I think the point is that the emotions of the family trauma are more focused on.

• Snow White in the movie seems like just this kid who this lady really wants to murder. You don’t really see much indicating that she’s been through a rough childhood till that point.
• Cinderella does go deeper into more prolonged torture, but it doesn’t feel like they are family at all. She’s not being gaslit by family members she wants to trust, she’s literally just a slave to these assholes who stole her house.
• Sleeping beauty is more about forbidden love than generational trauma. Both of the dads seem pretty alright if a bit short tempered lol (I need to watch the movie again just for that fight)

This is in contrast to

• Brave focuses on the misunderstanding and miscommunication between parents and children where both can cause each other significant pain/stress without noticing and then those emotions can lead to rash actions damaging relationships
• Moana is similar to brave but also with more added stress of trying to discover who you are when you’ve been repressing that part of yourself due to family pressure
• Frozen is much more focused on that latter emotion but also shows miscommunication between loved ones leading to significant problems neither wanted to cause

Point is there’s a difference between saying something traumatizing happened and focusing on the effects of that traumatic experience. I mean look, half the Disney characters have dead parents so there’s trauma there but that’s not the same as making that trauma a main focus of the story.

Aladdin and Jasmine have dead parents but the film focuses on their desires for “freedom”. Whereas, in Treasure Planet, it shows Jim growing up with an absent father and how that has affected both him and his mother. It also shows him growing fond of a surrogate father figure which becomes a source of internal conflict because that surrogate father figure has significant flaws. The former movie has family trauma; the latter is about family trauma.

I know :( the issue is I’m in ME and school is fucking expensive. Oh and I am working in a research lab getting paid for my work, not much though.

I would love nothing more than to stay in school and get like 82 different degrees in various topics. I would love to do a PhD in math, and one in physics, and one in cs, and linguistics, and psychology…

But the world forces me to specialize if I want to have enough money to live well. I chose ME because I knew it had a lot of overlap with a bunch of different fields. And yeah I’m taking grad level math and cs courses, but like you said, lots of the stuff I’m interested in is PhD level stuff.

Also Idk if you’re in America, but the money for research here is getting scarcer every day. It could likely be more effective for me to sell my soul to a defense company and then build my own personal lab with that blood money to do research I want to do than it would be to get a PhD and be a professor and simply hope the projects I want to work on will get funding.

Of course that’s assuming the country doesn’t fully collapse (or kill me) before I enter the job force. And assuming I could work for a defense company without deciding to kill myself out of guilt of building civilian killing murder machines.

Anyway, point is that you are right but I lack the financial security to justify trying to get a PhD in math right now.

Ah I think I know what this is about now. If you come from a country like Canada where “Engineer” is a protected designation, then I can understand you thinking it’s a lie and I apologize for that misunderstanding.

In America and my state specifically, the word “professional engineer” is protected and requires certification, but “engineer” does not. There were several people in the civil engineering firm in my hometown who were called engineers and only had highschool diplomas, but that didn’t change the fact they were experienced engineers and called engineers.

In other fields of engineering, like software engineering, you’ll find lots of people with the title of engineer without a degree.

I’m sorry that you felt mislead by me calling myself an engineer despite the fact I’m still in school and only an engineer by title for my research. But that was not an intentional deception, simply a discrepancy between our cultural definitions of the term/title.

Also, I have made it far and will likely continue to push on in academia (though I’d like to get out of this country before starting a PhD so that complicates things).

Anyway, I’m sorry that I’ve offended you and that my attempts to explain/defend myself have come off as petulant. I’ll stop engaging with your comments and you should feel free to block me if you don’t want to come across my posts and comments again.

I’m sorry I wasn’t able to explain things more clearly/calmly sooner and for what it’s worth I’ll try to avoid calling myself an “engineer” without a qualifier stating I’m a student or researcher now that I know some places are more strict about the term.

Edit: Might be important to mention that there are still regulations in civil engineering (and other fields) that require certification at some step. Like any design of infrastructure in my state (and I think most others?) requires the stamp of a certified Professional Engineer. You can create designs without the certification but if it’s going to be used by lots of people or affect them adversely through failure, you are supposed to get it checked off by a PE before it gets built / put into use.

Necrobumping this because @chloroken@lemmy.ml linked to it with a misleading description.

