alien cats 💚‼️

2023 -> 2024

spiders have got to figure out contracting I need to be able to call my local spiders union and be like "hey can you send a guy out for a few days the fruit flies are back" and then pay it in spider currency. I'll learn the conversion rates. I'll be generous with my rounding. please.

Guys, it's time to drop Google.

Google isn't the only search engine in the whole internet, there are others! And we need to diversify our search engine usage or we're gonna end up where we were a decade and change ago with the Internet Explorer issue. We can't let a single brand monopolize everything! This is why Google Search can afford to suck so hard: because people use it regardless! And there are alternatives.

A little bit about search engines, there are 3 types: crawlers, which work by scraping the web and developing their own indexes; metas, which get their results from the crawler-type search engines and therefore depend entirely upon them; and mixed, those which have their own (small) index but also pull results from the crawlers.

Right now, there are a couple of independant crawlers apart from Google, Bing (from Mycrosoft) and Yandex (the Russian one): this are Mojeek and Wiby.

Supporting independant crawlers is the easiest way to fight the shittyfication of the internet.

Mojeek.com is an independant british search engine with its own growing index commited to fighting internet censorship. It's small, and therefore it's usability isn't as good as that of the Big Three, but it doesn't censor, it's fairly respectful of people's privacy, and it doesn't drown you in adds. For those old enough to remember, it's a lot like early 2000s Google: you can find what you need, but if you write "dig shelter" instead of "dog shelter", that's what it's gonna search for. That said, please try to use it and support it as much as you can before we end up entirely dependant on Google, Bing and big corps adds. [click here to go to Mojeek]

Wiby.me is a new indie project that is literally dedicated to bringing back the old-school web. It's goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. So, for those of you who can't find any answers to technical questions beyond highschool level because Google buries them under a gazillion commercial sites and other meaningless shit, keep an eye on this project! It has a lot of potential. And, if you know of any personal websites that have great stuff but have been murdered by Google, you can go over to Wiby and submit it to their index. [click here to go to Wiby]

Aside from those, there are also meta search engines you can use to ween yourself off Google and search for random, day to day stuff.

Qwant.com is my go-to here—it has its own index and pulls from Bing, has relatively little censorship, and is fairly private. This is the one I use on my phone for everyday stuff. [click here to go to Qwant].

Historically, DuckDuckGo has always been a go-to for those who want a search engine that respects your privacy and doesn't censor. Personally, I've never been a fan, and there have been a LOT of scandals in recent years. It supposedly has its own index and pulls from Bing, much like Qwant, but I don't know. I just don't like it. Still, I've added it here for completeness' sake.

If you have Firefox Mobile browser, you can set any of these search engines as your default search engine and you can also add the others as secondary search engines and switch quicky from the navigation bar. If you don't have firefox mobile though, what are you doing with your life??? Go get it!! It is So. Much. Better. You can have add blockers and watch YouTube add free, for free! You can have reader mode and dark mode add-ons! You can have the world oh my goshhhh, drop Chrome!!

4get.ca is my last recommendation: it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn't have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it's the best for reaserch, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can. It's also very privacy conscious, so that's an other plus, and it has that late 90s / early 2000s vibe that I totally dig. [click here to go to 4get]

If you wanna learn more about the topic, you can over to the Search Engine Map [click here] which shows you a bunch of Search Engines and how they relate to each other. Or you can also go over to this one dude's personal website whose done A Lot of reaserch into the topic (way more than me) and seems to be pretty legit, if a little extra. [click here to go to digdeeper.neocities.org] Hope this infodump is useful to someone =D

PS: here's to hoping all the links work!

EDIT: eliminated the "read more". Figured there are enough mega long posts in tumblr, one more won't make no difference lol (tho the version w the read more has been reblogged already, in case you'd rather)

Cesium-133, let it be. Cesium-134, let it be even more.

Periodic Table Regions [Explained]

Transcript

[A periodic table with regions labeled.]

