That "gap between stimulus and response" is in some circles known as "mindfulness". And meditation is an effective exercise for building and strengthening that gap.
That seems to fly over a lot of heads.
Anyone who actually meditated will tell you the process of fixing yourself through meditation is painstakingly slow, you mostly become aware of how your mind does not do what it is supposed to, and if you stop meditating you quickly lose all progress.
What the post describes is essentially some form of micro journaling to build a cached hashmap of the thought patterns you want your mind to have.
Interesting to hear meditation described this way—gap. I’ve followed (as a neophyte) the works of Thich Nhat Hanh, and if asked I would say he describes meditation as a practice of focus. Not that I see any incompatibility with the idea of gap in meditation. I quite like it.
Also interesting is the notion of gap as I hear it used in psychology to describe post-traumatic stress.
In the first case the gap is too quick. In the last, it’s too long.
Also, in literature, another definition describes irony as having a “gap”.
“Gap” is obviously polysemous in these applications, but contain the same notion of spacing (which is also critical in music and art!).
This has nothing to do with dark matter, it's about the missing baryonic matter. And this result just confirms what most people thought anyway, but it's still rather important because it's a very solid result so we don't need to call it "missing matter" anymore.
The key to your difficulty is "my brain doesn't talk to me"... the solution is to realize that there is no "me" that's separate from your brain for it to talk to. You are the sum of the processes occurring in your brain and when it simulates others inside your mind, that's nothing but narrative. A simulation is a narrative. You may not perceive this narrative as sequence of words, a monologue, but it certainly is the result of different parts of your brain communicating with each other, passing information back and forth to model a plausible sequence of events.
So yes, you're conscious. So is my dog, but my dog can't post his thoughts about this on Hacker news, so you are more conscious than my dog.
Maybe all humans (and indeed other intelligent mammals) have an inner narrative, but it doesn't necessarily involve language. A mime or a silent film can tell a story without words, and the inner narrative can take likewise be in visual or other sensory form.
Plants are our cousin eucaryotes, and they've been evolving as long as we animals have and so there is likely to be equivalent information processing complexity to be found in them, we just don't know how to recognize it because it's so different from animal intelligence. There might even be something comparable to animal consciousness, not at the level of an individual plant, but more collectively, even including multiple species, whole ecosystems of plants and fungi together having an awareness and intelligence that can not only rival ours, but even transcend it, having lifespans in the thousands of years.
"... so there is likely to be equivalent information processing complexity to be found in them"
This sounds like a really wild take. Just because something has been evolving for millions of years doesn't necessarily mean it's evolving information processing capabilities. It's patently obvious to me that the information processing capabilities of animals (eg. just vision alone) are far beyond those of plants.
Another possibility is that this is a non-conscious trait. Luring pollinators is an evolutionary advantage, but there is survival cost to giving nectar indiscriminately, so natural selection will favor plants that can mechanically differentiate between the two.
> Plants are our cousin eucaryotes, and they've been evolving as long as we animals have
That is true. And look how different we’ve become.
> and so there is likely to be equivalent information processing complexity to be found in them
That’s quite a leap. I think precisely because plants and animals have evolved separately for so you can’t make that assumption. Maybe plants hasn’t not simply because they don’t need to, as a fundamental consequence of their differing physiology.
That is a leap, but its could be approached with open mind. We have learnt a lot in the last few decades that would have sounded like fantasy to someone 100 years ago.
As for rebar making concrete structures less durable; yes, that's certainly true for steel rebar. The reason being that it will rust, very slowly at first, but once it starts the expansion of the rusted part causes cracks in the concrete which allow more humidity and oxygen to reach the steel, thus rusting faster. This is often called "concrete cancer", and limits the useful lifetime of most modern reinforced concrete structures to between 50 and 250 years (depending on the environment they are in, the forces they are exposed to, and the quality of the concrete they were constructed with).
Concrete cancer can be reduced or even eliminated by using rebar material that rusts more slowly (stainless steel) or not at all (carbon fiber), but these are much more expensive of course. There is room for research on other reinforcing materials, but basically nothing with good tensile strength is going to be cheaper than steel and considering the quantities of rebar we use, cost is definitely a major issue.
The self-healing nature of Roman concrete might also help here, but the chemistry of concrete and rust formation on embedded steel is complex, and without extensive experimentation right now we don't know if steel embedded in Roman concrete rusts faster or more slowly than in modern concrete (before considering cracks).
You can't build sky-scrapers without rebar (i.e. with un-reinforced concrete), but you can build some pretty large structures if you use curves, arches, widening bases, buttresses, etc. The Pantheon is pretty big, built from un-reinforced concrete, and nearly 2000 years old.
You have to adapt your building style to the material you're working with and tall, thin structures depend on the tensile strength of steel; concrete doesn't have much tensile strength, but does have tremendous compressive strength, so your structure will have to be wider at the bottom, although not necessarily wider than it's tall. It's all about directing the vectors of forces in a way that they stay inside the material of the structure, so no flying slabs, upper floors have to have arches or domes supporting them from below (or lots of pillars that widen into a small arch at the ends).
Here is an idea for a technique may be useful for building with un-reinforced concrete: instead of pouring whole walls into a mold, pour "lego"-style interlocking (large) blocks, layer by layer. Between layers you paint the surface with a thin layer of weak but flexible mortar or glue before pouring the next layer. This way you keep enough room for the structure to shift and settle without cracking and you can use the angle of contact between blocks to deflect the vectors of force back into the material. The article mentions that the Roman-style concrete hardens much faster, so that'll work well with this idea (you don't have to wait too long between pours).
Also muscle cramps. I like to stretch out all my muscles when I first wake up while still in bed and when I don't supplement magnesium this has sometimes triggered cramps in leg muscles. When supplementing magnesium this never happen, and the stretched muscles feel better, more relaxed.
I find this to be true as well. I have nerve damage/pressure from bad back. If I miss a dose before bed, I almost invariably get a calf cramp in the early morning hours before waking. Very annoying, only way to get rid of it is get out of bed and stand up on it. I think flooding the body with the magnesium before bed, before it has a chance to maybe get rid of excess perhaps, because taking it too far from bedtime I'll still have twitches and cramps.
