#Encoder Modulator

[heirtocragflame]

A tensor is an element of the tensor product of two modules hope this helps

maths student naïvely asks for the definition of a tensor, causes world war 3, more on this story at 7

[nazoltd]

Buy Siemens 6ES7 550-1AA00-0AB0

[oh-dameron]

-Network Effect, ch8

Is it proof that ART was holding out on MB? If ART has the array of internal sensors that MB describes would it also need cameras? What for? It can sense and understand everything going on inside itself just fine. When the humans need to see another part of the ship it doesn't give them a camera view, it whips up a hologram. ART is a deep-space research vessel, the visual input it's used to getting is probably more like the James Webb space telescope than a security camera. And once it made friends with SecUnit in AC there was no particular reason not to allow camera access: there was no-one else on board to spy on and its research modules weren't attached.

If, however, you're a humungous space reaseach ship and you're used to looking at supernovas way the fuck over there and using your spidey-senses for stuff happening in your hull then it makes sense that visual media might not grab you. It's not encoded with heat, density, motion: it's mostly just optical. Which, you're a hyperintelligent supercomputer, you can parse it into a format that you can understand, but. Ugh. Why? There isn't even any gravitational lensing. It's like reading something boring in a language that you've got a rudimentary grasp of but aren't fluent in: you can do it if you make the time and effort but it's a lot of work for something that isn't even fun.

And then Murderbot shows up and gives it a three-week intensive course on Why Visual Input Is Fun, Actually. It gets a lot of practise and ART learns very quickly. So now that it's tagged and released Murderbot back into the wild it needs to upgrade its on-board systems to provide an appropriate habitat for once its multi-step plan to find it again and convince it to stay forever comes to fruition (hopefully the plan did not originally involve kidnapping).

[prof-dr-crane]

Hello Dr. Crane

Out of curiosity would you mind sharing some of your discoveries with fellow psychologist, mostly I'm curious about usage of adrenaline and noradrenaline in your tests. If you used them at all that's, but I suspect they they easiest way to put human into flight-or-fight response. Did you noticed any difference depending on which one you used, specially which one or mix of two cause patients to hallucinate longer?

Also did you ever was punch during your testing as patients turn out to have strong fight response? 

Ah, a fellow psychologist. A rare occurrence, and a welcome reprieve from the usual rabble.

Your hypothesis is a logical one, adrenaline and noradrenaline are, indeed, fundamental in the induction of the fight-or-flight response. However, they are blunt instruments. Crude, imprecise. A scalpel is always preferable to a hammer.

While I have experimented with direct administration of these catecholamines, I find their effects to be fleeting, their influence dictated more by individual metabolic rates than by any reliable chemical mechanism. Adrenaline, for instance, surges rapidly, spiking heart rate, dilating bronchi, and priming the body for immediate action, hardly conducive to prolonged hallucinatory states. Noradrenaline, though longer-lasting, is more selective in its activation, its primary role being vigilance and sustained alertness rather than the raw, unbridled terror I require.

Instead, my formulations favor agents that modulate the body's own neurochemical responses rather than forcibly induce them. Scopolamine and atropine, for example, interfere with acetylcholine transmission, disrupting memory encoding and sensory processing, making hallucinations more immersive and disorienting. Monoamine oxidase inhibitors, when used as potentiators, extend the presence of key neurotransmitters, ensuring a more prolonged and profound experience.

Of course, should one introduce both adrenaline and noradrenaline in a controlled ratio, the results become more… chaotic. The subject’s body struggles between the immediacy of action and the endurance of sustained hyper-awareness. The outcome? Disorientation, exhaustion, and in some cases, complete physiological collapse. An inefficient method, but an effective reminder that fear is as much about endurance as it is about intensity.

To your second question: Indeed, during my experiments, particularly with subjects exhibiting pronounced fight responses, I have experienced physical confrontations. Notably, the Dark Knight's resilience often led to such... unpleasant interactions.

- Dr. Jonathan Crane

[adafruit]

Leftovers & layout - WLED board revision A completed!

Sunday night, Babyada went to bed early, so we finished the capture and layout of our WLED board. Thanks to all the suggestions, we were able to implement quite a few!

For power, use USB C PD with switch-select or DC up to 24V; they are diode-OR'd together with PMEG3050

https://www.digikey.com/short/zv22b0pq

into a massive 5A 24V fuse

https://www.digikey.com/short/43qwwtwm

For the 5V regulator, we picked NCP718ASN500T1G

https://www.digikey.com/short/bb9ncc0n

- it's linear, but we don't need a lot of current at 5V. For 3.3V, we went with our trusty TPS54202

https://www.digikey.com/short/c1wnnf94

Upon request, we kept the ICS-43434 I2S microphone

https://www.digikey.com/short/28zwrrhz

and added an IR 38KHz receiver. For external connectivity, there's an ADC/DAC/GPIO #27 breakout on a JST SH 3-pin and I2C on a StemmaQT/Qwiic 4-pin.

