Parampreet Singh - Science Meditations

a screenshot reads: OPINION INTERESTING TIMES Did Bad Takes Ruin the Newspaper?

5 tips for better sleep that you can read on your bright phone at 2AM Sleep is vital to good health but studies find that 1 in 4 Canadian adults don’t get the recommended amount of sleep. So we’ve created this easy to read guide of tips for better sleep (specially desig...

5 tips for better sleep that you can read on your bright phone at 2AM

Stolen from the Internet, a cartoon: A "normal distribution" showing the standard bell-shaped curve with x-axis ticks. Then below it a ghost-in-a-sheet hovers above a ticked x-axis below which is labeled "paranormal distribution" The joke is that this kind of ghost is vaguely bell-shaped.

A reminder to all scientists & data viz people 🧪:

It's Spooky Science Time.

Adjust your models to use the paranormal distribution 👻from now until November 1st.

a blue jay on a branch looking intently at something out of the photo

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

A simple sign on a building in upstate New York that that reads “Books & Cake”

The truly perfect business model doesn’t exi-

The Naked Gun for sale on the itunes store for $14.99 but for rent for $19.99

This is a ZAZ joke in itself

the revolution will not be televised (they canceled their subscriptions)

Increasingly, my only mindset has been 'the only way out is through.'

Get more weird. Become more niche. Cultivate less broadly marketable stuff.

If people come out of this being feral little trash goblins, it will be a response to outside stimulus and nothing else. That's totally on them.

As a racialized Canadian who grew up here in the 80s I have never, ever understood the whole Canadians are so nice trope. Nice to who and when is the unsaid part.

Because all they care about is money.

It is very hard to be alive right now as a person who cares more about other things like love and friendship and family and community.

Please give me an unironic list of things that have gotten better over the last ten years because I’m spiraling.

I’ll start: you can buy an enormous TV from Costco for like $100 bucks now.

Nuns escape retirement home and run back to convent in Salzburg....it's Sound of Music backwards!

You can use ChatGPT instead of your own brain to write your paper if I can talk about ChatGPT instead of you in your letter of reference

Walkable Neighborhoods Help Adults Socialize, Increase Community Adults who live in walkable neighborhoods are more likely to socialize and have a stronger sense of community, report researchers at the UC San Diego Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human...

“Loneliness and isolation can lead to: 29% increased risk of heart disease; 32% increased risk of stroke; 50% increased risk of developing dementia among older adults; and 60% increased risk of premature death.”

Surgeon General recommends designing cities to create more connections. #WalkableCities

As a fan of Star Trek, I felt this way about the Khan character. I was excited (a Sikh character on ST!) and disappointed (he's a brown warrior villain) and charmed (played RM!). And when in the movie STID that character was played by white Brit actor Benedict Cumberbatch, I was just confused.

As I age, more and more I feel almost everything is amoral except a caring, loving heart. Education, intelligence, class, cultural background, etc. can all produce uncaring and unethical people. If you care you care, if you don't you don't.

Science Thought Nerves Couldn’t Heal. It Thought Mars Had Canals. It Thought Plastic Was Eco-Friendly. Then It Thought Again In honor of SciAm’s 180th birthday, we’re spotlighting the biggest “wait, what?” moments in science history.

180 Years of Scientific American Means 180-Degree Turns in Science—Here Are Some of the Wildest Ones www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/epis...

A middle school I interact with is in a state with a school cellphone ban and y’all everybody in there is relieved. EVERYBODY. The kids, the teachers, the janitors. They are so relieved. Nobody is really uptight about it…except some parents.

There’s a thin line between staying as informed as you should and making yourself anxious in a way that is completely unproductive and every single day the news is trying very hard to push you over into the latter

What a soldier, that man has returned from 59.5 wars lifetime.

I don't use the bird app but someone there once eloquently put it: If I can't wish ill on the dead and I can't wish ill on the living what am i supposed to do with all my ill wishing?

Feed Your Head Even now, especially now, your curiosity is powerful.

NEW WRITING:

"What will you stay curious about, even when authoritarians try to shape your reality by telling you not to think, not to read, not to ask questions, not to dare consider the possibility that there’s more to life than this?" 🧪

Cannot stop laughing at this

Saw someone upbraiding someone else for having a hobby while the world is on fire, and, my friends:

1. The world is ever on fire, this is today's conflagration;

2. If you don't find time for rest and joy the fire will consume you;

3. Don't let people shame you for being an entire human.

When you compare Chat-GPT and other LLMs to human beings, especially experts and artists, it sucks.

When you compare LLMs to Clippy, autocomplete, "if you would like to pay a bill, say 'billing' or press 2," or even Watson on Jeopardy, it's impressive.

Absurd overhype is negatively polarizing.

hoping that when they say the LLM talks like a Ph.D.-level expert, they mean "holds indecipherable decades-long academic grudges expressed largely in the form of questions that are actually more of a comment"

Emotional time dilation is when the emotional gravity (mental mass) of the task increases the longer you leave it undone and when you initiate action to complete the task, the emotional momentum reverses to zero exponentially to task completion. A little wordy but it's all I got.

I say it all of the time but I need to repeat this. Talk to elders who were activists and organizers in previous eras because they will share how much in the minority they were.

MAHA just announced that states will be able to prohibit people from purchasing junk food with SNAP.

They claim this will make people healthier. That it’ll force them to make better choices.

It won’t.

Why? They aren’t addressing the privilege involved with healthy eating 🧵