Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[wierd]

In this specific case, I would think that there would be issues related to chromatin packing.

In humans, two ancestral chromosomes are implicated in an unusual fusion process, where one completely inverted, and then fused to the other.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome_2


Due to the very different orientation of a large section of chromosome 2 (compared with the same sequences in the chimp's non-fused chromosomes), and the different packaging in the nucleus, genetic expression levels will almost certainly be affected.  This can lead to a wide assortment of complications.


Additionally, when considering fertility, one needs to be reminded that differences in the acrosome binding protein will prevent sperm cells from binding with the zona of the target ovum during fertilization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrosome_reaction

Significant divergence between the proteins of the zona, and the enzymes present in the acrosome, will prevent fertility.

[Ulfarr]

Spoiler: More of a rant/venting my frustration than a true wtf (click to show/hide)

Three days now I'm being spammed on my phone by a courier agency that they'll deliver my package today and now they just told me that they couldn't find my name on the adress. Of course the courier didn't even come here.

After I contacted them about it they told me they gave it to the wrong courier and my adress is outside of his jurisdiction so he just left it behind and the agency reported that he couldn't find me. Which implies I didn't make sure that the delivery could take place so they fulfilled their obligation and I then will have to go to their center and pick up myself.

For fuck's sake is it so difficult to just own up to your mistakes and then fix them?

[scriver]

Till it ends up to have human-like intelligence and the ability to speak and now your research team will be remembered as the guys that made the Truman Show in real life.

Just raise them to be an Otaku and they'll never want to leave their containment anyway

[AzyWng]

Discord is apparently being affected by "the general internet outage".

I can still access this website and all, but I can't seem to say the same for Discord - and my cell phone's internet is really slow, which may or may not be a related issue.

Anyone else getting this problem?

[pisskop]

This site is weird.  I could have next to no internet, due to wifi issues or even wired network problem, and this site will still load about half the time.

SMF is magic.  Im pretty sure it pre-caches the future.

[Reelya]

I've had that, and it was down to HTTP vs HTTPS. Port 80 is old faithful. Try running through a port 80 or port 8080 proxy.

[Arx]

It wasn't quite as far-reaching as Discord's dire message applied. I saw one theory that it was principally Cloudflare-based sites that went down, which doesn't seem unreasonable.

[Frumple]

And today's "most painful book title seen" award goes to Jean Plaidy's "Here Lies Our Sovereign Lord", a story about some king's affairs with multiple women.

Technically there's about four hours of work left today but I'm just going to go ahead and call it. The blatancy actually gave me a small headache.

[Tack]

Yeah I was playing online games and had discord go down- and be the only thing which went down.

[EnigmaticHat]

-re: memory-

(jumping into this conversation because its a cool topic not because I'm any kind of expert)

But my understanding of sensory information is that the brain "fakes" processing a lot of it.  Like your sight, basically the brain knows what's around you so it just fakes most of what you see outside of a relatively small circle where your eyes are focused.  All it notices outside that circle is movement.  This is why people can be shockingly bad at seeing things; like looking all over for an item and then finding it lying on a table somewhere, or no one at a boardgame noticing when someone is stealing another person's items/chips.  This is why (non-paranoid) schizophrenia can mean that the brain simply isn't processing sensory information correctly, so its "fake" info increasingly has nothing to do with reality.

So the idea of a photographic memory is kind of... questionable.  It would imply not only unusual memory but unusual focus.  Cause you can't remember something you didn't see and most people don't naturally notice every detail of a scene.  The way long term memory works for more people is also heavily linked to the idea of importance.  Like you only remember things that you think are important and drop the rest.  Now the brain isn't a computer but it is still a physical thing and memories do need to be physically represented somehow in your brain.  So I feel like being able to connect memories with every calendar day has to have some kind of consequence for your brain functioning.  Like maybe she has a harder time remember things not specifically related to her, like skills or data (like remembering the dates of historical events or multiplication tables).

[scourge728]

internet or computer briefly decided that it couldn't find any website's servers, and then it decided not to do that after like a minute

[Imic]

The real answer, of course, is to run into the hills, herd bizzare mutant sheep, remember only what has yet to occur, and then, finally, whenever you should juggle beetroots, you will get the ultimate and most perfect internet connection ever. It gets annoying when the mutant sheep don’t turn out bizarre enough, though.

[Reelya]

-re: memory-

(jumping into this conversation because its a cool topic not because I'm any kind of expert)

But my understanding of sensory information is that the brain "fakes" processing a lot of it.  Like your sight, basically the brain knows what's around you so it just fakes most of what you see outside of a relatively small circle where your eyes are focused.  All it notices outside that circle is movement.  This is why people can be shockingly bad at seeing things; like looking all over for an item and then finding it lying on a table somewhere, or no one at a boardgame noticing when someone is stealing another person's items/chips.  This is why (non-paranoid) schizophrenia can mean that the brain simply isn't processing sensory information correctly, so its "fake" info increasingly has nothing to do with reality.

