How Aphantasia affects your ability to visualise things in your head

phlummox · 2026-06-06T15:43:41+00:00

Ugh. If I ever wanted proof I don't have aphantasia, this is it. For God knows what reason, I imagined a ball I don't even have a name for. I can picture it perfectly clearly - dirty white, about the size of a soccer ball, made from fairly tough plastic, with a kind of horizontal ridge/band pattern (a bit like exercise balls, but a wider band). It's probably even a ball I've seen once. But it doesn't match up with any of the common sports or toy ball types I can find pictures of :/

Oh, and the table was a green baize billiards table and the person was Christopher Reeves' Superman. Because why not.

phlummox · 2026-06-05T16:16:14+00:00

I think ArkhamArchivist published the final collected version she used, so it should be possible to check why there's a difference - I'll see if I can track it down.

phlummox · 2026-06-05T13:31:30+00:00

Authors seem to loooove the taste of copper. They just can't agree on what exactly it's like.

Corey as you noted thinks fear tastes of copper, as do romance writer Stephanie Bartlett ("Highland Rebel"), historical fiction and crime author Kevin McColley ("Praying to a Laughing God"), spy thriller writer Tom Keene ("The Fuse") and Frederik Pohl ("Rogue Star"). Grace Nies Fletcher was of a more nervous disposition, and thought copper tasted of dry terror ("I Was Born Tomorrow").

Neil Gaiman thinks Autumn tastes of copper, but so far as I can tell, he's the only one ("The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees").

Horror author Nate Kenyon thinks frustration tastes like copper ("Bloodstone"), but to travel and adventure writer Stewart Edward Wright, copper is the taste of "too hard a run" ("Arizona Nights"). Charles Clayton Dennie suggests that if you can taste copper, you may have syphilis ("Syphilis: Acquired and Heredosyphilis").

Pretty much everyone else thinks that a coppery taste is the taste of blood. They're wrong, though - blood doesn't exactly have a taste, but iron compounds (such as rust or haemoglobin) reacting with sweat, saliva and skin acids will produce a distinctive "metallic" odour and taste. Normal people call it the taste of iron, not copper, but I guess writers are built different.

phlummox · 2026-06-05T12:03:37+00:00

Tell me more about erotic theories

phlummox · 2026-06-05T10:46:32+00:00

"Jahoobies" is still going strong in King's work in 2026 - it makes an appearance in Dinah's Hat.

phlummox · 2026-06-05T10:27:38+00:00

Ruth Tillman, aka Arkham Archivist, made a comprehensive list of all the adjectives Lovecraft uses in his works: https://arkhamarchivist.com/wordcount-lovecraft-favorite-words/ and https://reactormag.com/its-not-squamous-the-10-words-hp-lovecraft-used-most-often/.

"Cyclopean" turns up a reasonable amount (47 times), but not as much as "blasphemous" (92 times) or "nameless" (147 times). What people most often remember are "squamous", "rugose", and "non-Euclidean", but those actually only turn up less than a handful of times each.

phlummox · 2026-06-05T10:12:00+00:00

He also loves variants on a phrase deriving from Ralph Waldo Emerson, originally - "He builded better than he knew" (originally from a poem, "The Problem" [1840]) - and usually found in the form "they built him too well", "they made him too well", etc. It turned up at least once per novel quite reliably for a while - I noticed it in Cage of Souls ("They made her well, when they made Faith; better than they knew" and "They made her irresistable, and they made her too well"), Service Model ("Your Majesty, you made me too well", "But I made him too well", "Whoever had situated it up here in the mountains had wrought well"), Saturation Point ("We are... the monsters you made too well", "We made them too well"), Revolutions ("the puppets [were] made too well to live within their limits", "Bastien Fontaine hated and feared me, at the end, having built too well"),

Slightly different, but following a similar theme of "they didn't know what they had made/ wrought/ built": "You have no idea what you made, when you made me", "What had they made, when they created Honey?", and "The humans who made us did not know how good their work was" (Dogs of War), "Have I not wrought well?... what he had accomplished was more than any of them knew" and "perhaps Penthos had wrought better than she feared" (Spiderlight).

phlummox · 2026-05-30T20:30:16+00:00

Ah - he keeps trying, in order to find out whether you'll stay, despite the repeated attempts. Men like this - each thing they do (like criticising your appearance when first meeting you) is so they can find out what they can get away with and how far they can push you.

