Function

So here we go again, folks. Yep, it`s time for your favourite Fish Inna Barrel show

 

The script? Same as always.

 

1) a wild OP appears, the usual suspects zoom in

2) shootin` starts in the very first post (not even slightest attempt at answering the OP who`s dismissed with a lame "joke")

3) more of the similar (strawmen, fallacies, sweeping generalisations, irrelevant questions, barely hidden insults)

4) has the OP left yet? a) no - GOTO 3 b) seems so! GOTO 5

5) da fun: some anecdotes, bad poetry, personal rants, clever (ahem) musings

6) GOTO 4

7) OP either loses it (thread locked) or disappears for good (no worries, there`s always another one)

 

An honest engagement, polite explanations, some actual links to explain stuff better? You got to be ^#*^^%^& kidding me. We`re scienceforums.net! What are you, some New Age hippy anyway? Gerroffa my lawn.

 

The take out for a casual lurker?

- everything "non natural" is great because a) it`s modern c) there`s no synthetics b) OP is a "fool" c) we say so d) Seventies sucked

- there are only two positions to take: you`re either in with the in crowd or another "fool". Nice and simple, a binary world.

-if you are a "fool" then sweet Jaysis, what are you still doing here? I need a drink, and a shotgun (you stay classy, DrKrettin. Just hoping you`re single IRL these days

 

Yeah, well. Fear not, this is the last you hear from this particular "fool". For some reason I had a notion it`d be nice to try to discuss and learn something on science forums that proclaim to be The Original Ones, no less. What I see though is just another forum - never mind science - with all its usual trappings. The biggest one of which is the presence of an endless circle jerk in which the core regular clique massages their e-peens engaging in activity already described in the title of my "show". It`s the same sociopathic behaviour displayed on every single fairly old forum out there, be it cycling, videogames, books or engineering - doesn`t matter. It`s just another proof that this medium tends to bring out worst in people - or perhaps it just makes it more visible, since once posted, it`s there for all to see and does`nt disappear into thin air like spoken word.

 

Shame, because there are surely some "normal" members here, with whom it is possible to have "normal" conversation and respectful disagreements. Personally though, I don`t have time & energy to waste on dispelling the constant background noise. Y`all keep having "fun" - and your delusion that you actually represent scientific community. Luckily, things are much less binary in the real world.

 

Not sure if this belongs here or in the suggestion and comments section.

 

What did I just experience btw?

Is anything what any living creature does, that would not happen in the natural environment the creature resides in, if the living creature were to cease to exist, unnatural?

 

If yes, then by all means, we, the things we do and thus, our clothing, are unnatural. But then so is every other living creature. If using natural resources in ways that make our time more comfortable, more adaptable to the circumstances in which we find ourselves, if possible, then why would that be unnatural?

 

I can see why such things would be called unnatural, but then we have to consider other species living unnatural lives. Is it unnatural if a beaver builds a wooden dam in a river? If you answered "yes" to the first question, then please be consistent. Answering "no" to this question would be quite contradictory.

 

If you cannot resist yourself from answering "no", then we should consider a division of entities: naturality as such, and naturality for an organism.

 

If you answered "yes" to the first question, then yes, it is unnatural if a beaver builds a wooden dam. But no, it is not unnatural for the beaver to build wooden dams.

 

And then by extension, we must acknowledge the idea of considering clothing as unnatural, but the production and usage of clothing, and basically clothing itself, not unnatural for human beings.

 

Agreed, but how does that help those who can?

 

It doesn't. It's a probable hypothesis concerning the subject of this topic: trying to explore the science of boredom.

 

I'm sure Schrödinger didn't actively help anyone with his dead-or-not cat.

Are you sure all the paragraph options are the exact same. From your selection in the images the line height of the paragraph is different.

 

Yup, I was/am sure. Also line spacing was the same.

Maybe I have overlooked it, but where the heck does everybody live where physical altercations ending in assault seem to be the norm? Among youths, sure, but adults?

