African Americans and Vegans

New interesting facts:

1. Black Americans are called African Americans, Black Canadians are called Black Canadians.

2. There was a temporary vegan collective in Iran, one of the few vegan groups in history which did not suffer from B12 deficiency.  The speculation is that there was a lot of animal feces everywhere which contaminated their food, and that they grew some veggies out of human feces, and ate the roots, which had trace B12 content.  This has inspired me to make the following graph:

Notice how a severe b12 deficiency hits when you first turn vegan, but if you continue to love animals to the point that you bask in their shit you actually escape the trend.  With enough Love anything is truly possible.

Hermit

Changed my life.
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201409/the-last-true-hermit?src=longreads&printable=true

Future Science

Automated Professors
http://narrativescience.com/artificial-intelligence-platform/

Open-Source Science
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632760
http://www.openscienceframework.org/

Automated/Centralized Experimental Infrastructure
https://www.transcriptic.com/

http://www.synthego.com/

Generalization by Familiarity

This is something we all do.

Source: I'm planning out a task (taking fully dissolved nmrs of several reaction crudes) into a series of microtasks (weigh out solids into a bunch of vials, screen solvents, dissolve crudes in those solvents, nmr them all together) out loud to my undergrad and suddenly I got a feeling of familiarity which led to me following with "This is a big part of being a chemist: taking a daunting level of work and reducing it to a few, simple, highly parallelized tasks that wont take very long at all."

And I thought, wait, that generalization I made is insanely specific to this situation, why am I saying this is what all chemists do?  The feeling of familiarity could have just been at planning itself, not the specific method of planning.  It could have been from just parallelization itself in the abstract, why did I have to say link it explicitly to chemistry?  We often get a feeling of familiarity after doing something, and tend to generalize this vague familiarity based on whats going on at the time, but can very easily pick out the wrong features to generalize since the feeling itself is vague, its the articulation which follows that we choose and specify.

Transformation

matteoplix:

sepheps

Amir Mazaheripour:

were too caught up in transformations

matteoplix:

kk

sounds fun tho

Amir Mazaheripour:

of course it does, its what we all do every day

matteoplix:

:D / :(

Amir Mazaheripour:

whether its eating a snack, fixing a leak, knitting a sweater, we feel the need to transform the matter around us in order to feel “occupied”

and it seems like things are changing

but just like brostep

its more like a wild, desperate disruption, a forced superficial change in the short term, just to see something different

but in the long term, matter is indifferent to how much you manipulate it

it will still always be there

as matter

staring at you

unsolved

apathetic

transformations are just a game, an act we put on to convince ourselves

a fleeting flagellation 

matteoplix:

yes

wow

matteoplix:

transformation is essential to it all

Amir Mazaheripour:

i basically had this image of like a man with a bunch of “stuff” around him (visualize it as homogenous clay), and like panicking and shuffling it all around, but it doesn’t care, its still clay

matteoplix:

science

AND art

Amir Mazaheripour:

and then i thought “thats the story of every man”

yes

^^

Amir Mazaheripour:

its just an interesting concept

transformation

Amir Mazaheripour:

it seems like one of the few human cultures that hasn’t fallen into it is a certain eastern zen/buddhism/hinduism bent, where you cease external transformation and see the unified world through the self

but thats how powerful it is

almost all other cultures get caught up in external transformation

and while zen/buddhism is the leader, they still are not excused

they burn incense, they need to see certain things transform too

we’re all culprits

transformation is time

without time we all stop.

LSD

Italian Stallion's Answer:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090125204016AAN5VH9

Bodily Rearrangement (Burps):
". I personally tend to get a lot of burping when on the rise of my trips. "

Occasionally people will experience so-called Acid Indigestion on LSD, which usually manifests as minor burping without any real nausea or desire to vomit. This is often easily alleviated by loosening tight clothing and by performing relaxation exercises.

but i would just burp and it would feel awesome

but also like

fundamental

the burps were part of a material rearrangement going on in my body

mainly torso

Spilt Letters
http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/10033491

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala

Upon closer inspection the whole sea was filled with letters! Everywhere I saw letters of the alphabet in random patterns and combinations and spiraling in and out up and down flowing like water. I got closer and closer to the 'water' and I saw more and more letters. They got thicker and thicker. It was like those fractal things they use in math. Never ending. It felt amazing just drifting there. 
http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=32307

Taipei book review

Nice excerpt from a book review on Tao Lin's Taipei

Paul’s mother thinks that experience outside of the Internet makes a person more interesting, she believes that a mind on drugs is a compromised mind, and she thinks of relationships as two people in love who are nice to each other. Paul, in contrast, lives according to the maximum possibilities of the present: he makes little distinction between the parts of his life that are mediated through his computer and the parts he experiences physically. He also does not distinguish between a physical state of sobriety and one on drugs. His relationships are fragile, tenuous things where petty irritations and insecurities will, with time, always overwhelm the desire to love and be loved.