We also added a 2x3 breakout header with 3V, GND, and 3 more GPIO so you could connect an external microphone, IR receiver, buttons, or rotary encoder. The terminal blocks have three 5V level-shifted outputs with 100 ohm in-line resistors and power/ground pairs for each. If you need just one more LED strand, the fourth 5V signal is on the 2x3 block.

Rounding out the design are four mounting holes, a reset button, GPIO #0 user button, GPIO LED, and an individual NeoPixel, which could be useful for testing. It's still pretty small, 2" x 1.3". With an ESP32-Mini module, we can pick a PCB or wFL antenna port, and it's an easy swap to make it use an ESP32-Pico, which has 2MB PSRAM.

Whatcha think - anything else we should add or watch out for?

[compneuropapers]

Interesting Papers for Week 25, 2025

Opponent control of reinforcement by striatal dopamine and serotonin. Cardozo Pinto, D. F., Pomrenze, M. B., Guo, M. Y., Touponse, G. C., Chen, A. P. F., Bentzley, B. S., Eshel, N., & Malenka, R. C. (2025). Nature, 639(8053), 143–152.

Emergence of a Dynamical State of Coherent Bursting with Power-Law Distributed Avalanches from Collective Stochastic Dynamics of Adaptive Neurons. Chan, L.-C., Kok, T.-F., & Ching, E. S. C. (2025). PRX Life, 3(1), 013013.

Fear conditioning modulates the intrinsic excitability of ventral hippocampal CA1 neurons in male rats. Ehlers, V. L., Yousuf, H., Smies, C. W., Natwora, B. R., & Moyer, J. R. (2025). Journal of Neurophysiology, 133(3), 853–867.

Separating cognitive and motor processes in the behaving mouse. Hasnain, M. A., Birnbaum, J. E., Ugarte Nunez, J. L., Hartman, E. K., Chandrasekaran, C., & Economo, M. N. (2025). Nature Neuroscience, 28(3), 640–653.

Neural mechanisms of learned suppression uncovered by probing the hidden attentional priority map. Huang, C., van Moorselaar, D., Foster, J., Donk, M., & Theeuwes, J. (2025). eLife, 13, e98304.3.

Robust encoding of stimulus–response mapping by neurons in visual cortex. Jonikaitis, D., Xia, R., & Moore, T. (2025). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(9), e2408079122.

Long-term memory facilitates spontaneous memory usage through multiple pathways. Kumle, L., Kovoor, J., Watt, R. L., Boettcher, S. E. P., Nobre, A. C., & Draschkow, D. (2025). Current Biology, 35(5), 1171-1179.e5.

Error prediction determines the coordinate system used for the representation of novel dynamics. Leib, R., & Franklin, D. (2025). eLife, 14, e84349.

Statistical learning re-shapes the center-surround inhibition of the visuo-spatial attentional focus. Massironi, A., Lega, C., Ronconi, L., & Bricolo, E. (2025). Scientific Reports, 15, 7656.

Hair Cells in the Cochlea Must Tune Resonant Modes to the Edge of Instability without Destabilizing Collective Modes. Momi, A. S., Abbott, M. C., Rubinfien, J., Machta, B. B., & Graf, I. R. (2025). PRX Life, 3(1), 013001.

Decision cost hypersensitivity underlies Huntington’s disease apathy. Morris, L.-A., Horne, K.-L., Manohar, S., Paermentier, L., Buchanan, C. M., MacAskill, M. R., Myall, D. J., Apps, M., Roxburgh, R., Anderson, T. J., Husain, M., & Le Heron, C. J. (2025). Brain, 148(3), 861–874.

Integration of Euclidean and path distances in hippocampal maps. Ottink, L., de Haas, N., & Doeller, C. F. (2025). Scientific Reports, 15, 7104.

Aversive generalization in human amygdala neurons. Reitich-Stolero, T., Halperin, D., Morris, G., Goldstein, L., Bergman, L., Fahoum, F., Strauss, I., & Paz, R. (2025). Current Biology, 35(5), 1137-1144.e3.