[Hydrogen:] Slightly fancy protons [Lithium and Beryllium:] Weird dirt [Group 1 & 2 metals, Periods 3-4:] Regular dirt [Group 1 & 2 metals, Periods 5-7:] Ends in a number, let it slumber ends in a letter, not much better [Left side of the transition metals group:] Boring alloy metals Probably critical to the spark plug industry or something (but one of them is radioactive so stay on your toes) [Most of the top row of the transition metals + aluminum:] Regular metals [Below the rightmost "regular metals" - the "ordinary metals" and some transition metals:] Weird metals [The platinum group:] $$$$ [Boron:] Boron (fool's carbon) [Carbon, Nitrogen, and Phosphorus:] You are here [The Halogens:] Safety goggles required [Noble Gases:] Lawful neutral [Iodine and Radon:] Very specific health problems [Ordinary metals and metalloids - Arsenic, Antimony, Tellurium, Thallium, Lead, Bismuth, Polonium] Murder weapons [Astatine and Period 7 from Rutherfordium onwards:] Don't bother learning their names - they're not staying long [Lanthanides and Actinides:] Whoever figures out a better way to fit these up there gets the next Nobel Prize

augustus and chester sure pick some very interesting statements

Spider web collar.

Beasts I created by mashing together hammerhead worms, olms, salamanders and snakes… accidentally reinvented the diplocaulus 🤷‍♂️

"this only takes 10 minutes so you should still have some free time" but have you considered that i need to lie down for 5 hours in complete silence after even the most basic task you could think of

"can't emphasize enough that it has a LOT of claws and it is NOT happy. good luck out there."

This is what audio processing disorder feels like

I was recently informed by a science professor I know that journals do not publish papers that don't yield interesting results, and while I understand that journals would rather publish your paper on how you cured cancer than all the things you tried that didn't, I am ENRAGED by this idea.

If you don't publish the experiments that didn't yield interesting results, people are going to waste time repeating them because when they look in the database and see nothing published on them, they're going to assume the experiment hasn't been done???

And then my professor told me that scientists just "assume that if the experiment would be relatively easy to set up, but there's nothing published on it, that means someone has already done it with no significant results." WHAT? That means we could be assuming that important experiments have been done just because they seem to be too easy???

Not to mention that this also encourages people to fudge results towards significance for career advancement because no one wants to spend YEARS on a project they don't get any credit for.

This convention of the culture is DELAYING scientific progress, I guarantee it. Please let me be financially successful enough that I can start my own journal for publishing experiments with no significant results. I AM ANGRY AT THIS INEFFICIENCY.

Oh this is very much a known and oft-lamented problem in science. You're far from alone here. The main reason I left science is because I couldn't handle the politics of it; a lot of what you're doing is trying to get your research looking important enough so you can qualify for grants and pay rent, or trying to release enough citeable papers to be important enough to get grants and pay rent. How "good" a scientist you are depends a lot on a) where your papers are published (which is largely a grift from the prestigious papers who take money from everyone involved and give very little back) and b) how much your papers get cited by other scientists (which means there's a lot of networking and result-generalising and stuff to get those numbers as high as possible so you can keep making enough money to live and do more science).

The most dangerous part of this sort of publication, though, isn't academic dishonesty and exaggeration (which is ferretted out by other scientists after a few years, who tend to keep an eye on each other and know all the tricks) or missing something in the unpublished data (which is always going to happen). It's the opposite -- accidentally inventing trends that don't really exist.

In science, there is always the possibility that your result is random chance. I could give ten tomato plants fertiliser A and ten fertiliser B and mix them all up and it's possible that all ten fertiliser A plants will do great and all ten fertiliser B plants will die by completely random chance, even if fertiliser B is better, or even if both fertilisers are exactly the same. Most non-medical sciences have a confidence interval floor of p=.05 -- that is, the chance that your result was just coincidence has to be one in twenty (5%), or lower. (In applied medicine they're usually stricter).

So, as an example, let's say that 40 people do experiments that involve MRIs. One person might be checking the effect of sugar on the pleasure centres of the brain, one might be looking at some new medication, one might be pinpointing how imagining stuff translates into brain activity; it doesn't matter. Beforehand they do some baseline tests, and one of them finds, completely unexpectedly, a major difference int he baseline brain activity of their male and female subjects (p=.025)! P=.025 is pretty damn confident! They have to publish that, of course they do! So they do!

Running forty experiments, you expect this result if there is no difference, with a confidence interval like that. In context, this result means absolutely nothing. There's no difference. But the other 39 people aren't going to publish papers about a difference they didn't find while looking for something else, are they? They might mention having done preliminary tests on their subjects in the unrelated paper they do publish, and leave it at that. So what the scientific community sees is a paper finding a difference, and no papers contesting it.

