vneur's comments

Building virtual neuroscience software over here https://www.virtualbrainlab.org/

I think with so much hybrid learning and remote teaching going on there's an opportunity for STEM education to become more equitable. Right now to learn about neuroscience you have to go to a university, pay hefty tuition fees, and even then access to really cutting edge technology is blocked by the high cost of research tools. There's nothing stopping us from building virtual versions of this same content.

My vision is that these are used as complements to low-cost in-person lab experiences, so maybe in a class people learn about neurons using a backyard brains setup and then they learn about the really cutting edge expensive tools using this virtual environment.

Depends on scale. For our initial play-testing I bought a bunch of plastic card sleeves and regular playing cards, and then printed out the 3"x5" game cards on my home printer. The playing cards are to make the card sleeves stiff and this way you can really quickly swap out your cards while play testing.

For prototyping the box and the demo copies we tried a few different print shops that operate in the US. The easiest by far is the game crafter, their website lets you upload and proof your cards through a web portal and I found that to be really good for not making mistakes. Unfortunately their quality is lower because the print runs are so small and the cost is pretty high.

If you get to large scale production (>500 copies) you can start getting things printed for reasonable cost. You can work with a chinese manufacturer directly (a bit risky for a first time project) or use one of the US intermediaries. Panda games is probably the best option there, but their minimum run is 2000.

good point... I'm not sure why we never made the youtube video public. Thanks for bringing it up! This is why I feel like making that first game was good practice, I won't make these mistakes for the second one.

wasn't sure if it broke the rules to post, thanks!

I built a board game in 2021 that has been just breaking the cutoff for this post, all I do is mail out a few games a week as we get orders. We do all our own fulfillment to save money. Currently trying to design a real video game. I got lucky with the board game because it targeted a really niche audience (rock climbers) and so we weren't really competing with the full board game market, which is honestly super saturated. I think launching a real video game will require taking a similar strategy, and I have some good ideas for this. If you know how to do 3D modeling and animation and have always wanted to make a game as a side project, send a message.

For anybody thinking of following on this path, I would say it's not really worth it except as a fun hobby. I didn't keep track of hours designing/testing very well but we're almost certainly way below minimum wage on the project. Although I've learned a lot about how to make games which has been really cool. You'll make a lot more money if you don't have to manufacture a real product and deal with the high costs of freight and postal shipping. If anybody is curious you can look up "5.15 climbing card game" on google and you'll find it!

The author provided a compelling reason for this long-distance ebike: they have an injury and the acceleration assist allows them to cycle without aggravating the injury. I don't think it's fair to assume that every person who wants to cycle 200km can do so without electrical assist.

For this to be biological and not cultural we would need to see evidence that this happens before baby/infant primates are old enough to observe their parents performing similar behaviors, or when raised in isolation. The only citation here that matches that is the first one, and even then the experimenter was a part of the experiment and not blinded to infant sex, so there is a major possible source of bias there, and more recent papers appear to contradict this effect [1]. Rather than cite one-off studies from the 2000s this is a situation where a meta-analysis or review would be ideal, but I don't see one in a quick search. If you are aware of one that would be helpful to better understand this claim.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002209651...

I'm sorry you had a bad experience in Cascadilla Hall, but this seems like a lot of exaggeration. For others who want to see what these dorms look like, you can see images of the Cascadilla rooms alongside more modern campus dorms like Mews on this page: https://conferenceservices.cornell.edu/planning/accommodatio....

I've been working on a rock climbing card game! We hope to kickstart it sometime later in the year. https://five15game.com

I've also been making excessive amounts of bread!

I really hope you pay close attention to the comments by assdf replying to this. The graduate students clearly got desperate because of how crazy the financial situation got. It's sad to see how few people really recognize that. I hope you're lucky in life and never end up trapped the way they were!

Some caveats to think about for that particular book in this blog post: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ (I'm not a researcher in the area, so not sure how valid either side of this is!)

Continual small improvements is exactly what Tesla does. That's why so many of the small issues listed in the article have since been fixed (as the article points out).

Can this clickbait title be fixed? This is a news article covering a review. The review suggests that the (small) cognitive effects of caffeine and other things present in chocolate have mechanisms that are starting to be understood, in rodents.

Because it's a review it provides no new evidence unlike the implication in the title. Instead, it's suggesting possible neural pathways for why the cognitive effects might exist.