What have you learned today?

SupahEwok

Malapropic Homophone
Legacy
Jun 24, 2010
4,028
1,401
118
Country
Texas
I just enrolled into a The Great Courses membership. It's a streaming site specializing in academic lecture series. They use real professors and teachers, and seem to keep most of their production inhouse to curate their content. They're aimed for a collegiate level, and I have to say, so far the lecture series are better than what I got at my universities. Significantly.

Something I've learned: brain experiments have shown that electrical activity to activate a specific physical response begins before a conscience decision is made to do that physical action. For instance: if you bend your hand, the electrical activity to activate those nerves begins about 300 milliseconds before you decide to bend your hand. Which really throws a wrench into what you'd think conscious decision making is, and how much of our decisions run on automatic without us "thinking" them.

Something else I've learned: the difference between jelly, jam, marmalade, and fruit curd. They're all a similar process of cooking up to preserve, but they use different parts of the fruit or have additives. Jelly is made from fruit juice, jam is made from fruit flesh, marmalade is made from the whole fruit including the skin (marmalades are mainly made from fruit with usually inedible skin like citrus), and fruit curd is made from juice, grated fruit skin (zest), and eggs, to make it saucy. All of them are basically heated up gently and have granular sugar mixed into them, before being stored in sanitized jars.

I looked this up because I was interested in making preserves out of the multitude of lemons from my parents' tree which should be ripe within a month or two.
 
Last edited:

Trunkage

Nascent Orca
Legacy
Jun 21, 2012
8,684
2,879
118
Brisbane
Gender
Cyborg
I just enrolled into a The Great Courses membership. It's a streaming site specializing in academic lecture series. They use real professors and teachers, and seem to keep all most of their production inhouse to curate their content. They're aimed for a collegiate level, and I have to say, so far the lecture series are better than what I got at my universities. Significantly.

Something I've learned: brain experiments have shown that electrical activity to activate a specific physical response begins before a conscience decision is made to do that physical action. For instance: if you bend your hand, the electrical activity to activate those nerves begins about 300 milliseconds before you decide to bend your hand. Which really throws a wrench into what you'd think conscious decision making is, and how much of our decisions run on automatic without us "thinking" them.
If I remember my muscle acquisition classes, nerves are able to become more receptive to messages from the brain before conscious thought too. If I remember correctly, it sends sodium in to collect potassium so that when the action potential reaches the nerve, it more likely to fire at lower levels. Some drugs are able to manipulate this to help firing more frequently, and gives you a higher sense of awareness

Also, postural muscle (eg. Core muscles) turn on before any others.

I learnt this stuff 20 years ago so I could be misremembering or its
 

SupahEwok

Malapropic Homophone
Legacy
Jun 24, 2010
4,028
1,401
118
Country
Texas
If I remember my muscle acquisition classes, nerves are able to become more receptive to messages from the brain before conscious thought too. If I remember correctly, it sends sodium in to collect potassium so that when the action potential reaches the nerve, it more likely to fire at lower levels. Some drugs are able to manipulate this to help firing more frequently, and gives you a higher sense of awareness

Also, postural muscle (eg. Core muscles) turn on before any others.

I learnt this stuff 20 years ago so I could be misremembering or its
The lecture I watched didn't cover any chemical aspects, but I'm sure you're on the right track to something. We all know it's possible to train our reflexes to be faster and more accurate, often acting on instinct without conscious thought, without all the scientist know-how of the bio-mechanics of it..
 

Xprimentyl

Made you look...
Legacy
Aug 13, 2011
6,208
4,482
118
Plano, TX
Country
United States
Gender
Male
I learned today that Shelley Duvall had method acting literally forced upon her during the filming of The Shining. Director Stanley Kubrick verbally and mentally abused her, isolated her and encouraged others on set do the same because he wanted her extreme stress to be genuine on film. Now, I've never been a huge fan of the film, certainly not one I'd count as a classic as many do, but thinking back on Duvall's "acting" in many scenes, I can't help but feel for that poor woman. Apparently, she was forced to perform the baseball bat scene 127 times; that's crazy to think she was genuinely terrified...
 

