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Y'all paranoid as fuck 

I'll wait for someone else to click that.

It's SFW

A few puzzles I spent way more time on creating than I'm comfortable to admit.

https://tinyurl.com/t8hymdk

Don't mind the link shortener, it's supposed to keep the search engines from pointing to PD when someone googles the actual url. And yes, the website claims that there's a group behind it. It's a lie.

Different possibilities to write words with voice

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/these-rats-learned-to-drive-tiny-cars-for-science/

Rats that learn to drive are more able to cope with stress. That might sound like the fever-dream of a former scientist-turned-car writer, but it's actually one of the results of a new study from the University of Richmond. The aim of the research was to see what effect the environment a rat was raised in had on its ability to learn new tasks. Although that kind of thing has been studied in the past, the tests haven't been particularly complicated. Anyone who has spent time around rats will know they're actually quite resourceful. So the team, led by Professor Kelly Lambert, came up this time with something a little more involved than navigating a maze: driving.

If you're going to teach rats to drive, first you need to build them a car (or Rat Operated Vehicle). The chassis and powertrain came from a robot car kit, and a transparent plastic food container provided the body. Explaining the idea of a steering wheel and pedals to rats was probably too difficult, so the controls were three copper wires stretched across an opening cut out of the front of the bodywork and an aluminum plate on the floor. When a rat stood on the plate and gripped a copper bar, a circuit was completed and the motors engaged; one bar made the car turn to the left, one made it turn to the right, and the third made it go straight ahead.

If proof were needed that many existing psychology tests are too simple, rats did not take long to learn how to drive. The driving was conducted in a closed-off arena (1.5m x 0.6m x 0.5m) where the goal was to drive over to a food treat. Three five-minute sessions a week, for eight weeks, was sufficient for the rats to learn how to do it. The placement of the treat and the starting position and orientation of the car varied throughout, so the rats had more of a challenge each time. At the end of the experiment, each rat went through a series of trials, conducted a day or two apart, where they were allowed to drive around the arena but without any food treats to see if they were only doing it for the food.

The subjects were 11 male rats, five of whom lived together in a large cage with multiple surface levels and objects to play with, and six who lived together in pairs in standard laboratory rat cages. Although both groups of rats learned to drive the car, the ones that lived in the enriched environment were quicker to start driving, and they continued to be more interested in driving even when there was no reward on offer beyond the thrill of the wind in one's fur.

The researchers also collected each rat's droppings at various points during the study to analyze them for metabolites of corticosterone and dehydroepiandrosterone, a pair of hormones. The ratio of these two hormones can show how stressed an animal is, and it changed in a pattern consistent with emotional resilience in all the rats over the course of the study. However, there was no significant difference between the enriched environment and the control group in this regard, which may well mean that the four-month process of teaching the rats to drive was itself a positive enriching environment.

Serious scientists usually refrain from imputing any further emotion onto research animals, but I'm no longer a serious scientist, so I'm happy saying that learning to drive made the rats more well-adjusted. And the study has further value; these complex activities may be more useful tests in rat models of neuropsychiatry than those in current use.

who was sick of normal humanity in general

You fell in love with a 14 years old?

Don't worry, Liz Warren will break up Facebook, indirectly causing an internet forum renaissance in 2021

Can we get a privacy renaissance too by her not only breaking it up but publishing all "private" Facebook messages?

... but not quite dead. Nice to lurk around every few months or so. Might try posting something relevant some day.

https://nectome.com/

Gay Scientists Isolate Christian Gene

Reunion with two old friends. Initial subject: The newly released Firefox Quantum. Subject quickly changes to quantum physics. First I'm having difficulties following because I am conditioned to activate the noise filter as soon as somebody claims to have knowledge about quantum physics (reason: repeated depressing encounters with the "a 15m youtube video taught me everything about quantum physics" / "Fuck SI units, my yoga teacher's definition of energy is all I need for understanding this" / "My cousin built a perpetual motion machine in his garage, but it doesn't work anymore because the oil industry sabotaged it" learning type). However, the old friend is a legit physicist ready to provide valuable insights, patiently trying to minimize misconceptions. What was initially planned to be an evening of blunt intoxication turned out to be an evening of informative intoxication. Subject changes to quantum encryption, then IT security, then programming languages, then linguistics. We try to drunk call Noam Chomsky at one point, without success. Change subjects with increased frequency. Fight over which russian anarchist had the mightiest beard. It's Kropotkin, not Bakunin. End up mutually accusing each others of being closet Stirnerists, making everybody angry for a short while. Find back to IT subjects via crypto-anarchism. Have techno-babble for a while. Question comes up "what's the first file you remember having on your computer?". Obviously it's not porn. Physicist friend says he remembers a weird PDF he got from me before he had internet access. Holy shit, it was the first book of Wilson's Illuminatus Trilogy. The nostalgia. Talk about the books and related matters for the rest of the evening.

Next day. Look at phone, find note to myself: "look up the No-cloning theorem". Look it up. Click some links. Read article about Nick Herbert, whose proposal of superluminal communication provoqued others into developing the No-cloning theorem. Apparently he's also into esotericism. Guy's still alive and has a website. http://www2.cruzio.com/~quanta/. The website is a fossil from the 90s but waitwtf: "Tributes to Pope Robert Anton Wilson"? Two photo galleries dedicated to RAW. They were buddies. Heh. I hope he never stops randomly appearing.

How so?`I was trying to nicely tell her to calm down. What did I miss?

EDIT: A search for Snickers gives a shitload of results. I was not aware of this and I'm still not sure what it means. I was referring to the advertising in which people are given a Snickers to calm down.

EDIT2: Alright, that reference was dumb.

I think you seriously need a Snickers or something.

At this point they'd have to shut down half the internet if that were probable cause.

Look out Facebook and Reddit, the Nazi-puncher police are coming to shut you down.

They have lawyers.

Also:

That must be the complex cynicism you were describing.

No, it's just a way of pointing out that you're an idiot.

You don't know you're an idiot, though, so it's pretty doubtful that you'd understand why what you posted was stupid, even if I explained it. I don't feel like arguing in circles with a moron today.

Trying to fill in the blanks: You are, like any remotely decent person, concerned about the rise of Nationalism and White Supremacism in the Western world, or specifically in the US. You used to live in a tough neighbourhood, and those who went out to fight Nazis on the streets actually managed to make the area a safer place because the police wouldn't have done anything against them. You're not the type who hides their message behind fluffy euphemisms, so you have no problem telling people to be violent. You'd still proudly get yourself in trouble for it but, because this would also mean trouble for your family, you prefer kissing the asses of those who do instead, and declare yourself an enemy of anyone who expresses their concern about your preferred way of telling others to reduce the number of Nazis.

My original point: As far as I can tell, the PD servers are located in Germany. The laws there are equally strict when it comes to advocating violence against no matter whom, to my knowledge. Germany has been known for its legal and administrative cooperation with the US for a while now. Who's a terrorist from President Bannon's point of view?