TheVat

@Markus Hanke remarks were helpful and I agree with his observations, born from more direct knowledge. I hope it is clear I was speaking of support and developing coping skills to further life goals and not a "cure" for neurodivergence. Among staff I worked with, during my brief time working with ASD folk, there seemed to be some varying views on stimming, but I would trust MH's observations. My training pointed me towards looking around at the environment and seeing if stimulation could be reduced so as to ease the felt need for it - and, with some clients, see if they could articulate where a reduction in excess stimulation could be effected. This is what I earlier meant by "finding a path" past stimming - i.e. finding a quiet corner where other engagement could be enjoyed and not suppressing the stimming as something wrong. I recall one client who was overstimulated by the appearance of certain foods and so, enlisting the help of a nutritionist, we helped them develop a nourishing menu where they could look at their plate and eat with contentment (vs finger-flapping and running away from the table).

Now another artist, a London-based artist who operates under the name The Misfortuneteller, says the idea was stolen from him. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/mar/25/its-not-banksys-its-mine-artist-says-bristol-plaque-to-adulterer-is-a-copy Who put up the plaque commemorating the “husband, father, adulterer” – which included the payoff line “Roger, I knew” – remains unknown. But while locals speculated that Banksy may have been involved, another artist has now suggested they are the victim of a rip-off. The London-based creator, who operates under the name The Misfortuneteller, said he created a near-identical plaque in March 2020 after wandering around New York’s Central Park and looking at the inscriptions on benches. “Plaques are fine but they’re not really that truthful,” he said. “I wanted to do honest memorial plaques. Bittersweet ones.” He mocked-up a series of images featuring offbeat tributes to the deceased. Some of the designs were sold as real engraved plaques. An ex-girlfriend is commemorated with a real-life plaque reading: “For Barbara – Who was awful when hungry but otherwise pretty solid.” Others took on a life of their own after going viral, often being shared without credit or posted by meme aggregation accounts on Instagram. No one bought his design paying tribute to a “cherished husband, dad and adulterer”, even though the image proved popular online. As a result, The Misfortuneteller said he was surprised to see his original design and phrasing reappear on the Bristol bench this week, prompting him to say: “It’s not Banksy’s; it’s fucking mine.”

The decision is made when a person wants to communicate and relate with others, hold a job, have their own home, pay the bills, travel around unassisted... and has a disability which prevents these. That's what disability means. There were persons I worked with who faced such obstacles and yes, welcomed a path towards surmounting them. Their lives were better for seeing such a path and being able to move past, e.g., flicking their fingers back and forth in front of their faces for hours while spinning a coke bottle on the floor 3000 times while their loved ones silently weep.

Died at 54. From this anecdote I hypothesize that trying to please two women is exhausting and life-shortening.

The focus should be on a cattle ranch where the male children run the operation....because the focus is where the sons raise meat.

And how would a hermit know how to evaluate whatever answers he received, having no knowledge of the candidates? The randomness of his "sample" is irrelevant - he lacks the knowledge base to critically examine their opinions or determine their veracity. If his cave is in rural Alabama, he will likely be strongly directed to vote for TFG. If it's in Eugene, Oregon, he will be steered towards Biden. Either place, he lacks the contextual knowledge that literacy and reputable journalism can provide. How has the irony of this thread not inundated you yet?

I'm hearing US intelligence is now indicating strong evidence that the concert massacre was indeed Islamic State, as IS has claimed. But the chinless thug is certainly using it to smear Ukraine and justify escalating attacks there. And no doubt it will also mean bigger boot heels crushing Russian faces, too. IS provided sort of a windfall for Poots.

It's a spectrum. At the high functioning end, one might argue it's just a different cognitive style and I'm open to that. But I worked for a while with people elsewhere on the spectrum, where there were severe cognitive and social disabilities, and for them a cure (or, realistically, any amelioration) would be most welcome.

What field of natural sciences is your MS ? If you could relocate, that might help. Generally speaking, getting an entry level job means not setting too many requirements like those you mention (home based, flexible, not too routine). There is an old saying along the lines of you have to sweep the floors before you can sit in the corner office. Think of your first job as a conduit to the later interesting job, a way to build connections and show your reliability, and just roll up your sleeves. The world owes you precisely nothing - it is entirely up to you to go out and get what you want, first climbing over obstacles, and enduring some grunt work as cheerfully as possible.

Yeah, to formulate his famous field equations of 1915 he spent a couple years learning tensor theory from his friend Marcel Grossman, instead of bellyaching that he couldn't do math and insisting others do it for him.

That would depend on your field of inquiry. Neuroscience gives serious attention to a functional definition of consciousness. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222861/ Normal human consciousness is defined as the presence of a wakeful arousal state and the awareness and motivation to respond to self and/or environmental events. In the intact brain, arousal is the overall level of responsiveness to environmental stimuli. Arousal has a physiological range from stage 3 non-REM sleep, where strong stimuli are required to elicit a response, to states of high vigilance, where subtle stimuli can be detected and acted upon2. While arousal is the global state of responsiveness, awareness is the brain’s ability to perceive specific environmental stimuli in different domains, including visual, somatosensory, auditory, and interoceptive (e.g. visceral and body position). The focal loss of awareness, such as language awareness in aphasia or spatial awareness in left-sided neglect, does not significantly impair awareness in other modalities. Motivation is the drive to act upon internal or external stimuli that have entered conscious awareness. In the next section, we describe the brain regions that support these three aspects of consciousness and show that they are not independent, but rather heavily interact with each other....