 

I find it really unsettling when adults (but also adolescents and kids) reply to news articles on Facebook that e.g. a convicted murderer has been freed after sitting out his time, and then they reply things as they should kill him, he should be relieved of his civil rights, they should torture and kill him ... And then we haven't even mentioned reactions to posts concerning pedophilia.

 

Public opinion takes mental illness and psychological well-being (or the lack of it) too little into account when flinging its coloured view into the world. The things that certain people dare to wish that would happen to murderers, rapists, pedophiles, ... are, in my opinion, often way worse than the crime committed by the subject. They appear ISIS-ish in my eyes.

 

Lots of comments in this video (

) are stuffed with such wishes, directed at a certain William, a kid. If curious enough, the comment by "sarah singleton" is quite ... disturbing, as are the bulk of comments in reaction to her comment.

 

However ... I'm most certain that none of these people would ever hurt a fly. Telecommunication has made threats and looking "tough" much easier than real-life situations and lots of these comments will probably only be posted for likes by, in essence, the same narrow-minded nitwits. Yet, I'm shocked lots of times when reading that kind of stuff. And I'm not sure whether they'd actually do the things they post against rapists and pedophiles when confronted by them.

 

Concerning the last, rather off-topic, but I really find it important to screen every convict of any presence of mental illness. Not all pedophiles have pedophilic disorder (DSM-V), and the latter ones (the ones with the disorder), imo, should not be treated (locked up) equally as those without the disorder. But that aside: we should grow towards a society in which psychiatry takes up more space in the federal system, including justice. Criminals belonging in psychiatric wards should be sent there instead of jail, or even instead of receiving death penalty.

Find a way to isolate specific cults and species. Then homogenise all soils to be 'about equal' and try your experiment again.

 

Find a way to quantify your data.

I have infected twelve soils, three aren't listening to any music, three are listening to rock, other three to pop music and the last three classical. I've been doing it for four days now and the results are super clear. I did some research and the only thing I could find is that it has to do with the vibration of the soundwaves. But is that really it?

 

Are you sure the dishes are contaminated and colonised by one and the same sole species?

Did they grow significantly faster? How did/can you prove that? Does this make any sense to you, given the fact that bacteria are single-cell organisms, and are not able (nor feel the need) to hear anything at all?

 

Only effect your music could have on bacteria is changes in air pressure

 

Also interestingly, strongly focusing on cues while seeing things the "correct way" but focusing on the fact that they are inverted may make them inverted again. In other words, the brain uses cues to figure out which way is up and help you interpret it correctly and it is actually not a exclusively hard-wired effect.

 

Reminds me of the optical illusion of the lady silhouette spinning where you are asked whether she is turning leftwards or rightwards. Mostly I basically see her turning one way (can't remember which one), but when I focus really hard, I can manage to trick my brain in believing she's turning the other way.

 

Or on my train. Some trains here have black displays with yellow light letters displaying some text. Above the text, which moves from right to left (so that the letters, naturally, appear in the right order), there is a static yellow dotted line. When focussing on the line, you can't see the static dots moving (as they aren't), but when reading the text underneath, you're tricked in believing the dots are also moving along with the text, from right to left.

Suppose I were to say that I believe there is a significant number of individuals who are "able to learn to live with the discrepancy in head movement and visual movement" and that I have accumulated a significant amount of evidence to justify my belief. Would you be willing to look at that evidence?

 

If that proof were to present itself under the form of A1-published, peer-reviewed articles, then yes, by all means. Posted a line of thought on the inverted-sight woman in an edit of my previous reaction.

So does the optic nerve have separate wiring inside it that goes to the upper and lower areas of the cornea retina. The diagram above shows the area where the nerve enters the brain.

 

Very interesting and thanks again....

Teacherman

 

My pleasure. The thought experiment on what would happen when babies were to be born in zero-gravity circumstances is intriguing and would basically solve the question once and for all partly, but is under not any circumstance ethically justifiable.