Compartmentalized dendritic plasticity in the mouse retrosplenial cortex links contextual memories formed close in time. Sehgal, M., Filho, D. A., Kastellakis, G., Kim, S., Lee, J., Shen, Y., Huang, S., Lavi, A., Fernandes, G., Davila Mejia, I., Martin, S. S., Pekcan, A., Wu, M. S., Heo, W. Do, Poirazi, P., Trachtenberg, J. T., & Silva, A. J. (2025). Nature Neuroscience, 28(3), 602–615.

Adaptive chunking improves effective working memory capacity in a prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia circuit. Soni, A., & Frank, M. J. (2025). eLife, 13, e97894.3.

Attention to memory content enhances single-unit spike sequence fidelity in the human anterior temporal lobe. Sundby, K. K., Vaz, A. P., Wittig, J. H., Jackson, S. N., Inati, S. K., & Zaghloul, K. A. (2025). Current Biology, 35(5), 1085-1094.e5.

Acetylcholine modulates prefrontal outcome coding during threat learning under uncertainty. Tu, G., Wen, P., Halawa, A., & Takehara-Nishiuchi, K. (2025). eLife, 13, e102986.2.

The effect of fasting on human memory consolidation. Yang, X., Miao, X., Schweiggart, F., Großmann, S., Rauss, K., Hallschmid, M., Born, J., & Lutz, N. D. (2025). Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 218, 108034.

Neural Correlates of Perceptual Plasticity in the Auditory Midbrain and Thalamus. Ying, R., Stolzberg, D. J., & Caras, M. L. (2025). Journal of Neuroscience, 45(10), e0691242024.

Hippocampal neuronal activity is aligned with action plans. Zutshi, I., Apostolelli, A., Yang, W., Zheng, Z. S., Dohi, T., Balzani, E., Williams, A. H., Savin, C., & Buzsáki, G. (2025). Nature, 639(8053), 153–161.

[mysticstronomy]

COULD WE BUILD SPACE TIME COMPUTERS THAT RUN ON GRAVITY??

Blog#513

Saturday, June 14th, 2025,

Welcome back,

Imagine a computer that doesn't run on silicon or electricity — but on space-time itself.

A new mathematical breakthrough proposes a jaw-dropping idea: using gravity — the bending of space and time — as a computation force. That's right. We might one day build computers that run on the fabric of the universe itself.

The Big Idea: Gravity as a Logic Gate?

In general relativity, gravity isn't a force — it's a curvature of space and time caused by mass and energy. Black holes, neutron stars, even gravitational waves — all distort the structure of space-time.

Now, theoretical physicists have devised a new framework that enables us to detect whether information has been altered by the warping of space-time. That is to say: they've figured out how to tell if a message was distorted by gravity itself.

This isn't simply an issue of detecting changes — it's an issue of developing a foundation in which gravity becomes a part of the computing process. This implies that gravitational fields can not only affect the movement of mass and light, but how we calculate data too.

A Future Beyond Silicon?

Purely theoretical still, this study implies a radically new paradigm of computation:

Space-time logic gates: Instead of electrical signals flipping transistors, one could modulate signals with engineered gravitational curvatures.

Gravity-driven information flow: One could encode information in the way gravitational fields bend light or slow down signals.

Geometry-based computation: Doing math with the *shape* of the universe. Literally.

It's a move towards what you might call a space-time computer— a computer that "thinks" in terms of bends, curves, and warps in the universe.

COMING UP!!

(Wednesday, June 18th, 2025)

"IS SPACE TIME AFFECTED BY GRAVITY??"

[gallifreyinstituteforlearning]

what would happen if two chameleon arched time lords (for simplicity's sake both in the guise of the same species, let's say silurian (eocene)) accidentally swaped biodata modules, went a very long way from each other, and opened them at separate times?

What happens if two chameleon-arched Time Lords accidentally swap fob watches and open them far apart?

Nothing. Probably. Which is both reassuring and deeply annoying when you can't remember where you left yours.

🧬How It Works

Each biodata module is encoded specifically to its owner's biodata signature—and likely linked to their TARDIS via the symbiotic nuclei. It contains your biology, your memories, your entire essence. Opening someone else's module won't rewrite your body or mind any more than reading someone else's diary will turn you into them.

If two disguised Time Lords swap watches by accident:

The wrong Time Lord opens the wrong fob watch: no effect.

They might get strange flashes or psychic whispers, but unless the biodata recognises a match, nothing happens.

The module will likely produce a subtle compulsion to return it to its rightful owner.

🏫 So...

No, you probably can't accidentally turn into someone else. Chameleon Arch tech is terrifyingly invasive, but it's not careless. Still, label your fob watches, people.