Oh, good! I understood perfectly that I could bond the neutral in my breaker subpanel and save the expense of a grounding bar kit. Guess I didn't need the knowledge of that written electrical code, that neutral is only bonded to ground in the main panel. So the metal subpanel box and EMT conduit back to main panel went "live" and sent a grounding fault through me instead of back to the earth rod. NOW I understand everything!

But this still only establishes a correlation, i.e. it could be an indirect causation. For example, antibiotics temporarily alter our colonies of gut microflora (and do so in other mammalian species). This can change nutritional absorption, which in turn can affect fertility markers. So it is possible that humans, if they combined antibiotic treatment with probiotic treatments in the gut to counteract shifts in population of microflora, would not see the same decline in fertility. So "clearly causal" can have many hidden assumptions that need to brought to light and studied. Humans are incredibly complex ecosystems.

To whoever neg repped John C, I think he was joking. And his jest reminds us that male fertility drop is, as the paper notes, quite "multifactorial" in its causation. Indeed, I find it really hard to pinpoint much beyond fuzzy correlations there. For instance, the cohort of young men in one of the studies could likely include many men who are temporarily unemployed (i.e. they have free time to volunteer for such a medical study, especially if they were compensated). Unemployment might present other causal factors towards reduced sperm count, e.g. certain leisure time activities that reduce sperm count, or psychological factors that correlate with a drop in fertility. My sense is that sample randomization is extremely challenging in such studies. @Alfred001 Thanks for the citations!

Got citation? Would like to see the data.

I agree with @zapatos tips - useful for a somewhat less minimalist approach than mine - and I can't argue with the joys of hot beverages. I would suggest boiling water and plastic bowls don't always interact well, in light of concerns on leachates from plastic, so I would prefer aluminum (with insulated holder) for that. Like this? https://www.amazon.com/Burn-After-Reading/dp/B001D243WU

I am guessing you never played the telephone game in childhood.

One historical theory I've heard is that the A-bomb, because of its incredible destructive power, allowed Japanese command to "save face" in their surrender. Had the US simply continued with conventional artillery and firebombing, the warrior culture of Japan would have seen this as something they could try to stand up to and therefore a surrender would have been shameful. We can never really be sure how a non-atomic invasion would have played out, given we have no alternate timeline to look in on.

I've heard history buffs say that Luther and the Reformation wouldn't have happened without the invention of the printing press. (which wasn't solely about the written word - Luther also used woodcuts, to present simple stories to those less literate) I really can't think of anything that wasn't advanced by the press, given its role in dissemination of information and promoting knowledge. It eventually shifted literacy from a tiny elite to a majority of the population. Sure, it was double-edged - easier to spread propaganda and libel, too - but what technologies haven't had a double edge at some point? Societies that do well have information gatekeepers who filter out the lies, nonsense, sophistry, etc. The US Supreme Court just heard oral arguments yesterday on litigation over what such gatekeepers should do in social media companies.

There is a special happy feeling knowing one is not part of a garbage fire. Didn't walk from Springer Mtn to Mt Katahdin, but I walked some of it in Vermont and NH. It's all common sense stuff - pick your time (e.g. not winter in the north, not high summer in the South), bring a partner you don't mind having inspect you for tics, bring mosquito repellent, sturdy hiking boots, etc. Keep food in a bag and hang it from a high tree branch when you sleep, never in your tent. Take increasingly long walks before the trip, for several months, to build up muscles and spot any joint/tendon issues beforehand. Keep socks dry. Watch out for the protozoan fiend of Appalachia, Giardia lamblia. Do your homework on finding a high quality water filter that will strain out Giardia - pump filters are the best. Boiling water is a monumental PITA. Ditto cooking. Dried fruit, oat bars, pemmican, peanuts, trail mix, powdered milk or powdered non dairy drinks, are all handy sources that don't need fuel to prepare. Don't gather trail sources of food unless you know exactly what you're doing. Blackberries yes, mushrooms no. No sustained eye contact with bears. Etc.

Unclear to me what "any background geometry" would be here. As @Genady pointed out, causation can be defined operationally, e.g. I push two distant planets together and local curvature increases in "response" to greater local mass. The stress-energy tensor includes mass, right? Energy density is the whole thing in GR context - rest mass, pressure, momentum etc? I agree with @Moontanman on how interesting this thread is. I wish I had spent more time in my youth on physics instead of counting cougar scat.

I knew. I was just being deliberately stupid. 🤔

That is f-ing hilarious!

Bat chocolate pudding panting with amblyopia? 😉

Well it is the product of 11 x 22 x 33 so that's kind of cute in a Ramanujan and the London taxi sort of way. Also the product of the Supreme Court staff times an American jury. Also the sum of the "Lost" numbers: https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Numbers This way madness lies.