link: https://bsky.app/profile/brainvsbook.bsky.social/post/3llc72lyhu22j

google translate defaulting to chinese at first

okay but for those of us with interests in both the murderbot and the daomu biji fandoms this is kinda hilarious

(english-side-only really, i get that the kanji and hanzi are completely different)

our good (air)ship murderbot! thanks google

I love reading about these kind of translation decisions.

I've only ever seen 弊 used to refer to one's company: 弊社, as the article says.

I've been told 弊 is used to refer to one's own something, and it has a very humble nuance.

So 弊機 translates to something like "I, your humble machine" or "I, who am but a mere machine".

Japanese is great that it can say so much with simple pronouns.

Romance language translator: well we don’t have a gender neutral pronoun so I guess we’ll flip a coin for male or female

Japanese language translator, an intellectual: none of Japanese’s 30-something plus personal pronoun options have the perfect vibes so I’ll create a new one to bring that special somethin’

What I found to be particularly clever about the coining of this very unique first person pronoun 弊機 (heiki) is that it’s a homophone of 兵器(heiki), meaning ‘weapon’

On April 16th 2025 the US federal government has proposed to change the interpretation of the endangered species act so that it no longer protects habitat.

This is open for public comment until the end of May 19th. Please comment and make your voice heard.

Wildlife need their habitat. If the ESA redefines harm so that habitat is no longer protected, the implications for wildlife would be catastrophic.

GET EM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Guys please talk about Palestinian prisoners’ day. It feels like everyone has gone full mask off and just stopped bringing attention to this entirely - but a lot of detainees you advocated for one year ago are still detained today. Still facing the same conditions of squalor & torture & being indefinitely separated from their loved ones. The stats on Palestinian detainees are still as bad as they’ve ever been. Please talk about it

I wouldn’t be surprised if this went ignored btw - but this is a doubly bad look because I have thousands of followers, and a lot of them were very vocal about this as little as half a year ago. So just know that I know that you’re seeing this. And know that you’re a fucking weirdo for ignoring it

If Rock N Roll came out today they would call it Woke N Roll and it would be woke

i quite vividly recall alice cooper singing about how being a man makes him sick

also david bowie exists

also freddie mercury

get burned

its bait

are you saying alice cooper, david bowie, and freddie mercury have nothing to do with queerness

youre hilarious

I’m saying that my post about woke n roll is bait and doesn’t mean anything its just nonsense I posted in order to generate social media engagement

hey can I reblog this post

Only if you want to be cancelled by the toxic Woke N Roll fandom

I think that Tumblr it's not the best social media for generating engagement by a bait, like, you can be viral on here but it doesn't really ends anywhere?

On Instagram or Tiktok you could do a sales funnel strategy maybe but I think here it doesn't even work?

Anyway keep doing your think king

“Doesn’t end anywhere”? Sounds like someone’s never seen my Inbox

So turns out…..you guys are not gonna believe this…….but it turns out. Reading real books. Is good for you actually.

Let me be completely clear - I’m not being a sarcastic ass. I’m just realizing all over again, in real time, for myself, that reading a real life published book makes your neurons feel like they’re getting a spa day. Like I can feel my brain getting juicer and wrinklier with every page I turn. This shit is no joke, this is like hard drugs if hard drugs were good for you and made your brain feel revived and alive.

all lesbians should know the basics of transfeminine hrt. why WOULDN'T you learn the recipe for more women

Definitely one of the funniest feature discord has added.

WARNING! ANNOYING BITCH HAS BREACHED THE PERIMETER!!!

DO YOU WISH TO EVACUATE?

ALT

one of the best academic paper titles

for those who don't speak academia: "according to our MRI machine, dead fish can recognise human emotions. this suggests we probably should look at the results of our MRI machine a bit more carefully"

I hope everyone realises how incredibly important this dead fish study is. This was SO fucking important.

I still don’t understand

So basically, in the psych and social science fields, researchers would (I don't know if they still do this, I've been out of science for awhile) sling around MRIs like microbiolosts sling around metagenomic analyses. MRIs can measure a lot but people would use them to measure 'activity' in the brain which is like... it's basically the machine doing a fuckload of statistics on brain images of your blood vessels while you do or think about stuff. So you throw a dude in the machine and take a scan, then give him a piece of chocolate cake and throw him back in and the pleasure centres light up. Bam! Eating chocolate makes you happy, proven with MRI! Simple!

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

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

• Dead salmon can recognise human facial expressions. OR
• Everyone else's results are garbage also, none of you have data for any of this junk.

I cannot overstate just how many papers were completely fucking destroyed by this experiment. Entire careers of particularly lazy scientists were built on these sorts of experiments. A decent chunk of modern experimental neuropsychology was resting on it. Which shows that science is like everything else -- the best advances are motivated by spite.

there's a delicate balance between "seeing something on my dash so often i end up caring about it unexpectedly" and "seeing something on my dash so often that it gets added to the blocked list with extreme prejudice"