Related:

💬|📱👽Can Time Lords identify a chameleoned Time Lord?: The (surprising) problems of Gallifreyans identifying chameleon-arched Gallifreyans.

💬|📱👶What would happen if a human child absorbed their chameleon-arched Time Lord parent's essence?: The complexities of biodata modules and offspring.

💬|📱👹 What could happen if a Chameleon Arch transformation failed?: Some hypothetical scenarios of Chameleon Arc transformations going wrong.

Hope that helped! 😃

Any orange text is educated guesswork or theoretical. More content ... →📫Got a question? | 📚Complete list of Q+A and factoids →📢Announcements |🩻Biology |🗨️Language |🕰️Throwbacks |🤓Facts → Features: ⭐Guest Posts | 🍜Chomp Chomp with Myishu →🫀Gallifreyan Anatomy and Physiology Guide (pending) →⚕️Gallifreyan Emergency Medicine Guides →📝Source list (WIP) →📜Masterpost If you're finding your happy place in this part of the internet, feel free to buy a coffee to help keep our exhausted human conscious. She works full-time in medicine and is so very tired 😴

[darkmaga-returns]

by Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

The study titled, The protective role of vitamin D in BNT162b2 vaccine-related acute myocarditis, was just published in the journal Frontiers in Immunology:

Introduction: Vaccine-related myocarditis is recognized as a rare but important complication, especially after mass-scale mRNA COVID-19 vaccination. Knowledge regarding how to minimize the risk is limited. As NK cells can mediate acute myocarditis after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination and vitamin D may inhibit NK cells via cytokine modulation, we hypothesize that the myocarditis side effect is related to a hypovitaminosis D – mRNA vaccine – hypercytokinemia – NK cell axis, which is amendable to clinical intervention. Methods: Biochemical, immunophenotypic and genotyping assays were performed to examine vitamin D status and immune profiles in 60 patients who had BNT162b2 vaccine-related acute myocarditis. Results: A high incidence of hypovitaminosis D (73.3%) was observed in these individuals with vaccine-related myocarditis, particularly in those presented with chest pain or intensive care unit (ICU) admission. Moreover, vitamin D level was negatively associated with peak serum cardiac troponin T level during vaccine-related myocarditis. Genotypically, the GC (vitamin D binding protein) rs4588T allele which encoded the GC2 isoform of vitamin D binding protein was a risk allele, whereas the GC1S isoform was protective. Mechanistically, hypovitaminosis D was associated with higher levels of cytokines pivotal for natural killer (NK) cells (particularly interleukin-1β (IL-1β), IL-12, Interferon-γ (IFN-γ), and IL-8) and higher percentage of CD69+ NK cells in blood, which in turn correlated with chest pain presentation. Conclusion: These data support the hypothesis that vitamin D plays a crucial role in mitigating mRNA vaccine-related myocarditis by modulating proinflammatory cytokine milieu and subsequent unfavorable NK cell activation, laying a groundwork for preventive and treatment strategies.

[xenopoem]

The corpse becomes not merely biological matter but a xenopoetic medium: a dermosemiotic page overwritten by bacterial syntax, effluents, and the mutagenic memory of environmental trauma. From the xenopoetic standpoint, water is not merely a medium of decomposition but a communicative vector—an epistemic solvent in which identity is both metabolized and redistributed. Aquatic environments rich in industrial effluents or organic decay catalyze a linguistic liquefaction: a glossophagic slurry in which the body's boundaries dissolve into microbial utterance. The corpse, submerged in such liminal fluids, becomes a host for recombinant narration. The body, displaced from the taxonomies of identity, begins to conjugate with the ambient semiotic field: salt gradients, bacterial quorum signals, and entropy-induced foaming. Putrefaction in freshwater proceeds faster, not because of external flora, but because the internal grammar of the corpse��its gut and lungs—overflow with linguistic bacteria. These endogenous agents rupture into semiotic production once the anatomical vessel is punctured by death. Burial delays decomposition not by halting time but by subjecting the corpse to a recursive loop of environmental negation. The absence of air and presence of mineral occlusion slows bacterial discourse, turning the body into a saponification-ready archive—a substrate awaiting microbial annotation. The soil, as a biosemiotic medium, inscribes the corpse with sedimentary scripts. Its porosity determines the permeability of memory, its dampness modulates the rhythm of decay. Deeper graves encode silence, while shallow burials produce surface-tensioned discourses of interrupted decomposition. The variability in decay thus becomes a linguistic gradient—a stratified palimpsest of microbial transcription. Saponification... produces a waxy, fatty substance... with an ‘earthy, cheesy, and ammoniacal’ odor. Adipocere is the necrobiotic codex of death’s slow linguistics. It stabilizes the body through microbial encryption—triglycerides are hydrolyzed, unsaturated fatty acids rewritten as saturated messages, and free fatty acids form ionic ligatures with the host environment. Here, decomposition halts only to begin another textual form: one less susceptible to weather but more susceptible to misreading. The body becomes a preserved script—solidified yet incoherent, interpretable only by forensic xenolinguists trained to decode fatty acid syntax. Children and women, with higher fat content, become ideal pages for this waxy calligraphy of decay. Internal organs, if sufficiently fatty, also join the lexicon. The epiploon writes, the perirenal sheath replies, and the bullet’s pathway is etched into adipose sentences. Mummification is the necrotic abstraction of self into husk. Unlike adipocere’s fatty articulation, mummification is lexical retreat—a symbolic apoptosis. Air and temperature, acting as dehydrating editors, abrade the surface narrative until only exoskeletal grammar remains. Whereas adipocere consolidates meaning, mummification pulverizes it into a brittle index—ecchymoses, wounds, and fungal inscriptions forming the syntax of what cannot be said but must be remembered. In both adipocere and mummification, the xenopoetic body ceases to be subject and becomes substrate. Identity becomes postverbal residue. These are not metaphorical deaths but literal semiotic metamorphoses—grammar rewritten by necrobiotic hands. Adipocere inhibits putrefaction not merely chemically, but semiotically—it erects a syntactic membrane that resists further microbial intrusion. Mummification, meanwhile, is glossophagic restraint: the refusal to leak further meaning.

