The Boy Who Grew A Brain

Major types of Engines

Straight In-line

This is the type of engine that you find in your quotidian car. Nothing fancy, just all pistons arranged parallel along the vertical direction.

V in-line

Now, this is the sort of the engine that you find on sports cars like the Ferrari. When you hear sports enthusiasts go ‘ Whoa, that’s a V-12! ‘ - it just means that the engine has a V-type arrangement with 12 cylinders.

V +  Inline = V-inline

Commonly referred to as the VR engine.

The name VR6 comes from a combination of V engine (German: V-Motor), and the German word “Reihenmotor” (meaning “inline engine” or “straight engine”)

Volkswagen’s VR6 engines, and the later VR5 variants, are a family of internal combustion engines, characterized by a narrow-angle (10.5° or 15°) V engine configuration.

                    a: straight engine, b: V engine, c: VR engine

W engine

A W engine is a type of reciprocating engine ( again created by Volkswagen) arranged with its cylinders in a configuration in which the cylinder banks resemble the letter W, in the same way those of a V engine resemble the letter V.

A W16 engine is used on the Bugatti Veyron. That’s 16 cylinders!

Flat Engine

Flat engines offer several advantages for motorcycles, namely: a low centre of gravity, smoothness, suitability for shaft drive, and (if air-cooled) excellent cooling of the cylinders. You can find them on aircrafts as well

Radial Engine (aka the dancing starfish)

They were used mostly in small aircraft for the propeller

The big advantage of radials was their large frontal area, which meant they could be air cooled, meaning less maintenance, failures, and of course a lower cost of initial purchase and maintenance.

Wankel Engine

This engine has only 3 moving parts and can make a lot of power.However, they are pretty inefficient, the last car to use this was a Mazda RX-8.

Axial Engine

The axial engine is a very interesting design. But they are not widely used because they are just hard to make and running these things at high RPM’s  is a challenge.

Duke engines are equipped with this type.

Jet engine

Commonly jet engines refer to the engines that are found on, well Jets!

Air is sucked in through the front and  squeezed. A controlled explosion follows and the exhaust is blown out through the back

But, Jet engines also include the engines that are found on rockets, hybrids and water-jets. And their mode of operation is different than the one mentioned above.

Pretty cool eh?

Have a great day!

PC: Howstuffworks, Duke, MichaelFrey, Azure.km

** There is also the Stirling Engine. It’s amazing and a topic for an another post. But if you are interested do check out more about it here.

EDIT :  Had forgotten about the VR and the W-engines. My bad! Thanks for pointing it out.:D

Can you clear up the animal/human egyptian stuff some more? I find it interesting!

I’m honestly not sure any explanation will ‘clear it up’ but I’ll give it a go, since the original post has so many reblogged comments that misunderstand things. 

I kinda went into it a bit here in this post, and a little in this one, but I’ll reiterate it here for posterity. 

Egyptian gods appear to have animal heads, but, in truth, the animal headed form is merely to demonstrate the duality of the god - the animal and the human. (I want to point out at this juncture that not every Egyptian god has an animal form. Some are simply human, and others have forms that are anthropomorphised inanimate objects). Duality was important to the Egyptians as they were intrinsically linked to the world around them and often their religious mythology is deeply linked to the natural world. This is why we see themes such as life/death structure/chaos male/female animal/human etc. They equated what they saw in their lives as aspects of the divine. 

One such example is the god Khepri. Khepri is the god of the Morning/Rising sun, and was responsible for pushing the sun across the sky. Khepri is depicted as, in most cases, as simply a Scarab beetle, and sometimes with the body of a man whose entire head is a scarab beetle. The Egyptians took inspiration from the natural world to explain the divine, so they saw the humble dung beetle (that’s what a Scarab beetle is) pushing it’s ball of dung about, and also its babies hatching out from this dung ball seemingly out of nowhere. The ball of dung they equated with the Sun moving across the sky, thus assuming that a divine scarab was pushing the sun in a similar manner. Khepri took on a ‘creator’ aspect as the Egyptians saw the dung beetle seemingly creating life from nothing, though in reality they’re just laying eggs within the dung ball that eventually hatch. But this wasn’t something the Egyptians understood, so they believed that the scarab beetle had the power to create life from nothing, much like their own creation myth of life springing forth from a mound of earth in the waters of chaos. Dung ball = mound that emerged from the waters of chaos. Thus, when naming the god, the Egyptians chose a word xpr (kheper) which means ‘to come into being’ to relate to the creation of life and also the rising of the sun. And how is xpr written? With a Scarab beetle! Everything has it’s place in Ancient Egypt. As for the human body with a scarab beetle head form, well that’s more of a form that in art allows the Egyptians to show the Scarab beetle doing humanoid things in religious scenes. 