 

Edit: perhaps not once and for all, since, if the inverted-sight theory would be true for newborn babies for some time (perhaps even for some minutes), then the inversion of the inverted sight would perhaps also happen in space, if the baby were to move his head up and down: the brain will learn that the movement of the head and what the baby eventually sees (and thus the changes in perceived image, a visual movement), are not conform (are discrepant), and will potentially still correct the inverted sight to decrease the discrepancy between head movement and contradictory perceived vision movement.

 

One could argue that "why would the brain even want to put effort in correcting the image", if the baby is able to learn to live with the discrepancy in head movement and visual movement. However, stating this would also undermine the original theorem about inverted vision in newborn babies: they could perfectly learn to live with it. That's why I think gravity isn't the main argument for our brains to invert a potentially pre-inverted image, but rather a discrepancy between head movement and visual movement. Imagine that everyone would be born with inverted sight that were never to be corrected. We would have learnt to live with it and we would be having the discussion from the other side of the table and we'd be asking ourselves things such as "why are things falling up and why isn't our brain correcting that image?"

 

All of this, imo, leads to the statement that there is no inverted sight in newborns.

 

On the people seeing upside-down: perhaps an error in neur(on)al development; cortical dysplasia? ... ?

 

Actually, experiments with inversion goggles showed that people actually do get used to inverted vision and function normally after a while (classic experiment by Kohler and Erismann in the 50s).

 

Aha. Luckily enough I said "almost indisputable". No I'm just saving my ass now. My apologies.

 

You say that they get used to it after a while and function normally. But that says nothing about visual correction by the cerebral cortex; it does, however, have something (and perhaps, mostly) to do with cerebellar corrections as I basically explained in my first reaction.

 

Or was it stated that the vision was automatically re-inverted after a while when wearing the goggles?

 

 

Never intended to be the first one to insinuate something ... Thought that was basic neurophysiology ...

 

As displayed in this figure below from the great Kandel et al.

 

(Reference to Eric Kandel; I have his "Principles of Neural Science", 5th ed.; if you want to get insights in neuroscience and neurophysiology, this book is an absolute must-have.)

 

To answer your question: that is what I thought was the case. Do you have articles proving the wrong-side-up theory in babies?

 

 

Do you have any source saying that babies see stuff inverted for a short period of time? Or any period of time?

 

I don't see why that would be, truth be told; that is, not if the brain automatically is designed to 'reflip' the image vertically, which, imo, it does. You're right when saying that the image is inverted on the retina, but the upper and lower half of the retina project to parts of the brain that are also clearly separated from one another, by the calcarine fissure, if I'm not mistaken. In that way, the upper field of vision will project on the lower (retina and) primary visual cortex, whereas the lower field of vision will project on the upper (retina and) primary visual cortex.

 

But if I were to flip my eye, I would, of course, see everything inverted. It is almost undisputable that my brain wouldn't be able to correct-flip the image for me, since plasticity of our synapses has decreased too much from when we were a baby.

 

The question arises if the flip ever happened and, by extension, if it were necessary whatsoever.

 

Babies holding up their heads is, as far as I know, not guided by their vision, but rather is a postural reflex, determined by their vestibular system etc.

 

On the other hand, it's true that our vision is able to adapt to new situations quite quickly. I'm thinking specifically of the recalibration of eye movements when tracking someone (-thing) or when having to fix on another object: when e.g. someone is calling you withing your field of vision and you want to look directly at them, when suddenly wearing glasses, never having worn these before, you won't be able to fix the person on a first go. That is because your vision is distorted in comparison and your eyes are used to certain movement necessities to adjust to fix the person, that is, without the glasses. With the glasses, however, depending on the strength (actually: + of -), your eyes will move too much or too less and will have to readjust to fix the person. In fact, the correction and readjustment is controlled by the cerebellum. After a few tries, your eyes will have learnt the new 'set of movements' and will, without any problem, be able to fix new objects on the "first go".