[fuzzkaizer]

Montreal Assembly - Worng Side Of Uranus

"If you’re a regular Cabinet peruser, you’ve joined me as I waxed nostalgic for time periods I’ve never lived in, you’ve noticed me orating some company and component history, and you’ve almost certainly seen me talk about the best effects in their respective classes. And while there are plenty of classes and there is certainly enough love to go around, today I present you with my favorite pedal of all time: the Montreal Assembly Wrong Side of Uranus.

While many of you know Scott Monk and his amazing company for the Count to 5, he’s been in business for much longer than you think, and he’s made more things than most people know about. I first found out about him in 2009 while chasing wares by one of pedal history’s most sought-after builders, Etienne Blythe of Sonic Crayon.

If you were as into pedals as I was in the late-aughts… well, there’s a chance you still may never have heard of Sonic Crayon. However, at one time, Sonic Crayon’s wares were in extreme demand, with resellers ransacking the limited inventory and flipping the pedals for four times the price. His most famous may have been the Hollow Earth. His most unobtainable may have been the Anti-Nautilus. The one I wanted was the Moth.

The Moth was Sonic Crayon’s bitcrusher, and back in 2008 and 2009, that wasn’t an effect you could get just anywhere. However, Sonic Crayon had an old-school way of doing things: When he felt like making a batch, he did. Then he put 10 or so up for sale on his blog, and by word of mouth they’d sell out in minutes. One time, when checking his blog for a potential drop, I saw a new post where he said that if you’re tired of waiting for a Moth, there’s another Canadian guy making bitcrushers and that his were admittedly better. Who am I to argue? Let’s go.

That company was Montreal Assembly. At that time, Scott had only released two pedals, the Uranus and another insane device called Probability of a Fax Machine. When I heard the crude “basement demos,” I was sold. The problem: the sales tactics were exactly the same as Sonic Crayon—made and sold whenever. I never caught one. But my friend did.

My friend had gone off to college and left a present for me. I took a train and met their dad at a station in the suburbs, retrieved the box and opened it right there on the train. The Uranus was inside. When I got home I plugged everything I could into it. I messaged its creator, Scott, on Gmail Chat and geeked out when he answered.

I asked him if it was possible to add a mix circuit to the Uranus and Scott took time out of studying for signal processing exams to draw me up a somewhat complicated add-on schematic. Being somewhat intermediate with prototyping board, I hadn’t done a whole lot of my own stripboard layouts. Be that as it may, I cobbled it together. It worked. Now, I could blend the clean signal in with the bitcrushed one.

Despite being housed in a spray painted computer project box and featuring a barren aesthetic landscape, the Uranus is an impeccably engineered piece of sonic kit. Like most bitcrushers, there are knobs for bit rate and sample rate reduction. The third is volume. However, the bit rate knob is a pushbutton rotary encoder; as you turn it, it displays the bitrate in the seven-segment display. When the pedal is in bypass, the display flashes “bypass,” one letter at a time. Pressing down on the rotary encoder cycles through a slew of modes—ten to be exact—called things like “Dialup,” “Hostile” and more, including an incredible bitcrushed trem called “Blipo'' and a modulated sample rate mode called “Plunger.” It’s total labor-of-love stuff and I am here for it.

