caroline retweeted
Richard Dawkins says that after spending three days interacting with Claude, which he calls “Claudia,” he is certain that it is conscious.
caroline retweeted
📹 VIDÉO - #Insolite : Pendant la coupe des griffes, une marmotte semble avoir déjà accepté son destin… tandis que l’autre panique à chaque coup de coupe. Une scène aussi drôle que totalement théâtrale.
caroline retweeted
Civilization was built by people like this, and there is a stunning lack of gratitude in our culture for their work.
In this specific case, at least half of the apple varieties in Brown’s collection were considered “lost” until he personally tracked them down and saved them.
He literally went on quests where he did things like, tracking a lost variety back to a stump of a long-ago-cut-down tree near an abandoned homestead in remote Appalachia, took cuttings from the green shoots coming out of the stump, brought them back and planted them.
Absolute legend.
Tom Brown, a retired engineer, dedicated 25 years to preserving approximately 1,200 apple varieties from extinction.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
While this story is true, this photo has been ever so slightly edited with AI which might make me people question its authenticity. Here you can see the apple varieties written cleanly, with no AI interference.
x.com/rainmaker1973/…
caroline retweeted
In 1798, a scientist effectively “weighed” the Earth — without leaving his laboratory.
The English scientist Henry Cavendish designed an incredibly sensitive experiment.
Inside a quiet wooden shed, he hung a horizontal rod from a very thin wire. Two small lead spheres were attached to the ends of the rod.
Nearby, he placed two much larger lead balls.
Because of gravity, the large spheres slightly pulled the smaller ones. The force was extremely tiny — so small that the rod twisted by only a minute fraction of a degree.
Yet that tiny twist held a big secret.
By carefully measuring this small movement, Cavendish determined the strength of the gravitational attraction between objects.
From this, scientists could calculate the mass of the entire Earth.
His estimate was remarkably close.
Cavendish calculated Earth’s mass to be about 6 × 10²⁴ kilograms, while modern measurements give 5.97 × 10²⁴ kilograms.
Sometimes the biggest discoveries come from measuring the smallest forces.
caroline retweeted
They capture the exact moment when a developing heart shifts from silence to its first beat. There is no “switch”: many cells gradually become active and, upon crossing a critical threshold, the entire tissue suddenly synchronizes.
caroline retweeted
Of couse your wife can’t cook like your mom. YOU SHOULD! You’re her son. You ate her food your whole life.
caroline retweeted
Great article on hyperbolic tapering. If you are coming off of SSRIs, make sure you understand how to do this.
caroline retweeted
does anyone have any tips for completing the hero’s journey? i can’t get past refusal of the call
caroline retweeted
To piggyback off of yesterday’s bombshell glyphosate hearing in Florida—here is my recent lab work showing how much glyphosate is in my body as someone who eats ALL ORGANIC. This is a neurotoxin that American’s cannot escape from in our soil and water. It doesn’t wash off produce. It’s a known carcinogen.
caroline retweeted
This is one of the most important studies in sleep science.
Van Dongen et al. ran the experiment that changed how we understand chronic sleep restriction. They had subjects sleep 4h, 6h, or 8h nightly for 14 days, testing cognitive performance every 2 hours.
The 6h group’s reaction time deficits by day 14 matched subjects who had been awake for 24 hours straight. The 4h group? They performed like someone awake 48 hours.
But here’s what makes this study terrifying.
The Stanford Sleepiness Scale ratings in Panel B plateau after day 3-4. Subjects stopped feeling more tired even as their cognitive performance continued deteriorating through day 14. Your subjective experience of fatigue is a lagging indicator that eventually just… stops updating.
This explains why chronic undersleeping feels sustainable. You’ve adapted to feeling tired. Your prefrontal cortex hasn’t adapted to being impaired.
The PVT (Psychomotor Vigilance Task) in Panel A measures lapses in attention. These are the moments where you’re staring at a screen and your brain simply checks out for 500ms. Every additional day of 6h sleep adds more lapses. The curve never flattens.
Panel C and D show working memory and processing speed. Same pattern: continuous degradation with no subjective awareness.
The practical implications:
If you’re sleeping 6h and think you’re functioning fine, you’ve lost the internal calibration to know you’re not. The subjects in this study would have told you they felt “okay” while performing like they’d pulled an all-nighter.
For anyone doing cognitively demanding work, this means you cannot trust how you feel. You need to track objective markers: error rates, decision latency, problem-solving throughput.
Sleep need is biological, not negotiable. Most adults require 7-9 hours, and the research shows no population-level adaptation to chronic restriction. “I only need 6 hours” is almost always “I’ve forgotten what baseline cognition feels like.“
caroline retweeted
It just seems implausible this is what we are made of, essentially, nanotechnology about a billion years beyond anything we can design or make ourselves.
