Volcic-tentacles

Volcic-tentacles t1_j83dhdy wrote

Reply to Recent Superbowl Win Probabilities, Ordered by "Excitement" [OC] by tree-of-thought

I only started watching NFL this year (in week 11 of the 2022 season). It took me a while to decode the labels, which require quite a bit of specialist knowledge of the NFL and there is no key. Marks off for that.

Once I tuned in though, I did find this interesting. How were the probabilities worked out though? Where is the background on this?

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Volcic-tentacles t1_iv9k30h wrote

Reply to comment by MannAusSachsen in [OC] Detailed Language Family Map of the World by BLAZENIOSZ

Basque is a language isolate, though some speculate that it is related to Caucasian languages, there is no consensus. But it's not an "anomaly" at all. This would suggest that it is unexpected. It is not unexpected: Basques have been living in that part of the world, speaking that language for as long as we have records. Nothing anomalous about them.

As a linguist I can tell you that language isolates are common across the globe, largely because of the damage wrought by European imperialism - they didn't just murder people, they murdered languages.

Worse, in London alone you can hear over 200 languages being spoken today. So your view of Europe and languages spoken in Europe is about an uninformed as it could be and obviously rooted in unexamined imperialist and colonialist attitudes.

You should go back to commenting on cat videos.

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Volcic-tentacles t1_itp0wc4 wrote

Reply to comment by ShadyAidyX in Rishi Sunak will make history as the first person of color to be Britain’s prime minister. by Heyheyheyone

No Prime Minister is ever elected. Because the UK voting system is not presidential. You vote for your local candidate and the party with the most candidates appoints their leader as PM and that PM appoints the cabinet of ministers. Prime Ministers are all appointed. And changing midterm is almost as common as not.

Take the time to properly look at your ballet in 2025. You won't see the PM's name on that ballet unless you vote in their constituency. Never has been on the ballet. Likely never will be in your lifetime.

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Volcic-tentacles t1_itfssh9 wrote

Reply to Exploring a new environment helps boost dopamine levels which are projected to the hippocampus, decreasing the threshold for learning. However, in older people, the novelty of a new environment doesn’t boost memory as much as it does in younger people. by Wagamaga

"boost dopamine levels" is a nonsense phrase.
"Projected to the hippocampus" is also nonsense.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter. It is manufactured and stored in small vesicles at the extremities of neurons and is released into synapses: whereupon it is reabsorbed or destroyed within milliseconds. Neurotransmitters are not like other hormones such as adrenaline or thyroxine that are released into the blood supply. There is little or no dopamine sloshing around in your brain. There are only dopaminergic neurons, i.e. neurons that use dopamine to transmit signals across a synapse. And yes, rewards are mediated by dopaminergic neurons, but so are dozens of other processes.

How we increase levels of a neurotransmitter in a synapse, and what the actual effects of that are is very poorly understood. How we measure the amount of dopamine in a synapse is not clear since they are just 20-40 nanometers wide: one could not use visible light to see one and do spectroscopy for example. Blue light wavelengths are an order of magnitude longer than a synapse, i.e. 450 and 495 nanometers.

So there are a chain of inferences in the story as presented that don't seem valid to me.

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