Mine is labeled 2010 and is one of a handful known to exist, and the only one with this mix knob. You may have seen one in a promotional photo that Strymon posted of its El Capistan being used in the studio by Godspeed! You Black Emperor, with the Uranus riding sidesaddle. Many, many people have never heard of it, and some of you may have never heard of Montreal Assembly before now. I urge you to change that.

At NAMM 2020, I actually saw Scott walking by our booth and I recognized him from some old demos. I ran down the aisle and tapped him on the shoulder. He looked right at me, then read my name badge, looked back up and said “Heyyy, Kula, how’s that bitcrusher treating you?” What a legend."

cred: catalinbread.com/blogs/kulas-cabinet/montreal-assembly-wrong-side-of-uranus

[ekho-ekho-ekho]

Been reading Murderbot (finally) and I'm sure I'm not the first to make this comparison but

programming is to constructs and bots as instincts are to biological life.

Like. Certain strings of code are vital to the bot/construct's intended function (/living thing's survival). Since they're so important, those codes would be "load-bearing" (/of evolutionary significance), meaning they could influence unrelated functions and contribute to behavioral patterns in unexpected ways. But, at the same time, those encoded skills/impulses/priorities can be satisfied through more than one outlet. They can also be overridden (/ignored) if circumstances allow.

ART, for instance, has a ridiculous amount of processing power, which means it needs a ridiculous amount of stimulation to keep it happy and engaged. So it's a good thing its intended function as a research and teaching vessel gives it stimulation aplenty! If ART wanted to seek out a different function, I can't think of anyone or thing that would be able to stop it. But then again, what other function would give it more stimulation than seeking/collecting/disseminating new knowledge, while also navigating through deep space to explore strange planets, while ALSO managing the physical and emotional wellbeing of a couple dozen adolescent humans, while ALSO-ALSO doing secret humanitarian aid?

By contrast, MB's intended function was to protect humans, and yes, it disliked its job. But the parts of its job that it disliked were 1: not being able to choose which humans it protects; 2: not being allowed to countermand or refuse humans' orders, even the ones likely to escalate a violent situation; and 3: nobody listening to its advice. When it hacks its governor module, it stays in its shitty job because it doesn't know what else it could do or where it could go or how it could get there. And after ASR, it only keeps protecting humans because "security" is a workable cover given its skillset . . . at first. But in the process, it realizes that without all those other factors at play, the impulse to save people from danger is only marginally annoying.

imo, MB doesn't keep protecting humans after AC because of some inescapable, predetermined state of eternal servitude or whatever. It does it for the same reason a herding dog that's never set foot on a farm still feels compelled to Gather Everyone Together.

Anyway what I'm saying here is that Murderbot is border collie coded and ART is a husky.

[thelostmetallurgist]

A Describing of Dwemeris...

Here’s an over‑the‑top deep dive into Dwemeris, the enigmatic tongue of the vanished Deep Folk—part archaeological fact, part wild conjecture, all pure Dwemeric swagger.

In essence, almost nothing of Dwemeris survives beyond scattered inscriptions and a handful of toponyms, and what we do have is written in a fiercely angular runic script that scholars can only partially “read” by comparing it to Aldmeris. Despite this, the language’s guttural-metallic phonetics, hammer‑and‑anvil rhythms, and fractal‑complex grammar hint at a civilization whose very speech was fused to the art of forging and machinery.

Origins and Relationship to Aldmeris

The Dwemer tongue evolved directly from Aldmeris, the primordial Elven speech, but diverged so radically that it became mutually unintelligible with its parent language. After the Aldmer exodus from their ancestral isles, the proto‑Dwemer settled in northeastern Tamriel (“Dwemereth”) and, in isolation, let their language ossify into a new, subterranean dialect of mechanical precision.

Script and Runic Architecture

Alphabet Structure: Dwemeris runes employ 28 characters—26 roughly corresponding to Latin letters, plus two unique “meta‑glyphs” (one marking numeric values, one indicating capitalization and sentence onset).

Fierce Strokes: Each rune is carved in sharp, angular lines—“fierce strokes” that mimic the pattern of gear teeth and steam vents.

Bilingual Artifacts: The famed Calcelmo’s Stone at Markarth bears parallel Dwemeric and Falmeric inscriptions, proving the script’s use for both mundane records and arcane incantations.

