The Cincinnati Zoo covered all their parking lots with solar panels last year. Your car stays cool in the summer, and there's motion activated lighting under the panels after dark. It's awesome.
"Genetically encoded" is the appropriate term here -- it was used in the original journal article. It's a common industry term in neuroscience research. For example, GEVIs and GECIs are "genetically encoded voltage indicator" and "genetically encoded calcium indicator" respectively. "Genetically encoded adenosine sensor" here is a term of art.
> I have over 14 years of education in developed countries, and out of those, maybe 1 year combined meaningfully helped me in my jobs/career in terms of skills.
I think you're underestimating the effect of 14 years of daily training in literacy and numeracy.
I think Buddhism still (arguably rightly) doesn't sit entirely well with non-religious Westerners. I have studied with a Zen Sangha and transmitted teachers on and off for a bit and have found their explanations helpful. However, it's absolutely undeniably that the Buddhist cannon is full of batshit insane stuff, just like any other religion. You can write them off as skillful means, but in some ways I think it's more honest to say that you practice meditation with Buddhist characteristics than to say that you're a real Buddhist if you don't have the time of day for spirits and dieties.
Again, this isn't saying that Buddhist modernism is bad. I'd argue that having clear eyes about what parts of Buddhist practice you're willing to take and leave is good.
> it's absolutely undeniably that the Buddhist cannon is full of batshit insane stuff, just like any other religion
Buddhism is not like Christianity, where the source of truth is a book or a canon, and that the book must be believed in order to subscribe to the belief system. Speaking of Zen, at least, it's one of the foundational tenets that it's "a separate transmission, outside the scriptures." In fact, there's a lot written about how Zen isn't a religion at all, at least not in the Western sense, with beliefs, faith, and doctrines. You don't need to believe anything to be a Zen Buddhist. So even if the "Buddhist cannon" has "batshit insane stuff," who cares? Shakyamuni was a great teacher, but that doesn't mean that he can't be wrong.
> I think it's more honest to say that you practice meditation with Buddhist characteristics than to say that you're a real Buddhist if you don't have the time of day for spirits and deities
You might be under the impression that Buddhism is somehow theistic or dualistic. But the Buddha, for one, outright rejects mind/body dualism, which therefore rejects the possibility of spirits and deities. Some traditions, like Tibetan Buddhism, have tantric practices like deity yoga, which involve visualizing deity-like figures, but even then, there's no presumption that these deities actually exist, in some kind of spirit realm. But even if there were Buddhists who believe in "spirits and dieties," again, who cares? It's not like you have to believe anything to study and practice Buddhism.
My main point is that, if you're writing about meditation, or meditative practices, that either originated with Buddhism or were developed through Buddhism, it's fairly disingenuous to completely divorce it from its context.
There are specialized architectures (the Tolman-Eichenbaum Machine)* that are able to complete this kind of task. Interestingly, once trained, their activations look strikingly similar to place and grid cells in real brains. The team were also able to show (in a separate paper) that the TEM is mathematically equivalent to a transformer.
Poor generalization (overtraining on prompts) and loss of context over time are the biggest issues I've found with them. Slow card creation workflows and needing to rate your own reviews are merely UX issues -- losing context and losing generalization make SRS actively harmful when used for some topics.
There's 2 solutions I've thought of but haven't tried implementing:
1. A free-recall based approach. Free recall allows you to operate at a higher level of organization and connect concepts at lower levels. However, how you would schedule SRS with free recall is not clear.
2. Have an LLM generate questions on-the-fly so that you don't overtrain on prompts. You might also instruct the LLM to create questions that connect multiple concepts together. The problem with this approach is that LLMs are still not so good at creating good test questions.
I implemented free recall into FSRS pretty easily. Granted, it’s only for language learning, and I have it set up to work in a free recall friendly way (you don’t learn cards, you learn actual words and morphemes) but it’s been working for a few weeks now. I’m working on a product video atm, but once that’s done my next task (sometime this week) is to clean up the UI and merge it to master.
I almost never see someone talk about free recall so I was too excited to see it mentioned not to comment
How are you handling scheduling with FSRS? The challenge that I quickly saw was that it was difficult to figure out when you should advance a segment of information. If you get 80% of the info right, should it be advanced? What happens to the 20% you missed? How do you prevent yourself from missing the same 20% every time it comes around?
If you don’t mention an item, it is skipped (no grade). If you can’t remember an item, but you recall learning it, you describe it and it will be marked as fail. At the end there is a screen with all the words and you can change any from skip to fail if you truly forgot it.
Any skipped items are then prioritized in the flashcards/cloze completion/shadowing modalities.
AFAIK free recall is not very high signal as to which words you know and which ones you don’t. Skipped words I just as often forget about cards because they’re so easy as I do because they’re so hard. It is however an incredibly effective exercise to cement your recall (and in my apps case, a good way to skip a good portion of your reviews in a day)
High affinity RBCs would actually be a disadvantage for athletics. You actually don't need very high affinity to pick up oxygen from the lungs -- your lungs are comparatively extremely high in oxygen. What matters more is being able to drop the oxygen off in peripheral tissues. Higher affinity means that it's harder to actually deliver the oxygen, which is why we evolutionarily developed the switch away from fetal hemoglobin.
I thought the evolutionary impetus for fetal hemoglobin was because it greatly increases the efficiency of fetal oxygen uptake across the placental interface?
From shadowgovt:
> I have seen no literature on whether having fetal RBCs in adulthood has any benefits or drawbacks (besides changing the affinity ratio for their fetus if the patient gets pregnant
This was exactly the question that popped into my mind when I read about switching from normal adult RBCs to fetal RBCs: does this therapy reduce the likelihood of carrying a baby to term?
Yes, that is true. I phrased that badly -- it's more that we didn't take the evolutionary branch where we retain the fetal hemoglobin because it is maladaptive in adults.
