anonmohawk

[anonmohawk]

Scanned some of my Dragon Ball Super Card Game Cross Worlds set

[anonmohawk]

Write, Like It's What I Know Best

Write, Like It’s What I Know Best

It all started with a picture. A small, rich, and appealing picture. Little house, white picket fence, up in the hills, near the mountain. Log cabin or better. That was the plan. Picture the setting sun against the hills, the sun so low in the sky that the mountain creeps down and behind the hills, to stalk and seep low. The light of the sun casts on the mountain and drops low in a matter of…

[anonmohawk]

Memory performance decreases with increasing age. Cannabis can reverse these ageing processes in the brain. This was shown in mice by scientists at the University of Bonn with their colleagues at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel). Old animals were able to regress to the state of two-month-old mice with a prolonged low-dose treatment with a cannabis active ingredient. This opens up new options, for instance, when it comes to treating dementia. The results are now presented in the journal Nature Medicine.

Like any other organ, our brain ages. As a result, cognitive ability also decreases with increasing age. This can be noticed, for instance, in that it becomes more difficult to learn new things or devote attention to several things at the same time. This process is normal, but can also promote dementia. Researchers have long been looking for ways to slow down or even reverse this process.

Scientists at the University of Bonn and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) have now achieved this in mice. These animals have a relatively short life expectancy in nature and display pronounced cognitive deficits even at twelve months of age. The researchers administered a small quantity of THC, the active ingredient in the hemp plant (cannabis), to mice aged two, twelve and 18 months over a period of four weeks.

Afterwards, they tested learning capacity and memory performance in the animals - including, for instance, orientation skills and the recognition of other mice. Mice who were only given a placebo displayed natural age-dependent learning and memory losses. In contrast, the cognitive functions of the animals treated with cannabis were just as good as the two-month-old control animals. “The treatment completely reversed the loss of performance in the old animals,” reported Prof. Andreas Zimmer from the Institute of Molecular Psychiatry at the University of Bonn and member of the Cluster of Excellence ImmunoSensation.

Continue Reading.

[anonmohawk]

It’s been a while since I’ve made a post, and I figured that these tips might be extra helpful with exam season approaching. As someone who struggles a lot with procrastination, I do everything I can to fight the urge to put assignments off until the last minute (even though I’m not always successful). 

As always, good luck! (ᵔᴥᵔ)

[anonmohawk]

A Year Later: My Time On My Terms

A Year Later: My Time On My Terms

In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well-being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary.ERNEST HEMINGWAY, A Moveable Feast “A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take…

[anonmohawk]

This is a blog post I wrote almost a year ago. I’m coming up on the one year of sobriety I committed to, and I thought I would share this as I get ready to write a new post. It’s almost here! What a year it has been!

[anonmohawk]

#boypositivity

You know what sucks the most about being a guy? We are judged far more critically for our personas than women are. There are a lot of harsh realities that women face when societies everywhere hold a lens to the female sex, but the fundamental differences between how we adjust our views of men and women according to our critical analysis of them is that women are inspected for beautiful traits, whereas men are often supposed to have many faults. And those faults are flaws that many people of all genders actualize, but your atypical hetero bachelor male will always be the worse for the wear than a hetero bachelorette.

First of all, if you’re not some sort of attractive type at all, you’re out. Sex is out for you, and so is dating. At an early age you learn that you have to have a certain degree of attractiveness to find an attractive companion. Being overweight usually does the trick, unless you can turn that around and make it a necessity of some sort. If you wrestle, or play football (typical highschool sporting events that allow one to show ones masculine prowess) then being overweight is a pretty low-risk factor. Overweight AND artistic though? Never fucking mind.

How about education? If your a handsome hunky dude, you’re fine. Even a total moron with muscles and a well defined jawline has enough determinable attractive qualities that qualify him for a suitable mate with girls and women alike. What if you’re really smart? You better at least be in decent shape and not to hard on the eyes. Education really just doesn’t matter to the majority female population, and even though you might tell yourself that you don’t want a pick from the majority population of attractive females, the attraction level plummets like a parabolic curve, so just be aware that if YOU, a male, get too picky, pickin’s get slim son. And by the time you’re in your twenties, what attractive single females who are looking to date, have already mated and now come with kids.

Which brings me to the next point: Finances. If you make it to your twenties to live out of your parents house, go to school, work a full-time job, and have a couple of hobbies, chances are you wont have any money to even make most girls think twice about whether or not you’re worth their time. You might get a date, or even the pleasure of their company from time to time, but settle into the single life because no early twenties female wants to date someone who merely has long term prospects ahead of them. You’re going to be working on that masters degree for a few years while you wait tables at your local olive garden or change tires or landscape part-time, and that means you will likely sleep with a handful of women over this time, but you won’t settle down with any of them for a long long time.

