Obviously, most states use first past the post, but there are some, like Alaska, that use IRV. It’s better, but not perfect, as Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem says it can’t be. I don’t really understand it though, so my question for Hannah and Michael is: could you explain AIT, and what are your favorite voting systems? (I like Duncan Black’s system, which is Condorcet with a Borda fallback)

I recently got my flu and COVID boosters this fall and afterward my arm was really sore. What is causing the ache? Is it the physical harm caused by sticking a needle in my arm? Is my body's immune reaction in just that location the main source of pain?

I don't have allergies to anything and don't feel otherwise ill. Just wondered whether it was more of a physical thing or chemical/immune thing.

I often have saunas, and they're my version of shower thoughts. I can't help staring at the sand timer in there and wondering how accurate it really is.

- Is there an exact mass of sand that corresponds to a given length of time?

- Do different types of sand produce different times?

- Is there a set calculation linking the width of the aperture to the time it takes the sand to fall?

- Does the angle of the timer when flipped affect the time taken?

- Does the heat in the sauna affect it too (usually my sauna is around 80 degrees Celsius)?

Curious to know. Thanks in advance, everyone.

I feel like the obvious answer is yes, electricity being used reduced the number of house fires because there's no more open flames inside homes, but also house fires are caused largely now by electrical devices, heaters, chargers or before the led light bulb boom, bulbs. So I wonder how much the frequency really changed, and if we're better off now than back then

Another thing to consider is the fact that people were more cautious around flames than they are around electrical devices that we leave plugged in passively

If a person who was born blind were given a procedure to be able to see, would they be horrified by what humans actually look like? Also, would suddenly knowing what colors look like and the world around them looks like be overwhelming? Like when we try to imagine a new color but can’t?

I can't find the video where they talk about fertilizers and how battles were fought over poop. YouTube search is pretty, no pun intended, crappy nowadays and is just suggesting me recently uploaded videos. Would appreciate the help

In a recent episode The Right Way To Open A Shaken Soda Can, Hannah mentioned the gentle sound of air being released as a nun’s fart. A side quest to verify nun’s fart? Sounds like that could be fun! After a bit of work, I think I have finally managed to sort it all out (see diagram) and will spare the mobile users from having to read too much.

Turns out the best explanation is that somewhere at least in the 15^th century, there is reference to nun’s fart in both France and Germany to deep-fried choux pastry eaten traditionally during Shrove Tuesday. The fart could refer to the audible component choux pastry when fried, just like the more fragrant cabbage farts could refer to bubble & squeak.

How nun’s farts became pancakes (crepes)? I suppose the story goes that during Shrovetide the nunnery ran out of frying oil, so the nuns watered down the choux pastry batter and added some lemon and sugar…thus Pancake Day was born!

The next challenge is to make farts of portingale a useful saying. #spicedmuttonfruitballs

this gets weird the more I think about it, because the total contemporaneous population across a person’s lifetime is SO much larger than earth’s population at just one point in time. And it must vary if you go to a lot of stadiums in your life or if you are from a squillion years ago when the population was much smaller….

My question is at what point does the development of a brain move from nature to nurture, or vice versa?
What if Isaac Newton never knew what numbers were until he was 20? Was Newton’s mind truly one in billions, or would we have had a couple hundred more of him if everyone in underdeveloped countries received a proper education like he did?  I’m 17 now, so is it solely up to how much I learn and study to have a strong mind, or is still a bit out of my control?

Seeing Michael get out his notepad to write down something memorable made me curious about his and yours thought on the fragility of memory.

How do you think about forgetting something interesting? There are so many facts, quotes, ideas and thoughts that one comes across every day, but there is no way we can remember everything.

Sure, you can build your memory palace and train yourself to remember a lot of details by putting in effort. But in the end I really enjoy learning new things, and not working to remember things I already learned. Because of this I just enjoy learning a new topic, remember what I happen to remember and continue onwards while reminiscing about what I once knew.

What are your thoughts and experiences on this?

*"Always hand them something first if you want them to be more willing to listen to you" from some Hare Krishnas, probably.

