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skayafair · 3 months ago

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Let's talk Hilbert, Pt. 2

Now that I made it clear why I like the character so much even despite his atrocities, let's get back to the topic of why he's so compelling.

A lot of people seem to think Doctor Hilbert has abandoned his own "self", dedicated his life only to his work and his aim to save humanity (by creating a virus). That simply the fact that the only meaning he sees is in his work and not life is selfless.

Well.

To me he's selfish to no fucking end and this is FRUSTRATING because it fucked up his whole life, cut short a lot of other lives and was tragic overall for nothing. (Of course, the real reason for all this was trauma and since I don't think Wolf 359 universe is that different from ours, therapy wasn't really an option, which makes it all all the more tragic in the worst way possible - the one I hate the most, the "it didn't have to happen like this and could actually turn out REALLY good but the circumstances just didn't line up".)

Because it didn't have to be like this, shouldn't have been like this, and I hate Goddard Futuristics with passion for setting things up to feed to Hilbert's obsession in the worst way possible. I'll just copy my tags from that drafted post next because they sum it up well.

Hilbert is hellbent on his aim and has a tunnel vision, talking big about the science and logic when THIS ISN'T HOW SCIENCE IS DONE.

You don't just barrel into experiments without proper theoretical preparations! And no one in their sane mind would work on something so complex ALONE, at the very least to keep a critical mind. And this is what he failed at - he's not CRITICAL to his own work because it's so important to him. But if it IS so important he HAS to be critical and he isn't! He contradicts himself every step of the way and this drives me up the wall!

That's why I'm so hooked. This frustration - if only he could see past his own nose juuuust a little bit. What a life it might have been then.

This is just a matter of perspective. Traditionally it is understood between humans that the most value is attributed to the existence, "life", personality. But to some, their essence lives in other things still connected to them directly. To Hilbert, he amounted in his work, reaching his aim, not a personality or its existence in a human body. So in his case, threatening his research was the same as threatening a human life in normal circumstances, and threatening his life was pointless, it didn't hold any meaning on its own to him. If he could exist as an AI, he'd be the happiest probably - less restrictions in any way that matters. Ask autistic folks, a lot would agree.

However, despite all the claims of his logic and no feelings, this is always the fattest lie. Thing is, any human still has feelings. They may be almost muted, they may be warped, they may be silenced, but the fact still stands - they exist. They don't go away. You can't get rid of your "self", for better or for worse. And Hilbert toootally didn't.

He set an aim - chose a field, chose to follow this path, chose to set any attachments aside and treat people as expendable if the situation demanded so. All this was his choices, his personality. And the fact that he never doubted - no, forbade himself to doubt - his virus research and experiments? It wasn't selflessness, far from it. It was a very human, very selfish fear to be wrong. I mean this isn't suprpising - he isn't even a genius of a scientist, the plant monster and Decima failure considered. To learn that he wasted so much time, or wait, it's worse. If some 10, 20 years prior to this Haephestus mission he had a research team and they showed the virus idea wasn't warking, he could start all over again many times by now. He could have an actually working one. So the fear would be not only about time but opportunities... and in the end, it would be about his own self, his own life (which is his work), his whole essense just - wasted. Wrong. Annihilated.

Every creative person knows this fear. Every time you put a piece of yourself into a thing you create and put it out for people to see, you know this. That they can nulify it all, killing this piece of you. It's painful as is. Imagine putting your whole self into one and getting it trashed.

So no, Hilbert is not selfless. He's very much and selfishly afraid of death, only in his case the meaning of "death" is a bit different from a traditionally accepted one. And this fear has led him so, so far astray, turned his and many other lives into a tragedy.

I can't call him a coward - this is a very reasonable fear after all, and I admire his dignity and resolve. I don't justify his actions, he crossed too many lines which should have never been crossed. But it all just frustrates me so much! Because all of it could have been avoided! But the circumstances - it's always these damn circumstances.

Of course he agreed to work with Goddard Futuristics. They offered the funds and the equipment no one else did and no moral restrictions, but left out one of the most important resources - people to work with, the teammates. Hilbert isn't great with people, that much was obvious, so he wouldn't have found anyone on his own (or maybe it was even restricted). His failure was set up, which is to be expected - the podcast showed Cutter's way of handling things, choosing the ones driven into a corner and manipulating them in all details. Find a scientist obsessed with one aim and let him drown in it.

Hilbert even met people willing to throw him a life ring despite everything, but alas, it was too late. The circumstances, y'know. And he didn't even learn about that.

It's just so damn tragic when an overall okay man with a really good goal ventures off the wrong path because there was no right one in sight, and then it's just one thing pulling another in tow, and he drowns.

I've seen a few people mentioning how Hilbert just doesn't agree to be redeemed, and I think it's not just that. This road was simply closed to him and he saw that clearly. He couldn't walk it, not with the way he is... was. Too much has already been done and there was no turning back. His personality wouldn't have let him. Moreover... his redemption, for him, was probably his virus finally working, and nothing else. The rest just wasn't alowed to matter enough.

And he cared. Despite all the big talk about no attachments and no feelings, he tried to minimize the damage the best he could, but one person can only do so much. Too bad there weren't more to help.

And he even admitted to the fear of being alone. Of the door waiting for him in case he was the only one left again - this would mean he lost another crew, another group of people who shouldn't have died - not in general, not because of him. Another failed try, another number of years wasted. And loneliness, again. The doctor didn't engage in the crew's shenanigans just because. The feelings are there, hide however you want.

Eiffel and Lovelace gave him "Humanity 101", but I really don't think there was a need. Humanity is such a wide spectrum.

#wolf 359 #wolf 359 spoilers #alexander hilbert

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skyllion-uwu · 2 years ago

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Giving you a wild card for the ship bingo :3 Rant about whatever ship you want!

Oh boy okay so a ship that makes me super autistic is Batstrange (Batman and Hugo Strange) from. Batman. Focusing on comics here

This bingo board doesn't capture the nuances of how I ship it so. Rant it is! (he doesn't know what it unleashed)

To set the stage, Hugo Strange is a really old villain (in fact one of the oldest reoccurring villains), and while he started as scientist using science to do crimes, his main thing nowadays alternates between turning people into monsters and wanting to be Batman (why are you as a man wanting to be another man? Because you admire him? 🤨). I'll be focusing on the latter since that's my preferred version of him and more relevant.

Hugo's actually one of the first villains to discover that Batman is Bruce Wayne (appeal number one: the intimacy of a villain knowing who you are under the mask) and after discovering that he's like "Okay, I'm going to take Bruce Wayne's place and become Batman myself" and he becomes obsessed with replacing him and being Batman (appeal two: being a twisted reflection of the other; this is what I mean by aesthetically since they're the same but different).

He's also had a lot of queer coding over the years. I have no idea how much was intentional but: he whips Batman in his first appearance, sometimes dresses flamboyantly and colorfully, holds extreme admiration for Batman despite hating him, has an overall obsession with Bruce/Batman, wants to be Batman, put his finger in Bruce's mouth while fighting once, and just the entirety of Prey and Terror. He's obsessed with him to the point of dressing a sex mannequin up like him (yes, that's real. I wish she still existed in the present day)

This adds up to a really compelling picture where Hugo's motives are rooted in his internalized homophobia (appeal three: wow this guy has layers) and that along with him being a screwed up reflection of Batman makes me go fucking insane. I thought about marking "the impact/their story is more interesting than the ship itself" but the story and ship feel intertwined as opposed to separate but then again all ships feel like that to me

I don't want it canon in the sense of "these two should date because it's cute" but in the sense of "Yes this guy is canonically attracted to Batman and it's an influential part of his character"; sure I wouldn't complain if they did date (it wouldn't be cute but it'd be interesting) but its primary appeal to me is it can be used as a character exploration for Hugo and his repressed sexuality

To explain the superhell one, I'd send them there because I hate both of them (affectionately). Everything else is self explanatory, but I do wish there were more fics of them because there's only FOUR THINGS TOTAL ON AO3 and one is mistagged and has nothing to do with Batstrange, one has stuff I'm not interested in, and then I only liked one of the last two. I'm being forced to write the content I want to see 😔

Also I don't think it'd fix anything with them but it sure as hell would be funny if they did get together lol

TL;DR:

#asks for sky #nibwhipdragon #as you can tell im a bit autistic about them. i saw this ask and went autism mode for like the entire afternoon and night yesterday djsbisv #if youre interested in any extra details or anything do not hesitate to ask me i love talking about them

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ecto-american · 4 years ago

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Hey I wanted to fuck around and ramble about how I specifically headcanon and like to portray Jack and Maddie career-wise for my fanfics/personal take on the DP canon.

So to start; I headcanon Maddie as having a masters in electrical engineering and Jack as having a PhD in Thanatology (the scientific study of death and the practices associated with it), though he has a bachelor's degree in mortuary science while also having a funeral director’s license.

Why these? Because I absolutely see Maddie as the builder and thinker, the one who can build things, and Jack as the theorist who knows everything there is to know about ghosts. I picked Thanatology because it was as close as I could find to studying ghosts in an actual applied scientific sense, but I liked the mortuary science because it felt like a good accompaniment. I originally had mortuary sciences as his PhD (if you’ve heard me talk about this before), but I found out that I was actually a big dumb because in the US, you cannot get a PhD in mortuary sciences ihsofsa so I did research for an alternative.

So how do their jobs work? Well, I think it's approached in a very academic-y sense. While I kind of play with it loosely based on the specific fanfiction, I generally say that their job is a sorta combination of any number of the following:

Research grants to study ghosts, from both the government and just private companies

Writing books/textbooks revolved around ghosts (like ectobiology, ghost hunting, etc)

Contract ghost hunting work (like being paid to get rid of ghosts from private residents/buildings)

Income from ghost invention patents (think their Fenton weapons and things like the Fenton thermos)

They do non-ghost research and inventing as well (since they seem to custom build their own computers and other various technologies, and even just things like the Specter Speeder can be marketed to a non-ghost hunting audience like the military, and Jazz implied in GNO that Maddie has a lot of inventions outside of Jack that she works on)

Paid to teach/give lectures or make appearances at seminars, conventions or speak at certain events

Since Jack in this is licensed funeral director, he also occasionally works with a funeral home, and sometimes I even headcanon that Jack and Maddie used to own a funeral home before they got the grant/funding to build their ghost portal (which I touch on a little later!)

Jack teaches part time at a local community college/university, teaching normally one or two classes here but sometimes more, and sometimes even as Casper High teaching ghost 101 safety

Maddie is also a licensed electrician that does occasional work related to that

And this is kind of where you may be asking: wait, aren't they kind of a joke? Why are you giving them all this credit?

Well, honestly, I really like to think of the Fentons as being actually fairly well respected academically and by fellow ghost hunters. There's a lot of scientists that you'll basically learn are real Weirdos, but that doesn't distract from the fact that they are incredibly smart people who made amazing breakthroughs.

To me, I headcanon Jack as being autistic, and that ghosts and the paranormal is a special interest in which he's actually an incredibly well respected scientist, who has the most accurate (as far as the paranormal studies scientific community knows) information and knowledge about ghosts. He's been writing and studying it for twenty years, and arguably, essentially proved that ghosts exists because of his ghost portal and living in Amity Park, where ghost activity boomed. While there's canon evidence dedicated to him being made fun of in Million Dollar Ghost, I personally like to think of this as more of other ghost hunters just kind of seeing how Awkward and ridiculous he can be socially. We also hear about Danny and Jazz dunking on them, but I think this comes more from two teenagers being embarrassed about their oddball parents.

I definitely picture the Fentons as still being the town weirdos because well. You see their oddballness every day. But most ectobiologists would only see Jack when he's presenting and read his work, where I imagine he's presented as a bit less goofy and more serious. Because it's a chance for him to essentially ramble on about his special interest and area of expertise without interruption to an incredibly eager audience that's going to be asking questions and wanting his opinions. To me, Jack definitely seems like the person who you don't really think about how odd he kinda is (purely because of masking and it just not really coming up) until you're really with him 1v1 outside of these of these conventions/lectures/classroom environments.

