ultimape 🐜💩 💛 @ultimape@mastodon.social

➡️ Content Warning: ⬅️

I am a walking-talking infohazard and am probably dangerous to your wellbeing. I vacillates between curiosity/playfulness, but even IRL I have trouble with signaling intent.

Subverting the way we model the world can break walls we build to protect ourselves. Breaking my own walls is how I overcome my own fears.

This may enhance triggers in those who have differing fear/disgust responses.

Knowing your emotional limits is not a weakness.

I won't be mad if you unfollow.

Things I've been absolutely fascinated with: #governance and #governancestructures, #socialnetworks, #gametheory, #incentive systems and mechanism / #gamedesign, #decentralized anything, organizational #rituals, #advertising theory, #information #networks, #psychology, #sociobiology, #complexsystems theory, #emergence, #swarmcognition, #groupformation and #autopoiesis, risk reward processing, and the nature of #homeostasis in living systems.

Basically I wanna put sentient robotic ants on mars.

I'm a computer obsessed autistic nerd w/ executive function disorder. I am effectively agoraphobic. I'm so fucked with anxiety/depression/sensory issues that I can't even manage to get on disability.

I'm living on a donation of $100 a month, and by grace of some girl I met on the internet.

I spend most of my time reading science pubs in quest to fix myself, hundreds a day. I have an operating model of disease that lets me make predictions that end up panning out months+years later.

What do?

The maned wolf has long legs so It can walk faster between ant mounds... to poop on them.

Their pee also apparently smells like weed.

if you haven't yet, do some research on the history of snake oil.

There is actually a legitimate form of snake oil that came from a particular kind of snake in China that actually does help with inflammation.

The selling snake oil trope we know as a culture? Comes from people who were just selling random shit under that brand. Believing even themselves that it would help in the same way.

If they can't tell you what temperature the oil can be distilled at, they're probably lying to you.

Beware of hucksters. Scam artists who sing a great song about gut health. There's people hawking essential oils saying that the improve your gut.

Entire multi-level marketing companies recruiting on the basis that they're saving humanity from disease. It could be your next-door neighbor. It could be that nice lady from the church who was suckered into selling pampered chef a while back.

If they can't tell you what microbes strain it helps, down to the DNA level? Tell them "begone wizard".

I'd say consult a doctor, but even doctors are fucking this up because they don't understand this shit either. You have to be an expert. It's literally a burgeoning field, one with lots of shity studies not taking into account the ecosystem effects. And a field that hasn't get permeated mainstream medical science.

But in meantime you can be sure that these giant corporate food conglomerates are going to be hyping the shit out of it to compete. Stay safe.

Probiotics; it's what guts crave.

So yeah some probiotics can help you lose weight. I'm sure a nice round of untreatable chronic diarrhea would stave off childhood obesity too.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/6823927/

Let's ignore the fact that diarrhea is one of the leading causes of death of children around the world.

Don't fuck with probiotics because it's trendy. Don't just take them because you think they might help. Have a very particular reason in mind that's related directly to your own personal biology. Do your research.

If your body is not set up to support a particular microbe, then taking a massive dose of it in a probiotic is the dumbest shit you could do.

At best it will just give you a bunch of diarrhea, but worse you are disrupting an ecosystem.

That random probiotic you're putting in your body... If it actually works: it can kill off all the other bacteria that actually help you function. Creating a niche for something more aggressive.

Maybe its best bros with Candidia. And in that one's wake c-diff.

The gut is an ecosystem. The gut is a garden, and a complex interaction of many parts of your body. Everything from your saliva glands to your anal glands play a role.

Everything I've read on the mechanics of the gut, from how the gut produces the chemicals that encourage bacteria, the nature and spread of such chemical facilities on lining of the gut, and even the genes that produce sweat on your skin and produce acid in the gut: It all encourages ecosystems, regulated by the immune system.

So this is really important and I need to emphasize this: I've read everything I could on a ton of different strains of microbes.

I investigated what they poop, what they eat. I researched the kind of ecosystems that support them in the gut. and if I could have found them I know the exact genetic strains that I wanted to encourage growth of. I'm not taking some random probiotic because of hype trends. That's dumb.

More importantly I knew what other kind of bacteria they tend to commingle with.

"For example, probiotics can prevent a deadly infection called NEC in premature babies. But neonatologist Josef Neu pointed out that 90 percent of the probiotics used in neonatal intensive care units in the US have no data supporting their safety or efficacy. Formulations are chosen, instead, based on what’s readily available."
https://vitals.lifehacker.com/its-official-probiotics-are-not-harmless-cure-alls-1829202390

Can you imagine just taking some random drug whenever you're sick?

TFW: you delete your facebook, but find out that Amazon still has access to your social network because of goodread's integration.

Why the fuck is this on business insider?

https://www.businessinsider.com/psychosis-linked-with-autoimmune-diseases-2018-7

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/schizophrenia-australian-research-immune-system-2018-9

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/schizophrenia-breakthrough-discovered-at-neuroscience-research-australia-neura-1027533677

Also TL;DR: glial cells and macrophages, because of course it is.
https://www.neura.edu.au/news/schizophrenia-breakthrough/

Has anyone noticed that we also found this in autism and depression?

Brawndo brand probiotics, It's got what guts crave ...

If👏you👏aren't👏personalizing👏your👏gut👏to👏your👏own👏etiology,👏what👏are👏you👏even?

That Ant Lab channel has been pumping out some really good videos on how ants operate. This video shows how they discover what kinds of chemicals they produce as part of sharing their immune system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myNxDOC3uxM

This particular one is interesting because it suggets that some don't produce antimicrobioal compounds.

I wonder if the ants they used are ones that depend heavily on bacteria. I know many ants rely on bacteria to produce anti-cancer compounds.

This is one of the best footage I've seen of the trophallaxis process, and also highlights a form of Kleptoparasitism by myrmecophilic beetles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ-k0TBwvL0

(BTW: are there any ant scientists on mastodon? Following them all on birdsite is one of the few reasons why I still go back there. I am also myrmecophilic.)

Reading about people disparaging remote work because they get distracted by family makes me wonder if half the time people go to work is to escape their family.

If you have that problem, I might suggest using a co-working space. E.g. not working from home? Working remotely doesn't necessarily imply working from home. It means your place of employment is remote.

More importantly, not being tied to a specific location means you are more able to adapt to these kinds of constraints. Change it up!

Planning on working on Goliath again tomorrow.

A perfect storm of stress aligned with an alignment of a bunch of troughs in my life rhythms. But I managed to fight the depression symptoms fairly quickly and afterwards deal with life events that I had in my schedule.

One of them involved getting some extra money, so this past week I've been quite stable thank to saving up to afford a sunlamp!

If it works well, I'm looking forward to staying productive all fall/winter.

x = y
x == y
x === y
x :=y
x <- y
x.equals(y)
x eq y
x.set(y)
x.assign(y)
x.apply(y)

Request: a programming language that can overload the emoji ⬅️ as an assignment operator but also as a comparison returning a boolean, but only if it is used in a string context.

See also:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=15582501426999352803&as_sdt=5,46&sciodt=0,46&hl=en

and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1642028/what-is-the-operator-in-c