Thomas Varley, MPhil

I have no idea if this is appropriate analysis for a cephalapod but who cares!

Well this is something. A team put a squid in a 16T MRI to attempt to reconstruct a meso-scale connectome. From a squid. How can I get my hands to *those* connectivity matrices? https://www.cell.com/iscience/pdf/S2589-0042(19)30562-0.pdf … @joshfasky @spornslab

One of the most frustrating aspects of this #coronavirus thing is the sheer number of men on Twitter who seem to believe that simply working in Silicon Valley (often as venture capitalists) is equivalent to an epidemiology or virology PhD.

@smellosopher this seems like content you might enjoy.

Anyone with better math-chops than me want to explain why this is clearly ludicrous? I admit, I am stumped. I feel like it has something to do with the fact that powers of two can be satisfied with both positive and negative numbers, but that's all I've got.https://twitter.com/AnnaGHughes/status/1222608360450617344 …

This is absolutely mind-boggling. Somehow Jacobs feels that the best rebuttal to #Medicare4All is ... an 18-tweet thread quoting arcane insurance policy documents and suggesting that people *engage in insurance fraud* if they can't afford $1000s of dollars in COBRA coverage.https://twitter.com/chrisjacobsHC/status/1222874181945241601 …

This is a nightmare. Kids are going to die because of this and I fully believe that the authors not only know that, but are actively in support of it.https://twitter.com/BrynnTannehill/status/1222196191993221120 …

Fascinating preprint by @_fernando_rosas et al., that I can't quite wrap my mind around yet, but am very excited to dig into. https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10387 

Or are these trajectories independent of any individual and instead emergent reflections of deeper cultural trends? If so: then it might be time to panic.

If Leary and Alpert had been at Warwick, would the Ccru have ended up all blissed out and optimistic? If Land had been at Harvard in the 60s, would the psilocybin project be synonymous with nightmarish cosmic horror?

I'm curious: given how both groups seemed to share similar beginnings, how much of the ultimate divergence is a reflection of deeper changes to our culture over the intervening 40 years, vs. how much is just the personalities involved.

Accelerationist writing can range from far-right revolutionary fantasies of violence, to something rather like Milton-Freedman-meets-HP-Lovecraft in it's unrelenting horror.

The Ccru thinkers (particularly Land) have become synonymous with an incredibly pessimistic worldview concerned with alienation, hyper-capitalism, digital anomie, and general modern misery. Accelerationism is the crowning jewel of this grim bouquet.

What gets interesting is how the groups diverged. The Harvard group was, fundamentally optimistic about the role of their new spiritual technology in transforming the human race for the better. This cultural perspective still lives on in the #psychedelic culture movement.

Both groups produced thinkers who had significant cultural impact in their own right: Tim Leary, Richard Alpert, Nick Land, Mark Fisher, to name a few.