TL;DR: @chloroken@lemmy.ml purposefully misrepresented the argument in his link. I didn’t lie nor did he ever prove me wrong, nor was I talking out of my ass in this thread or the other. I share science I think is cool and I find all sorts of science cool even if the research is outside my main field of study. I’ll even admit when my claims are proven wrong or are less certain than I thought (which you can see if you read this full comment section about liver vitamin A).

I’m not “talking out of my ass” in this thread. (Read it btw I mention interesting science) I was doing the research, just like I said, for a personal project on trying to structure a Spiking Neural Net more similarly to human vision, just like I said. This lead me to look into visual processing in the brain and to the structure of the eye since the initial pre-processing of vision actually might start within the retina.

I never mentioned “cuttlefish” but I guess that’s the only cephalopod he thinks of because this was the initial theory of @chloroken@lemmy.ml.

Did you just see that other post about Cephalopod eye anatomy and write this?

I ask because you have a poor grasp of how evolution actually is when you say “evolution makes a mistake”. The truth is that our eyes are one of many layouts in the animal kingdom, it’s not some binary thing like you’re making it out to be.

This was in response to my casual comment about how evolution fucked up our eyes. Obviously evolution can’t really make mistakes because it isn’t conscious but it is the general consensus that our eyes are “inverted” because by the time it became an issue, the system was too complex to easily flip back around (the recurrent laryngeal nerve is another good example of this kind of “fuck up”).

Also obviously there are more kinds of eyes, I never said there weren’t nor did I mean to imply (or think I even accidentally implied) this was binary. Idk why chloroken got the impression that’s what I was saying…?

Anyway, I actually am (and was) doing graduate level research despite being an undergrad. And guess what: you don’t need to have a degree to learn things or read research papers.

I do not write bullshit for people to “be dazzled by the academic tone” (in fact I’ve heard I write to casually in my papers), I “write bullshit” because science is cool and I want to share what I’ve learned with others. Who cares what field of science it’s in, it’s fascinating no matter what.

Do science. Share what you learn. Tell people like @chloroken who just want to be mad at you to fuck off instead of engaging them like I have lol (good advice if they are being purposefully aggressive but it seems like this specific case may have started as miscommunication so I’ll x it out)

Oh and to defend myself (and actually brag a little haha) as of now I’ve officially prototyped a real, novel, mechatronics system for use in prosthetics and augmented reality systems, and there’s now a paper in the works with my name first. Point is I don’t think it’s wrong to call myself an engineer. Especially to strangers on the internet who don’t need to know whether I’m a grad researcher or working for a company.

Also I’d go into more detail about my research (the federally funded ones not the hobby ones) but @chloroken@lemmy.ml seems like the kind of person who’d stalk/doxx me. So I really should be more careful about what I say about my personal life.

I haven’t intentionally misrepresented myself in this comment section or the previous one or any others as far as I can think of.

I also have not lied.

So, what is the real reason for the aggression mate?

Ah yes my wildest fantasy: to find out that the ideas I think are new and original have been studied well beyond my level of understanding by other people lol

I hope you’ve never worked in academia. You sound like you really like discouraging people from enjoying science unless they meet your arbitrary education standards.

Anyone can do science. Sure, sometimes people who don’t know a lot learn a little and think they know a lot, but you shouldn’t just shut them down. If someone has a passion for exploration you should encourage them to keep going, catch their mistakes sure, help them question their thought process, but remind them that making mistakes or thinking an idea is novel when it isn’t is something everyone does and they shouldn’t be ashamed for it.

You’re right, we build on the backs of giants. The issue is, typically, anything I discover myself is typically very far below the level where new science can be done OR it is far enough above my current knowledge that I just don’t even know where I’d begin.

Bi intuitionistic logic is the latter category. I was expecting truth tables and instead had to add a ton of words to my vocabulary like “Heyting Algebra” and “Kripke Frame” etc. just to understand what the paper was saying (not that I do fully understand what the papers are saying lol)

First, I said the “new things” were already discovered by dead guys. They’re new to me, not to the world. That’s the point of the comment.

Secondly, I am an engineering undergrad and I don’t think I ever claimed to be working with “ocular algorithms.” I had been experimenting with spiking neural networks and was replicating a research paper on using a two layer inhibition structure to recognize MNIST numbers.

