thrownblown

start packing a flipper zero and make friends up shift on steep climbs

Wow, over a decade of HN relevance!

100 gorillas could definitely kill the most well armed dude

A real friend will help me fight a gorilla whether there are 100 of us or not

I just leave mine in LTE and upgrade to 5G only when I know i'm gonna DL something big.

Project Farm!

Not South America, but the story of Moncacht-Apé (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moncacht-Ap%C3%A9) is a fascinating—if slightly dubious—primary source describing his journey across North America immediately prior to European contact. I found a copy of his account as told to a French colonial officer on Amazon, and it looked like it was printed on a laser printer.

Cabeza de Vaca spent 1528–1536 wandering through the Southwest, living with multiple indigenous tribes. His experiences ranged from enslavement to becoming a medicine man. His firsthand account, Naufragios, is available, but I highly recommend A Land So Strange by Andrés Reséndez for a more accessible read. De Vaca also had a second adventure in South America, but it’s not as well-documented.

Another great read is River of Darkness by Buddy Levy, which covers Francisco Orellana’s journey down the Amazon. His expedition was roughly contemporary to Cabeza de Vaca’s own jungle survival story—though Orellana was a bit more conquistadorial than De Vaca.

I’d also love to see a proper follow-up to 1491 (1493 doesn’t count!). The closest thing we have might be America Before by Graham Hancock, which incorporates recent LiDAR discoveries—but it leans more into speculation than hard archaeology.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SillyTavernAI/

you gotta pay for them italics

Comic sans is great for dyslexia, b's and d's are not mirror images.

I have used Comic Code for years for this reason, and get the occasional giggle when pair programming.

https://tosche.net/fonts/comic-code

Toxo comes into the picture by way of an old wives' tale forbidding mothers from having cats around during pregnancy. Basically the only spot that toxo can reproduce itself is within a cat's stomach. The toxo then goes out with the feces (which is where the caution comes from) and rodents eat the feces. Toxo's mission is to get that rodent back into the stomach of a cat.

Rodents themselves are genetically wired to fear cats. A rat that smells cat urine will go the other way. However, get that same rodent infected with toxo and it will suddenly be attracted to the scent. Thus it checks out cat urine and becomes more likely to find itself in the stomach of a cat.

So you'd think toxo is wreaking havoc with all sorts of elements within the rat, turning it into a deranged rat. Nope. Everything else remains and functions normally - olfaction, social behavior, learning and memory, and even fear behaviors all stay the same.

It takes about 6 weeks for toxo to migrate from the gut to the brain. In the brain it forms cysts in multiple locations, but mainly in the amygdala region. The amygdala is the brain's center for fear and anxiety. It is also the brain center for forming predator aversion pathways. Once in the amygdala toxo is able to take dendritic nerve cell endings and cause them to shrivel up.

Shrivel up the dendritic spine, shrivel up the fear pathway.

Taking the creepiness up several notches, recall that other fear/anxiety based behaviors remain constant. The parasite is actually locating and unwiring the very pathway it needs to destroy.

Amazingly, it does not stop there. Toxo wants to make cat urine attractive and it is able to do so by hijacking another well known pathway; sexual attraction. Part of the neural connection for sexual activity passes through the amygdala. This gets rewired and a rodent infected with toxo will no longer have a fear response to the urine but it will have activation of this sexual response pathway, resulting in attraction to the scent.

Eau de merde. C'est fantastique! They are mapping out the toxo genome. One curious element discovered is that this protozoan parasite has two genes for tyrosine hydroxylase. This is responsible in part for the production of dopamine, which is all about rewards and the anticipation of rewards (really it's the thing that gets you to do the thing needed for the reward). It acts as a catalyst in the conversion of L-tyrosine into L-DOPA, which is in turn a precursor for dopamine.

So at the right moment, the parasite secretes the enzyme, thus driving the neurons to create dopamine at the time the toxo wants them to, thus associating dopamine with the neural pathway that toxo wants used!

Do other parasites that are closely related to toxo share this gene? No. Strangely it does not have genes for other common hormones - just this one that allows it to plug into the key for mammalian reward systems. And it starts generating it after it has penetrated into the brain and formed cysts, especially cysts in the amygdala.

