Two more #SoCIA18 talks today! Some confusion but I believe the next one is "What Lives? Life, Consciousness, and the Eco-Systemic Multiversity" by Kala Perkins. Ooh, she used to be an neuroscientist, might be my jam. (Extra jammy. It's all jamful here today.)
What is life? Why (don't we) respect it? Beyond the Last Common Ancestor, we share our origins with the entire universe from its original impulse, stellar atomic synthesis. A radically eco-systemic view.
There are things we co-exist with, intertwined with, than we know. Forex, we sure can't list all the bacteria that make our digestion possible. Bioethics require a better understanding of life/birth.
Example: egg and sperm from donors in different countries, gestated in a woman in a third country (blanking on the proper term for that) - the child goes back to a donor, and their government refuses to recognize it as a citizen of there.
Analogy/causality goes up to infinite universe/multiverse: each ontological being as a cosmic seed potential? This part of the talk is kinda beyond me, but the bioethics stuff is lit.
Harmonics across scales: neurons to people to communities, up to planets and the universe. This is hard stuff to talk about - I love to challenge my own students to think about how things interact across scales of space & time.
We are only beginning to understand those links & emergent properties on a human scale (e.g. neurons - brains - people!groups - cultures); what might they be at as cosmological scale?
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Handedness comes in two groups, "right handed" and "not right handed." Most people use their right hands for almost all precision movement, but the other group is a broad spectrum from weakly-right to strongly-left. baen.com/handedness
The way we describe and define handedness creates the effect @CStuartHardwick rightly notices. Culture defines how we talk about it - but the behavior is mostly genetic. The % of righties has remained constant across continents and milennia.
Hand dominance is a more squirrelly thing than most people realize. For example, righties are better at *some* things with their left hand... and *some* of these asymmetries flip in lefties. Take a few minutes on #LeftHandersDay to learn more!
But you should read and learn from the #BlackSpecFic report anyways! The missing data is due to idiosyncrasies of the @EAPodcasts model, and has no impact on any other magazine's numbers.
Long story short, we treat reprints very differently from other magazines. For @escapepodcast specifically, they were ~45% of our 2017 stories, and our editorial process has one unified pipeline for originals + reprints together.
Regretting organizing my two Worldcon panels this year. It means I'm not free to throw up my hands in frustration and give up on programming. The last 24hrs have been the last worst icing on a bad cake that's long been baking.
I mean, my panels will be awesome. But if you're skipping programming because you don't trust the con, you've made a sensible choice.
There are always more people who want to be on programming than can fit. There's no way to make everyone happy. I get that. But this weekend's screwups come in the context of a long chain of trust-erosion.
So glad this one came out! "After Midnight at the Zap Stop" by @ouranosaurus is an awesome story - full of late-night grease, and the luckless & the worthy. But also because it's a #neuroscience teaching opportunity. Might even be a #NeuroThursday!
One offhand line explains a technology as "stimulating a particular set of mirror neurons." Which works as a story element just fine. It sounds plausible and authoritative! But as a neuroscientist, I have strong opinions about #mirrorneurons. I don't think they're real.
To be clear, mine is a controversial opinion. Many neuroscientists would disagree. But it's a hill I'm willing to fight on, especially given how often "mirror neurons" crop up in popular science.
This phenomenon - when you look away from a moving thing, and you briefly see illusory motion in the other direction - is the "Motion Aftereffect," and it comes from some very basic brain maneuvers. Who wants to join me on going full #NeuroThursday here? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_af…
Most neurons in the brain (and elsewhere) do this thing called "adaptation," where they accept whatever's going on as the new normal. For example, if you sit down with your laptop on your lap, you'll soon stop noticing the weight.
This can arise from the crudest single-cell level: some ion channels in the cell membrane have negative feedback loops that self-dampen.