That lead me to question how images were processed in the brain which lead me to read up on the structure of the eye (which you tried to call me out on previously) as well as the structure of the neocortex and the supposed function of each of the visual processing areas of the neocortex.

I’m sorry if I’m coming off as condescending or as “an intellectual giant” I’m a kid with ADHD and curiosity. I like explaining the cool things I’ve recently learned.

As for “what would happen if a professor for an undergrad lab you work at saw the way you write” they definitely already know. In fact my supervisor is pretty supportive of my random tangents into other kinds of science (so long as it doesn’t distract from the work I need to get done). Oh and remember how I said there might be an application for spiking neural nets in one of the grad students projects? My supervisor thinks so too! (though it’s not the one I was thinking of lol)

Edit: Also, I don’t think I ever mentioned cuttlefish in that comment stream you linked…? You mostly just said I didn’t know what I was talking about and then after I showed you the sources I’d drawn from you started asking questions about my research and education. Are you just upset that people downvoted you in that thread?

Yeah I am an undergrad in engineering not math or physics or bio or anything like that. I just get curious and end up going down rabbit holes of niche science.

Nothing kills my motivation more than discovering something new in math and then finding out some dead guy beat me to the punch by several centuries lol

Then again sometimes it’s worse when I expect there to be literature on a topic and then discovering there isn’t even a wiki page for it.

Hell, most recently it was bi-intuitionistic logic. Originally studied in the 40s by one German guy who took bad notes. Main body of work done by a single math grad in the 70s (Rauszer) culminating in her PhD. Turns out there were errors discovered in her proofs and it was proven inconsistent in 2001. Only for two relatively young mathematicians to clear up that there are two separate versions of bi-intuitionistic logic which are consistent. This discovery and proof are found a paper that was published only this fucking year.

I asked a simple question about dealing with uncertainty in a logical system and instead of finding a well studied foundation of knowledge I was yeeted to the bleeding edge of mathematics.

Edit: in case it isn’t clear, by “new things” I mean new to me not new to the world; hence the aforementioned dead guys with published works on the topic. And when I say I was yeeted to the edge of math, I should mention that edge is well beyond my capacity to further. I had to learn a lot about notation for logic just to parse the paper, and I’m sure I still don’t fully understand it.

I’m an engineering student researcher with a CS minor and ADHD; this kind of research is what I do with my freetime lol.

To be fair this is kind of a shared hobby project/topic between me and my friend (who is a biophysics major now in med school).

Anyway, point is that you don’t need to have a real “purpose” in order to be curious. I work in a robotics/medical lab at my university and my friends is trying to be a surgeon, yet we’re constantly in debates about astro and quantum physics to the point we’ve gotten career physicists to weigh in on our arguments.

No relevance to our majors or our work, but super fucking interesting and full of gaps where there are more theories than facts. Plenty of room for new perspectives.

Normalize doing research for fun!

Edit: changed “engineer” to “engineering student researcher” because a certain person thought I was purposefully misrepresenting the fact I was a student (despite referencing the fact I’m in school in my other comments).

Jsyk in America only “Professional Engineer” is a protected title requiring a certification. You can work as an engineer and have the title of engineer without getting a degree.

I knew several civil engineers in my hometown who were called engineers without having a degree. I think one of them did eventually get his PE certification too after working under a certified PE long enough and taking the tests. (Infrastructure needs a PE sign off before getting built in my state)

In other fields like software engineering you’ll find a lot more people with the title of “engineer” and no certification or degree.

Anyway, point is that I’m sorry if I mislead anyone. I thought it was obvious I’m in school; in the future I’ll try to avoid calling myself an engineer without a qualifier mentioning I’m a student. I think this is the only comment I’ve needed to update for that, hopefully it will stay that way.

SNNs more closely resemble the function of biological neurons and are perfect for temporally changing inputs. I decided to teach myself rust at the same time I learned about these so I built one from scratch trying to mimic the results of this paper (or rather a follow up paper in which they change the inhibition pattern leading to behavior similar to a self organizing map; I can’t find the link to said paper right now…).

After building that net I had some ideas about how to improve symbol recognition. This lead me down a massive rabbit hole about how vision is processed in the brain and eventually spiraled out to the function and structure of the hippocampus and now back to the neocortex where I’m currently focusing now on mimicking the behavior and structure of cortical minicolumns.