For humans the current clinical dogma is that it's a disaster for a fetus but otherwise runs its course and goes latent. However, a small literature exists suggesting that males in particular become more impulsive after a toxo infection and that people who are toxo infected are 3-4 times more likely to be killed in car accidents that involve reckless speeding.

He quips that this is a protozoan parasite that knows more about the neurobiology of fear and motivation than 25,000 neuroscientists standing on each others' shoulders.

And it's not alone. The rabies virus knows how to control the neurobiology of aggression. It makes the animal more likely to bite and pass on the rabies infection.

from: http://www.robertsapolskyrocks.com/toxoplasmosis.html

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29906469/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC117239/ https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/13/2/593

Martin Shkreli is still getting raked of the coals over his deraprim pricing shenanigans

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/01/...

I would say that this one of the greatest casualties in the war on doping, Dr Ferrari especially has amassed a wealth of knowledge on blood and human energy systems that will never be acknowledged. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michele_Ferrari

so grass track racing? It was more popular worldwide but is still very popular in the Caribbean and Guyana.

I used to give cancellara the benefit of the doubt. But after discovering the very very sneaky second bike change I think its very unlikely he didnt do mechanical doping.

Cancellara had a mechanical issue and did a first bike chance. The main mechanic jumps out of the car and gives him a new bike. A few km's later Breschel has a real issue and requests a new bike, but the main mechanic isnt in the car anymore resulting in Breschel getting the wrong bike, losing a lot of time and never returning to the front. A few km further the images show Cancellara suddenly sitting on his original bike.

What happened, at the point where cancellara did his first bike change, the stage makes a loop. The mechanic had to walk 500 meter to get on the other part of the stage. What does amateur footage reveal. In a turn everybody where makes the short turn, Cancellara goes wide where the main mechanic is waiting with the original bike and you see Cancellara do a lightning bike swap.

Its a sad thing but after all these years I am convinced Cancellara cheated.

(Stolen from a comment on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6z7uUe0tVA)

checkout japanese keirin racing armor.

also low speed crashes can be worse than high speed because it's worse to hit and stick vs hit and slide.

Top level competitive flying 200's are sub 10s. That's an average speed over the timed distance of 72km/h or 44.75 mph with a peak around 75-77km/h.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_record_progression_track...

edit to add the Tokyo Olympics qualifiers all under 10 seconds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_at_the_2020_Summer_Oly...

apples to oranges. Look up this meatball https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F%C3%B6rstemann

working at gym after 4 Hour Body came out was pretty loud...

the hypercard!

11. Eratosthenes, Olympic Victors 3rd century via Favorinus, Varied History, via Diogenes Laertius, Lives 8.47 “Eratosthenes (according to what Favorinus reports in book eight of his Varied History), said this man [sc. Pythagoras] was the first to box using technique, in the 48th Olympiad, letting his hair grow long and wearing a purple robe; after being excluded from the boys’ games and jeered at, he immediately joined the mens’, and won.” Olympiad 48: 588 to 584 BCE cf. Eusebius, Chronography, p. 93 Karst

time is base 12 or 60, ounces are base 16, feet back to 12, but miles are base 5,280

Definitely not going to argue with you on that. But it did all start with the simple addition to the URL.

Incrementing a URL can (and has) get you prison time.

https://www.wired.com/2012/11/att-hacker-found-guilty/

As a bit of a GPD fanboi I have both a pocket 2 and a pocket max. When I was a server admin, pocket 2 went everywhere with me in a pelican case. That was just this side of too bulky to carry without noticing.

Pocket max in the pelican was just on the other side of that threshold.

The benefit of the pocket 2 is the full windows/linux installation alongside the usable qwerty keyboard.

Fabuloso

you'll never be in cicada 3301 with that kinda attitude my guy!

but to counter your point: people do have to write those libraries that you depend on. others have to validate them, and yet still others are doing their best efforts to invalidate them and attack them.

but you are correct that most people should not roll their own cryptography suites.

to those who flagged my "do you even crypto bro?" comment:

even a little research into cryptography will inform you that prime numbers are used heavily in encryption algorithms.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/439870/why-are-primes-im...

HyperRouge! i've got it on my phone!

writing splunk queries, they are often wrong but close enough that I can edit it into working

Popover drop-down is broken in mobile chrome on Android unless I request the desktop site.