my garden of obsessions

[Image ID: A graph of Codywan works on AO3. The horizontal axis shows the years from 2009 to 2023, and the vertical axis shows the total number of Codywan works from 0 to 6000. From 2009-2015, there are nearly no Codywan works. From 2015-2019, there is a slow gradual growth to about 350 works. From 2019-2023, there is a huge growth of 1000-2000 works per year ending in nearly 6000 works in 2023. /End ID]

you can see the sudden growth of codywan in 2020 in the following graph:

[Image ID: A graph of Codywan works per year. The horizontal axis shows the years from 2009 to 2023, and the vertical axis shows the number of Codywan works posted. From 2009-2015, there are nearly no Codywan works. From 2016-2019, there are about 50-100 works posted each year. From 2020-2022, each year there is an increase in Codywan works posted from 900 to 1400 to 2000. In 2023, there are a little more than 2000 works posted*. /End ID]

*the number of codywan works posted in 2023 was extrapolated from the number of works posted this year so far. at the time of this post (2023/07/31), there have been 1179 codywan works posted in 2023

it's wild to think about how just a few years ago, what is now the 7th largest star wars ship was a rarepair. now there are redditors running into it and screenshots making the rounds on twitter. so uh congratulations codywans?

There are two kinds of crustaceans that are called "shrimp" that use concussive force via cavitation bubbles as a weapon.

These are Pistol Shrimp, a group of actual shrimp, and Mantis Shrimp, which are not actually shrimp but they are the ones you probably think of when you hear "murder shrimp" and "shrimp colors" (specifically the Peacock Mantis, bc there's a lot of species for both.)

I'm not annoying enough to grumble about the mantis being called a murder shrimp, because "murder stomatopod" is objectively a less fun combination of words.

HOWEVER!! People keep drawing mantis murder shrimp with pistol shrimp claws. They are not the same claws!! They are not used the same way!!! I will explain!!!!

Pistol shrimp: A number of shrimp species which have one big megachad claw and one dinky normal one.

The dactyl, or movable part of the large claw, is snapped shut with so much force that it shoots a cavitation bubble out with a very loud snap that can stun prey or scare off predators. It's very fucking cool.

As cool as that is, there is a reason that the mantis shrimp is what most people think of when they read "murder shrimp."

This is the Peacock Mantis Shrimp. Which is not a shrimp, but a stomatopod.

(In a lot of pictures it appears like they're staring intently at the camera. They probably are, because they are alarmingly intelligent.)

Note that it doesn't seem to have the big classic claws, and that's becaus it doesnt. Please stop drawing a shrimp claw on them. Their "claw" appendages are kept tucked up, praying mantis style.

These are a raptorial appendage that do have a sharp bit, but that sharp point has adapted to add support to the club end. They use the club to punch the shit out of things. They do punch so hard that they create a cavitation bubble, but the punch is the main deal.

If you look up a mantis shrimp puncher you may find this image, but they rarely if ever fold out fully past the punching part.

The second common mistake on mantis drawings is from mixing up two types of mantis shrimp. There are punchers, which includes the peacock mantis, and stabbers. You can guess what they do.

Fun fact! The peacock mantis is the largest puncher species, maxing out at 6-7 inches. Some of the stabber species, such as a zebra mantis can get 11 inches. This is because the peacock mantis is as big as it can get before it would shatter itself with the force of its punch!

This has been the marine biologist PSA.

@robowarrior-god this is good and valid to suggest!

but also. in my very unscientific, pure vibes, anthropomorphizing opinion. Peacock mantis shrimp would be totally honored to be called a "murder shrimp" and they super super deserve it.

idk about other mantis species (there are LOTS of various sizes) but having worked with a few peacock mantis' every single one has had a distinct "punch first, ask questions later" approach to life. It never seems aggressive or defensive, to be clear. It's like. Part of their curiosity. So many I've worked with will see a new thing - like say, a scrubber or hose or tongs - approach it, examine it with their antennae/normal legs.

and as part of their examination they just. fucking punch it. like part of their exam method is "what will happen if I Do Violence upon it?"

They have fish roommates!! It's very cute!!!

This is what's called a mutualistic relationship between various species of pistol shrimp and various species of watchman gobies. The shrimp is good at making a burrow and is good at snapping at things. The goby is not as good at burrow making, but it has much better eyesight and field of vision. When they team up the shrimp will often keep an antennae touching the goby whenever it (the shrimp) is out of the burrow so that it can be alerted more easily to danger.

This happens with multiple species of pistol (aka snapping shrimp) and watchman gobies, and often they'll pair up with a species of similar size. And lots of them do very well in home aquariums with other animals! They're very polite. Absolutely lovely.

I mean the line that I think of first is “A kid dies in this movie.”

Which I suspect to horror fans is shorthand for “The director of this movie subverts horror tropes (wherein kids are usually immune to the monster/slasher/source of terror) to make something that is deliberately shocking. Seeing a child character die in this story is not a happy thing or a good thing, but for a horror story emphasizes that nobody is immune to the source of the terror, which makes the horror more serious and scarier.”

