truculation | 7 years ago | on: Card-Carrying Precadavers
truculation's comments
truculation | 7 years ago | on: Card-Carrying Precadavers
Eww. I suspect that in the computer age the enduring value of dissecting dead bodies is that it's even more repulsive than cutting open live bodies (which trainee medics will have to do later on).
For those of us who don't have to, I recommend:
truculation | 7 years ago | on: Why the Luddites Matter
>Of course, we know that today the Luddites are not viewed particularly kindly
On the contrary, it is technology and progress that are viewed with scepticism -- watch almost any recent sci-fi movie.
truculation | 7 years ago | on: How Posture Makes Us Human
>The sense we have that someone is fit generally comes from their posture.
Exceptions I've noted are joggers with hunched shoulders, splayed feet, leaping too high off the ground, and so on. By no means uncommon.
>Does this idea-retraining work as well as the gym?
Not a gym user but I gained a cm in height within a week of encountering the Alexander Technique (AT). My guess is that the best gym users have good posture too, if only for safety's sake.
It's not so much about fitness and muscular bulk but about whether you are receptive to the proprioceptive feedback from those muscles and joints. AT has a unique way of pointing you towards these sensations but it relies on personal contact with a teacher.
truculation | 7 years ago | on: Switching Off: Joseph Brodsky and the moral responsibility to be useless
It's a reason why some people become social cynics, I think, and this reason is represented in their brains. However they may not be able to articulate it, partly because they need to see themselves (and for others to see them) as good people. Indeed the strategy depends on it.
truculation | 7 years ago | on: Switching Off: Joseph Brodsky and the moral responsibility to be useless
No doubt, but consider that some people will then become cynical about society in order to become freeloaders.
(Rather as in Upton Sinclair's famous quote: 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!')
truculation | 8 years ago | on: Varieties of Argumentative Experience
Debate and criticism are defence, it seems to me; their value lies in averting heartache and war. For the purpose of changing the world, the ultimate argument is to create something new and substantial and then make progess with it, giving people somewhere to jump to.
truculation | 8 years ago | on: When nostalgia fails: a dad rewatches the TV of his childhood
Rainbow theme music:
truculation | 8 years ago | on: How mirror neurons affect the experience of fandom
Are mirror neurons really a thing? Why can't the neurons which govern my arm be used to help predict the actions of other people's arms?
truculation | 8 years ago | on: Households Need to Earn $300,000 a Year to Live a Middle Class Lifestyle
My idea of middle-class existence is a thrifty but relatively happy family life with an emphasis on education. The budget could vary enormously depending on how this is implemented.
truculation | 8 years ago | on: Chart of the Milky Way Includes More Than 1B Stars
Thanks! Took me a minute to work out which planet was which (Jupiter being the one just outside the 'belt').
truculation | 8 years ago | on: Chart of the Milky Way Includes More Than 1B Stars
Superb stuff. On a more mundane level I hope we'll soon also have a chart of all the asteroids in our solar system (to the most realistic extent possible).
truculation | 8 years ago | on: Idle Hands Are the Dreamer's Tools
Yes and it's not just at work: most of us feel we should fill every hour of our non-working lives with activities. Especially our kids' lives (no wonder people are having fewer kids!)
There are two things wrong about this I think. Firstly, it confuses activity with purpose. Secondly, unscheduled time is valuable not only for itself but for extra capacity when something important pops up.
truculation | 8 years ago | on: A guide to building a fast electric skateboard at home
Yep, high speed can definitely ruin a wheel(!):
truculation | 8 years ago | on: A Feasible Approach to Human Stasis for Long-Duration Deep Space Missions
If the sci-fi I've been reading lately is any guide, one of the greatest threats to humans in stasis will be sabotage by ideological fanatics.
truculation | 8 years ago | on: Heart surgeons refuse difficult operations to avoid poor mortality ratings
In another sense, 'Goodhart' seems like a splendid cosmic coincidence. Instead of obsessing over targets, try to perceive the whole system. And who can do that? Good-hearted individuals.
truculation | 8 years ago | on: Losing the Nobel Prize
Feynman again, on the topic of prizes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEUcmKDaklY
So the real prize is seeing one's work used by others in their work.
truculation | 8 years ago | on: In India, high-pressure exams are creating a student suicide crisis
The way I see it. Exams can check recall of facts, names, definitions. Also skill at identifying narrow classes of problems (which resemble facts) and extracting them from unrealistic settings. e.g. 'There are 49 dogs signed up to compete in the dog show. There are 36 more small dogs than large dogs signed up to compete. How many small dogs are signed up to compete?' and other such trick questions.
The former can be crammed and quickly forgotten. Not knowledge. The latter skill isn't knowledge of the relevant field.
In the less rigorous, more arty fields (shall we say) the trick is usually to flatter the examiners by firing their own opinions back at them in original ways. This can be highly skillful and requires awareness of the academic milieu. But not knowledge of the relevant field.
What counts is depth, and depth depends on semantic connections, including connections to other fields. These are all differentiated and can't be meaningfully added to yield a number, as if we were counting eggs or measuring a distance.
truculation | 8 years ago | on: In India, high-pressure exams are creating a student suicide crisis
>stupid gimmick like anti-suicide ceiling fan
Yep. It matters less apparently if millions of people wander around feeling suicidal as long as they don't actually commit suicide. For what? So we can pick candidates for the professions more efficiently.
truculation | 8 years ago | on: In India, high-pressure exams are creating a student suicide crisis
The ridiculous thing is that exams are irrational: they don't measure knowledge and ability, i.e. they don't measure what they purport to measure. It makes the societal scale suffering and death all the more meaningless and disturbing.
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I'm not recommending we end the use of cadavers -- and this is a discussion site, not a medical school!