• 3 Posts
  • 631 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 14th, 2023
  • Rolando@lemmy.worldtoAnd Finally...@feddit.uk•Ig Nobel prize goes to team who found mammals can breathe through anuses
    15·
    3 days ago

    Some of these studies sound pretty interesting. Links to them in the article:

    Botany

    Given to Jacob White in the US and Felipe Yamashita in Germany for reporting evidence that the South American plant Boquila trifoliolata can mimic the leaves of plastic plants it is placed alongside, leading them to conclude that “plant vision” is a plausible hypothesis.

    Medicine

    Won by a Swiss, German and Belgian group for demonstrating that fake medicine that causes painful side-effects can be more effective in patients than fake medicine that does not cause painful side-effects.

    Physics

    Awarded to James Liao at the University of Florida for a comprehensive, multi-publication investigation into the swimming abilities of a dead trout.

    Probability

    Shared by a team of 50 researchers, mostly Dutch, who flipped 350,757 coins to test a hypothesis put forward by Persi Diaconis, a former magician and professor of statistics at Stanford University. Their work supported Diaconis’s prediction that tossed coins are (slightly) more likely to land the same way up as they started.

  • Rolando@lemmy.worldtoAnd Finally...@feddit.uk•National Park calls out ‘world changing’ impact of dropped Cheetos bag
    3·
    5 days ago

    wow, I’d never heard of this before:

    The Actun Tunichil Muknal cave or ATM - for short, may be the most prized and treasured Mayan site in Belize - and that’s because of the spectacular skeletal remains of 15 individuals that can be found there.

    They are estimated to be over a thousand years old - and the most precious is the so called Crystal Maiden, the skeletal remains of a young woman.

    Wikipedia has more info:

    The ceramics at the site are significant partly because they are marked with “kill holes” (holes created to release spirits lurking within),[2] which indicate that they were used for ceremonial purposes. Many of the Maya artifacts and remains are completely calcified to the cave floor. One artifact, named the “Monkey Pot”, is one of just four of its type found in Central America.[3] The Maya also modified cave formations here, in some instances to create altars for the offerings, in others to create silhouettes of faces and animals or to project a shadow image into the cave. The cave is extensively decorated with cave formations in the upper passages.

    Sounds amazing. Maybe I’ll look for a good video walkthrough.

  • Rolando@lemmy.worldtoPeople Twitter@sh.itjust.works•Tarot reading expert
    46·
    7 days ago

    So there’s one approach to fortune-telling where you convince them that you have some magical ability to figure out their secrets, and then you use cold-reading techniques to trick them into thinking you have mystic powers.

    But there’s a better approach where you give someone an open-ended set of symbols, and you use those to help the person think through the issues in their life. You’re giving them the opportunity to reflect on things from a new perspective.

    • a Tarot card might have symbols for “loss in worldly matters” and be in a position that represents their past
    • another card might have symbols for “an older person, very patient” and be in a position that represents their current circumstances
    • another card might have symbols for “the end of a time of plenty” and be in a position that represents the conflict of their current circumstances
    • another card might have symbols for “gain through cooperation” and be in a position that represents their future

    So you talk to the person and describe what each card means, and they think about how it applies to their life. They might ask questions like: “does ‘loss in worldly matters’ mean money?” and you say “sure, it can, or it can mean something else like being reprimanded at work.” and they might say “oh, I think in my case it means (whatever).” And then you can think together how that applies to the rest of the reading. People have a lot of things going on in their lives, things can just slip by, and this gives them a chance to step back and think it all over.