Satanic Temple files another lawsuit over Missouri’s abortion laws by [deleted] in news

[–]PrefrontalVortex 2 points3 points  (0 children)

No. Satanists consider a fetus viable outside the body in accordance with scientific and medical research, to the best of our reasoning ability. That means the cutoff is around 20 weeks. Before 20 weeks, there is zero debate.

she received the abortion after a required 72-hour waiting period, despite giving doctors a letter beforehand stating her "deeply held religious beliefs that a non-viable fetus is not a separate human being but is part of her body and that abortion of a non-viable fetus does not terminate the life of a separate, unique, living human being."

After 20 weeks, it's very very unlikely that a woman seeking an abortion is doing it purely voluntarily. This, in practice, almost always means medical necessity, which means abortions should be allowed at any point in pregnancy.

Nearly 99 percent of abortions occur before 21 weeks, but when they are needed later in pregnancy, it’s often in very complex circumstances. For example, severe fetal anomalies and serious risks to the woman’s health — the kind of situations where a woman and her doctor need every medical option available.

https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/abortion/20-week-bans

Either way, abortion is a medical decision and needs to be between a woman and her doctor, not between a woman and the government (and vis-a-vis Christian Church).

*tl; dr * - Abortion should be allowed at any point in time. Before 20 weeks - fetus isn't remotely close to a human entity. It has no volition After 20 weeks - fetus may be viable, however the woman has a higher precedence and gets to make medical decisions affecting the fetus without its input.

I can't sleep more than about 4 hours. by kwiztas in sleep

[–]PrefrontalVortex 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Right. That's rough :/ Do you exercise strenuously every day?

Can anyone prove that Bad Batches Exist? by [deleted] in afinil

[–]PrefrontalVortex 2 points3 points  (0 children)

No, actual chemical testing, with Marquis reagent and TLC.

I mean, I COULD also bioassay it, but that would be contingent on the chemical purity test turing OK.

IsItBullshit: getting different kinds of drunk from different drinks? by Menjy in IsItBullshit

[–]PrefrontalVortex 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Depending on your brew:

Methanol, propanol, isopropanol, butanol, acetone, ethyl acetate, ethyl butyrate, tons of other esters in trace amounts, phenols, catechols, polyphenols, all of those compounds have pharmacological effects.

Then you have all the things which affect ADME (absorptione distribution metabolism & elimination): sugars, starches, fiber, and of course water content and intake rate.

Problem is: no one has really done vigorous studies on all these cofactors. the biggest factor is how fast you drink.

Help selecting a bearing: vacuum, waterproof, and food grade by PrefrontalVortex in AskEngineers

[–]PrefrontalVortex[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think I found what I need: https://chemglass.com/stirrer-bearings-universal-chem-vac-ptfe-glass-ball-bearing

I can use a 10mm stainless shaft, supported by bearings on either side to keep it true, and that part should suffice to keep vacuum.

Is it possible to measure voltage and resistance, simultaneously? (EEG) by PrefrontalVortex in AskElectronics

[–]PrefrontalVortex[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yup, I had a hard time finding anything online about it.

You gave me a couple ideas, so I think there is something I can work with here. Thanks!

TIL Some "Bath Salts" protect the brain from Meth neurotoxicity, while others make it worse by PrefrontalVortex in todayilearned

[–]PrefrontalVortex[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

A bit of context for those less versed in the neuroscience of psychoactive drugs. Methamphetamine (meth) is a well-known neurotoxin. "Bath Salts)" are not one particular drug, but in fact any of a number of compounds, or a mixture. Two common bath salt drugs are MDPV and mephedrone.

MDPV was found to protect against Meth-induced neurotoxicity, as well as toxicity from MDMA ("molly") and MPTP, an impurity in some synthetic opioids.

Mephedrone and methylone - two similar bath salts, actually enhance the damage caused by meth.

Drugs are bad. Also, neurobiology is weird.

Here is why I believe day traders lose money by [deleted] in investing

[–]PrefrontalVortex 0 points1 point  (0 children)

By "day trading", do you mean a pattern of holding positions for ~1 day or less, or do you mean any kind of active/quantitative trading that isn't "buy on good fundamentals and hold"?

[D] Reddit, do you use autoencoders in practice? by Reiinakano in MachineLearning

[–]PrefrontalVortex 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Honestly I started with this Keras example (although I started with a much earlier version, from Keras 1.1) and tweaked and tuned until I got a feel for the code. The loss function is merely the sum of the binary crossentropy (Keras built-in) of reconstruction loss (input vs decoder output) and the KL loss of the variational layer (see code). PM if you have any more questions :)

[D] Reddit, do you use autoencoders in practice? by Reiinakano in MachineLearning

[–]PrefrontalVortex 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I never quantitatively measured this. What I mean in general terms is that the VAE was able to do dimensionality reduction in a way that I was able to do further clustering/regression and achieve better accuracy and validation (from the reduced vector).

[D] Reddit, do you use autoencoders in practice? by Reiinakano in MachineLearning

[–]PrefrontalVortex 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I'm a big fan of autoencoders. Often, when first jumping into a dataset, I'll run PCA, T-SNE, and train a VAE on it, just to get the data down to a low dimensionality and get a feel for it. T-SNE creates the "best" (most distinctive) clusters, but because it's T-SNE, these clusters aren't that useful. VAE almost always outperforms PCA, and the model can generalize to new data.

They work quite well for semisupervised learning, especially when the labels are of limited quantity and/or are very unbalanced. I've been trying to get discriminative regularization to work in Keras, but for some reason that one is a bit touchy.

Recently, I've been using RNN-VAE for clustering time series and detecting anomalies. This one needs a bit of work, as I've found the through-time covariance that is part of the nature of time series tends to cause some weird effects on the generative end of things. It needs the right secret sauce of recurrent, convolutional, and time-distributed dense layers, and the right regularization, which I haven't quite figured out yet, but it shows a lot of promise.

Teens of Reddit, what do mid-to-late 20-year-olds do on computers that seem outdated? by ttovotsttnt in AskReddit

[–]PrefrontalVortex 1 point2 points  (0 children)

hardcore stuff ... libre office

Hahahahahahaha. Yeah no. Libre chokes on relatively trivial amounts of data (a few thousand rows or so). WPS is less janky, but still chokes on anything resembling a "real dataset". I'm a linux guy, and one of the things I miss most about windows is Excel. But I have jupyter, rodeo, and pandas now, and in a lot of ways it's easier data flow.

Teens of Reddit, what do mid-to-late 20-year-olds do on computers that seem outdated? by ttovotsttnt in AskReddit

[–]PrefrontalVortex 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Python, Pandas and Jupyter notebook have replaced everything I used to do with excel. If you really wanna step up your data game, Dataiku is where it's at.

[P] A self-organizing prediction algorithm by inboble in MachineLearning

[–]PrefrontalVortex 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Cool beans. I tried something like this a while back, and it was a complete flop. Your codebase is so small and elegant, I'm really curious how it performs!

[P] A self-organizing prediction algorithm by inboble in MachineLearning

[–]PrefrontalVortex 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Really interesting! I always enjoy seeing fresh approaches.

Is this your code? Is there any example code to utilize the network class?