depressingly makes a lot of sense
There’s one, but use isn’t widespread enough to be useful in most cases.
same thing with gold.
we dont actually know how much gold has been mined and audits have a very wide margin of error.
Who exploits this flaw the most? Could we know?
Hi yes that would be me
When projecting a movie, presentation or whatever onto a canvas, anything you see as black (text, etc) is just the pure plain white without light shining on it.
Turn the projector off and the parts that looked black a second ago now look chalk white with no changes done to that part.
So what you’re saying is it’s all a matter of perspective
If you take it as a philosophical metaphor, I guess I would go for “context can change everything” :)
When making the concorde, the engineers couldn’t break the sound barrier until they put the like 6 ft long needle at the front of the plane.
Black holes slowly evaporate.
They loose energy due to hawking radiation, although this happens so slow, it will take an eternity for them to disappear
What is really frustrating my intuition is how large holes don’t radiate more than small ones.
The most common website hacks, including the ones Anonymous used to steal info, require nothing more than a keyboard and browser.
SQL Injection?
SQL injection is what Anonymous used to steal, yes, but there are also other attacks that can be done
In 1990 British Airways 5390 suffered an explosive decompression when a cockpit window blew out due to improper maintenance. The force of the decompression partially pulled the captain out the window pinning him to the fuselage while his feet were caught on the control column. Thanks to the efforts of the first officer and flight attendants the plane was able to land safely around twenty minutes later. There were no fatalities.
Most electric cars only have 1 gear and it’s always engaged. If you put the car in reverse, it uses the same gear, but the motor spins the other way.
Even in neutral the motor still spins when the wheels are turned, it just doesn’t output any power to the wheels.
Seals can let one half of their brain go to sleep while the other side stays awake.
There’s a certain subset of reality that is non-physical and timeless, called “ideas”.
Look on the internet for “Platon ideas” to find out more.