I don’t totally see Maddie teaching, because while I’m definitely picturing her here as being a very smart mind that would likely also be a good teacher; the specific reasoning why I say Jack would be the ones that does the teaching part time is because it’s literally perfect for him. It's an excuse for him to trap 25+ people in a room on a regular basis to listen to him about ghosts. He'd absolutely just one of those easy A teachers, where if you just show up and listen to him babble about ghosts for 1-3 hours and turn in the homework (he gives no tests, midterm/finals or quizzes), you get your easy A. It’s the similar concept with the seminars and guest lecture things; Jack is just much more enthusiastic and would want that solo speaking time, and Maddie knows how much it means to him, so I feel like she would let him have this.

Maddie herself, I feel liker her heart rests more in just the general inventing and building side of it. While she has an interest in ghosts, this also seems to mostly enjoy the physical side of inventing. I say this mostly because, again, in GNO, Maddie has a whole bunch of inventions that she’s working on outside of things she builds/helps Jack build. To me, this straight up personal invention projects, even though they’re still ghost based, tells me that her heart and passion seems to lie within engineering and not necessarily too much in the way of ghost theory.

The way his and Maddie's relationship works to me is that Jack knows more of the ghost related information and he relays this to Maddie for her to build what they need. For example, he'll tell her “this is what the Ghost Zone is like, these are the dangers, this is what we need to survive, etc” and Maddie will have the knowledge to design the Specter Speeder, and they build it together with Maddie being the primary leader and troubleshooter.

However, Maddie has the education and license to do the electrical work and knows how to properly build and submit the patents. Meanwhile, Jack will eventually do all the research and write and publish the book detailing what they learned about the Ghost Zone. Repeat the process with ghost weapons and other such inventions.

I like to think that Jack and Maddie were essentially going through the process of getting the huge government grant they'd need to build the actual ghost portal, which took a lot of prior research, convincing, pleas for money and getting the city permission and code permits to get the money and permission building it, hence the like 20 year gap between the prototype portal and the final portal. Especially since they obviously started a family during that time too.

#danny phantom #headcanons #posts #my posts #jack fenton #maddie fenton

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phcking-detective · 5 years ago

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You know how Nines is a military grade android, and in the military soldiers are meant to be completely obedient to their CO. So what if the RK900 model had an imprinting protocol? Like them bonding deeply with the first human Officer that they see. It would ensure obedience and could start a reward system. Success means time with their human while failure means that they’re separated completely until they can prove themselves. And what if Gavin was the first human Nines saw after waking?

I kind of have an AU bouncing around in my head where Nines is human but was selected (along with Connor) to go through an experimental enhancement trial that fucked with his DNA. It either kills you, barely enhances you, or sometimes super rarely, like him Connor and Markus are the only successes, turns you into an incredibly Ultra Human

he’s separated from Connor because they’re identical twins and the scientists want to see how differently they react to the serum while totally separate, so no cross-contamination. Connor mostly develops mental-based powers, like telekinesis, reading people’s emotions, and even manipulating them. Nines mostly develops physical-based powers, like super healing, incredibly enhanced senses, extremely fast and strong. Markus develops all of that, but all of those powers at much lower levels. so like, he can do everything, but Connor and Nines are more specialized to their abilities specifically

Gavin is one of the rare kids that didn’t die from the experiments, but he barely (allegedly) was enhanced at all. since the government doesn’t want to waste money, and Gavin and Nines went through years of testing together as children, they decide to put Gavin to good use as Nines’s handler, especially since Nines doesn’t care for anyone else. the rumor is that while Connor’s serum enhanced all his emotions and empathy, Nines’s serum burned all the humanity right out of him. Gavin is the only person he’ll tolerate

(Nines is just autistic!! the serum didn’t do SHIT to his emotions or capacity to love, that’s the fucking childhood trauma of watching dozens of other kids die in tests or from the serum eating through their bodies, after being separated from your twin for the first time, forever)

the secret is that Gavin is ALSO an empath! his results might be more closely related to Markus, except weaker. the problem was that the scientists tested his healing and physical strength in comparison to NINES, the most successful case ever, and when Gavin didn’t measure up they were like “well that barely did anything >:/” and there’s not really any way to measure empath abilities, since that doesn’t have any physical, observable criteria. Connor and Markus’s abilities were both noted because they spoke up and demonstrated them in order to receive rewards and praise (bc they’re little kids and want love!!), plus their natural personalities made it obvious

but no one though to even ASK Gavin if he was experiencing empath signs, and since Connor and Markus were kept separate from the strength-based group Gavin and Nines were part of, he didn’t know anything about what those powers actually looked like himself. I mean, who would even consider that this horrible, angry little rat child would be an empath?? Connor and Markus are so nice and sweet!

so Gavin is drawn to Nines because he’s so quiet and his energy is so cold and forcibly stabilized that it’s a lot easier to deal with his own explosive emotions, like getting to stand in front of an air conditioner in the desert. and Nines bonds with Gavin because he needs someone after Connor is taken away and Gavin never forces him to talk and seems to understand him even when everyone else thinks he’s “creepy” or “stupid”

then Gavin becomes his handler and they’re a soldier-team together that works shockingly well, so the military’s attitude is basically “whatever gets these freaks results” so Gavin and Nines are allowed to always be together and work together, and Gavin handles all the bullshit politics going on in the military and making sure no one messes with Nines for being mostly non-verbal with zero social skills bc he’s literally never been allowed outside on his own before, and Nines physically protects Gavin on their missions

Gavin makes a really good leader because his low-key empath skills let him pick up what’s really going on, he can sense where Nines is all the time and how he’s feeling, and he can see the big picture while Nines tends to get bogged down in tiny details. meanwhile, Nines’s super senses make him incredibly physically observant, he has an eidetic memory, and he really is exponentially smarter than everyone else, people just underestimate him because he’s a big guy who can’t talk

(tw: mention of suicide below)

ugh, I really don’t have a plot or anything, just Gavin and Nines being super soldiers together and loving and protecting each other until they get a really fucked up order at some point. Nines can’t disobey orders due to the trauma-training / brainwashing since he was a child, and Gavin knows he CAN’T do this horrible thing, but also Nines will be ordered to kill him if he doesn’t and he can’t be responsible for “making” Nines do that bc he knows Nines would be devastated on the inside, so he decides to just do it himself so Nines doesn’t have to kill him, but Nines stops him like “You fool. I am so much smarter than the people giving orders and I have preconstructed 112 different ways to rules-lawyer my way out of these orders.” and then they burn down the whole program, and also Connor and Markus are there using their empath skills to help “deviate” the other soldiers / child-soldiers who have been brainwashed and they’re all finally reunited again

#reed900 #suicide #tw: suicide

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ltwinks · 4 years ago

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So today I fucked up, kinda, I guess.

I have ADHD. In a nutshell and in an extremely-super-simplified way of explaining it, ADHD is what happens when your brain doesn't process dopamine like a neurotypical brain does; it doesn't get enough or it isn't consistent enough, so it becomes an absolute dopamine fiend and constantly searches for sources of

The Good Chemical.

From what I understand, doctors and scientists and whatnot can't agree on what exactly the issue is (which is, I think, where the idea that it doesn't exist comes from?), but that isn't related to how I fucked up.

I have had it my whole life (as you do, you're born with it) but I wasn't diagnosed until I was 23. An adult.

Anybody who knows me in real life (what's up, Val!) can attest that I was a very bad student, but like, in a weird way. I always forgot to do the homework and usually forgot to do take-home projects, but my test scores were generally awesome. I had an incredibly difficult time paying attention, not because I was bored (I mean, 'bored' in the way neurotypical people are bored; in terms of ADHD-style boredom, I'm actually the CEO of the company), but because I could not force my brain to focus. I read other books and wrote things that were entirely unrelated to the class (people used to imitate how my seventh and eighth grade math teacher used to say "Put away anything that's not math!" in his loud, booming voice, and I was generally responsible for him saying that so often) and daydreamed and stared into space (which I now know is called d i s s o c i a t i n g). Basically, you know the teacher from Peanuts? The one whose dialogue is just a formless salad of sounds? That's what people sound like when my brain decides there's no dopamine to be found here, cue the Windows shutdown sound.

What I'm getting at here is that, looking back, it was pretty obvious, but only if you were looking for it. Like, I don't have The Zoomies (usually, but sometimes I will admit that I fancy a good sprint) or other hyperactive activities or behaviors, and that was the hallmark of ADHD back then. So if you were just looking for Zoomies And Other Extreme Sports, you wouldn't even see me.

Aaaaaaand it's pretty clear that I should have had an IEP. And then maybe school would have turned out better for me and not been so stressful that I (for legal reasons, this is a joke) wanted to un-alive myself by yeeting myself into traffic.

But what's in the past is in the past. I got my diagnosis now and, with a therapist, am putting together a toolbox of techniques and strategies to help me be A Functional Adult©.

And now we come to the part where I fucked up.

Because like any good ADHD story, it must be winding and long-winded and go off on at least two tangents that aren't totally necessary to the story but I'm not sure if they're not so here, have some exposition, I made it just for you and please help yourself to a second serving if you're still hungry.

I made the decision not to tell my mother that I have ADHD. I have three autistic siblings and another sibling diagnosed with ADHD, but he's the hyperactive type and I'm the inattentive type, so our symptoms present a little differently. Without a doubt, I know my mom would feel so guilty if she knew she missed the fact that I have ADHD and I struggled because of it.

So I figure, I can't change the past, I am becoming able to live with it, and making her feel guilty is cruel and unproductive when there's nothing she can do fix it.

A friend of mine just got diagnosed with autism and he has been posting about it on Facebook a lot since then. Today, he posted an apology, saying he realized how much he's been posting about it and that he'll rein it in. I posted a comment saying that I get it, I got a neurodivergent diagnosis as an adult too, and it's so clarifying to get answers and see the pieces fit together, and that it's healing to not have to wonder anymore why I am the way I am and that it's not my fault; my brain is wired a little differently.

THE PROBLEM IS that my friend is also my brother-in-law and we're friends on Facebook, and my mom is a mutual friend. She saw his post and my comment and commented "I'm so happy for both of you!"

And that's it. She hasn't called me or texted me, and that's weird behavior for her. Usually she would instantly call and confront me. I can only assume that she's freaking out.

Yeah, I fucked up. Thanks for reading.

#adhd #living that adhd life #i fucked up #oops im rambling

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thetaboochristian · 5 years ago

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Some Mother’s Day Musings

Ok, so this post is going to hit a few different angles, as it relates to motherhood. I’ll mention a little bit about my mom, but I’m also going to throw a couple other philosophical ideas in here too the most people might not think about when it comes to Mother’s Day.

I’m totally not going to mention anything about “Rebecca” in this post, nothing really positive or negative, even though yes technically I mean she is the mother of my son... she has a new husband to celebrate her in that regard and that’s fine. I still love my son “Aaron” and... “Rebecca” has still taught him some good things despite all of the conflict you’ve already heard about in my previous content, and I believe that my son will still learn some great things from her in the future.

Ok so moving on from that, I want to first say thanks to my mom for all of the crazy things she put up with as I was growing up and even during much of my 20′s, since I still had to be around her a lot for work even when I wasn’t living with her anymore.

Even though my mom and I have certainly had our rough patches, my relationship with her is WAY better than my relationship with my dad. With my Autistic brother requiring most of her attention growing up, and my dad not around or doing stuff with me that often, I spent most of my childhood alone. I mean yeah, my mom fed me and took care of my basic needs, but I spent most of my day playing or researching stuff on my own, or day dreaming... lots of day dreaming and philosophizing, even as a little kid.

You see, my mom feels kind of bad that she couldn’t spend more time with me as a kid, and while I understand it, it shaped me in a way that has helped me a great deal in my life as an adult. All of that time spent alone helped me become the intrepid researcher, scientist and philosopher that I am today. Because of that upbringing, I don’t mind being alone most of the time, and aside from my current desire for a wife (a good one this time around), I don’t have much NEED for friends, though I don’t mind socializing with others as long as they aren’t @$$holes and the socialization isn’t impeding on some big important project that I want to get done for my business or personal development.

