A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
I always imagine it more like neural networks. simply based on a lot of training and experience. As an example think of times when you step onto a non moving escalator. Your mind definitely knows its not moving but you still can't defeat the trained expectation of jerk.
Not advanced maths per se; neural networks are amazing! Fuzzy matching based on experience - taken to an incredible level. And, tuneable by internal simulation (imagination).
The second thing about microslippage is why I, even though I would say I'm transhumanist, would only ever go full cyborg if the robot parts had a sense of touch.
I don't wanna pet my dog and not only not feel their fur, but also end up crushing them with my super strength.
I think with the beginning stages of this kind of technology would work better with a removable option, for this reason. We are already getting able to make better human appendages, with super strength and dexterity, etc., but the touch is something that will probably be hard to implement for awhile.
Also the ability of mirror neurons to watch someone do a thing, then conceptualize and execute it with your body is extremely interesting.
Agreed, until prosthetics can achieve full parity of both function and sensation then they are only good as replacements for parts that are already missing. No sane person is swapping their hand for one that lacks a sense of touch just as good or better than what they have already, even if it's mechanically superior. In such a scenario that mechanical superiority is desired they would opt for an augmentation over a prosthetic.
A lot of it is less math and more just approximations using old data, just fitting a complex statistical model neural nets suck ass at math
Most people who've been juggling for awhile don't need too much additional practice to be able to do at least a few blindfolded catches just because of how consistent your throws get after awhile.
The other thing that's interesting is how pattern recognition in flying things people aren't generally used to seeing develops. I used to play ultimate, and when people start learning how a frisbee flies they might be susceptible to chasing it down by following along the path of the disc rather than moving directly to where it's going to end up. This is sometimes called dogging the disc because (many) dogs do the same thing. But then you learn to "read" the disc and you can tell by the flight path and angle of the disc where it's going to land.
I was always amazed at how we can catch objects in flight.
Compared to how long it takes me to calculate projectile momentum in Physics 1
Or tiny birds that can expertly navigate wind currents with an almond sized brain using real-time force feedback. The computational power at their disposal is very well optimized for what they do.
Hummingbirds are fucking incredible. They can literally hover, fly backwards, fly inverted, fly silently, or flap their wings loud enough to generate sound waves as a mating ritual. They're like miniature f-18s dog fighting constantly.
microslippages: some of us just call it what it is ... masturbation
Another one is levelling.
A lot of people can see a picture frame is about 0.5° out of level and their fucking eye twitches until they fix it
Me included
That's nuts when you think about it
I worked on an industrial robot once, and we parked it such that the middle section of the arm was up above the robot and supposed to be level. I could tell from 50 feet away and a glance that it wasn't, so we checked. It was off by literally 1 degree.
Degrees are bigger than we think, but also our eyes are incredible instruments.
See, I live in an old apartment. The corners aren't 90°, the wall a picture is hanging on is convex. When I'm lying in bed and look at the picture it looks like it's crooked but I used a level several times on it and it's as straight as can be. It's driving me insane.
This is when you set it relative to the rest of the unleveled stuff in your view to make it look level.
But “level isn’t what you need. If the floor and ceiling aren’t level, it’ll look wrong.
I purposefully slightly tilt most my wall hangings. I like watching guests squirm when they mention it and I do nothing
I respect and hate this. I could never
That's a game that would be hilarious. But yeah, i wouldn't be able to do it.
We would probably fist fight then, because I'd level it without saying anything, and if you set it back crooked, I would throw it on the ground.
Sorry cousin, unfortunately I will get the flu this Christmas and won't be able to come visit.
Madlad
When my wife was pissed at me she would go to my office before I got to work and tilt every picture/award and move my books about.
She knows what buttons to push and my sous chefs just let her do it... ungrateful pricks
/S
Our bodies n brains are so cool. Think about what goes into locating a sound in space.
Edit: there's more to it but at the most basic level your brain calculates the fraction of a second difference between when one ear picks up a sound and when the other does creating a reference point based on that.
In space, no one can hear you scream
I think the “more to it” might be significantly crazier than the timing thing.
Or ears have unique complex shapes that attenuate certain frequencies and bounce sound around in complex ways depending on the direction they ate coming from. And our brains instantly process all that stuff too. It’s why our sense of hearing isn’t just on a flat plane around our head.
My hearing is pretty severely damaged in my left ear, and for several months I thought everything was to my right. but my ability to locate sounds has come back. My hearings not any better, my brain just figured out that my left ears fucked and compensated.
I got into an argument with someone once about this, when they told me (paraphrasing) "it's safe to drive listening to music through headphones, because they let outside sound in".
Yes they indeed might, but - even ignoring delay introduced from digital electronics - you've now lost all sense of where that sound is coming from, because you're listening to the sound of one microphone being played through one speaker.
The human ear really is an incredible thing.
Counterpoint: echolocating with footsteps in csgo (entirely a joke, I agree that headphones while driving are unsafe)
Now you've got me picturing headphones hooked up to microphones outside of your car. I wonder if that would work well or not.
I have friends who refuse to play with headsets and then wonder why I'm so good at FPS compared to them. I've told them multiple times that it is solely the fact that I can locate enemies due to the headphones, yet they refuse to believe me, for some reason.
That’s boring. Two ears only allow you to put the sound somewhere on a plane (the vertical one that cuts your body in half lengthwise). How do you know the ‘height’ of the sound on that plane? By utilizing the different distortions the sound goes through while being funneled through your auricle.
If you're about to walk into a bar with you head, or like the top of a doorpost or smt. You'll instinctively pull back and avoid the obstacle, inches before it hurts, because your brain notice the hairs on your head moved. That's why men who have recently gone bald, often have bumps and bruises on their head. My bald colleague told me that for him, that was the hardest thing about going bald.
Maybe I'm understanding wrong but hair don't have nerves. Is our brain detecting the micro movements of hair follicles inside the skin?
Nerves in the scalp.
So by that logic, a boxer who shaves his head will take harder hits!
Or does that fractional reaction cause the brain to shift forward more than it would if they had not reacted? Could that reaction lead to worse brain injuries? Makes me wonder.
You pull away from the object touching your hair, so I don't think it would lead to worse injuries. I suppose it could set someone up better using fents and jabs.
When sharpening knives, with practice you can tell when you are done by sliding your fingertips along (not across) the sharpened bevel. It's possible to feel imperfections measured in micrometers this way.
If the earth were shrank down to the size of a golf ball, you could feel houses.
Throwing and catching always amaze me. And it's not something that everyone is always great at, for sure, but anyone can try to toss a wad of paper into the waste basket. Whether or not you make it, the calculations under the hood, happening so quickly, always astound me to think about.
What's amazing is our ability to calculate the path of something in the air.
There's a test they did with Cristiano Ronaldo where someone kicked a ball to him so he could head it. They shut off the lights before the ball was in the air and somehow from the body shape of the person kicking it, he was able to know how to make contact with it without being able to see it.
I'm not a fan of Ronaldo but that was very cool to watch, thanks for sharing!
I remember when I was younger and would lay on my back throwing a baseball up in the air and catching it, that I could watch it go up and not follow it with my eyes as it goes down and still have my hand in the right spot to catch it