The motor cortex is organized in a way that correlates to a distorted representation of the human body called the cortical homunculus...

That piece of terminology just made my day.

I've used homebrew for 2 years but I still don't know what taps and formulas mean :S

Good advice, thanks!

free will as conventionally defined

The article should have defined what free will it is talking about, and let each expert define how the define it. Is there a problem with this definition: "the ability to act depending on personal experiences within the limits of current biological functions"? In that sense Charles Whitman, who had a brain tumor and was compelled to kill people, was acting with free will at the time of being in medical distress. We can never truly know what thoughts he was having at the time just like we can't know everyone else's.

There's something eerie and brilliant about these photographs.

I don't quite understand what folded means in this context, is it that the molecular crystal structure is deformed without breaking?

That went fast! Without disclosing too much details, it was interesting enough that I read it in one breath.

I've finished too.

Since no one announced that they started reading, I'll start the spoilery discussion.

"The universe began as an enormous breath being held." delighted me. The story is about entropy, or, if you will, about the ultimate end, but it still manages to put some hope and poetry into that situation, rather than sliding into pointlessness and looking for external validation (although it kind of does the latter by invoking aliens).

There was much less focus on that, but the observation "where is my body?" is quite salient. People tend to think that there's a border between "me" and "not me", whether it's the border of meat/nonmeat, or soul/body. But this seems all arbitrary, and I think it's fluid. If a prosthetic can be "me", then why not a wheelchair, and if a wheelchair, why not my glasses, or my bed, or family?

Sometimes I think we individualized ourselves too much and forgot that alone, we're worth very little. How often do you hear "I've earned all of this alone"? We're ants, and an anthill is a superorganism.

This was an enjoyable read, thank you for sharing it. Some random stuff that I thought about while reading the story:

• Human vision compensates for visual input latency by combining recent input with past input https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.722.842&rep=rep1&type=pdf
• Implementing boolean logic circuits with air (pneumatics) https://www.powermotiontech.com/home/article/21122363/basics-of-pneumatic-logic

Truly magnificent.

Impressive. I like this collection of snippets: https://mlochbaum.github.io/bqncrate/ (/u/eris might like it)

I like that definition! It is very much relevant and still going strong: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/extensions/services/

To be honest I didn't even notice it but anyway it has been published using GitHub pages so source is also available here and also in its raw form.

Personally, I'm in a format=flowed camp, and the inability to author such emails through Gmail's web interface, as is the case with many others, is really unfortunate.

An even better idea is a combination of markdown and format=flowed like MailMate does: https://blog.freron.com/2011/thoughts-on-writing-emails-using-markdown/

Gotcha's all the way down! Thanks for posting!

Found it also under their personal space at canonical.org server: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/peg-bootstrap/

https://stackoverflow.com/a/13223927