So thanks mom, for loving me and supporting me through all of the awkward stages of my teens and early twenties as I figured out what I wanted to do and become in life. {*I’m writing this in her honor, but I sure as heck would never let her read this, or my blog as a whole that is at least, because I DEFINITELY don’t want her seeing some of the other things I’ve written about... they’re just not things that parent’s and their children want to hear or know about each other.*}

Ok so now, I’m going to get into something a little bit more abstract, regarding the mothering instinct and heart.

This is going to get a little spiritual here.

In Christianity, God is referred to as Heavenly Father, and if you believe the Bible is true, then you know that God Himself spoke that to people, told them that He was a He... however, God made human kind in God’s likeness... both the male and the female. So, in reality, while God may assume the form of a man/father, God also contains the feminine nature and mother-heart. God has an equal amount of masculine and feminine qualities inside of Him, in His heart and soul and mind.

Interestingly enough, though I’ve often times considered what I’m about to say next as a curse, I noticed something interesting about myself when I thought about this concept of God’s dual masculinity and femininity. So... I am a man who has a good amount of masculine nature inwardly and outwardly, but I also have... maybe a little bit more of a feminine nature within my heart than most men do. I’m not effeminate, as like a gay man would be, but I think I have an interesting blend of masculine and feminine traits that makes me much more like God and Jesus than I once thought.

You see, Astrologically speaking, I am an Aries/Pisces cusp... I’m a mix of the two signs based upon when I was born. Aries is the MOST Alpha (Type A) of all the signs, and Pisces is the MOST Beta (or Type B) of all the signs. Aries is the most Masculine in terms of personality and behavior, and Pisces is the most Feminine in terms of personality and behavior. I would say that if I had to really break it down, I’m 65% masculine and 35% feminine overall, in regards to my personality, world view and lifestyle.

When it comes to tackling tasks that need to get done, or trying to fix some urgent problem that could wreak havoc on me or my family if it isn’t resolved soon, I’m 100% Aries mode, I’m like a bulldozer with nitrous tanks and a turbo! I’m attacking that problem with everything I’ve got and people better stay the heck out of my way and not hinder me unnecessarily.

When it comes to socialization, I either have nothing to say or I’m almost too chatty. I never know which one is going to come out of me when I’m in a given situation. I guess I’m more feminine when it comes to having conversations with people.

When it comes to romance, I start off VERY Pisces-like (feminine), very slow and gentle and wanting to rub, cuddle, nuzzle and slow kisses, etc. Then, once that has started, I start turning more and more Aries-like again (masculine), increasing in intensity regarding the forcefulness of my touching, kissing, and expressing my burning flame through my voice and words. This is where I need a girlfriend/fiancé/wife who’s OK with being told blatantly X-Rated things that I want to do to her OR for her, once we’ve reached the point in our relationship where we’ve had the talk and know each other’s “Yes and No” list. If she can’t handle and enjoy dirty talk during the right times, she’s not the one for me. I need a woman who will let me fully express my sexual energy to her through words, and who will do the same to me.

Once it gets to sex (which is only within marriage according to the principles I practice), I will naturally repeat the cycle of Pisces-like first, and Aries-like a few minutes in, and I’ll alternate back and forth throughout the time together unless she asks specifically for one or the other primarily. It really though, boils down to “Vanilla” days and “Not-Very-Vanilla” days, regarding my desires and expressions of them within a marriage.

When it comes to managing a house hold, parenting, finances, etc, I’m very masculine. While I care about people’s feelings, they don’t come before the structure, cleanliness and integrity of our house, car, bank account, etc. I will NOT let my kid make huge messes, or I will ONLY let him make messes in designated places. I don’t mind saying NO to something that my kid would find fun if it can’t be done without damaging something in my house/car or wracking up a bunch of debt for something that’s not a necessity.

Finally, when it comes to movies, TV shows and books, I kind of rapidly cycle between Masculine and Feminine. Basically, anything in a story, show or movie that typically makes most women cry, it will make me cry too. I can’t help it. I really can't! Sometimes I’ve even gotten more teary eyed and emotional over something than my mom or one of my exes did. While that might be kind of embarrassing in one way, it shows what a genuinely caring and empathetic person I am. If I see something on TV about a little girl in a hospital bed and they bring in a therapy dog for her to pet and she get’s all excited and emotional about it, I’ll usually get a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes.

Same thing applies to tragic stuff in movies and shows. When there’s a 100 car pile up in the middle of a blizzard and people are trapped and freezing and rescuers have to go around and help people... that makes me tear up. When someones’ loved one is dying in a hospital bed... it makes me cry. I REALLY took it hard when I read 50 Shades of Grey and got to the end of the first book in the series and Christian Grey whipped Anastasia with a belt really hard over and over and she got so upset and cried and ran away and said to the effect of “WTF is wrong with you?! How can you enjoy doing something like this to a woman?!” I know that in the next story, Christian eventually learned his lesson and felt sorry and changed and became a better person, but my goodness... I understand LIGHT bondage/“Soft-Dom” and I’ve kinda grown into my interest in that (both to give and receive it in my next marriage if she’s willing), but I just can’t understand people who get pleasure out of INTENTIONALLY trying to inflict pain on other people. I guess I thought about it from the perspective of what I would or would never do to a woman who I loved. Arguments and hurt feelings are inevitable but physical harm... I could NEVER do.

What’s so interesting about my Masculine/Feminine balance is, if you read the descriptions for Aries signs and Pisces signs, I’m like a 95% accurate match to BOTH of them, even though they are pretty opposing. This strange combination probably played a large part in what made me into a “Sigma Male”.

You’ve heard of “Alpha Males” and “Beta Males”, “Alpha Females” and “Beta Females”, but a SIGMA is one who has a unique balance of both Alpha and Beta characteristics, but this doesn’t make them “average”... it makes them incredibly special and unique. Most people are only either Alpha OR Beta (though there are some other types that are less common, like Omegas who just sit around all day goofing off and have no ambition or drive for anything except video games, internet and junk food.)

But anyway, SIGMA men and women are like lone wolves, they have some big grand mission in life that they want to accomplish, and they care little for the rules of Social Hierarchy. They can be friends with pretty much any clique but are rarely close to anyone except a romantic partner. They find socialization a waste of time many times, and prefer to spend most of their time doing something productive or pleasurable. Sigmas are the Christian Grey’s of the real world, in the sense that they prefer to be rich, mostly isolated people who are ABLE to socialize and be a people person but like to do so only when it fits their schedule. Minus the abuse part, I saw A LOT of similarities between Christian Grey and myself when it comes to how I would structure and manage my life if I had a lot of money. I’d be just like him, just with Christian moral values and no sadomasochism. If you look at all the other personality traits and world views, etc that he has, it’s probably 75-80% similarity to my thoughts and feelings and interests and world views.

While I couldn’t find any lists of famous people who are Sigmas, I did find some links to webpages that explain Sigma’s in more detail. Even if it says it applies to Males, the characteristics pretty well cross over to women too, and I know because I used to date a Sigma girl, and she was the best girlfriend I ever had, even though we eventually broke up.

Here are the links:

https://herway.net/life/11-traits-define-sigma-male/

https://hackspirit.com/sigma-male-11-things-they-do-and-how-you-can-become-one-too/

https://www.zoosk.com/date-mix/dating-advice/sigma-male/

https://www.aconsciousrethink.com/9304/sigma-males/

SO... in closing...

What does all this Sigma stuff have to do with Mother’s Day and mothering nature? Well... I believe that Sigma men (straight ones that is) have a particularly high amount of “mothering instinct” without being effeminate or seeming devoid of masculinity. I believe that Sigma men and women both exhibit the most “God-like” or “Christ-like” nature just how they naturally are. I believe that it’s probably fair to say that GOD is probably a Sigma... if He had to be classified as having one specific personality type. God is the epitome of Masculinity AND Femininity (in all of their good ways), and I think that Sigma men and women are also like that... the best balance of Masculine and Feminine in one being.

Come to think of it, my mom seems an awful lot like a Sigma to me, now that I think about it... and while my dad is a little bit more “Beta”, he also has a good bit of “Alpha” traits too, so when I consider what both my mom and dad are like, maybe that’s where I got my Sigma traits from... but more so from my mom... I’m sure.

My dad for the most part taught me what I did NOT want to do or be like, and my mom for the most part taught me what I DID want to be like. Come to think of it, now looking back I think that my mom’s dad (who recently passed) seemed a lot like a Sigma male too. Maybe that’s where my mom got her’s from. My grandpa on my mom’s side taught her how to be a good hearted person and how to not take advantage of people or be greedy. He taught her how to be financially responsible and care for those in need who can’t help themselves. While some of my mom’s siblings may have not adopted all of those good life lessons and characteristics, thank God that my mom did.

While I may not have much good to say about my Dad or most of the people on his side of the family, I am sure thankful to have had all of the good lessons, teachings, foundation and love that came from my mom’s side of the family, which my mom passed on to me and lavished upon me, even when nobody else had my back.

:) <3

Until next time, take care and God Bless!

“Luke Davidson” - Author of The Taboo Christian book and blog

#mother's day #mother #feminine #masculine #femininity #masculinity #family #love #sigma #beta #alpha #aries #pisces #personality type #God #Jesus Christ

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a-soft-nerdy-gal · 5 years ago

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Okay here’s my “tannis is evil” rant

Tannis has never in the series done anything evil or manipulative that wasn’t in the name of science, she has audio logs telling you about her life and how hard it was for her to move out of her home. while she may complain a lot and seems a bit crazy or mean you have to keep in mind that she as an autist is in a world that would be a nightmare for her, there isn’t a quiet place to clear your head and there is a total chaos all around. in the world of borderlands everyone already is already bit over the top and crazy so if the only autistic character wasn’t going to be a bit of a over-exadurated portrayal of autism then they wouldn’t do it justice (in my opinion) so the things she says about science and testing make total sense. And the worst thing i found online was someone saying “she is way too friendly for a true autistic” I HAVE AUTISM- I HAVE FRIENDS- WE’RE NOT ROBOTS- the only thing you guys really have on her is the easter egg in battleborn but “not what she seems” can mean MANY THING not just that she’s evil! Because even when you look at how they portray her in borderlands 1 and 2 you can see that they never teased something like that or made a good setup for her to become evil. I mean tannis inly talks about performing experiments while zed actually does them on humans and animals. And no one is calling him evil.

And while y’all are making the odd woman who is just trying her best and who got tortured out to be a villain no one is seeing the possibility that there could be a character who is WAY more likely to be a villain. Moxxi

Moxxi has dated many powerful people and knows how they workd. She was the one who told markus “if you’re strong look fat, if you’re smart look sexy” so we know she is smarter than she looks. She literally threatens the player with DEATH in the pre sequel if you tell people that she works with machines. She has run multiple fighting rings. There are more points of evidence but there is one point that the pre sequel kind of glossed over but which is VERY important.

Jack was a good person, he wanted to save the world, and then moxxi betrayed him and that was the one of the BIGGEST tipping point for jack. But how did moxxi know that he was going to be evil? He was a little crazy to jet the scientists into space but he believed that one of them was a traitor and had been bettayed by one of his friends that same day, of course he is going to be paranoid and take harsh actions. So how did moxxi know? Who did she get the information from? Did she know? Or did she just use the vault hunters from bl1 to betray jack because it would work out better for her? There is no way that she can know about the treasure in the vault or what jack may do with it.

Furthermore she isn’t even nice to her own children, telling ellie to loose weight and go work for her. Not telling scooter that she fucked a bandit which causes scooter to send mercenaries after the guy thinking he raped his mother YES SHE LIED ABOUT BEING RAPED- HOW DO YOU GUYS NOT SEE THAT SHE IS A MANIPULATIVE EVIL PERSON-

She even dated people that where evil as she was still dating them like motor mama. She doesn’t even give explications for the things she does. We don’t know much about her and she has never put her life in danger in purpose, never leaving her bar in bl 2 and the pre sequel. She lets the vault hunters do all her dirty work and lets them think they’re doing the right thing.

