Ryan Rhodes ⚙️🧠

Fun fact: Koko the gorilla didn't do this, because Koko the gorilla couldn't talk and the researchers made it up. Also there was some weird stuff going on over there.

I had just assumed the synaptic cleft was just empty salt solution for neurotransmitters to diffuse. TIL like everything else in the body it's packed tight with structure:

There are QRPs in the sciences more generally - are there QRPs in the humanities more generally? If so, what are they?

In this new translation of the TAO TE CHING, David Bentley Hart reveals the metaphysical, moral, and poetic depth of Laozi’s classic. Born of the Axial Age, it explores the tension between flesh and spirit, renewed here with striking clarity and relevance.

This man insists that Achilles was Brad-Pitt-in-Troy blonde. However, we know that ancient Greeks did not perceive colours in the same manner as we do today. They described them contextually by brightness, shine and quality rather than fixed modern hues. Xanthos, the term applied to Achilles’ hair, covered a range of bright, light shades; including tawny, honey, golden, auburn and reddish tones. Plato in the Timaeus explicitly defines xanthos as the result of mixing bright (lampros), red (erythros) and white (leukos), producing a fawn-like or tawny shade, not the pure Scandinavian yellow we imagine today. That is also why the Romans, who were quite familiar with the Trojan cycle, consistently depicted Achilles with reddish or auburn hair Achilles's son Neoptolemus was nicknamed Pyrrhus (“the fiery/red-haired one”) for the very same trait. The ancient Greek history is not a canvas for contemporary fantasies of morons who seek to steal a glorious past that it isn't theirs to begin with. PS: 2 Roman mosaics and 1 fresco. 1 shows Achilles with his centaur tutor, and the other 2 with Odysseus when Odysseus went to Skyros island to find Achilles who was hiding on his mother's orders and pretended he was a girl named Pyrrha (aka the redhead/firey one).

What about actually reading the papers you cite? I am really puzzled by the pushback on arxiv new policy. Is it just exposing that many people don't read the papers they cite?

Hallucinated references are a real problem. But the main job of researchers is to make new discoveries and train the next generation to do the same. Pretending every citation in every paper must be read in detail by the authors is simply not how research operates — nor should it.