Fearoflongwordsistoolong - Pahoillani

“This is one more reminder that our experience of the external world (i.e. the sum of its qualia), and the actual external world, are two very different things. In fact they are entirely different orders of being — right down to the bottom. Your experience of things exists only inside the few dark cubic inches of your skull, in a neural model of the outer world that your brain creates from the inputs of your senses. This is the only way that your self-awareness, your personhood, can understand and interact with the external physical world, because your sense of being a self is also a neural phenomenon. The outer world, which exists independently of human awareness, is vastly richer and more variegated than our limited senses perceive or than a brain-sized neural model could ever fully mimic. And internal world-models only evolved in ways that helped creatures survive, thrive, and reproduce. Anything else would be selected out as a distraction and a biologically expensive waste of neural processing power.”

—

This Week’s Sky at a Glance, January 10 – 19 - Sky & Telescope - Sky & Telescope

Damn, Sky & Telescope, I just wanted to know what was up this week; I wasn’t looking for an existential examination of the subjective nature of reality, and I *really* didn’t need it while I was a little stoned.

underground parking garages are criminally underutilized as a horror setting. windowless curving concrete labyrinths stretching up and down and all around you, that's some Backrooms shit

Arctic wolves traversing deep snow...

Synergistic innovations enabled the radiation of anglerfishes in the deep open ocean

Chase D. Brownstein, Katerina L. Zapfe, Spencer Lott, Richard C. Harrington, Ava Ghezelayagh, Alex Dornburg, Thomas J. Near

Summary

Major ecological transitions are thought to fuel diversification, but whether they are contingent on the evolution of certain traits called key innovations is unclear. Key innovations are routinely invoked to explain how lineages rapidly exploit new ecological opportunities. However, investigations of key innovations often focus on single traits rather than considering trait combinations that collectively produce effects of interest.  Here, we investigate the evolution of synergistic trait interactions in anglerfishes, which include one of the most species-rich vertebrate clades in the bathypelagic, or “midnight,” zone of the deep sea: Ceratioidea.  Ceratioids are the only vertebrates that possess sexual parasitism, wherein males temporarily attach or permanently fuse to females to mate. We show that the rapid transition of ancestrally benthic anglerfishes into pelagic habitats occurred during a period of major global warming 50–35 million years ago. This transition coincided with the origins of sexual parasitism, which is thought to increase the probability of successful reproduction once a mate is found in the midnight zone, Earth’s largest habitat. Our reconstruction of the evolutionary history of anglerfishes and the loss of immune genes support that permanently fusing clades have convergently degenerated their adaptive immunity. We find that degenerate adaptive immune genes and sexual body size dimorphism, both variably present in anglerfishes outside the ceratioid radiation, likely promoted their transition into the bathypelagic zone. These results show how traits from separate physiological, morphological, and reproductive systems can interact synergistically to drive major transitions and subsequent diversification in novel environments.

Read the paper here: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(24)00576-1

(behind a paywall, unfortunately)

You may be able to contact the authors for a copy if you wish. (here)

The cruelty of racist white men.

bitter aloe adorned with the webs of a dome spider (Cyrtophora moluccensis)

question! if a workplace is violating labor laws (which they often are) is there anything that prevents an employee from:

printing out copies of the laws being violated, maybe with helpful highlights/summaries

(and a helpful reporting hotline, if possible)

taping these signs anonymously in the employee bathroom stalls

i know retaliation is something many workers worry about, but bathrooms at least still don't have security cameras. so is this a practical and anonymous thing to do? and if so, why isn't it more common?

Here's a fun story of malicious compliance to brighten your day:

Until recently, a few people in my office had these desk shades to combat the obnoxious fluorescent lights, which is very helpful for people (like me) with migraines or other light-sensitivity issues.

A few days ago, everyone who has them was told to take them down. Different people were given different reasons - It violates fire code (it doesn't) / It blocks line of sight (sort of?). Since this goes against the existing status quo, the union reps (my beloved) jumped on it. Someone jokingly suggested using umbrella hats instead, since hats are allowed in the dress code. Today, the union reps are passing out these ridiculous things in protest:

If the rules are absurd, the resistance should match.

the 3.5mm headphone jack was the wound through which light entered your phone it was a little cave for angels to live in inside your phone and big tech got rid of it cause theyre scared of God the wrong way