Now, what you're supposed to do in a situation like this, is consider this preliminary and run another experiment. But this lab is studying something else with the brain. They threw this paper out because it's an interesting thing they found, it's not their focus. It's not anyone's focus. And a few years later, another lab does the same thing. Until you end up with a handful of pretty solid-looking papers about this difference between male and female brains, and nothing contesting it.

"Oh, but surely someone will eventually run the experiment properly and -- " and what, write one single opposing paper? Maybe someone will, if for some reason there turns out to be enough attention tot he topic to make it worth it. Maybe a few people will. Maybe someone will write a meta-analysis, comparing all the papers on the topic and diving into a few that weren't on the topic to try to find what the standard results are, trying to find the truth. It's unrewarding work, but people do it. In the meantime, ten years of popular science books have been written casually citing the "fact" that male and female brains think differently and it's been proven with MRI, and second and third generation tests have been built on this utterly failing premise to say things like "MRIs show that women are better at social stuff and men are better at physical stuff because [horrible misreading of the data from some such paper]" and "trans women's brains behave like female brains and not male brains in an MRI" (yes, it's still bullshit even if it's used in support of something good instead of something bad; bullshit science is bullshit science on both sides of the fence). And while the MRI stuff is being debunked, is the stuff about diet that help autistic kids being debunked? Or the differences in metagenomic analyses of the microbial life in different parts of the world? Or the effect of boats on dolphin populations, or whether the colour blue is calming for infants, or what types of music different fish can distinguish, or data on lion pride social structures, or whether or not almonds help with high blood pressure?

A lot of what we 'know' is confirmation bias, even in science, because it depends on what gets published, not what gets discovered.

Speaking from a treatment standpoint (and this is why *I* left academia, or at least one of the chief reasons), this tendency to only publish what’s interesting plays out as only publishing what appears to work.

Let’s say you have three therapies/treatments (Tx) for, say, dementia. Something objectively awful for both patient and caregiver. Something time-sensitive, where effective, timely Tx can have an enormous effect on quality of life. So you, a researcher who cares deeply about this cause (why else would you have spent a decade of your life reading and talking and writing about it 12 hours a day, 360 days a year), test Tx A. A sister lab tests Tx B, and a third lab tests Tx C.

You find that Tx A doesn’t have a significant treatment effect. Tx B and Tx C, on the other hand, do have a significant effect.

Here’s where the problem comes in: you, because your treatment didn’t work, will almost certainly not be able to publish. What you have is a “negative result.” It’s interesting. It’s extremely interesting. Other researchers and clinicians absolutely should know that Tx A doesn’t work for the circumstances/population you tested.

Except, because you got a negative result, nobody will ever know.

What this means in terms of outcomes is that (1) people keep doing Tx A for dementia because there’s no contrary evidence; (2) you as a researcher have nothing to show for your time/grant money (which threatens your “publish or perish” career / any future funding); and therefore (3) researchers, not being willing to gamble their careers, tend to reach for the lowest hanging fruit lest they end up like you, with nothing to publish for their efforts, or (4) other labs will waste their time doing the same study of Tx A and getting the same results you got, not knowing it’s strengthening the case against Tx A and not being able to publish their findings, either.

(This is not hypothetical, btw, my own research was tanked by taking on a topic that had negative results too often, too early in my career.)

You also tend to see fewer repeat studies because everyone wants to be cited as groundbreaking, but repeat studies are where the strength of science comes from.

All this is not to say science is unfixably broken or untrustworthy. But it does have flaws and the impact factor / publish or perish / positive results only stuff drives all of us completely up the wall. And everyone kicks the can down the road for someone in the future to solve, citing how pervasive it is and how long it’s been going on, so it never gets solved and keeps getting more and more entrenched as Simply How Things Are, Kid. It’s infuriating.

i cant believe there are people who still havent seen this video

I could probably recite this entire video, word-for-word, on demand.

Goddamn, this is nearly thirty years old and it fits like a glove into contemporary shitpost cadence and aesthetics, this is High Art

IT BETTER NOT BOUNCE OR YOU’RE A DEAD MOTHERFUCKER

holy shit this was made the year i was born

ALWAYS REBLOG BIG BILL HELL’S CARS!

Little doodle of the PRINCE of the cryptids, MOTHMAN!

Couldnt take out my paints today but pretty happy I was still able to doodle!!:D

autumn mornings ⋇ 5 oct

one thing about me i’m the leaver. i will leave