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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • The contact lens technology uses nanoparticles that absorb infrared light and convert it into wavelengths that are visible to mammalian eyes

    Sounds like florescence—but with florescence, the light is re-emitted in all directions, not the same direction as the incident light. So the contact would glow in the presence of infrared light, but it wouldn’t maintain an image.

    when the mice were given the choice of a dark box and an infrared-illuminated box, contact-wearing mice chose the dark box whereas contact-less mice showed no preference.

    That’s consistent with the mice seeing a glow but not an image.

    the pupils of contact-wearing mice constricted in the presence of infrared light, and brain imaging revealed that infrared light caused their visual processing centers to light up.

    That still doesn’t imply that the mice are seeing an image.

    In humans, the infrared contact lenses enabled participants to accurately detect flashing morse code-like signals and to perceive the direction of incoming infrared light.

    Hmm, the directionality is suggestive—but is it just a result of turning their eyes or head?

    Because the contact lenses have limited ability to capture fine details (due to their close proximity to the retina, which causes the converted light particles to scatter), the team also developed a wearable glass system using the same nanoparticle technology, which enabled participants to perceive higher-resolution infrared information.

    Ok, now they admit the limitation, but I don’t understand how glasses would help… unless you used a lens in front to focus light on a translucent film that would act as a retina which you’d then look at from behind. But that would be more like holding a pinhole camera in front of your face than like using conventional glasses.


  • That doesn’t define a whole species, it just establishes that a pair of organisms belong to the same species. And most randomly-selected pairs of conspecific organisms would fail this test: if both organisms are the same sex, or if either one is immature or infertile.

    And in order to define species unambiguously, this pairwise test would have to be transitive, but IRL it isn’t: there are cases where a member of population A can produce offspring with members of population B, and members of B can produce offspring with members of C, but members of A can’t produce offspring with members of C.









  • How generative natural language works has been highly debated for over 60 years—there’s certainly no consensus most linguists would agree with. And while we have a pretty good idea how the process of facial recognition works, we know that process isn’t conducive to extracting a conventional explanation of how to recognize a particular face. (The best you could do is to make a list of features that would allow someone to eliminate all but one candidate from a small group, but that’s distinct from the process of actually recognizing someone.)




  • “Currently, there is no consensus on the face of the Democrat Party, as a majority of voters either give the title to AOC (26%) or simply say there is none (26%),” Co/efficient concluded.

    Never heard of Co/efficient, but “Democrat Party” is a bit of a red flag. From mediabiasfactcheck:

    FiveThirtyEight, an expert on measuring and rating pollster performance, has evaluated 20 polls by co/efficient, earning 0.7 stars for accuracy, indicating they are Mixed Factual by MBFC’s criteria. They also conclude that their polling moderately favors the Right with a score of -2.7, which equates to a Right-Center polling bias. In general, co/efficient is considered moderately accurate and demonstrates a right-leaning bias in polling.