For gods like Anubis, who are depicted with the head of their animal form, it’s different. The duality works the same, insomuch as the form you see (Golden Wolf headed human) is just a combination to show that the god has two forms and two kinds of power - the divine human form and the divine animal form. In most cases you would never see the human form as you were only allowed to see a God’s true form after death, so it was prohibited to depict the god as human (though there’s a rare depiction of Anubis in human form at Seti’s temple at Abydos). Basically, the Egyptians believed that images could magically come to life so depicting a god as a mortal human would cause the god to die. No one wants that.* So, the Egyptians combined the Animal and Human in order to show the god legitimately in a scene.

* I am aware that there are gods that only have a human form, but they’ve always got divine markers such as headdresses that mark them as ‘not mortal human’ but a god, therefore they wouldn’t be subject to them to the same rules. Isis and Nepthys for instance have their names in hieroglyphs as headdresses to mark them as different, and Hathor has her cow horns and sun disk.

However, when I say ‘animal form’ I do not mean, and neither did the Egyptians, a walking talking animal that does everything a human does. Anubis’ animal form is not a walking, talking Golden Wolf in human clothing. When I say ‘animal form’ I mean a literal animal. Just a wolf. Nothing else. Every wolf an Egyptian saw they would believe was a form of Anubis visiting the mortal realm. 

Unlike in Greek Mythology, where the gods were essentially human (though looking at Zeus…goddamn Zeus) and everyone knew they lived on Mount Olympus, Egyptian gods had no such thing. The Ancient Egyptians believed that their gods lived on the same plane of existence, but on another level. Kinda like ghosts I guess? There but not really. So they would manifest as something. Khepri was the scarab beetle pushing the dung in a ball and in turn rose the sun. Dogs/Wolves hung about in the necropolis so they saw that as a manifestation of Anubis guarding the dead (even though those dogs were most likely eating the dead…), which also gives way to the epithet of Anubis on his Mound (i.e. Anubis who sits upon a mastaba guarding the tomb). Bastet was the cat hunting mice around the grain stores so that the harvest wouldn’t be ruined. The Egyptians would feed these animals as a form of worship,** and that’s how they ended up with so many cats in the house. 

** I say worship in a very loose sense. The worship of gods like Osiris, Isis, Amun, Mut, Khonsu etc was the prerogative of the Pharaoh and his phyles of priests (set of Priests for each god). Most Egyptians were not allowed into the major temples. In fact, they were not allowed past the first forecourt, and that was at festival time. The Egyptians believed that their Pharaoh was a demi-god and therefore their link between the gods and themselves. Only he was allowed to worship the gods, as it was Pharaoh’s job to maintain what’s known as Ma’at (cosmic order). If Pharaoh didn’t then the world would fall into chaos, which is why they tried to exorcise Akhentaten from the record because he did not maintain ma’at! Of course, Pharaoh couldn’t be in the temples for each god every day, so most of it was devolved to High Priests and their underlings. Regular Egyptians would not have worshipped the main pantheon, but rather the more minor domestic gods, such as Bes and Taweret, at home. Feeding cats would have fed into this more ‘loose’ worship.

But of course there was also the ‘human’ form, which meant that a god could come to you as a person and you wouldn’t even know it. Sekhmet could manifest as the general who leads the troops into battle, Taweret is the midwife who delivers your baby, Sobek is the fisherman responsible for the good haul of fish today etc etc. The depiction of them in one zoomorphic form is purely to demonstrate that they could be both and that human and animal forms were equal parts of their power and character.

I hope this clears some of it up!