So long story short: tannis is just an autist who is in a world that would be a nightmare for any autist and moxxi is the actual villain if you look into her actions.

#borderlands #tannis #moxxi #borderlands 3 #BL3 #theory

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phantom-le6 · 4 years ago

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Episode Reviews - Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 5 (1 of 6)

Continuing my reviews of the voyages of Picard’s Enterprise, here’s my first round of reviews for season 5 of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Episode 1: Redemption (Part 2)

Plot (as adapted from Wikipedia):

Captain Picard is aware that while he cannot get involved in the Klingon civil war, the Romulans will likely see it as an opportunity to gain an advantage over the Federation. He is put in charge of a fleet of ships to create a blockade between the Klingon and Romulan border. Many of the Enterprise crew are assigned temporary command of severely undermanned ships. Picard initially does not assign Lt. Commander Data command of a ship, but after Data questions him about the omission, he gives him the Sutherland. Data’s command of the Sutherland is made somewhat difficult by Lt. Comm. Hobson, who initially seeks transfer because he doesn’t think an android will make a good captain, and when refused is disruptive and disparaging of Data’s command.

Picard arranges the fleet to form a detection network that should detect any cloaked ships that pass the blockade. Commander Sela, a Romulan resembling the late Natasha Yar, orders her scientists to find a way to disable the network, but also contacts the Enterprise. Sela reveals that she is the daughter of Tasha Yar, who returned to the past on the Enterprise-C 24 years earlier (as seen in the episode "Yesterday's Enterprise"). Sela warns that if Starfleet does not break off the blockade in 20 hours, their fleet will be attacked.

Meanwhile, Worf is kidnapped by the Duras sisters, who attempt to seduce him to join their cause by marrying B'Etor. Worf declines, stating that honour would be subverted and that the Klingon Empire would quickly fall to Romulan control. Seeing the cause is defeated, Sela orders Worf to be turned over to the Romulan guard.

Picard urges Gowron to attack the Duras forces, who are running low on supplies; this will force the Romulans to enter the detection network and be caught by Starfleet. Gowron agrees, knowing that association with the Romulans will destroy the Duras family's support and end the civil war. The Duras sisters demand the Romulans bring supplies. Sela's scientists find they can disrupt part of the network by sending out an energy burst. Sela initiates the plan, selecting the Sutherland as the target. When the network destabilizes, Picard orders the fleet to retreat and reform the net, but Data observes that he can trace the source of the disruption. He orders the firing of torpedoes at specific coordinates, revealing Romulan ships. The convoy retreats, and the Duras sisters are forced to end the civil war. Worf breaks free in time to secure Toral, but the Duras sisters escape.

Gowron gives Worf the opportunity to kill Toral by Rite of Vengeance, but he declines to do so because Toral was just a puppet of his aunts. He spares Toral's life and requests Picard to reinstate him into Starfleet.

Review:

This is a decent episode for the season to start off on, and certainly it manages to achieve the main function of the second part in a two-part story, namely bringing the part 1 story to a conclusion. However, it struggles with the weight of additional plots and a certain lack of consistency with part 1. Right out of the gate, Picard is talking about setting up a blockade on the Klingon-Romulan border, and two ideas occur to me. The first is that this is a form of interfering in the affairs of other cultures, highlighting yet again the problem illustrated by part 1 with Trek’s general inconsistency with the prime directive. Secondly, the detection grid set up between the ships can only cover so much space, and there’s nothing to say why the Romulans can’t just fly a circuitous course around the blockade. It’s not like this is Leonidas putting his 300 Spartans at the hot gates to stop Xerxes. This is Trump proposing a wall which boats can sail round and planes can fly over; the Romulans didn’t have to cross through the detection grid at all.

Leaving aside this and the inconsistencies of Trek time-travel that bring about Commander Sela, not to mention the fact that a true daughter of Tasha and anyone would not look like Tasha Yar with a partial Romulan make-up job (they should look like a mix of Yar and whoever the dad was), the episode does do well wrapping things up for Worf, as well as giving Data a great little storyline of his own. In fact, his efforts to deal with the bigoted Hobson while assuming command of the Sutherland is a better story for him than his last solo episode ‘In Theory’. It’s something of a shame it’s mixed in with Picard’s inconsistency on the matter of the prime directive and the Worf plot, which loses a little bit of its impressiveness when you see how anarchic and ill-disciplined the Klingons can be. No wonder events ultimately turn out as they do when Deep Space Nine picked up Worf and all things Klingon after TNG came to an end.

Overall, it’s a decent episode, but as I say, full of quite a few flaws. For me, it only scores 6 out of 10.

Episode 2: Darmok

Plot (as adapted from Wikipedia):

The Enterprise makes contact with a Tamarian ship in orbit around the planet El-Adrel. The Tamarians had been previously contacted by the Federation, but could not be understood; although the universal translator can translate their words, they communicate by using brief allusions to their history and mythology to convey thoughts and intentions. Likewise, the Tamarians cannot understand Picard's straightforward use of language.

The Tamarian captain, Dathon, has himself and Captain Picard transported to the planet's surface. The Tamarians then cast a scattering field that blocks further transporter use. Dathon utters the phrase "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" and tosses Picard a dagger; Picard assumes this is an attempt to engage him in battle and refuses, and each captain makes their own fire as night falls. The next morning, Dathon comes running and Picard realizes there is a hostile predator in the area. Picard begins to understand the Tamarians' jargon when he recognizes one allegory as a tactic to fight the beast. The two captains attempt to battle the beast together, but the Enterprise's unsuccessful attempt to beam up Picard prevents him from participating at a crucial moment. Dathon is severely wounded.

On the Enterprise, Commander Riker and the crew struggle to understand the aliens' language. They make several efforts to rescue the Captain, all foiled by the Tamarians. While tending to Dathon's wounds, Picard slowly deduces that Darmok and Jalad were warriors who met on the island of Tanagra and were forced to unite against a dangerous beast there, becoming friends in the process. Dathon tried to recreate this event with Picard, hoping to forge a friendship through shared adversity. Picard recounts for Dathon the Epic of Gilgamesh, a story that parallels the allegory of Darmok and Jalad. Dathon seems to understand the story but succumbs to his injuries.

The Enterprise fires on the Tamarian ship, disabling the scattering field, and beams up Picard. A battle begins, but just when mutual destruction seems certain, Picard enters the bridge and uses his newfound knowledge to communicate with the Tamarians. The Tamarians joyously perceive that Picard's eyes have been opened. Picard offers them Dathon's diary and dagger. The Tamarians tell him to keep the dagger as a gift, and record the incident as "Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel"; a new phrase in their language.

Picard later reads the Homeric Hymns, explaining to Riker that studying their own mythology may help them relate to the Tamarians. He notes that Dathon sacrificed himself in the hope of communication, and wonders if he would have done the same.

Review:

Much like ‘Yesterday’s Enterprise’, this is an episode that seems to have wowed the main fanbase and critics alike, and apparently, it’s had a major impact beyond even that. The episode is used by language courses at American universities to illustrate certain aspects about language, and Picard’s citation of the tale of Gilgamesh caused a surge in that tale’s popularity. However, much like ‘Yesterday’s Enterprise’, I think the episode is over-rated. As an autistic person, I can’t stand people not being anything less than clear, straight-forward and logical in trying to tell me something, so the idea of a race that communicates exclusively through metaphor and allegory is my idea of a nightmare. As such, this episode is my idea of a terrible story.

Granted, the premise is interesting, but I just feel they could have the idea better. Why not just have Picard stranded with an alien with his comm. badge, and the universal translator therein, shot to hell? That way, you’d still have the language struggle, but minus the idea of a language that was all alien cultural references with no guide to what they referred to. If I was trying to teach an alien English, I sure as hell wouldn’t be using references to Star Trek, Marvel comics, DC Comics or anything else I’m into to teach them. I’d teach them the actual words and their meanings, because only then could they understand those stories, which in turn would allow any references to make sense. It’s no wonder a phaser battle between the two ships broke out; personally, if I’d been in Riker’s shoes, I’d have been going down that route far earlier out of sheer frustration.

For me, the idea that any race would communicate like this is frankly unconvincing, just because there is no logic and common sense to a race communicating solely in metaphor. It would be like if human societies communicated entirely in slang without understanding the proper English language to which all the slang terms actually refer. To my mind, the only logical course for any language is to avoid a total metaphor/allegory/slang base and, in time, to keep the use of such things to a minimum or else eliminate them to avoid unnecessary confusion and understanding. For me, this episode is only worth 4 out of 10 (it loses a lot of points over just how much I can’t stand the idea of a purely metaphorical language).

Episode 3: Ensign Ro

Plot (as adapted from Wikipedia):

The Solarion IV settlement is destroyed, and the Bajorans supposedly claim responsibility. Their homeworld Bajor was annexed by the Cardassians generations ago, and the Bajorans have been refugees ever since, with some apparently using terrorism to draw attention from the United Federation of Planets. Captain Picard meets with Admiral Kennelly, who tells him that the Bajoran responsible is a terrorist named Orta. Picard's mission is to find Orta, and to send him back to the Bajoran settlement camps where he can do less damage. Kennelly assigns a controversial person to assist Picard: Starfleet Ensign Ro Laren, a Bajoran whose reputation is very poor and who the admiral has had to release from prison following a court martial. Kennelly insists she can help, and she comes aboard the Enterprise.

Despite a difficult attitude, Ro works with the crew to locate Orta. Ultimately, they head to the third moon Vallor I where they believe he is based. Meanwhile, Ro receives a secret communication from Admiral Kennelly and tells him all is going according to plan. The next day, the away team prepares to beam down, but discover Ensign Ro had preempted them by beaming down six hours earlier. They follow her, and are promptly captured by Orta and his people. Orta, who was disfigured by Cardassian torture, tells them that he felt abducting them was necessary, and says that the Bajorans were not responsible for the attack. Picard finds himself inclined to believe Orta, but confines Ro to quarters for her unauthorized beam down. Guinan, who has befriended Ro, goes to see her, and after learning there is more to what is going on that meets the eye, convinces her to talk to Picard. Ro reveals that she is on a secret mission by Kennelly to offer Orta Federation weapons in exchange for returning to the camps. Given her experiences, she no longer knows what to do or whom to trust. Picard decides that the best course might be to actually take Orta back to the camps, and see what occurs.

However, as the Enterprise escorts a Bajoran cruiser to the camp, two Cardassian ships cross the border and demand the Enterprise leave the ship to them. Picard initially refuses, and the Cardassians give him an hour to reconsider. Far from helping, Kennelly insists that the Cardassian treaty is the more important issue and orders Picard to withdraw. Picard withdraws, and the Bajoran cruiser is destroyed. However, suspecting a chain of events like this might occur, Picard had ensured no one was aboard, and had the ship operated remotely. Picard informs Kennelly that the Bajoran ships are so old and obsolete that they were incapable of even reaching the Solarion IV settlement, much less attacking it, and suggests that the Cardassians staged everything, hoping to find someone like Kennelly, naive enough to help them solve their problems. With the mystery solved and the mission accomplished, Ro accepts Picard's offer to remain in Starfleet and join the Enterprise crew.

Review:

After a couple of lack-lustre opening episodes, season 5 really manages to return to the higher quality that TNG, and indeed all of Trek, is capable of on this one. Not only do we get our introduction to the Bajorans, who become a major component in the eventual Deep Space Nine spin-off, and a repeat appearance by the Cardassians (the last wearing their pre-DS9 uniforms, if I understand Memory Alpha’s notes on this episode correctly), but we also get a fresh secondary recurring character. Actress Michelle Forbes, who initially guest-starred in ‘Half a Life’ in TNG’s previous season, takes up the role of Bajoran Ensign Ro Laren, a character whose impact served to inspire the creations of Major Kira in DS9 and B’Elanna Torres in Voyager. Both characters stem from the same character mould as Ro, and largely because Forbes was unavailable to reprise this role in those shows. As a result, she has ended up remaining a dedicated TNG character.