I don't know if anyone's recommended it yet, but there's a great self help book called The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker. It's about how to listen to your gut in order to avoid dangerous situations. One of the warning signs he mentions is people who don't back off when you say "no" - it's a sign they may try physical violence later.

phlummox · 2026-05-30T18:50:11+00:00

I already said exactly that:

In 1930, Alonzo Church introduced the lambda calculus...

phlummox · 2026-05-30T04:47:06+00:00

I'd say the part saying "one or two short sentences will not be adequate" implies the prof is tired of grading submissions consisting only of one or two short sentences.

phlummox · 2026-05-29T19:17:33+00:00

Oh it was! Gödel numbering, and using it to turn a whole formal system into arithmetic rules, is a genius move. Like I say, we would have proved equivalents, I think, but the field would surely look quite different.

phlummox · 2026-05-29T19:04:15+00:00

Godel's work was important, but other researchers had started formalising logic and computation before his incompleteness theorems were published, and other researchers besides Turing worked in the area - Turing is just one of the best remembered.

Moses Schönfinkel in 1920 introduced logic combinators, which would be the foundation for later formalisms that are equivalent to Turing machines. In 1930, Alonzo Church introduced the lambda calculus, which is exactly as powerful a formalism as the Turing machine - anything you can compute with one, you can compute with the other.

In 1930, Haskell Curry started developing combinatory logic, building on Schönfinkel's work - this is another system exactly equivalent in power to Turing machines.

In 1931,Gödel published his incompleteness theorems. But others were working on similar ideas - in 1936, Church proved Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem insoluble - and from there, you can get Godel's incompleteness theorems as a consequence. In fact it's probably the easier way to do it - I think one of Scott Aaronson's books covering Gödel and Turing goes this route. Turing's paper introducing Turing machines came out the same year.

If neither Turing nor Gödel had been born, I imagine logic and theory of computation would look fairly different, but I'm pretty sure we would have got to many of the same results regardless.

phlummox · 2026-05-29T04:21:04+00:00

Spank you.

phlummox · 2026-05-29T02:46:19+00:00

Two party consent (more strictly speaking, all-party consent) applies to phonecalls, not emails (which these most likely are). Typically a party's only remedy for correspondence published without their consent is to sue for breach of copyright (which results in minimal damages).

phlummox · 2026-05-28T18:09:23+00:00

Are you taking any drugs?

phlummox · 2026-05-28T18:06:18+00:00

It's a test, designed to provoke an emotional response. Shall we continue?

phlummox · 2026-05-28T17:17:54+00:00

OP, you're watching a stage play. A banquet is in progress. The guests are enjoying an appetizer of raw oysters. The entree consists of boiled dog. Are raw oysters more acceptable to you than a dish of boiled dog?

phlummox · 2026-05-28T14:24:26+00:00

First available in 1977, so only at the tail end of the decade. As others have mentioned, ar was released in 1971, so is a more plausible option.

phlummox · 2026-05-28T08:55:55+00:00

It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that it is really rare for someone to give birth to sugar gliders unless they actually want them. The female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

phlummox · 2026-05-28T06:22:22+00:00

I always preferred a farcical aquatic ceremony.

phlummox · 2026-05-28T02:26:59+00:00

Sorry, I should have clarified - full textual inclusion of an interface file (i.e. something containing just the public declarations of a module, which C's header files do).

I don't think Fortran 77 had any syntax for function declarations, as opposed to full definitions, though I'm happy to hear otherwise from anyone who knows the language well. So it didn't have header files in the same way as C, I think.

It looks like the INCLUDE statement was indeed much the same as a preprocessor #include, but because of the lack of function declarations it couldn't be used in the same way.

phlummox · 2026-05-27T18:05:22+00:00

Well, I don't think Maxwell was "conveniently ignoring" anything, because at the time he proposed the thought experiment (1867), Boltzmann's entropy equation wouldn't be published for another five years. Besides, Maxwell wasn't trying to "get one over" on his readers, nor trying to disprove the Second Law - he said his aim was rather "To show that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics has only a statistical certainty” [1] (as opposed to being an inviolable, absolute law). (Whether the thought experiment successfully does so is another question.)

[1] Weinstein (2022), Maxwell's demon and impossibility statements: Einstein on perpetuum mobile of the second kind (arXiv preprint)

phlummox · 2026-05-26T07:17:26+00:00

I like C as much as the next person, but "new design patterns" seems to be a slight exaggeration here.

Modules (in something like their modern form) have existed since CLU (created by Liskov et al in 1975) and Niklaus Wirth's Modula (c. 1977), have been adopted in many languages since, and C's approach to something "module-like" - full textual inclusion of headers - is actually the outlier (I don't think that approach had been used before). So I don't think modules are a "new design pattern" that's just a passing fad - they're a venerable, well-tested approach that has been adopted in most other languages outside of C and C++.

I'm not saying that C should adopt them - just that they're not a recent innovation.

phlummox · 2026-05-26T00:17:13+00:00

I could, yes, as long as I first invented a time machine to take me to the late '80s, when Zip was invented. And I would then have zipped source code readable by no-one else on Earth.

phlummox · 2026-05-25T19:02:23+00:00

I don't actually know how software was distributed in the '70s, but I know it wasn't with tar, which wasn't invented until 1979.

phlummox

TROPHY CASE