 

Which, truth be told, doesn't have much to do with what you're asking and saying, but interesting nonetheless.

Hello everyone

 

Ran into a new problem formatting the thesis I will be writing:

 

 

 

The distance before the chapter heading "CHAPTER 7" respectively "CHAPTER 8" to the border of the page, is not equal. Why is that? In the paragraph options, the distance is equal. So why is there a discrepancy in distance?

 

It classically happens in chapter headings after a new part. So what I do is, I make a new section on an odd page and there I put, in the middle of the page (perfectly aligned in the vertical middle):

 

"PART I

INTRODUCTION"

 

Whereafter I insert another section ending with start on a new odd page so that the chapter will start on an odd page. All parts and chapters begin on an odd page.

 

The decreased distance between "CHAPTER X" and the top of the page occurs in every new chapter after a "part title page".

 

Does it have something to do with the lay-out of the part title pages, being vertically aligned in the centre?

 

Can someone help me on this one?

 

Thanks.

 

F

 

EDIT: the problem seems to disappear when I insert a hard enter between the part title and section break

 

Now it is

 

"PART I

 

INTRODUCTION

 

---SECTION BREAK---"

 

instead of

 

"PART I

 

INTRODUCTION---SECTION BREAK---"

 

But, porque?

What you're explaining reminds me of self-consciousness. It's estimated to be developed (and still under development) when you're 1.5 years old. It is believed that babies younger than 1.5 years old have no (important degree of) self-consciousness.

 

A classic way of testing self-consciousness in animals is by the mirror test. You might want to look up stuff about self-consciousness and the mirror test.

 

You'll find that humans (aged +1.5 y/o), most primates, elephants, dolphins, and if I'm not mistaken, octopuses and magpies are believed to be the only animals (so far tested) having a certain degree of self-consciousness.

How did I not think of that. Thanks, fw

Hello everyone

 

While perparing the layout for my future thesis, I was presetting table and caption layout.

 

Problem: when I insert a table at a random point in the text and then make it align by means of Table Properties > Around > Positioning ... > Vertical: Position: Bottom - Relative to: Margin; then the table correctly places itself at the bottom of the page, where it belongs.

 

Should I then, however, insert a caption, then the caption will not appear above the table (despite selection of appearance of the caption above the table), but it appears in the text where I stood when inserting the table.

 

How can I solve this problem?

 

 

Thanks!

 

F

 

You would no nothing else and no outside world. You have nothing to compare it.

 

It like people born in North Korea they have no concept of democracy or freedom. This is why when people leave countries like that and move to countries that have democracy and freedom they have a hard time fitting in.

 

Exactly. You couldn't imagine what it is you're missing, so why be bored.

Done. If you're interested: my native language is Dutch, I speak English quite fluently, have a good command in French and basic command in German.

 

I can tell with a certain degree of certainty that Europeans and Americans wouldn't be able to guess this. I have no clue what a single one of those could mean.

 

Indeed. It felt like an exam I totally forgot about.

Formalities and convention?

Yes, i understand that, but you're confusing boredom with craving. when your bored, you think of everything you can do, like read a book, watch TV, or talk to someone. When you crave something, you're only thinking about one thing and one thing only, not any alternatives. Also, boredom normally occurs when your doing some thing mundane and repetitive or doing nothing at all.

 

Craving for the lack of boredom?

Would it not be caused by the reward system (especially dopaminergic VTA-NAc-pathway) and the absence of stimuli stimulating it?

 

If we were to be born in an empty room, out of nothing (hypothetically), and we were to be fed there through a small hole through which we won't see anything interesting, and we'd be 'raised' in that manner, would we get bored?

I could. But I won't. That's not how things roll here.

 

The idea is that you should first let us get some insights in what you already know or think, in order to help you towards something we'll both understand. Not something you could just copy.

 

So.

 

What do you think? Why would it be?

Hm, still no solution. It's supposed to be a school problem.

 

What kind of frickin' school do/did you attend