The main benefit of SNNs over ANNs is also a detriment: the neurons are meant to run in parallel. This means it’s blazing fast if you have neuromorphic hardware, but it’s incredibly slow and computationally intense if you try to simulate it on a typical machine with von Neumann architecture.

I actually came across this for the first time when I was doing research into the visual pathway for the purpose of trying to structure a spiking neural net more closely to human visual processing.

The Wikipedia page mentions cephalopod eyes specifically when talking about the inverted retina of vertebrates.

The vertebrate retina is inverted in the sense that the light-sensing cells are in the back of the retina, so that light has to pass through layers of neurons and capillaries before it reaches the photosensitive sections of the rods and cones.[5] The ganglion cells, whose axons form the optic nerve, are at the front of the retina; therefore, the optic nerve must cross through the retina en route to the brain. No photoreceptors are in this region, giving rise to the blind spot.[6] In contrast, in the cephalopod retina, the photoreceptors are in front, with processing neurons and capillaries behind them. Because of this, cephalopods do not have a blind spot.

The Wikipedia page goes on to explain that our inverted retinas could be the result of evolution trying to protect color receptors by limiting their light intake, as it does appear that our glial cells do facilitate concentrating light.

However, the “positive” effects of the glial cells coming before the receptors could almost certainly be implemented in a non-inverted retina. So that’s the evolutionary duct tape I was mentioning.

It would be difficult to flip the retina back around (in fact since it originates as part of the brain we’d kind of have to grow completely different eyes), so that’s not an option for evolution.

However, slight changes to the glial cells and vasculature of the eyes is definitely more possible. So those mutations happen and evolution optimizes them as best it can.

Evolution did well to optimize a poorly structured organ but it’s still a poorly structured organ.

Bro myopia is the least stupid part of our eye design problems. Our retinas are built entirely backwards for no other reason besides evolution making a mistake and then duct taping over it too much to fix it later.

If your retina was the right way around (like cephalopod eyes) you would have:

• No blind spots
• Higher fidelity vision even with the same number of receptors since the nerves and blood vessels wouldn’t interfere like they do now
• much lower likelihood of retinal detachment since you could attach it for real in the first place
• possibility for better brightness/darkness resolution since blood supply could be greater without affecting light passage
• possibility for better resolution because ganglion nerves can be packed more densely without affecting light passage
• The ability to regenerate cones and rods because you could, again, ACTUALLY HAVE SUPPORT CELLS WITHOUT BLOCKING LIGHT TO THE RETINA

Our eyes are built in the stupidest way possible.

Another fun fact: retinol is regenerated by your liver. Not your eyes, not some part of your brain, not some organ near your head like your thalamus which could probably get the job done if it tried, your fucking liver. Your eyes taking a while to adjust to the dark has basically nothing to do with your eyes; it’s because of the delay in adjustment by your fucking liver to produce more retinal, dump it into your vascular system and wait for it to hopefully reach your eyes. Why are we built like this?!

Edit: A few comments asked for sources on the relation between dark adaptation and liver vitamin A. So I went looking for sources. It was honestly somewhat difficult to find information, but I was able to find two different case studies showing that night blindness in patients with damaged livers. Specifically these individuals had liver damage that affected their serum Vitamin A levels. And after raising their vitamin A levels, their symptoms improved.

This study details a patient with normal day vision and no other ocular problems besides being unable to see at night.

The patient had a medical history of stage 4 non-alcoholic liver cirrhosis, which led to a malabsorption of vitamin A, as confirmed by the very low vitamin A level in the serum analysis… …Subjective improvement in symptoms, along with better performance on visual field, were noted after initiating oral vitamin A supplementation for 6 months.

This study details a patient with night blindness caused by low levels of vitamin A presumably due to Hepatitis C.

Case description: This case describes a 64-year-old female patient with symptomatic VAD, likely secondary to liver cirrhosis in the setting of Hepatitis C. The patient presented with night blindness and blurry vision. She was successfully managed with direct replacement of Vita-min A.

These studies do show that dark adaptation is dependent on vitamin A produced by the liver, but I’ll be the first to admit it’s not exactly conclusive evidence of my initial claim that the liver must respond to dark conditions increasing retinol concentration in the blood in order for rod cells to function properly in low light conditions. That is a possible explanation for these case studies but not necessarily the only one, so take my last fun fact with a grain of salt.