Trunkage

Nascent Orca
Legacy
Jun 21, 2012
8,684
2,879
118
Brisbane
Gender
Cyborg
I learned today that Shelley Duvall had method acting literally forced upon her during the filming of The Shining. Director Stanley Kubrick verbally and mentally abused her, isolated her and encouraged others on set do the same because he wanted her extreme stress to be genuine on film. Now, I've never been a huge fan of the film, certainly not one I'd count as a classic as many do, but thinking back on Duvall's "acting" in many scenes, I can't help but feel for that poor woman. Apparently, she was forced to perform the baseball bat scene 127 times; that's crazy to think she was genuinely terrified...
She was under so much stress her hair was falling out
 
  • Like
Reactions: Xprimentyl

Mister Mumbler

Pronounced "Throat-wobbler Mangrove"
Legacy
Jun 17, 2020
1,844
1,692
118
Nowhere
Country
United States
That I'm both better and worse at Unity programming than I initially thought.
Decided to try to learn how to make video games and such, so started dabbling and with the help of Tom Francis (developer of Gunpoint and Heat Signature, he is doing a swell tutorial series on his youtube channel for first time Unity users) got a rather nice weapon script working that had different firing behaviors between semi, full and burst fire modes. Being the end of the night or so, I looked at my mess of code and thought that I could clean it up and start seperating out the various chunks to make that whole thing make sense.
Fast forward 12 hours and now all my various scripts look nicer but now all don't work properly. So spent another few hours just going back and undoing all of my changes and now my burst fire behavior, which caused a colossal headache for me the first time around is borked again and only fires semi auto only and of course I did all this without backing up anything and can't quite remember how I pulled it off before. Been a long couple of days. :/
 
  • Like
Reactions: SupahEwok

Xprimentyl

Made you look...
Legacy
Aug 13, 2011
6,208
4,482
118
Plano, TX
Country
United States
Gender
Male
She was under so much stress her hair was falling out
Yeah, I read that as well. I'm surprised she put up with it, but slightly less than I'm surprised Kubrick had the balls to go that far and that others went along with him. I can't imagine mentally torturing someone for some imagined authenticity's sake. I mean, they're ACTORS; let them act; they're not "REAL"tors. Realtors? I think I just discovered and important connection between Hollywood and the real estate industry; I'm expecting a visit from the Illuminati any moment now...
 

SupahEwok

Malapropic Homophone
Legacy
Jun 24, 2010
4,028
1,401
118
Country
Texas
That I'm both better and worse at Unity programming than I initially thought.
Decided to try to learn how to make video games and such, so started dabbling and with the help of Tom Francis (developer of Gunpoint and Heat Signature, he is doing a swell tutorial series on his youtube channel for first time Unity users) got a rather nice weapon script working that had different firing behaviors between semi, full and burst fire modes. Being the end of the night or so, I looked at my mess of code and thought that I could clean it up and start seperating out the various chunks to make that whole thing make sense.
Fast forward 12 hours and now all my various scripts look nicer but now all don't work properly. So spent another few hours just going back and undoing all of my changes and now my burst fire behavior, which caused a colossal headache for me the first time around is borked again and only fires semi auto only and of course I did all this without backing up anything and can't quite remember how I pulled it off before. Been a long couple of days. :/
That's them new programmer feels.

It's also them professional programmer feels.

Basically, welcome to programming.
 

Mister Mumbler

Pronounced "Throat-wobbler Mangrove"
Legacy
Jun 17, 2020
1,844
1,692
118
Nowhere
Country
United States
That's them new programmer feels.

It's also them professional programmer feels.

Basically, welcome to programming.
Thanks. I'm pretty sure I know where the problem is, just need to get off of work and try slamming my face into that code some more. Learned some important lessons for later though, like backing up your work before "fixing it", and the time for "fixing it" definitely shouldn't be past midnight.
 
  • Like
Reactions: SupahEwok

Kae

That which exists in the absence of space.
Legacy
Nov 27, 2009
5,792
712
118
Country
The Dreamlands
Gender
Lose 1d20 sanity points.
Spanish for ordeal is ordalía.
EDIT: And V2 supports accents. Go V2.
Yup, I'm pretty happy for it, I like to type the name of my country properly, but the odd thing about V1 is that it originally supported accents but at some point it stopped supporting them and changing them to scribbles which is very weird to me, so let's hope support of foreign languages (I've seen @Neuromancer use Greek characters) doesn't get removed this time around.