So much of my PTSD from 10 years of being involved in protests and direct actions is from how the the cops and counterprotestors reacted, but the memories of the actions themselves are the opposite of trauma memories yet equally indelible.
Stay safe out there, take care of yourselves and others, don't let them break your spirit and shred your message with cowardly brute strength.
A lot of people are posting a video by Sabine Hossenfelder right now, and I'm not going to comment on the video or the points and discussion, but I wanted to post this video detailing her problematic views on trans issues, how she promoted (in a biased-centrist way) the harmful, TERF-associated, and unfounded view that gender affirming care for trans kids is a social contagion leading to "rapid onset of gender dysphoria," while making claims that transitioning before puberty is harmful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Kau7bO3Fw Also there's a line where she offhand belittles people who say early gender affirming care saves lives
"Whether or not she meant to, she repeatedly used a misleading rhetorical device to elevate transphobic talking points to the same level as scientific evidence, and she did that in front of a very large audience"
@NicoleCRust@axoaxonic@Sheril there are a lot of people making YT vids for genuinely educational reasons and also some folks making a good living doing it in ways that are quite respectable. It's a matter of judgment, but IMO usually obvious, when someone starts chasing revenue; it usually starts by going outside their area of expertise with strong takes on current click-magnet controversies. Certainly I don't mean to say that any scientist making vids is on that path.
Yesterday I met the final boss version of cars pulling into the bike lane: construction downtown #Seattle at Westlake redirected all car traffic to move around it by going into the bike lane. No warning signs, just cones and a stream of cars suddenly in front and behind me for two blocks
In this society that emphasizes competition and mastery to create value, so many people say you have to focus on one thing to be successful, but no one really says how to do that.. When I was younger I heard that advice, I decided to focus on neuroscience, but even within this field there's actually millions of potential things to focus on.
If anyone wants to share their method/s of deciding what to devote serious time to, feel free to reply
What works for me is to identify a target at the horizon of knowledge, for which there is, or I can conceive of, an angle of attack that is inexpensive and feasible, and that the result won't be "yes/no" but rather deliver a resource (data, tools, concepts) that others – and my future self – can build upon. If on top of it I happen to like it, there's even more of a chance I'll go for it: human motivation matters an awful lot.
"Propagation of Sinusoidal Electrical Waves along the Spinal Cord during a Fictive Motor Task", Cuellar et al, 2009 https://www.jneurosci.org/content/29/3/798 [cat study]
I tried uploading three different pictures of me to a modern automatic photo captioning app that uses AI, and it referred to me as a "woman," a "person," and a "man"
This paper from 6 years ago is still relevant:
"The Misgendering Machines: Trans/HCI Implications of Automatic Gender Recognition", Os Keyes, 2018 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3274357
Went to the Shahdmehr lab youtube page too look if there were any #cerebellum vids, and was surprised to find a whole series of hour-long lectures from the Johns Hopkins Cerebellum Seminars
Applying information theory to cellular ion concentration gradients, these authors derive a principle where cells optimally code responses to environmental perturbations -- incl input from other cells -- by minimizing the cross entropy (Kullback-Leibler divergence) between intracellular and extracellular ion concentrations.
"We demonstrate the ion dynamics in neuronal action potentials described by Hodgkin and Huxley (including the equations themselves) represent a special case of these general information principles."
@axoaxonic
I mean when you consider how those ion gradients are actively and passively manipulated and computed on across the entire arborizaton of a neuron, hell ya they encode a shitload of information
On a related note, I'm looking at schools in Germany because of the [mostly] free tuition and abundance of neuro programs. Does anyone with US citizenship have any experience studying abroad there? Wondering what it's actually like. Housing costs seem to be a hurdle for people but I've been managing in Seattle, and I'm good at learning languages. Quick searches are just bringing up pithy sites with stock photos of people holding pretzels
I'm statistically unlikely to be successful in academia as a neurodivergent trans person who grew up below middle class and has lived in poverty since, but I'll do everything I can to keep trying, keep sharing and cooperating.
I'm not in it to win, I'm doing this because I want to contribute to something that can help people and because I actually just love it
With sensory overresponsivity it's really hard to read PDFs, even with redshift (linux version of f.lux). Inverting the colors doesn't help because the white letters seem amplified by the back background and cause an afterimage effect that also makes it hard to read. Screenreaders are the best option but the free ones can't read equations or figures.
The other day I found that switching programs from atril to qpdfview allowed me to change the page color, and I can finally read whole docs on my screen with the letters remaining black and the page a gentle reddish orange color
@axoaxonic zathura has settings to easily have all colours adjusted to what you want; I use it purely for astnetic reasons but I can assure you that all of my PDFs are completely inverted into Dracula background and Dracula foreground, even the images get put through those filters. You can easily revert to normal with control r if you want to see original images. Perhaps might be worth a try!
I was interested in public health as a field before the pandemic, but witnessing the response, especially the USA's, devolve into "you do you" and conspiracy misinformation made me reconsider.
On the other hand, I gained a lot of faith in mutual aid and ingenuity. A lot of people have stepped up to take care of people and distribute resources, and so much amazing research and development happened in the past few years: DIY 3D printable masks, air filters etc, low cost rapid PCR tests with paper microfluidics, people reverse engineering the vaccines and open-sourcing the sequences https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/
@axoaxonic
If anyone has not been radicalized by this pandemic we havent been in the same reality. We help each other. No one is coming to save us ❤️💔❤️