There’s a lot of reasons why Ro is such a great character. First, she is very much not like the rest of the TNG main cast and recurring guest crew in that she is highly assertive and at times confrontational. In other shows, that can backfire (I believe that’s part of why CSI Riley Adams, played by Lauren Lee Smith, only lasted for one season of CSI’s original Vegas-based show), but in Trek it can be a huge asset in breaking away from any sense that Trek is overly, even unrealistically, utopian. She also brings home that even in the 24th century, we’ve not really solved issues of displacement and terrorism; they’ve just migrated out into the stars, especially when we hide behind treaties and non-interference policies.

Next, Ro also brings out a bit more moral courage in Picard, at least in this episode. He’s far more willing to help and do the right thing in the end, and I think that’s in part down to dealing with Ro. However, what really makes you like Ro is she has Guinan’s seal of approval. Whatever you might think of the character before that moment where Guinan tells Picard that Ro is her friend, that statement is a huge endorsement given the unique and mysterious relationship that exists between Picard and Guinan, and from that Ro in turn earns a lot of credibility with the audience.

If I have any quibble with this episode, it’s how harshly Riker acts towards her over Star Fleet dress code just to make a point, considering both the exceptions made for Worf and Troi and the fact we’re given no idea what Ro has actually done in the past. For all we know, Ro did the right thing and got shafted, or did the wrong thing with the best of intentions, but apparently neither this episode nor any others explain what actually happened. It was left to some tie-in comic, and to my mind that’s a stupid error in judgement. Considering how much Ro’s past was impacting her initial treatment by various crew members, it should have been covered in more detail in this episode or a follow-up episode. Tie-in media is for isolated stories of relatively little significance, whereas Ro’s back story is implied to have great significance here. Overall, I give this episode 9 out of 10.

Episode 4: Silicon Avatar

Plot (as adapted from Wikipedia):

Commander Riker, Lt. Commander Data, and Dr Crusher are visiting the Melona IV colony when the Crystalline Entity appears and begins tearing up the planetary surface. Although the rapid evacuation into the caves is mostly successful, two of the colonists (including one in whom Riker expressed a possible romantic interest) die in the onslaught. The Enterprise comes to the survivors' aid and frees them after the Entity leaves.

The Enterprise sets out in pursuit of the Entity, with the help of Dr Kila Marr, who is a xenobiologist and expert on the creature. Marr does not trust Data, as she is aware that Data's brother Lore has assisted the Entity in the past. Captain Picard hopes to challenge this perception by having Data work closely with Doctor Marr, in spite of Counsellor Troi's worry that his suggestion will not suffice Doctor Marr's feelings of animosity.

While working around the caves of Melona IV, Marr continues to show animosity towards Data. Slightly confused, Data tries to convince that he is nothing like Lore and has no affiliation with the Entity whatsoever. When he asks her what makes her think he had anything to do with the Entity, Marr reveals the source of her prejudice: her 16-year-old son was killed by the Entity at Omicron Theta, which was also Data's homeworld. She even threatens to have Data dismantled piece by piece if she finds out that he is involved with the Entity as she suspects him to be. Picard tells Marr that he does not intend to kill the Entity without first attempting to communicate with it. Marr is sceptical of this approach, but she and Data work out a method for talking to the Entity.

As Dr Marr works with Data, she comes to understand that Data and Lore are quite different androids, recognizing Data's stoic yet virtuous personality and high intellect. During their research, Marr discovers Data is programmed with the memories and experiences of the Omicron Theta colonists, including those of her dead son, Raymond "Renny". Data tells her about how much her son admired her work as a scientist. At Marr's request, Data reads extracts from her son's journals, in the teenager's voice, causing the emotionally moved woman to cry over hearing the sound of her dead son's voice.

The Enterprise locates the Entity and begins sending a series of graviton pulses toward it. The creature responds, and emits a signal pattern which is a clear sign of intelligence. Picard is elated at a potential first contact, but Marr alters the pulse to emit gravitons with a rapidly increasing amplitude, and locks the program so it cannot be stopped as her desire for vengeance wins out. The amplitude reaches a level of resonance where the Entity is shattered. Marr addresses Data as though he is her son, telling him that she destroyed the entity for him.

Having finally taken her long-awaited revenge, but sacrificing her career in the process, Marr is near collapse. A disgusted Picard has Data escort Marr back to her quarters. In her quarters, Marr asks Data how long will he function, and he replies that he was programmed to function for an eternity. Relieved, Marr tells Data that as long as he functions, her son is alive. Speaking to him as if he were her son, Dr Marr pleads to Data that let "Renny" know that she destroyed the Entity for him, in the hopes that her deed will give her son's spirit a sense of peace. However, Data informs her that her son would not have approved of her destroying the Entity, stating that he loved her work as a scientist, and that in her grief over his death, she destroyed that. He states that he cannot help her, leaving Dr Marr struggling to deal with Data’s response.

Review:

For fans of the Trek films who enjoyed the Moby Dick parallels in TNG’s ‘First Contact’ film, this episode is another example of the Next Gen crew getting to explore that kind of narrative, only with a guest character taking on the role of Captain Ahab against the Crystalline Entity acting as the white whale. It’s an interesting premise to explore, as is Data being able access the memories and writings of the colonists from his home planet. It’s an interesting aspect of Data that is seldom explored, and it’s good to see that getting a look in for once.

However, for me this episode is let down by Picard saying ‘we’re not going out to kill this thing, let’s see if it can be communicated with’. Um, Picard? Lore communicated with the damn thing twice; once to destroy the Omicron Theta colony and once to try and destroy the Enterprise. That means that not only has it been proven by the anti-Data that this thing can be communicated with, but that it is not ‘simply feeding’ as if the damn thing’s a force of nature. Forces of nature don’t communicate with androids, unless this is somehow the Trek equivalent to Marvel’s Galactus and Lore was playing herald (and frankly I doubt that scenario). It’s yet another example of a Trek episode undone by a combination of inattention to continuity and a slavish devotion to the oft-unrealistic idealism of Roddenberry. As a result, I give it only 6 out of 10; if the communication angle had been more about learning how Lore did it and less an attempt to discover the already discovered, it might have earned more.

Episode 5: Disaster

Plot (as adapted from Wikipedia):

The crew of the Enterprise are undertaking routine tasks when suddenly the ship is struck by some outside force, rendering much of it inoperable and many of the crew isolated without communication to other sections. Later the crew discovers the collision was with a fragment of a quantum filament, and after effecting basic repairs, set course back to the nearest starbase for a full overhaul.

Several different sub-plots are followed among the various crew members:

The bridge is manned by Counsellor Troi, the most senior officer on the bridge at the time of the incident with the rank of Lt. Commander, accompanied by Chief O'Brien and Ensign Ro. They soon establish that Lt. Monroe died in the incident. They find that the anti-matter containment field in Engineering is rapidly fading. Ro suggests that they split the drive section of the Enterprise off to save those in the saucer section, but O'Brien considers this cold-blooded and Troi rules against it. Instead, she suggests a plan to divert a supply of their minimal power reserves to Engineering to the appropriate panel, hoping that someone there would rectify the situation. This is later done by Commander Riker and Lt. Commander Data. Ro apologizes for considering such a hasty action while Troi acknowledges Ro could have easily been correct.

Riker and Data are in Ten Forward along with Lt Worf and a pregnant Keiko O'Brien at the time of the disaster. With many crewmembers injured, Data assigns Ten Forward as a triage area with Worf and Keiko tending to the wounded. Riker and Data realize that without functioning turbolifts, it would be faster to travel through the Jefferies tubes to reach Engineering in order to regain control of the ship rather than to try to make it to the bridge. In Engineering, they find that the computer remains offline and Data offers to use his own positronic brain to gain basic control of ship systems. Riker discovers the operating panel that indicates the containment field failure, and he and Data quickly set up the proper connections to restore it until regular computer operation is restored.

Captain Picard is giving a guided tour of the ship to three children that won a science fair, a task he has not been looking forward to as he is uncomfortable around children. They are aboard the turbolift when the accident occurs and Picard fractures his ankle from the sudden stop. He calms the children down, and to boost their morale, assigns them honorary command roles. With their spirits renewed, Picard and the children start to climb out of the turbolift and up the shaft until they are able to access the lift doors on another floor and climb out safely. Picard comes to appreciate the children and offers to give them another tour once the situation has been resolved.

Dr Crusher and Lt. Commander La Forge are in a cargo bay taking inventory while Crusher tries to encourage La Forge into performing a song from ‘The Pirates of Penzance’. When the disaster strikes, they are trapped in the bay and find that a plasma fire has erupted in a nearby panel; it is not only letting off potentially lethal radiation affecting them, but also destabilizing some nearby chemical canisters, risking an explosion. They come up with a plan to depressurize the bay to douse the fire due to lack of oxygen and remove the destabilizing chemicals during the depressurization. They safely hold on during this process and reseal the bay with air.

In Ten Forward as they tend to patients, Keiko goes into labour, forcing Worf to help her deliver her child despite having only basic emergency medical training. Though the delivery is tense, Keiko's child, Molly, is delivered safely.

Review:

For me, this episode doesn’t live up to its title in that it’s, well, not a disaster. Out of this homage to the disaster film concept, we get some decent character development for Picard (overcoming his discomfort around children), Troi (her first time assuming command of the Enterprise, though ultimately not her last) and Worf (nothing like making a Klingon play mid-wife to expand him beyond his warrior archetype). DS9 fans would do well to watch this episode just to see the birth of Molly O’Brien and understand Worf’s reaction when he learns of Keiko’s second pregnancy. It’s a fun break from the standard TNG episode as well, its originality and the above instances of character development compensating well for any lack of issues to be explored. All in all, I give the episode top marks; 10 out of 10.

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sillyanimegamingroad · 4 years ago

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How much information can our brain store?

In 2016, Professor José A. Esteban gave the conference “ What are memories made of? And where are they kept? ”At the Achucarro Forum of the Basque Center for Neuroscience. In it, the CSIC biologist and researcher spoke about synaptic plasticity and the development of therapeutic applications for diseases such as Alzheimer’s. It has always been a curiosity that how much information can our brain store?

Thinking about the content of the talk, the first thing that came to mind were a couple of recent articles. On the one hand, the tweet from Vala Afshar, Chief Digital Evangelist at Salesforce.com, commenting on the Constellation Research study on the importance of Big Data, Analytics and Data Mining (again) at this moment in history in which 90% of the data in the world was created in the last year.

On the other hand, the creation by scientists from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom of a new data format that, by storing information in crystal nanostructures, has achieved an expected life time of 13.8 billion years of expected survival for said support. You don’t know where to store 360 terabytes of data and you may have to put it at 190º of temperature? No problem! We have the perfect hard drive for you thanks to a scientifically proven 5D storage technique. So I got to thinking, how much information can we remember? Will it be more or less than what can be generated in a lifetime? And what about the one that has been generated throughout history?

The information peta

Information peta of our brain

To estimate how much information could be generated, nothing better to do this than to look for the leaders in information processing. In 2011 Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, the company that wants to order the world’s information to make it accessible, said that humanity generated 5 exabytes of unique information every two days on the Internet .

What is that? Bernardo Hernández pointed out in these parts that it is as much information as from the beginning of history until 2003, all together, at the same time, without anesthesia. As there were people who did not quite square the figure, Science magazine decided to recalculate, concluding that we have generated about 600 exabytes up to 2011. And how much is an exabyte? Much.

1000 kilobytes = 1 Megabyte 1000 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte 1000 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte 1000 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte 1000 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte 1000 Exabytes = 1 Zettabyte 1000 Zettabytes = 1 Yottabyte 1000 Yottabytes = 1 Bronobyte 1000 Bronobyte = 1 Geopbyte

So of course, a skill that is becoming essential to survive in this modern environment is a hypertrophied memory, whatever they say. Therefore I needed to have an idea of our maximum capacity to memorize in order to determine if everything we generate fits or not.