Even if you somehow manage to jump through all of those hoops, make it to your thirties, get a three figure a year job, find a girlfriend, and begin a long term relationship, you will always be competing with other males to keep your female companion. We aren’t biologically designed for monogamy, so every body everywhere who is fertile and secretes gender-specific hormones, will always be looking for a better mate. Intercourse with people you’ve never banged before is on all of our minds, but we are being pressured so much to maintain loyalty to our loved ones, spouses, significant others, that guys are constantly having to surpress their desires to make a move with a female coworker or the girl at the bar that definitely eyed you for half an hour.

If you are a heterosexual girl, and you are slightly attractive, and you can keep a fuckable figure (meaning, someone can physically enter your vagina and fill it with sperm) then you’re going to be fine. You will never be alone, you will always have a place to live, guys will find ways to keep you around, and you might get cheated on, but your chances of keeping a steady partner that you cheat on are slightly higher. Oh, and no job and education? That’s fine, because societal expectations have already built an image around us that men can provide enough for you and themselves, so all you need to do is find a male mate of some sort, and when he fails to provide a comfortable life for you and himself, you will be given a plethora of excuses to not do much more about it yourself than “find someone better”.

For us guys, we have to worry about maintaining good features, financial stability, better education, better jobs, and all over better self control. Even then, that might still not be enough, and you’ll probably die alone. For some guys who try to embrace that depressingly realistic expecation of life, that may be your very undoing. If suicide rates are significantly higher for men, so be it. Those are the ones that have freed themselves of their worldly bonds and no longer need worry about the depressing nights sleeping alone in a house with a bed and a car in the garage and money in the bank with two degrees on the wall and still no one to love them because they are short and have a lot of body hair and maybe cheated on their girlfriends once or twice.

We all make mistakes, we all have our flaws, but I think the tropes of recognizing womens mistakes and flaws over guys is undermined too often by feeling sorry for women and expecting men to just deal with it. Life isn’t fair. It’s pretty un-fucking-fair as a matter of fact. And the treatment of men’s issues with indifference and sometimes hostility is second only to how we mistreat people of different nationalities, race, religion, and disability in this world.

[anonmohawk]

23 science facts we didn't know at the start of 2016

1. Gravitational waves are real. More than 100 years after Einstein first predicted them, researchers finally detected the elusive ripples in space time this year. We’ve now seen three gravitational wave events in total.

2. Sloths almost die every time they poop, and it looks agonising.

3. It’s possible to live for more than a year without a heart in your body.

4. It’s also possible to live a normal life without 90 percent of your brain.

5. There are strange, metallic sounds coming from the Mariana trench, the deepest point on Earth’s surface. Scientists currently think the noise is a new kind of baleen whale call.

6. A revolutionary new type of nuclear fusion machine being trialled in Germany really works, and could be the key to clean, unlimited energy.

7. There’s an Earth-like planet just 4.2 light-years away in the Alpha Centauri star system - and scientists are already planning a mission to visit it.

8. Earth has a second mini-moon orbiting it, known as a ‘quasi-satellite’. It’s called 2016 HO3.

9. There might be a ninth planet in our Solar System (no, Pluto doesn’t count).

10. The first written record demonstrating the laws of friction has been hiding inside Leonardo da Vinci’s “irrelevant scribbles” for the past 500 years.

11. Zika virus can be spread sexually, and it really does cause microcephaly in babies.

12. Crows have big ears, and they’re kinda terrifying.

13. The largest known prime number is 274,207,281– 1, which is a ridiculous 22 million digits in length. It’s 5 million digits longer than the second largest prime.

14. The North Pole is slowly moving towards London, due to the planet’s shifting water content.

15. Earth lost enough sea ice this year to cover the entire land mass of India.

16. Artificial intelligence can beat humans at Go.

17. Tardigrades are so indestructible because they have an in-built toolkit to protect their DNA from damage. These tiny creatures can survive being frozen for decades, can bounce back from total desiccation, and can even handle the harsh radiation of space.

18. There are two liquid states of water.

19. Pear-shaped atomic nuclei exist, and they make time travel seem pretty damn impossible.

20. Dinosaurs had glorious tail feathers, and they were floppy.

21. One third of the planet can no longer see the Milky Way from where they live.

22. There’s a giant, 1.5-billion-cubic-metre (54-billion-cubic-foot) field of precious helium gas in Tanzania.

23. The ‘impossible’ EM Drive is the propulsion system that just won’t quit. NASA says it really does seem to produce thrust - but they still have no idea how. We’ll save that mystery for 2017.