So the idea of a photographic memory is kind of... questionable.  It would imply not only unusual memory but unusual focus.  Cause you can't remember something you didn't see and most people don't naturally notice every detail of a scene.  The way long term memory works for more people is also heavily linked to the idea of importance.  Like you only remember things that you think are important and drop the rest.  Now the brain isn't a computer but it is still a physical thing and memories do need to be physically represented somehow in your brain.  So I feel like being able to connect memories with every calendar day has to have some kind of consequence for your brain functioning.  Like maybe she has a harder time remember things not specifically related to her, like skills or data (like remembering the dates of historical events or multiplication tables).

That's covered in the articles I linked. The person in question has a poor short-term memory but once things become long-term they stick forever. She has memories from age 12 days old and can put specific dates on memories from when she was around 1 year old. It's not the same thing as photographic memory.

Generally, people with "super-memories" on one sense often have crippling mental issues in other areas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Shereshevsky

Shereshevsky participated in many behavioral studies, most of them carried out by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria over a thirty-year time span. He met Luria after an anecdotal event in which he was told off for not taking any notes while attending a work meeting in the mid-1920s[1]. To the astonishment of everyone there (and to his own astonishment in realizing that others could apparently not do so), he could recall the speech word by word. Along the years Shereshevsky was asked to memorize complex mathematical formulas, huge matrices and even poems in foreign languages and did so in a matter of minutes.[2] Despite his astounding memory performance, Shereshevsky scored no better than average in intelligence tests.

He had an active imagination, which helped him generate useful mnemonics. He claimed that his condition often produced unnecessary and distracting images or feelings. He had trouble memorizing information whose intended meaning differed from its literal one, as well as trouble recognizing faces, which he saw as "very changeable". He also occasionally had problems reading, because the written words evoked distracting sensations.

similar to children with eidetic (visual) memories, this guys super memory was at odds with abstraction, and he had a problem with faces being maleable since his memory was very literal, so any deformation of the face made it hard to reconcile with his memory-version. The point with faces is that to recognize a face, you need to construct a mental model of the face and recognize distorted versions of it: i.e. versions you've never seen before. Therefore, recognizing faces requires "fake" memories: if you say "I've seen that face before" you're actually lying to yourself, because for any face, you've probably never seen that exact version of the face at all.

[Yoink]

I just went nuts in the supermarket and did the biggest grocery shop of my entire freakin' life. o____o   

[wierd]

I find myself wanting to design a custom EMS ISA card for obsolete 386 class computers, for reasons I am having difficulty clarifying even to myself.


It might have something to do with the (nowdays) inexpensive SRAM DIPs out there, and also just for fun I guess... but wtf.  I dont even have a 386 class machine to upgrade in the first place.

Spoiler: Danger, deadly levels of nerdism inside (click to show/hide)

For those that do not know, LIM/EMS is a specification for accessing memory outside of the CPU's direct control, as a means to overcome the size of the memory that can be used by the computer due to the limited number of CPU address lines.

It works by defining a 64kb window in the memory between 640k and 1mb called the "Page frame", which gets paged around on the EMS memory device's pool of managed ram, through commands issued to the card via a standardized IO port. 64kb was used because it is conveniently the size of a standard real-mode offset.

This specification was developed before the 386 era, and was really intended for use in XT class machines that only had 12bit addressing. However, subsequent software, including windows 3.X, know how to use this memory.

As far as the CPU is concerned, the only memory presented to it is that 64k page frame. It gives orders, and that page gets switched out and replaced with another slice of the expansion's memory. Reads and writes are performed on that 64k page exclusively.

These days, you can get some pretty big SRAM modules.  See for instance, this (unthinkable for the time) 4mb SRAM. It comes in a convenient DIP package, meaning you can use a standard chip socket for it on a project board.

Why SRAM?  Because you dont need any refresh circuitry. Just raw reads and writes by taking certain pins high or low-- Controlling the chips is super duper easy electronically.

I was thinking I could use something like an AT-MEGA to do the actual movement of the pageframe, and just hard-map the location using the ISA card's address lanes. It would sit there, waiting for the host CPU to send it appropriate commands over the IO registers on the ISA card, and then move the frame around.   You would only need an 8bit microcontroller, because you are just moving the chip select lines and address lines around. (Could be done on the cheap with a few GPIO pins and some transistors.)

16 such modules would give you an additional 64mb of memory, which for a computer of that class, is nothing to sneeze at.  Especially since it would be able to co-exist with whatever was present from populating the SIM slots.  If used no other way, it could be used with something like EMSDISK, and Drivespace/stacker, to give a "very fast" compressed ramdisk without tieing up flat XMS memory.

But......


Why?