Mrs. KA

NL | laughter, grief, contemplation & Entwicklung | science, nature, medicine, art, humor & people | like is mostly bookmark | It’s only love, give it away

[NASA Solar System @NASASolarSystem]

Searching for clues about Mars’ ancient past… right here on Earth.

Our Perseverance rover found greenish "reduction spots" on Mars. On Earth, spots like these can be formed by microbes, so NASA scientists headed to Scotland to take a closer look.

https://t.co/Uk88kue5yT

[Rick Evers @RickEversRoyal]

Prinses Astrid, de 94-jarige oudere zus van koning Harald 💔

[Danny Clinch @Danny_Clinch]

RIP Dolly Parton . What an inspiration for kindness , inclusivity and community . There was nobody quite like her !

📸 - NYC 2001

[#WOMENSART @womensart1]

'Snuggles' by contemporary UK printmaker Sarah Morgan #WomensArt #Sunday

[LBC @LBC]

‘Why are we on the sixth generation of Viagra but women are sent home with a paracetamol after a miscarriage?!'

Myleene Klass wants answers from Health Secretary Wes Streeting.

[Mrs. KA @_Mrs_KA_]

❤️‍🩹

[Dr. Edith Eger @DrEdithEger1]

Today we said goodbye to our sweet Edie. Her legacy will live on through the lessons she taught us in life, and the courage we gained by listening. Thank you for all of your love and support over the years. Rest in Peace.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

One of the greatest and oldest special effects in history can be witnessed in Rome today

And it has been playing out, on cue, for nearly 2000 years...

Each year on April 21, the traditional birthday of Rome — the legendary date Romulus founded the city in 753 BC — the midday sun pierces the oculus at the crown of the Pantheon's dome and casts a perfect disk of light that settles squarely on the temple's entrance.

For roughly two minutes and fifty seconds, the bronze doors blaze gold...

At that exact moment, the Emperor would step across the threshold, his body swallowed in sunlight, as though the heavens themselves were handing him the city.

Hadrian's engineers designed the entire building as a cosmos in miniature: the interior is exactly 43.3 metres wide and 43.3 metres tall, meaning a perfect sphere fits inside it.

The Roman senator Cassius Dio wrote that the vaulted roof was meant to resemble the heavens themselves...

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A MIT professor who built the world's first neural network machine said something about intelligence that nobody in Silicon Valley wants to admit.

His name was Marvin Minsky.

He co-founded MIT's artificial intelligence lab with John McCarthy in 1959. He built SNARC the first randomly wired neural network learning machine in 1951, as a graduate student at Princeton. He won the Turing Award.

He advised Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Isaac Asimov, who was not a modest man, said Minsky was one of only two people he would admit were more intelligent than him.

In 1986, after decades of building machines that could think, Minsky published a book about something far more unsettling.

How humans think. And why we are wrong about almost everything we believe about it.

The book is called The Society of Mind. It has 270 essays. Each one is a page long. Together they build a single argument that most people, when they first encounter it, reject immediately because it is too uncomfortable to accept.

The argument is this: you do not have a mind. You have thousands of them.

What you experience as a single, unified self making clear-headed decisions is not a thinker. It is an outcome. The result of hundreds of tiny, specialized, mostly mindless agents competing, negotiating, overriding, and occasionally cooperating with each other beneath the surface of your awareness. You do not decide things. You are what is left over after the arguing stops.

Minsky was precise about this.

He wrote that the power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single perfect principle. He called this the trick that makes us intelligent, and then immediately added: the trick is that there is no trick. There is no central processor. No ghost in the machine. No unified self sitting behind your eyes, calmly evaluating options and choosing rationally.

There is only the parliament. And the parliament is always in session.

This reframing destroys the standard explanation for every failure of self-control.

The reason you procrastinate is not laziness. It is that the agent in you that understands long-term consequences is losing an argument to the agent that wants comfort right now, and neither of those agents has a decisive vote. The reason you change your mind the moment someone pushes back is not weakness. It is that the social agent, the one that monitors status and belonging, just outweighed the analytical one. The reason willpower fails is not a character flaw. It is that you sent one small agent into a fight against dozens, and you called that discipline.

Minsky had a specific line that breaks this open completely. He said: in general, we are least aware of what our minds do best.

The things you do with the most apparent ease, reading a face, walking through a crowded room, understanding a sentence, catching a ball, are not simple at all. They are the products of staggeringly complex agent networks that run so smoothly, so far below conscious access, that you experience them as effortless. The things that feel like work, the logical arguments, the deliberate choices, the careful plans, are actually the clumsy surface layer, the small fraction of mental activity you can observe at all.

You have been taking credit for the wrong parts of your own intelligence.

The practical implication is the one that most productivity advice misses entirely. If your decisions are not made by a single rational self but by whichever coalition of agents happens to win the moment, then the game is not about training yourself to be more disciplined. The game is about designing the environment so that the right agents win without needing a fight.

