#metaphors are totally learnable

[chaoticincompetent]

"You can't be autistic, CI - you understand metaphors."

Okay. But allow me to present for the consideration of the board: smiling, nodding... and then systematically looking up the meaning and etymology of every weird phrase when I get home.

(The French "il pleut des cordes" still makes way more sense to me than than "it's raining cats and dogs".)

[gallusrostromegalus]

ok so AEIWAM question bc i just read a tag “kido is a reverse chinese room” on one of your responses and now the AI scientist in me is dying to puzzle this out, but also it’s like 1 AM so holding all the pieces isn’t quite working.

as best i can picture, a reverse chinese room would be the rooms operator writing random words from their symbol book, passing them to the outside, and receiving an intelligent response to the fully articulated question in chinese that they unknowingly asked.

if i’m sliding this metaphor right, would that mean that kido incantations are basically gibberish being fed by casters into the God Machine that just so happen to be successful requests to run Lightning Bolt.exe? if so, how’s the random running of arbitrary system files squaring with the God-Machine’s previously-mentioned energy crisis?

You've got it exactly! All the Kido Spells in Bleach are... random strings of poetic nonsense. They're random strings of words that just so happen to activate specific Universe Cheat Codes!

Aizen is, canonically, GREAT at Kido! He can cast while taking invocation shortcuts, or even coming up with new spells! He thinks it's because he's GREAT at math- so far as Aizen knows, he has been using really advanced statistics to catalogue what random phrases the universe will react to, and what chains of phrases will cause what effects!

Orihime, Intelligent: ...bitch that's just grammar. This is a language? A Learnable Language???

As for the Energy crisis: there's less than a thousand humans that can use Kido with any sort of effectiveness, and the demands they make are laughably small. Every Kido Spell cast since the invention of Kido has taken less energy than rendering every species of Bat does for five minutes.

Granted, there are A LOT of bats, in terms of both species and total population but my point here is that a handful of humans using the occasional cheat code is NOTHING compared to the background data processing that goes into rendering- The Life Machine actually took Reality down a couple notches in simulation processing, because it needs to conserve power- that why it's all anime-style now, with it's limited color palette and simple polygon shapes to make up the characters and heavy reliance on Shonen Tropes to keep the stock character AI simple.

[botanyshitposts]

It's my dream to a botanist and work with plants, but recently, I've been realizing a lot of things involve math. My Environmental Science teacher says that nobody can ever be a successful botanist unless they're a math genius. You're studying botany / plant sciences, so do you agree? Do you have to be good at math? ;--;

omg ok i read this ask and immediately thought of the second chapter of one of my favorite science books ever, Letters to a Young Scientist by Edward O. Wilson, a dude who specializes in bug science, specifically ants. He won the Pulitzer Prize and also taught at Harvard so just throwin that out there too

        If, on the other hand, you are a bit short in mathematical training, even very short, relax. You are far from alone in the community of scientists, and here is a professional secret to encourage you: many of the most successful scientists in the world today are mathematically no more than semiliterate. A metaphor will clarify the paradox in this statement. Where elite mathematicians often serve as architects of theory in the expanding realm of science, the remaining large majority of basic and applied scientists map the terrain, scout the frontier, cut the pathways, and raise the first buildings along the way. They define the problems that mathematicians, on occasion, may help solve. They think primarily in images and facts, and only marginally in mathematics. 

       You may think me foolhardy, but it’s been my habit to brush aside the fear of mathematics when talking to candidate scientists. During my decades of teaching biology at Harvard, I watched sadly as bright undergraduates turned away from the possibility of a scientific career, or even from non required courses in the sciences, because they were afraid of failure in the math that might be required. Why should I care? Because such math-phobes deprive science of an immeasurable amount of sorely needed talent and deprive the many scientific disciplines of some of their most creative young people. This is a hemorrhage of brainpower we need to stanch. 

he goes on to talk about the specific math required for biology and how its all totally accessible and learnable and not crazy insane hard to any extent

in my experience, a lot of ap bio-level-math+ is easier to grasp because you have something to apply it to. like, its not just mindlessly learning concepts like you do in general education math classes (elementry-high school). even if you sit down and read a real, actual botanical research paper, the odds are that more of the complicated stuff they’ll talk about is in chemistry/organic chem/advanced biology.

the only field that I know for sure requires a TON of math is plant systematics/taxonomy. so like, figuring out where a plant is on an evolutionary tree and classifying it. 

as a person im more scared for my eventual college organic chemistry course than for my college math classes