Type: staged photo

Location: British Columbia, Canada

Notes: I have no idea what kind of plant this is, but at Reek scale it looks like an alien forest!

The berries produced by the C. canadensis are edible, but not tasty. The lycopodium is a particularly fascinating vascular plant more closely related to ferns than real bryophytes. Their spores are very oily, hydrophobic and quite flammable. They were historically used in stage theatre (dramatic “explosions”) and to create the flash (tiny explosions) in early photography. Today the spores are still used as a coating on pills/tablets to prevent them from sticking together. 💫

-CX 99008

🤓

They are all born to fight.

Case in point:

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ 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 research, 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.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

My favourite moment of the whole concert:

These tests get used for all kinds of stuff, and they get used by a lot of people who don't actually know what they're doing, how to interpret the data, or whether there's any real link between what they're measuring and what they're claiming. It's why you see shit going around like "men think of women as objects because when they look at a woman, the same part of their brain is active as when they look at a tool!" and "if you play Mozart for your baby for twenty minutes then their imagination improves, we imaged the brain to prove it!" and "we found where God is in the brain! Christians have more brain activity in this region than atheists!"

There are numerous problems with this kind of science, but the most pressing issue is the validity of the scans themselves. As I said, there's a fair bit of stats to turn an MRI image into 'brain activity', and then you do even more stats on that to get your results. Bennett et. al.'s work ran one of these sorts of experiments, with one difference -- they used a dead salmon instead of living human subjects. And they got positive results. The same sort of experiment, the same methodology, the same results that people were bandying about as positive results. According to the methodology in common use, dead salmon can distinguish human facial expressions. Meaning one of two things:

Dead salmon can recognise human facial expressions. OR

Everyone else's results are garbage also, none of you have data for any of this junk.

The problem is that the total probability of a false positive across the entire analysis accumulates with every single test. If you do 100 tests with α < .001, the false positive probability for each individual test is still lower than 0.1%, but the probability that at least one of the 100 tests is falsely positive jumps to 1-(1-0.001)¹⁰⁰ ≈ 0.095 ≈ 9.5%. And in voxel-based analyses, you don't do 100 tests – you usually do at least 500,000 if your resolution is relatively low, millions if your resolution is 1x1x1 mm. The probability for a false positive is so close to 100% that most calculators won't even bother displaying the result of 1-(1-0.001)⁵⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰ as anything other than " = 1". Obviously you will find correlates for emotion recognition in dead fish if the probability of at least one voxel with p < .001 (it'll usually be more than just one voxel) is practically 100% by design.

So modern studies started correcting for multiple comparisons. It's not that the entire methodology was thrown out of the window, it's that our nominal significance levels are far stricter now, so the probability of a false positive in the entire brain is in an acceptable range (usually the classic .05). But that still doesn't mean you can make conclusions like "The """""pleasure centers"""""" lights up when you eat chocolate, so chocolate is pleasurable". You can't just look into the literature, see that brain regions xyz are active in people who report feeling pleasure, and then go "oh, that means that you're always feeling pleasure if regions xyz are active, so my subjects were definitely feeling pleasure when that region lit up as they ate chocolate". And I don't mean "you can't make these conclusions because the literature still contains these old unreliable studies", I mean that this kind of reverse inference is literally not possible with standard univariate statistics.

The "pleasure centers", i.e. a region or a group of regions uniquely responsible for pleasure and nothing but pleasure, simply do not exist. If region x lights up during pleasurable experiences, that means it is involved in pleasure, but it'll be in a complex interplay with the rest of the brain to generate this feeling, and it will have other jobs than generating pleasure as well. Even if you know for a fact that pleasure is impossible without regions xyz (because people with lesions in these areas cannot feel pleasure anymore, or because a disturbance of the regions via transcranial magnetic/electric stimulation diminishes pleasure), that doesn't mean "you must be feeling pleasure if xyz are active". Other cognitive states could activate these brain regions as well. If you want to decode unknown cognitive states from MRI data rather than finding correlates for known cognitive states, you need statistical models that are a lot more complex (Bayesian rather than probabilistic frameworks, multivariate pattern analysis, usually machine learning, definitely some form of validation like cross-validation or two distinct datasets for training and testing your statistical model). And even then, it's iffy because validation can still not account for every single other cognitive state that could create this activity pattern. This point is really important to me because reverse inference is regularly used to hurt minorities, especially people with mental illness. Do not fucking believe any study that says "people with narcissistic personality disorder show less activity in The Caring About Other People Region™, so they're incapable of ever loving you".

The Elvenking and The Goblin King

I would reblog directly from you @lydiacroftart if you post this masterpiece also on tumblr.

Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.

But... Stochastic Parrots.

If we want to have nice things, decentralization is essential, and if we want to decentralize, we need to have our eyes on things that are beyond the scope of the current Big Tech narrative.

It was a revelation in my twenties to learn there was almost a whole hour more of it – and available online!