[anonmohawk]

White Out

The snow began to fall again, for three straight days. Large, full, deep sheets of snow. Pure white blankets in the day, so thick that at night it blocked all moonlight. Only the streetlights gave …

<p>Source: <a href="https://notsoshortstories.wordpress.com/2016/12/30/987/">White Out</a></p>

[anonmohawk]

R.I.P. Vera Rubin; 1928-2016.

She never did win the Nobel prize for her discovery.

[anonmohawk]

Lightning engulfing a volcanic eruption - aka a Dirty Thunderstorm ⚡

[📷 via Francisco Negroni]

[anonmohawk]

This Generation

It’s so easy to dismiss young adults thoughts and opinions because of their lack of experience, and I understand how misleading it can be to look at someone who is 25 and younger, hear them spout of their idealized vision of the world through the lens of hope and grandeur and toss it into your mental trash bin without a second thought.

But here’s a thought: What if we actually tried to make those visions a reality? What if older, more experienced people with more money and education, actually looked at the plausibility of things like not running our countries like businesses, or only accepting applicants for jobs with long-term standings in previous occupations, or deciding that the only way to grow is to demand an increase of profit every year?

What if we actually attempted to find a logical analysis of what it would take to put us on a path to some of these endeavors? Sure, we might not benefit from it financially, but who really wants to keep living in a world that is in constant demand of higher income because we equate wealth with progress?

Who’s going to listen though. And what do I know. I’m just a 26 year old with a few college credits and less than a thousand dollars in his bank account, no romantic prospects, and will probably never own anything worth more than about $500. Really, what do I know? To most people, I’m a nobody.

[anonmohawk]

Dear grad students

As a recently graduated PhD, I completely understand your stress, your worry, your anxiety, your exhaustion, your endless sense of uncertainty, your feeling that even though you do all you can, it’ll never be good enough. Before I graduated, I heard lots of scary things from my mentors- that it would never end, that things get even more stressful after graduation, that in order to be successful you have to work nights and weekends for the rest of your life, that I’d have to pick between research and clinical work. 

 I want you to know those are scare tactics, not reality. 

 Life gets better post-PhD. I sleep better, my skin is clearer, I’m more mindful, my immune system is better, I can focus on TV enough to watch an entire episode of Sherlock, I’m more motivated and able to do fun social things in my free time- and I actually have free time! 

 And it’s still possible to be successful at work. I spent college and grad school learning how to work well. How to work efficiently and effectively. How to prioritize my responsibilities. How to learn new things. How to set my own deadlines. How to work with other people, who may have completely different working styles. How to receive critical feedback. How to live in an uncertain world and be confident in myself anyway. 

Now I use all those skills, and my mentors and colleagues take me seriously. They trust my skills and my work. I don’t have to prove myself constantly anymore. Work is better. It’s easier, and I’m more effective. 

Best of all, getting out of grad school has ended the tunnel vision grad school creates. I can see my whole life now, and prioritize what I want, rather than only seeing grad school stretching into the endless future. My whole identity doesn’t have to be centered around grad school. My goals don’t have to be solely academic. 

Which is amazing because I get to be a complete person, and because it means I have more options for my life. The further I get away from grad school, the more I realize I don’t have to get that tenure track job at some super prestigious university to be happy or successful. I have options. And I can pick what’s important to me- the perfect job, the perfect institution, the perfect financial package, the perfect location. I don’t have to put academic success first in order to be a good scientist or to prove myself. I can pursue the right life for me.  

You can, too. You can make it to the other side. You can pursue happiness and success. Keep going. 

[anonmohawk]

[anonmohawk]

[anonmohawk]

Gift ideas my family will never see

An ‘Infinite’ Galaxy Puzzle That Can Be Built in Any Direction

[anonmohawk]

A simple algorithm could explain the inner workings of human intelligence, and it could one day be encoded into artificial intelligence (AI) systems, researchers suggest.

It’s a mind-bending idea: that all the complex thoughts running through our heads are the product of a set of definable sums. But scientists have identified clear patterns in the brains of mice and hamsters, and if a similar phenomenon could be found in human brains, it could form the basis of such an algorithm for intelligence.

“Many people have long speculated that there has to be a basic design principle from which intelligence originates and the brain evolves, like how the double helix of DNA and genetic codes are universal for every organism,” says lead researcher Joe Tsien from Augusta University in Georgia.

“We present evidence that the brain may operate on an amazingly simple mathematical logic.”

Continue Reading.