Robert Birge , a professor and researcher at the University of Connecticut who analyzed the storage capacity of proteins, estimated it to be between 1 and 10 Terabytes in 1996, assuming that a neuron was a bit. Closer in time, in 2008, he considered in a radio interview that it could actually be something closer to 30 or 40 Terabytes , given that the brain does not store information in the same way as a computer. In any case, it seems insufficient to reach our goal, so a solution must be found. On the one hand, it is hopeful to remember that the brain forgets things, leaving room for new memories. We all have things we want to forget (those over 40 years younger because there are no compromising photos of us on the Internet of when we were young, for no other reason). But it is also true that we could forget what we should not.

No, in these topics we better bet on the Diogenes syndrome of memories, we are not going to forget any important anniversary for our partner, such as his birthday or Valentine’s Day. So we tried to keep asking to find out that depending on who we talk to we can reach the magic Petabyte number. The calculation in this case comes from estimating 100,000 million neurons with 1,000 synaptic connections each, taking each connection instead of each neuron for 1 bit.

The confirmation comes to us by a team of researchers from the Salk Institute led by Terry Sejnowski estimated in a paper published in eLife at the beginning of 2016 that it could be considered to go from tera to peta without problems since the synapses were not all the same, and that the different types could allow estimating up to 4.7 bits of information for each one .

What’s more, in some cases there is even talk of a maximum of 2.5 Petabytes . Paul Reber gives us an idea of the impact of this difference in capacity in an article in Scientific American .

In it, this professor of psychology at Northwestern University explained that this amount would allow 300 million hours of television to be stored . Of course, what he did not say is that it was not in HD, so I do not think that with that quality we can survive our challenge: 1 petabyte in HD quality is barely 13.3 years of video , very little if we are looking for true love and for all life.

An image and thousands of words

Digital Brain

I admit, this first approach is discouraging. It was urgent to find solutions. So my next step was to try to determine the maximum potential of our memory . If it was greater than the information generated we would still have a chance. We have already left behind the mistaken idea that we only use 10% of our brain, but it is still clear that we cannot use everything at once and that we have it quite underused. How do you get to use it in such a way that it is possible to memorize everything you can memorize? The next one seemed obvious: we had to find the great memorizers of history , see what they were capable of and compare it with the limits.

Unfortunately, it seems that many of the best known cases of “infinite” memories were the result of trauma or unwanted situations and, what is worse, not easy to repeat without putting our integrity at risk to achieve it. An example of the risk we talked about was the old case of Cenn Fáelad mac Aillila , an Irish scholar who died in 679. Although what is called a scholar was actually scholar, it was not very scholarly. Come on, his thing was weapons and fighting. Precisely in one of them he got a good wound on his head, which resulted in a wound that caused him pain all his life on the one hand, and an elephant memory on the other. What’s more, it is said that he did not manage to forget anything else during the rest of his existence. To understand the harsh implication of acquiring this superpower we must know that Cenn, after obtaining his new condition, completely changed his life to devote himself to poetry and learning Latin, instead of enjoying with friends from the “third time” after the battles .

Recent literature has also treated the subject with interest. Forges wrote about ” Funes the memorable ” telling in his collection of “Fictions”, back in 1944, the story of a man who suffers from hypermnesia after a common accident: a fall, in this case from a horse.

Curiously, his new gift is also associated with another headache, this time that of not being able to sleep (a big mistake, as we will see later). The absence of sleep and the premise that this process is a “memory eraser” means that the protagonist has, during his short life, a memory full of details but a total inability to think and make use of them. I was on the right track … well, you understand.

Closer in time was the case of Kim Peek , who inspired the character of Raymond Babbit in the movie “Rain Man.” Kim did not have any accidents during his life as his ability apparently originated before his birth. After Kim was born, the doctors told his parents that the child was not normal and that he would have mental retardation all his life, so they even recommended admitting him.

They refused to discover as he got older certain abilities that contrasted with the evident delay that he actually showed, as they had been diagnosed. Little Kim had been reading since he was 18 months old. Well, the reality is that he memorized the books his father read to him and he didn’t need to read them ever again to remember them. At the age of three he went to the dictionary, which he also memorized, to finish with what is estimated to have been around 9,000 books in his life.

As in the case described by Borges, his great memory and other abilities did not help him in his day-to-day life (coordination problems) or in analyzing or drawing conclusions. Apparently the reason for his ability would be related to the absence of a corpus callosum in his brain, causing his neurons to form a compact mass of connections that amplified his capacity, combined all this with an evident case of macrocephaly.

Kim’s father met Barry Morrow, the scriptwriter for the film “Rain Man,” at a conference in the State of Texas in 1984. The film introduced the “Sage Syndrome” or Savant into our lives, studied by Darold. Treffert. A “Savant”, or virtuoso of the arts in French, is a person who despite some physical, mental or other disability, possesses other skills that are normally developed at a much higher level.

It is associated with autism although it is estimated that less than 10% of autistics have abilities of this type . It is also estimated that half of the Savants are autistic, which does not help us much in our search (safe and without risk to our integrity) for an infinite memory. In a century of study, a maximum of one hundred people with this capacity are calculated. Treffet himself considers that less than 50 exist right now in the whole world with it. Other researchers, such as Snyder or Mottron and Dawson, tried to find the ability to induce skills, but without much success. Looking for alternatives, I went to ” The Big Bang Theory” , which allowed me to remember that there is what is known as Hypertrophic Eidetic Memory or Photographic Memory. Yes, those people who remember everything, like Sheldon Cooper or Will Hunting. If they only remember things related to their own existence, we speak of a Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), of which it is estimated that 20 such people have been studied around the world (all in the USA). They are the “Google Humans” who suffer from hyperthymesia or excess memories. Unfortunately it is a quality that, coming as standard, can be lost if it is not diagnosed and worked on.

It appears suddenly and from that moment those who suffer from it begin to remember a large number of details of their day to day. In this case, Jill Price , who published a book about her case in 2008, can remember all the days of her life since she turned 14. Remember that at the age of 8, in 1974, you were beginning to be aware that something was not normal in your memory.

Unfortunately these people do not always have the ability to memorize anything, usually their memories are focused on aspects of their own life. They also do not use techniques or mnemonic rules that can be learned or replicated by others, or managed or improved. There are several recorded cases besides Jill Price (the long time patient AJ), all of them very similar.

For example Brad Williams, Rick Baron or Marilu Henner, star of a TV series in the US, which is the place of origin in most cases. The study of these patients by a team from the University of California at Irvine, led by Dr. Parker, has helped to better understand where and how data is stored in the brain.

It has not helped so much to the bearers of this gift, since as Jill herself has the negative part of spending much of her life in the past, of not being able to identify what each key is for , of suffering problems with recognition facial of people and also showing obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

Become a Foer

At this point on the road it seems that the alternatives to have a memory “in keeping with the times” were having an accident waiting for luck to smile on us, inducing a genetic or birth anomaly and little else. Is there no other way to get an elephant memory? A journalist in the United States dedicated a year of his life to finding the solution to this problem. Our great man is Joshua Foer , who decided to leave everything to better know the people who were professionally dedicated to developing their memory, even training himself for the memory championships in the USA.

Without any prior knowledge of the subject, or special ability, or natural genetics, he won the championship in 2006. He ended up writing his experience in a book, ” The challenges of memory ” can be found in Spanish, “Moonwalking with Einstein : the art and science of remembering everything ”in English. Joshua also gives TED talks explaining how “normal people” can expand their retention capacity.

One of his first discoveries was the millenary mnemonic techniques , such as the palaces of memory. Aristotle spoke already in his time of places where we were able to store content to be remembered. The thing did not remain in the past: the ars memorativa was discussed and studied in classical sources or medieval studies. Saint Augustine wrote profusely about memory in his “Confessions”, in fact the term appears about 100 times, and also refers to a place where we can access and where memories are kept.

Frances Yates in her book “The Art of Memory” (1969) confirmed how the ancient Greeks and Romans used a technique based on prior memorization of the arrangement of everything in a room or building. Joshua Foer includes in his the story of the Greek Simonides of Ceos, who was enjoying a banquet with friends in the 5th century BC when everything collapsed around him, most of those present perishing. A survivor of the catastrophe, he suddenly became a history of memory when, abstracting from what happened and taking as a reference the columns, tables and general arrangement of the room, he managed to lead the relatives of the deceased by the hand to tell them where they were at the moment that everything changed in their lives. Joshua and the legend say that at that moment, with this practical demonstration of the Simónides technique, the study of memory began its official journey.

This is how the idea of using a physical “place” as a reference is the basis of this mnemonic technique known as the Loci Method (plural of the Latin term “locus” or location, location). We first memorize a “container”, a reference, for example using a building or a house, ultimately a place we know; we can even create one from scratch. Once it is developed, we design routes through it, to also have an order, a sequence that we will follow to move through it and that will act as a common thread, turning a complex task into a pleasant walk.

Information stored in Brain

In this way we solve two important problems: remembering things that the brain has trouble remembering naturally, and remembering them in context even when they do not have them per se. The idea, later copied by communications engineers, of using a “carrier” of the message, which facilitates its transport and storage, is as old as our culture. Greeks and Romans in their ancient rhetorical treatises, such as the ” Rhetorica ad Herennium “, the oldest surviving book of rhetoric in Latin to this day (originating from the year 90 BC), already spoke of the places to store things in our memory.

Problem solved … for now

At this point part of the problem seemed solved. We could not confirm if the brain could remember all the information that is generated, but we did know that there were people who remembered everything , and that following Foer’s instructions, anyone could learn to memorize a large amount of important information, such as the dates essential to survive in a modern couple relationship. And after all, if Foer, a journalist, had been able to do it, anyone should be able to be.

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raystxntz · 3 years ago

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[Ray listened to both Egon and Dana's speeches quietly, impassively, even as his heart felt like it was going to tear itself into tiny shreds at any moment. To know that Egon felt like his legacy didn't mean anything- to know that he'd been wrapped up in self-loathing and doubt for so long- made Ray's heart clench the longer he listened to it, the longer he was forced to stand there and listen to Egon vent his woes to the world.

He had to put a stop to this. He had to show Egon just how much he meant to him- without actually saying "love". Trying to rush into that particular admission wasn't what Egon needed right now. All Ray could do was hope that his words would be enough to get the message across- that he'd lay down his life if it meant Egon was happy.]

Stop talking like that. You are not a burden. You're not dangerous to be around or whatever you said to Elizabeth. It is not your fault that all this crazy shit is happening all around us. And you're not an inconvenience. I'll say it as many times as it takes for you to believe it.

You really think that all you are is some recluse who has bad social skills? Egie, I'm the one that's literally autistic. I'm the one who had to mask for god knows how long to actually fit in in society. I'm the one that would get odd looks for going off on tangents about my special interests. I'm the one who had to teach myself how to interact with people. Trust me, if anyone's social skills are terrible on this team, it's mine. And it's because you work so tirelessly at this kind of thing that I appreciate you.

You have inspired people, Egon. I see it in the fan mail we get, in the looks that we get from people when we walk down the street....I've gotten who knows how many kids coming up to me and saying that they were inspired to become scientists because of the work we do. That you do. Who saved the world a grand total of three times? Who came up with the idea to cross the streams even though there was a good chance it might have killed us? Who came up with all the technology we use, who helped me with the Ecto, who continues to develop things to make sure that our equipment doesn't fail and that we're as efficient as possible? You. You have made a mark, you have done good, and if people can't see that? Screw them. They don't matter. Only the people who see you for who you are do.

You want to know what I see in you, Egie?

[He was finally bold enough to move closer, to look Egon in the eye as much as he could in order to drive the impact of his statement home.]

I see a man who's not afraid to speak his mind about what he believes in. A man who's passionate, who's intelligent, who's sometimes a little messy....but who isn't? You get this spark in your eyes whenever you're really keyed into something, and it inspires me to be just as passionate in turn. From day one, you inspired me, Egon. You're good at fiddling with electronic things, even more than I am. I don't think we'd have half of the tech that we do without your help. You're so kind. You care about other people, even if they don't see it. You're great with kids- I've seen the way you interact with the ones that come up to us wanting autographs or just wanting to ask a question. You'd lay down your life to make the people closest to you happy. You get these crinkles in your face when you genuinely smile. You're just....brave, Egie. You're not afraid to do what it takes to solve a problem.