Can we, naturalists, celebrate a "still not fully known because this was only one study "win on this? J/k

Anywho according to this research, we have found out that an unconscious brain still processes and predicts sounds and languages like it would if it was conscious. This implies to me that our consciousness is a physical trait that evolved to help interrupt our senses and predictions. Our subconscious is constantly getting signals, processing them, doing background stuff like breathing, and as these got more complicated the ability to actually understand them became more advantageous. This over time developed a "driver" that can take in all of this information and then judge if it was a trick of light that is making those reflections so there is no need to pounce on it. To be able to process that not every outside tribe is an enemy and that by working together they win mostly. The ability to take certain patterns of speech and sound then translate it into words and ideas is very obviously a superpower on earth.

I heard this idea on a podcast, it may have been this one, that consciousness arose to help us process the growing difficulty of our social interactions and other real world observations. Well here is some "not fully tested or duplicate" results that add some sand to that ideas bucket (Sean Carroll's example to explain bayesian reasoning).

Plus I think this is what you would expect from a survival stand point too. A creature that is always listening has more ways of surviving than those who don't. Which would require more energy and that could help support the theory that the cooking of foods helped us evolve bigger brains. Though I wouldn't be surprised that we find out that most animals not only have some sort of background sensing like this as well but also have a not as formed form of consciousness.

The final thing I found fascinating was their linking of our background pattern recognition is like that of lmms. It's wild that we naturally develop a way of processing information like AI does when unknown to us our brains were doing in the background. Which then suggests that in order for AI to get better is to have multiple AIs for different sense and one to not direct but to try to reason (see patterns) out the full context of the situation. This reminds me of the "AI prison escape" where AI is tested to try to escape and how one test the AI came together with other versions of itself, formed a "director" and almost escaped.

Thanks for making it this far in my probably jumbled up rant. I blame it on my lvl1 bipolarness and not my laziness to proofread or edit.

>“Our findings show that the brain is far more active and capable during unconsciousness than previously thought,” said Dr. Sameer Sheth, professor and Cullen Foundation Endowed chair of neurosurgery and a McNair Scholar at Baylor. “Even when patients are fully anesthetized, their brains continue to analyze the world around them.”

>Sheth, who is also a neurosurgeon at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center, and his collaborators first recorded neural activity from hundreds of individual neurons in the hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with memory, while patients were under general anesthesia during epilepsy surgery. Patients undergoing this type of surgery were sought after because it allowed researchers access to this particular part of the brain.

>The study began with patients exposed to repetitive tones interrupted by an occasional different sound. Researchers found that hippocampal neurons could distinguish these unusual tones and that this ability improved over time, suggesting a form of learning or neural plasticity during anesthesia.

>Researchers then moved on to conduct a more complex experiment where they played short stories to patients while recording neural responses. Surprisingly, the hippocampus demonstrated real-time processing of language. Neural activity showed the brain’s ability to differentiate parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs and adjectives, based on patterns of neuron firing.

>Even more surprising, researchers found that neural signals could predict upcoming words in a sentence.

>This activity also mirrors the predictive behavior seen in artificial intelligence (AI). The brain’s ability to predict upcoming words is similar to how large language models generate text. These findings help researchers understand how biological and artificial systems process information. This could be a step towards the development and refinement of new technologies for communication, such as speech prosthetics for individuals who are unable to speak.

>These discoveries suggest that cognitive functions such as language comprehension and prediction do not require consciousness. Instead, consciousness may depend on broader coordination across brain regions rather than activity within a single structure like the hippocampus.

>However, more research is needed. The findings are specific to one type of anesthesia and may not apply to other unconscious states such as sleep or coma. This study only looked at one brain region as well, and it is unknown how widespread these processes are across different regions of the brain.

I was wondering if you listen to other podcasts (science related or not) and which ones they are? I very much enjoy Science Vs with Wendy Zukerman.

I just binged through all episodes and now I want more lol. Does anyone have any recommendations of something similar to The Rest Is Science?

I M(33), studying maths on top of studying engineering. I’ve become a bit obsessed with maths lol. But I’ve come across the collatz conjecture. I don’t understand why can’t we say or even figure out that every number would get to 1? Is there not a point we could say for example, well if 6 thousand and 6 million and 6 billion, trillion, quadrillion up to decillion reaches 1, that everything after generally will reach 1?