Sources:

Silverman, D. (1991) Divinity and Deities in Ancient Egypt, In J. Baines, L. Lesko, & D. Silverman, Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths and Personal Practice. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 7-87

Schoske. S & Wildung. D, (1992) Gott und Götter im Alten Ägypten. Berlin: Von Zabern

Meeks. D & Favard-Meeks. C, (1996) Divine Life of the Egyptian Gods (Hachette (original), 1993 / Cornell University (translation), 1996)

Assmann, J. (2001). The Search for God in Ancient Egypt.(D. Lorton, Trans.) Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press.

Hornung, E. (1982). Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many. (J. Baines. Trans) Ithica & London: Cornell University Press

The Neuroscience of Serial Murder

Why do serial killers commit heinous acts of murder? The answer may be found in the reward center of our brains, or the Nucleus Accumbens. This is where dopamine is created. When you eat sugar, snort cocaine, snack on chocolate, or have sex, that reward center is triggered and dopamine is released. This chemical conveys the feeling of pleasure, reinforcing those prior indulgences you’ve engaged in. If a serial killer has linked sex with torture, killing, or dismemberment, his brain is sending him a signal, making him feel rewarded for his behavior. It’s the same feeling we may get from eating some chocolate ice cream after a long day or a really good orgasm. A serial killer’s brain reinforces his behavior, telling him that whatever he is doing is good and that he should keep doing it. This may explain why serial killers often do not stop until they are caught.

There are SO many types of coders. Do any of these remind you of someone you know? 🤔  Tag em! 

occuption: full-time helen of sparta apologist

Researchers explore why those with autism avoid eye contact

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often find it difficult to look others in the eyes. This avoidance has typically been interpreted as a sign of social and personal indifference, but reports from people with autism suggests otherwise. Many say that looking others in the eye is uncomfortable or stressful for them – some will even say that “it burns” – all of which points to a neurological cause. Now, a team of investigators based at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital has shed light on the brain mechanisms involved in this behavior. They reported their findings in a Nature Scientific Reports paper.

“The findings demonstrate that, contrary to what has been thought, the apparent lack of interpersonal interest among people with autism is not due to a lack of concern,” says Nouchine Hadjikhani, MD, PhD, director of neurolimbic research in the Martinos Center and corresponding author of the new study. “Rather, our results show that this behavior is a way to decrease an unpleasant excessive arousal stemming from overactivation in a particular part of the brain.”

The key to this research lies in the brain’s subcortical system, which is responsible for the natural orientation toward faces seen in newborns and is important later for emotion perception. The subcortical system can be specifically activated by eye contact, and previous work by Hadjikhani and colleagues revealed that, among those with autism, it was oversensitive to effects elicited by direct gaze and emotional expression. In the present study, she took that observation further, asking what happens when those with autism are compelled to look in the eyes of faces conveying different emotions.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Hadjikhani and colleagues measured differences in activation within the face-processing components of the subcortical system in people with autism and in control participants as they viewed faces either freely or when constrained to viewing the eye-region. While activation of these structures was similar for both groups exhibited during free viewing, overactivation was observed in participants with autism when concentrating on the eye-region. This was especially true with fearful faces, though similar effects were observed when viewing happy, angry and neutral faces.

The findings of the study support the hypothesis of an imbalance between the brain’s excitatory and inhibitory signaling networks in autism – excitatory refers to neurotransmitters that stimulate the brain, while inhibitory refers to those that calm it and provide equilibrium. Such an imbalance, likely the result of diverse genetic and environmental causes, can strengthen excitatory signaling in the subcortical circuitry involved in face perception. This in turn can result in an abnormal reaction to eye contact, an aversion to direct gaze and consequently abnormal development of the social brain.

In revealing the underlying reasons for eye-avoidance, the study also suggests more effective ways of engaging individuals with autism. “The findings indicate that forcing children with autism to look into someone’s eyes in behavioral therapy may create a lot of anxiety for them,” says Hadjikhani, an associate professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. “An approach involving slow habituation to eye contact may help them overcome this overreaction and be able to handle eye contact in the long run, thereby avoiding the cascading effects that this eye-avoidance has on the development of the social brain.”

The researchers are already planning to follow up the research. Hadjikhani is now seeking funding for a study that will use magnetoencephalography (MEG) together with eye-tracking and other behavioral tests to probe more deeply the relationship between the subcortical system and eye contact avoidance in autism.

Lasers + Keyboards = All the best things!!! CODE ON. ⚡️⚡️⚡️