I could go on and on, but that's what I see in you. A person that I admire. A person that I'm proud to call my friend. A person that I....that I care about. Deeply.

I don't know what to do about your family, or other people that can't see your worth, or how you've been putting everything you have into what you do. I may not be able to carry your burden, Egie, but....

[And here Ray would make his move, enveloping Egon in as tight of a side hug as he possibly dared.]

....But I can help carry you.

Okay, stay calm stay calm stay calm

….Egon? It’s Ray. Dana’s here too, I….I thought you might need somebody to talk to. And two sets of ears are always better than one.

Can you open the door for us? Or at least talk? We’ll listen.

@do-ray-egon @bassclefdana

#OOC: yeah there's a thinly veiled samwise reference in here what of it keep scrolling #ghostbusters #ray stantz #roleplay blog #open rp

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photographicmemorypro-blog · 7 years ago

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Psyc 104 Week 4 – Amazing Memory

youtube

(Male voice, host) Daniel Tammet, an Englishman, a 27-year-old math and memory wizard. I was born November 8, 1931. That’s a prime number, 1931. You were born on a Sunday. In this year, your birthday will be on a Wednesday. (laughs) And you’ll be 75. Precisely. (Host) It’s estimated there are only 50 true savants living in the world today, and yet none are like Daniel. He is articulate, self-sufficient, blessed with all of this spectacular ability of a savant, but will very little of the disability. Take his math skills. Okay. So… 31 by 31 by 31 by 31… Yeah. Is 923,521. I dare say you’re right. Or 17 times 17 times 17 times 17… 83,521 And it’s not just calculating. His gift of memory is stunning. Briefly show him a long numerical sequence and he’ll recite it right back to you. 9 1 4 1 9 3 4 2 1 7 1 8 4 4 3 2 2 3 8 1 Of course. (laughing) And he can do it backwards, to boot. 1 8 3 2 2 3 4 4 8 1 7 1 … that feat is just the warm-up for Daniel Tammet.

He first made headlines at Oxford when he publicly recited the endless sequence of numbers embodied by the Greek letter Pi. Pi: the numbers we use to calculate the dimensions of a circle. It’s usually rounded off to 3.14, but its numbers actually go on to infinity. Daniel studied the sequence, a thousand numbers to a page. I would sit and I would gorge on them… and I would just absorb hundreds and hundreds at a time… (Host) It took him several weeks to prepare and then Daniel headed to Oxford where, with number crunchers checking every digit, (1 4 1 5…) He opened the floodgates of his extraordinary memory. (8 3 0… 4 1 4 6… 8 9 6 5 0 2 2… 7 0 7 9 5 4…4 5 6 8 1 5…) You were able to recite, in the proper order, how many? 22,514 (Host) It took him over five hours. He did it without a single mistake.

3 9 9 5 2 0 6 1 4 1 9 6… 3 5 8 7… finished. (applause) (Host) Scientists say a memory feat like this is truly extraordinary. Dr V S Ramachandran and his team at the California Center for Brain Studies tested Daniel extensively after his Pi achievement. Once you met him, what did you make of him? Well, I was surprised at how articulate and intelligent he was and was able to interact sociably and introspect on his own abilities. (Host) And while that introspection is extremely rare among savants, Daniel’s ability to describe how his mind works could be invaluable to scientists studying the brain, our least understood organ. Even how you and I do 17 minus 9 is a big mystery. You know, how these little wisps of jelly in your brain… doing that computation. We don’t know that. (Host) It may seem to defy logic, but Ramachandran believes that a savant’s genius could actually result from brain injury. One possibility is that many other parts of the brain are functioning abnormally, or sub normally, and this allows the patient to allocate all his attentional resources to the one remaining part and there’s a lot of clinical evidence for this.

Some patients have a stroke and suddenly their artistic skills improve. (Host) That theory fits well with Daniel. At the age of 4, he suffered a massive epileptic seizure. He believes that seizure contributed to his condition. Numbers were no longer simply numbers. He developed a rare crossing of the senses known as synesthesia. I started seeing numbers in my head… the colors, the shapes, the textures… so, when I see a long sequence, the sequence forms landscapes in my mind. Every number up to 10,000 I can visualize in this way…

It has its own color, has its own shape, has its own texture. (Host) For example: this is how Daniels says he sees Pi. And when he does those instant computations, he’s not calculating, but says the answer simply appears to him as a landscape of colorful shapes. The shapes aren’t static. They’re full of color, they’re full of texture; in a sense, they’re full of life. Are they beautiful? Not all of them. Some of them are ugly. 289 is an ugly number. I don’t like it very much. Whereas 333, for example, is beautiful to me. It’s round… (laughs) it’s chubby. (Female voice) He was constantly counting things… I think what first attracted him to books was the actual numbers on each page. And he just loved counting. Do you think there’s a connection between his epilepsy and his talent? He was always different from…

When he was really a few weeks old, I noticed he was different. So I’m not sure that it’s entirely that… but I think it might have escalated it? That it opened up that part of the brain… Yes. That’s what I believe, yes. (Host) Daniel was also diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism. It made for a painful childhood. I would flap my hand sometimes when I was excited, or pull at my fingers or at my lips… and of course the children saw these things and would repeat them back to me and tease me about them and I would put my fingers in my ears and count very quickly in powers of two: 2 – 4 – 8 – 16 – 32 – 64… Numbers were a defense from the real world, yes? Yes. Numbers were my friends and they never changed.

So they were reliable. I could trust them. (Host) And yet, Daniel did not retreat fully into that mysterious prison of autism, as many savants do. He believes his large family may have actually forced him to adapt. Because my parents, having nine children, had so much to do… so much to cope with, I realized I had to do for myself. (Host) He now runs his own online educational business. He and his partner, Neil, try to keep a low profile, despite his growing fame. And the limits of his autism are always there. I find it difficult to walk in the street sometimes if there’s lots of people around me. If there’s lots of noise, I put my fingers in my ears to block it out. (Host) That anxiety keeps him close to home. He can’t drive and he rarely goes shopping and finds the beach a difficult place because of his compulsion to count the grains of sand. And it manifests itself in other ways, like making a very precise measurement of his cereal each morning. It MUST be exactly 45 grams of porridge, no more, no less. Perfect. (Host) Do you think that Daniel, in a certain way, represents a real pathway to further understanding the brain? I think one could say that time and again in science, something that looks like a curiosity initially, often leads to a completely new direction of research.

Sometimes they provide the golden key. Doesn’t always happen… sometimes it’s just mumbo-jumbo… but that might well be true with savants. (Host) Daniel continues to volunteer for scientists who want to understand his amazing brain. But he’s reluctant to become what he calls “a performing seal” and has refused most offers to cash in on his remarkable skills. People all the time asking me to choose numbers for the lottery… or to invent a time machine… or to come up with some great discovery… but my abilities are not those that mean I can do EVERYthing… (Host) But he has written a book about his experiences entitled, “Born on a Blue Day.” That was totally inspiring. (Host) He also does motivational speeches for parents of autistic children. Yet one more gift of his remarkable brain. -Thanks -Thank you. (Host) But at the end of the day, genius or not, that brain does work a little differently. One hour after we leave today and I will not remember what you look like and I will find it difficult to recognize you if I see you again I will remember your handkerchief and I will remember that you have four buttons on your sleeve…

And I’ll remember the type of tie you’re wearing… it’s the details I’ll remember. (Host) And it’s the details that make us all so different. One man may see numbers as a tedious necessity of modern life another sees them as the essence of life. (Tammet) Pi is one of the most beautiful things in all of the world and if I can share that joy in numbers, if I can share that in some small measure with the world…

through my writing and my speaking… then I feel that I will have done something useful..

For More Info : photographic memory

#Speed read test #Read faster #Read fast #Speed read #Training Photographic Memory

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helshades · 8 years ago

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Good morning, my love! I wondered your thoughts on whether Le Pens would succeed in the election or not? As well as how likely a Frexit would be should she win? And maybe a little curious where all the worldbuilding is, too, *sobs*

A most excellent (although slightly terribly belated) evening to you, my dear! I answer you from the pit of the Helcave, through litres of sno... tears, in this dire hour of ailment, because I have way too tardied already, caught as I was amidst my new crepe paper flower project and the various ills that befall the imprudent cave-dweller; as the Queen of the Undead (by interim) I do command many foul things, but not the viruses, apparently.

Anyway, you sobbing, me sneezing, ‘tis not advancing the worldbuilding terribly, is it? Yeah. Thing is, I miss it too, but it seems the dry spell has got something to do with the horrid lack of new material, for such a long time. While I know I’ve more than enough to go with old notes and three movies as presently, I’d like MOAR and most of all, I’d like a rejuvenated fandom: from my corner of the Interwebz, it had become gradually impossible to work amongst the collective cries for overzealous social justice—“Loki is secretly intersex!” “Stop assigning Groot a gender!” “Why is Star-Lord white?” etc.—and the depletion of our ranks, as exemplified by one notable correspondent who went utterly fruitcake after I disagreed with her on the topic of Jane Foster being written as autistic.

In fewer words, I’m always welcoming prompts, even though I’m approximatively 5,238 ones late, but the engine is due to start running smoothly again as soon as we get a trailer for Ragnarök, or set pictures, or ANYTHING—I, for one, would love to get creative about the system of government in Asgard and how there should be a popular revolution anytime soon, shortly followed, preferably, by Loki getting thrown overboard the blooming planet by an angry mob with the Asgardian version of a pitchfork (probably golden anyhow).

Speaking of usurping tarts forming a terrible basis for government, hey, do you know the best news from Frogland ever? We don’t have to worry only about Marine Le Pen getting her grubby hands over the country! Now, with added psychological torment, enter the right wing’s champion, François Fillon! Here, a good illustration of our current main source of anguish:

Note that the true exploit behind this photo-montage wasn’t to mash up good ol’ Maggie and Tête de Fion, rather to find a photograph of him smiling in the first place. In fact, I’m pretty sure that was Photoshopped—unless a paparazzo caught him right after his early morning flagellation and got him to snicker with a cry of “À mort la Sécu !”

How to better state my thoughts... Well, let’s say that it’s not only the resistible rise of fascism in Europe we should care about, but also the considerably more pregnant and irresistible rise of Angela Merkel-friendly Ordoliberalism and the blatant annihilation of over a hundred years of hard-won social struggles. More than ever, the Right intends to rob us of healthcare, labour protection and free (quality) education—the worst thing being that most of the self-proclaimed Left wants exactly the same thing, albeit on a longer term, perhaps, but that’s about it. Yesterday, we got the results of the Primary election for the Left parties—we have primaries too, now, go figure—and the two finalists are going to be Benoît Hamon (theoretically a leftist, rather on the green sides on several accounts, did confess to great admiration for Bernie Sanders) and Manuel Valls, the only recently-resigned Prime Minister, a man whose hatred of unions was strikingly palpable, and who, a mere months ago, violated all democratic principles to force an unjust labour law on the French people. If he ends up the Left’s main man, the 2017 presidential election is going to be a real blast, and the proverbial choice between Charybdis and Scylla, the sequel, now with Scylla’s long-lost little sister Manuel.

I almost remarked that if Le Pen got elected, at least maybe we’d get something good out of it when she charts Valls back off to Spain, but upon reflection, I dare say the Spanish have suffered quite enough from authoritarianism, plus I guess it would be a poor consolation indeed. Still, I wonder: could Marine Le Pen truly become France’s very own President Trump...? In reality, I suppose she could, but a lot of people who would hesitate before voting for someone who hasn’t totally succeeded in wiping out the memory of her father yet (and quite right, too) won’t bat an eyelid before rushing to the voting booth in the name of François Fillon. Especially old money and the Catholic ultras, but that can’t be all, alas.

And while we’re on the subject of European evils, I don’t really believe in the extreme right version of a Frexit. Yes, I know the nationalists and pals aren’t too warm-hearted when it comes to European regulation, but liberalism isn’t exactly incompatible with fascism, either. I would even dare suggesting that liberalism, especially the current economic model, rapidly spiralling to deregulation and a profound dehumanisation of the peoples which nourish it, encourages the rise of fascism as it drives social classes further apart, disarming the lower ones and freeing the upper ones of any guilt...