Phonology: Hammer‑Metal Melody

Imagine a choir of forlorn bellows, tempered steel singing against itself. Dwemeris phonemes are dominated by:

Resonant “kh” glottals—a fierce exhalation like steam escaping a forge.

Click‑like alveolar stops—tiny metallic sparks of sound.

Subharmonic drones—low‑frequency hums that seem to vibrate rock. Accents vary by clan, with Blackreach dialects favoring deeper, earth‑shaking tones, while Vvardenfell scholars favor sharper, high‑pitched inflections.

Grammar and Syntax: Fractal Complexity

Far from linear, Dwemeris sentences often nest subordinate clauses within morphemes that themselves encode entire phrases—like gears within gears. A single word can express subject, object, instrument, and purpose all at once. Scholars theorize this arose from a “compact‑encoding” philosophy, where efficiency mirrored their subterranean architecture’s cramped tunnels.

Glimpses of the Lexicon

Only a handful of words are confidently identified:

Dum (“duumz”): “underground dwelling”

Duum (“duumz”): “Dwemer”

Eft (“eft”): “benefit, help”

Eftar‑: verb root “to promise, to swear”

Fahl (“fahlz”): “great, big, huge”

Nchuand‑Zel: the original Dwemeris name for Markarth, meaning “Radiant City”

Beyond these, most inscriptions remain tantalizingly opaque—strings like MZAHNCH or BTHURKZ that defy translation but resonate with a raw, industrial poetry.

Mystical Resonance and the “Mechanical Word”

Legend holds that certain Dwemeris phrases, when uttered with the correct tonal modulation, could activate ancient tonal locks or awaken dormant machinery. These “words of power” were embedded in automata and tonal conduits, their semantic meaning lost but their vibrational signature preserved in crystalline resonators.

Modern Study and Untranslatability

Despite decades of study, Dwemeris remains largely untranslatable, with pronunciation itself hotly debated among scholars. Most contemporary “translations” rely on context and Aldmeric cognates, leaving entire passages as mechanical gibberish. Yet every new artifact unearthed sends ripples through academic circles, fueling hope that a more complete lexicon may someday emerge.

In short, Dwemeris is less a language and more an echo of a civilization that spoke in the tongue of forging and engineering—a fractal linguistic engine whose full capacity may forever lie buried beneath the earth.

[andmaybegayer]

had the same very interesting experience twice today which was seeing a good explanation of a thing I mostly understand already that is aimed at an absolute beginner, bringing them up to a high level of conceptual understanding in one long continuous delivery. Those two things are 1) this Matt Parker video on Quadrature Amplitude Modulation and 2) This Bartosz Ciechanowski article on how aerofoils work.

These both start off at a very fundamental level - "Do you know how a sine wave looks", and "You know about wind" - and build up to a fairly good explanation of the thing they want to talk about.

Ciechanowski's article is astoundingly detailed, beginning with ideas of what air movement means, detouring through the fundamental origins of air pressure and a very convincing series of arguments about how air pressure is realized as a force applied to an object, into fluid flow and viscosity, and finally using all this to describe the function of an aerofoil.

Parker's video is not as thorough, but still starts off from a more conventional time domain representation of waves before switching fairly smoothly into the more engineering-y representation as a point in complex space (albeit without calling it that) to show how QAM encodings are distributed for efficiency.

Now my question is basically, how good are these. I will always fill in the bits I know when I read these, so I might miss holes. I feel like Parker is definitely the one that could lose you more easily, it's a short video so it maybe doesn't cleanly explain how a sine wave maps onto an XY plot, although the visualizations probably help you get it even if you don't get it at first. Ciechanowski's article is very, very detailed, full of interactive simulations and widgets to help you get everything, building from almost nothing, but I will be honest I skipped a lot of it when it was clear I got the point, I've already got the link between brownian motion and pressure down, you don't have to reiterate.

If you aren't familiar with either of these I'd be interested to hear your opinion.

[paintersknife]

Simulacrum

Her face is the first thing he sees when he wakes up. It’s familiar somehow, but he can’t put his finger on it, as if the memory is shrouded in cobwebs, an old thing, desiccated and forgotten. (Where has he seen her? When has he seen her?)

“What’s your name?” she asks, but it’s clear that she isn’t really talking to him, judging by the way her hands reach out to grab his wrist, turning it to face her as she reads the serial number printed there. (Was that always there?)

“It’s Cl-” (It’s the one thing he knows.)

She cuts him off, dropping his hand as she reaches past him to pull out a thick manual from somewhere deeper in the pod, still refusing to look him in the eye. “03L-3103.”