This is why removing your phone from the room works better than deciding not to check it. This is why writing one task on an index card works better than building a sophisticated system. This is why commitment devices beat motivation every time. You are not strengthening your will. You are changing the conditions of the argument so that the outcome you want becomes the path of least resistance.

Minsky spent his entire career building machines that could imitate intelligence. What he discovered in the process was that natural intelligence, the kind running inside every human brain on earth, is nothing like what we think it is.

It is not a single flame burning in a single chamber.

It is a city. Loud, chaotic, full of competing interests, with no mayor.

The people who understand this stop trying to win the argument through force of will.

They learn to build a better city instead.

[The Road Jess Travelled @JessPected]

Not surprising but nice to see it validated is that men do not respect the women they want to accept positions of dependency & inferiority. They like the power, the control, but have contempt for women willing to submit. Which is why their true feelings come out during divorce.

[PsyPost.org @PsyPost]

A new study reveals that young men who support the so-called tradwife movement are driven more by hostile sexism and resentment toward women than by a chivalrous desire to protect and provide for them. https://t.co/SuC2rzJVf7

[Mies @MiesBee]

ipv gladjanus zonder kunstachtergrond Splinter Chabot zouden musea, tv programma’s e.d. Emma Louise moeten bellen. Kennis v zaken, erudiet, zo’n fijne verteller, goeie stem, gewoon alles. Maar ja, dat zeg ik zo vaak, kan @lammert dan niks regelen

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Both societies exist simultaneously. really incredible to think about

[VenetiaJane's Garden @VenetiaJane]

An old song tells that where fairies dance by moonlight, #wildflowers rise to mark the places their feet touch the earth:

“For where their nimble feet do bound,
Each flow’r unbidden grows:
The daisy, fair as maids in May,
The cowslip in his gold array,
And blushing violet rose.”

[John Carreyrou @JohnCarreyrou]

The mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, has remained unsolved for 17 years. Not anymore. Read my 18-month investigation to find out who Satoshi really is. https://t.co/fPtaK6YHJC

[MOON @DailyMoonX]

Myself… in breathtaking detail. Thousands of frames… one Moon 🌕😌

[Mordecai @MenschOhneMusil]

Pieta, Roy De Maistre, 1950.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The math Italy just handed Netflix is terrifying for every subscription company on Earth.

5.4 million Italian subscribers. Up to €500 per Premium user, €250 per Standard user. Netflix launched in Italy at €11.99/month in 2015 and hiked four times to €19.99 by 2024. The court said every single increase was illegal because the contract never stated a justified reason for any of them.

The total refund exposure is somewhere in the hundreds of millions of euros. For a single country with ~2% of Netflix's 325 million global subscribers.

Here's what nobody is pricing in: Germany and Spain have already filed identical challenges using the same EU Directive from 1993. Berlin and Cologne courts already ruled that generic price-change clauses are void. Italy just gave every consumer group in Europe a finished legal template.

Netflix hiked prices globally on March 26. Six days later, this ruling dropped. The company is now simultaneously raising prices worldwide while a court in its fourth-largest European market ordered it to roll prices back to 2015 levels.

The real exposure here isn't Italy. Netflix can absorb hundreds of millions. The real exposure is the legal principle: telling customers "we're raising your price, you can cancel if you don't like it" is not consent under EU law. That logic applies to every subscription service operating in Europe. Every SaaS company. Every streaming platform. Every telecom.

The freedom to cancel is not the freedom to agree. That one sentence just repriced the entire European subscription economy.

[Mio_Sub🇯🇵 @MyColleagueMio2]

Witnessing an Oiran Dochu, a traditional procession of high-ranking courtesans from Japan's Edo period, with stunning kimonos and their unique Sotohachimonji walk, is truly mesmerizing! ✨🌸

[Paul O’Brien @Paul_L_OBrien]

From the files of an Alzheimer’s caregiver. Today my mom asked me at least 20 times where my dad is. He died in 2002. She asked me at least 20 times why I was sitting in a recliner resting. I had a painful surgery last week and I’m still recovering ( barely) She asked me at least 20 times when her parents were going to stop by. They have been dead for 40 and 35 years respectively. She asked me where Paul is 20 times ( that’s me) She wandered around every time I turned my head away from her. She walked by with no clothes on once. She went into the bathroom and locked herself in. All while I tried to watch her 24/7 while on painkillers. At least I could laugh and even asked her if she’d like to dance once. Thankfully she said absolutely not. 🤣 God bless her. Alzheimer’s is a vicious disease.

[Critically Thinking & Drinking 🧐 🥃🧉🍸🍹🤪 @TheCriticalDri1]

80’s > 90’s 💯

Don’t believe me? Listen to Smells Like Teen Spirit like THIS!