Quoting well-known left-oriented philosopher & economist Frédéric Lordon:

‘Here is the question underlying this libellous accusation: wouldn’t leaving the European Union condemn us to sovereignist regression? There is a lot to say, here: first, I don’t regard either “sovereignist” or “sovereignism” as swearwords, unless you would belittle the idea itself—which is the ultimate modern idea. And let me be clear: I don’t say modern the way the journalist stooges of liberalism use “modern” and “archaic” every few editorial; I say modern in the historic sense, as “modernity” is a period which started in the 16th century, and which stated that peoples should not be ruled by commandments issued from any cloud-borne god, or by his Earth-bound delegates—and that the peoples had to take their own fates in hand. This is what sovereignty is about, conceptually. That one would seek to disqualify such idea says a great lot about the anti-democratic principles of the European institutions, and of all those supporting them.’

‘Besides, leaving the Eurozone doesn’t have to condemn you to the shrivelled, regressive, nationalistic and identitarian version of sovereignty—indeed, the latter is entirely possible. But we do not have to choose such regression, because nothing actually prevents us, if we so decide to abandon single currency, from developing as much as we can all relations between peoples, and for good this time. Although not, this time around, by throwing them onto and against one another because of murderous economic policies. What would stop us, out of the Euro, to do the exact same thing we once did before we got the Euro? Meaning international programmes for industrial cooperation (like Airbus, or Ariane Espace), scientific cooperation, and other things aplenty? Do we really need the straitjacket of a single currency for students to travel, for scientists to travel, for artistic exchanges to take place, as well as transversal teaching programmes on national histories and the making of a European history, for developing the translation of the literatures of Europe...? Nothing actually prevents it. It says a lot about the colonisation accomplished by neoliberal obsessions that we are now only capable of thinking that the only possible internationalism has to be this of capital and single currency.’

‘To want to relinquish the Euro doesn’t have to do with monetary fetishism. It’s not about going crazy over mere currency. What we call the Euro is much more than money, banknotes and monetary politics: the Euro is a global institutional system for economic policies. This is what we should abandon completely. In order to change the E.U. “from the inside”, we would have to see organised progressive political forces come into power simultaneously in a great number of member countries. The probability to see an actual government on the radical left is already infinitesimal, so the hypothesis of 6 or 7 at the same time is very nearly ridiculous. The Central Bank or Europe has the power, totally illegitimate, totally implicit, but totally efficient, to bring down any government that would attempt to oppose any of the European treaties...’

The current, and soon-to-be-former, government has done some work, too, to encourage most people in believing that Frexit = fascism, all the while slashing social protection and beating the occasional striker to a pulp, when the genuine article has been making vibrant spiels on poverty and labour, overall nicking a lot of arguments... from the radical left. The paradox isn’t one: both extremes join on populist propaganda, therefore the extreme right had a lot to gain from borrowing facts and ideas from the far left then grind them in its own rhetoric.

‘Labour, under the arbitrary management of the capitalist regime, is odious; people know this because they’re living it, and because they are many more still to be living it. Middle classes used to give zero fuck about the ill treatments inflected to the working class, for the first two decades of the neoliberal system. Now, unfortunately, the level of the muddy waters is rising, and all suffer.’

Sincerely, if Marine Le Pen became the Présidente this May, I’m not too sure the promised referendum on a possible Frexit would get positive results, and lead to the actual Frexit, even if it’s a UKIP-friendly kind of Frexit. People seem mostly afraid of leaving the E.U., although mostly because they keep being told it’s not possible and they shall lose everything and hordes of cutlass-chewing commies are to surge into their very homes to read some Karl Marx to their children. Also, unlike the Brits, we’ve actually got Euro coins to dispose of, you know, and it will be costly.

#answers #nonnies #atchoo!

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Must-have Windows 10 apps for being a productive powerhouse

New Post has been published on https://universeinform.com/2017/03/25/must-have-windows-10-apps-for-being-a-productive-powerhouse/

Must-have Windows 10 apps for being a productive powerhouse

Normal, we use computer systems up-to-date get matters achieved. Beginning with the Anniversary Replace, and persevering with the Cleanup to dates Replace, Microsoft is doing big things with Home windows 10 up-to-date keep humans doing the things they love higher and greater effectively. Those Home windows 10 apps are vital for getting you through an efficient day.

OneNote

This genuinely is going without saying, but Microsoft has absolutely long past above and beyond with its OneNote app on Windows 10. OneNote is must-have Windows 10 app for the scholar and expert alike. OneNote lets in up-to-date take notes in a college lecture or enterprise assembly and makes it easy up-to-date via your notes while you want up-to-date find pertinent statistics on-the-fly. One of the exceptional parts of OneNote is that everyone your content material syncs with the cloud so that you can begin properly where you left off on from any up-to-date each time you want.

OneDrive is a lifesaver for Home windows 10. All my most vital files are synced with OneDrive and prefer OneNote, I can access my documents every time, anywhere, and the use of any up to date. Every so often I use an Android phone updated live can on the trendy Microsoft apps on Android, and OneDrive may be very reachable once I need up-to-date percentage documents that I created on my Surface Seasoned 4 with colleagues. OneDrive is extremely helpful up to date when I run up-to-date issues with my Home windows 10 computer. up to date rest confident that I gained lose any documents that I sync through OneDrive. Those documents won’t be misplaced if my Home windows 10 up-to-date runs an updated any gadget hiccups, I’m able updated usually fall back on OneDrive up to date up-to-date all my vital files.

Adobe Phoupdatedshop Express is the great light-weight Windows 10 app for up-to-date modifying. Certain, you can always upgrade updated the feature-packed Adobe Shoup to date shop Fact updated 15 apps on Home windows 10 for $99.ninety nine. However, Adobe Shoup-to-date shop Express does the activity for small projects for free. On up-to-date of that, Adobe Shoup to date shops Specific is touch-pleasant and permits for easy enhancing of your updated and motion pictures whether or not it’s updated Home windows 10 Computer or tablet.

Windows 10: Better, Stronger, Faster

Microsoft made a huge splash with its release of Windows 10 on July 29, 2015. For plenty Laptop customers, switching to the new OS is, even as for others, it’s a near name. If you have not determined whether or not your business is ready to make the switch, here’s a more in-depth observe Home windows 10 that will help you decide if the brand new OS is clearly better, more potent, and faster.

Fee

Improve to Home windows 10 totally free! users with Home windows 7, Windows eight.1, and Home windows Smartphone eight.1 can obtain the brand new OS free of the fee until July 29, 2016. Windows 10 is free for the life of the tool, which means help and updates at no fee as long as Microsoft helps the working machine.

Home windows Vista, XP, 7 Agency, eight/eight.1 Enterprise and RT/RT 8.1 are excluded from this unfastened provide. These OS’s require a payment of $119 consistent with a Home license or $199 in line with Pro license to Upgrade to Home windows 10. However, if you have Software program Guarantee with one of these OS’s, then your Upgrade is unfastened.

Help

Windows 7 and Windows 8 are drawing close give up of help quicker than we would like to assume. Via upgrading to Home windows 10, you advantage years of additional mainstream and prolonged aid. Here is a comparison of the running system aid lifecycles for Home windows 10 vs. Windows 8 vs. Windows 7:

working device quit of Mainstream support quit of extended support

Home windows 7 January 13, 2015, January 14, 2020 Windows 8 January nine, 2018 January 10, 2023 Home windows 10 October 13, 2020, October 14, 2025

Home windows 10 brings brought years of mainstream and prolonged help. give up on mainstream help means that Microsoft will not beautify the product, but there’ll nonetheless be support for security and reliability issues. end of prolonged assist nevertheless offers safety and reliability guide; However, this marks the give up of guide for non-protection hotfixes, requests for brand spanking new functions and designs, and assurance claims.

The question is what is going to you do while your OS aid involves a stop in the following few years? In case you’re an eligible candidate for a free Upgrade to Windows 10, it could be profitable to Upgrade earlier than the provider expires.

Speed

Is Windows 10 faster? TechSpot positioned Home windows 10 to the test towards Windows eight.1 and Windows 7 for Speed overall performance. the brand new OS ranked within mere seconds of Home windows eight.1 and Home windows 7 for Pace in all performance regions. Here’s a short study the distinction you may be able to experience on an each day foundation with wake up and boot instances:

Operating system Hibernation wake up Hybrid Sleep awaken Boot Time

Home windows 7 27 seconds 17 seconds five seconds Windows eight.1 23 seconds 12 seconds 4 seconds Windows 10 21 seconds 10 seconds 6 seconds

Much like wake up and boot Speed, it is a near name for Windows 10 towards Home windows 7 and Windows 8.1 in an application, garage, and gaming overall performance. Home windows 10 would not have a clear win over beyond era in terms of Speed in any precise category.

Features

Windows 10 brings futuristic capabilities to computing. With this new OS, users can assume enhanced collaboration, mobility, and ease of use with a clean appearance. right here’s an outline of some of the newest upgrades:

Assessment Apps for Adults With Autism

The transition to adulthood is a first-rate turning factor in absolutely everyone’s lifestyles. However, for younger people having autism spectrum sickness, the transition is generally very hard. younger autistic adults have decreased ranges of employment and even be afflicted by total social isolation as compared to human beings having other disabilities.

Almost -thirds of teenagers, who’ve autism, have no process or gainful employment, nor any instructional plans. For a couple of thirds of young adults having autism, that is frequently persisted in their early Nineteen Twenties. Evaluation apps for adults with autism are often used to measure their ranges of competency.

But the employment state of affairs for teenagers with autism spectrum disease simply paints a bleak photo. The financial shift inside the US towards greater activity possibilities in the service region hasn’t absolutely helped a great deal. Beginning inside the mid-1970s, there was a first-rate shift in employment generation from the producing area to the carrier quarter. And the sort of jobs within the latter area that requires direct consumer interplay, are the roles that most people with autism spectrum disease find difficult to deal with. Professionals propose the capability of a younger grownup is first judged with Assessment apps for adults with autism.

Researchers claim that by the time a man or woman reaches the give up of excessive faculty, they face something referred to as the “offerings cliff”. Autistic students in public college are eligible to get tutoring and receive mental health offerings, with along with different support thru the unique schooling program in their school.

“The complete artwork of teaching is simplest the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the motive of pleasurable it afterward”. – Anatole France

The cause of schooling is to create responsible, productive and socially contributing residents – folks who can provide for his or her own families as well as make contributions to their communities. As Toffler says, training inside the twenty-first century needs to allow people to examine, unlearn and relearn. However, I am not certain our faculties and faculties are devoted to this.

Education is one of the maximum unscientific human endeavors. You do well in school to get into a great university and earn a good degree. a great degree is supposed to be a passport to a good activity. Primarily based on your instructional qualifications, you can climb to a fairly high position without having to illustrate any incredible capability.

Beyond that, but, you can have issues. There’s no mounted hyperlink among your performance in college and your overall performance in a process. Even more importantly, There is no link among your performance on the activity and your performance in life.

To be proper to cause, schooling has to support an infant expand three fundamental abilities:

Discover, expand and usually evolve an imaginative and prescient to come to be a useful member of society:

Many of us have an advantage – our dad and mom envision our destiny for us, using us to work in the direction of attaining this imaginative and prescient. but, this is not as common among the terrible. The education device has to step in to assist each person to create this imaginative and prescient, and to build even the terrible child’s confidence to pursue the vision.

Rainbowbalaji Sampath, who runs Eureka baby – an NGO committed to enhancing literacy and math potential in government faculties, advised us a touching story in this context. Getting back from the united states to do something meaningful in education, he immersed himself in neighborhood issues by way of spending some months in a village. He was in a village school room whilst an infant asked the teacher whether it became viable to travel to the moon. “You and that I can’t fly to the moon,” the teacher replied. “However scientists in the U.S. Can…” We ought to stop robbing our kids of desires and desires.

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