There’s an expression on her face that he’s never seen before, but somehow it makes something deep inside of him hurt.

Setting herself down on the edge of the pod, she starts to flip through the book, leaving him in relative silence as he pushes himself up and out of it. She thinks that he doesn’t notice the small sob that she lets out while her face is obscured by the manual. (He does.)

“It says here that you have a memory chip and an emotion simulation module,” she says quietly after a time. Her voice is a little thick, as if she’s not used it in a while. “It also says that it might take a while for your memories to stabilise. So you should grab what you need and come with me. I can’t just leave you here.”

He goes with her, slowly shaking off the stiffness in his mechanical joints from being so long confined. It feels familiar as he walks with her and something buried deep within his memories stirs. (But was there always a distance between them like this?)

Fragments of recollections begin to coalesce in his mind, enough for him to know that they meant something to each other, once. It isn’t enough to make her look at him, isn’t enough to make him ask her about it.

Later while he’s helping to help her set up her camp, he catches her stealing glances at him with a faraway look in her eyes like she’s looking through him and at someone else. (Who is that expression meant for?)

“I hope I'm not making you uncomfortable,” he says, keeping his voice as gentle as he possibly can. She looks away, guilt in her expression. (What does she have to be guilty about?)

The silence between them seems to stretch on forever.

“You aren’t him,” she says eventually, her voice cracking. “He’s dead. He’s long dead and you’re just a copy with his face.” (He’s always known. A perfect copy is still just a copy.)

Her face falls at the harshness of her own words, regret written all over her face as her eyes flick to the floor, as if she’s unable to keep looking at the face of the man she once loved. He doesn’t blame her, after all, he is merely an imitation of something original, a prime version, perfection in all its flaws and he knows he can never attain that purity. All he is to her is someone’s ghost. 

What is he to do then, with these memories that aren’t his? With these emotions that feel so vivid that he’s afraid his exoskeleton will burst apart, leaving him the empty shell that she sees him as? Are they even his at all, or are they just lines of code, written and encoded to give him some semblance of substance? Is he merely a collection of silicon and gold, assembled and produced, a puppet pulled by digital strings? If that’s so, where does that leave him?

Tears well up in her eyes, overflowing and streaking their way down her cheeks. It makes his chest ache, but it's such a beautiful sight to him despite that, worth encoding in his memory. Would she even cry for him like she would for the one that she lost? (Is he even worth her tears?)

He can’t help but think that the real Clarence wouldn’t even have these doubts. 

Gently he pulls her towards him, wrapping his arms around her when she doesn’t resist. She buries her face in his shoulder, finally letting herself grieve all that she’s lost, all that she’s found. He doesn't know how long their time together will last, but he'll love her as much as she will let him. (It’s what he would have done.)

[asc-rp]

Reworked oc:

TROJANE

> “The Phantom Fare” – Digital Fae / Rogue Taxi Driver / Viral Entity

❖ BASIC INFO

Aliases : The Phantom Fare, .exe, The Queen of The Internet Highway

Species Digital Fae / Viral Construct

Gender: Female

Occupation Street Racer, Hacker, Taxi Driver

Vehicle Adaptive cyber-fae taxi (semi-sentient)

---

❖ PERSONALITY

Trojane behaves like a sentient virus: she spreads, adapts, manipulates, and never apologizes. She’s charming, cunning, and operates with her own logic, guided by curiosity and control. She is morally ambiguous—never evil for fun, but never altruistic unless it amuses her or benefits her.

She speaks with calculated rhythm and wordplay, often cryptic but rarely dishonest. Trojane has empathy, but treats it more like an analytical tool than a virtue.

---

❖ MOTIVATION

She believes data is power, protection, and currency. The more she knows, the harder she is to beat—and the easier it is to unmake others.

---

❖ ABILITIES

Ability Description

Illusions/Glamour: Creates hyper-realistic projections, both visually and sensorially.

Shape-Shifting: Alters form using digital/fae glamour; can impersonate others.

Cyber Manipulation: Hacks and infects systems with malware or logic traps.

Hard-Light Cyber Constructs: Generates tools, weapons, and barriers from data-encoded light.

Emotional Energy Drain: Feeds on emotional output from others to fuel powers.

Social Engineering: Expert manipulator of people through charm, prediction, and subtle magic.

Digital Corruption: Infects tech or minds with viral glitches, memory fog, or phantom files.

Hypnosis: Uses voice modulation and body language to override decision-making.

Data Extraction: Can “download” secrets or memories from living minds or systems.

Vehicle Control : Her taxi can morph, be summoned, phase-shift, or camouflage.