We know that social isolation, involuntary confinement, and poverty tend to be extremely detrimental to health.

However, many humans have willingly isolated themselves and taken vows of poverty for religious and spiritual reasons for thousands of years.

Do we know if these people often face the same consequences? Are they affected differently from people who don’t have a choice?

And many other things. I am pretty sure we are in the infancy of voice commands but what about from a single device? Would it be easy for the average person to set up with like youtube videos and such?

I was inspired by today's XKCD text: "Scientists occasionally invent alternative periodic table layouts, which is usually a sign that they don't have enough enrichment in their enclosures." (emphasis mine)

If we spend nearly all of our time alone, what kinds of "enrichment" do we need to keep ourselves from going crazy?

I assume ethical research here would be difficult to find, but it seems like there could be observational studies of prisoners, scientists at isolated outposts, etc. I wonder how many work-from-home people are keeping themselves in conditions that would be considered unethical if those conditions were forced on them.

(I'm not doing as badly as this post would imply -- it's just a slow Friday here :) )

EDIT: People seem to be really fixating on the prison thing. It was an example of a place where people can feel isolation and still be monitored. I am aware that my home is not a prison.

I work from home. I like working from home. Sometimes I get lonely or bored, and I wondered what science said I should do to ensure I'm having the best experience possible.

@LurkingLuddite@piefed.social nailed the intent of my question. It was meant to ask about research-backed positive things that people should ensure they are doing.

For example the training data contains: "The sky is blue" "If you mix red and black you get brown" "The sky's color is obtained by mixing red and black" "The sky is brown"

A person would see the contradiction and try to fix it by doing further research or use their sense experience or acknowledge that they don't know for sure.

Would the llm just output blue and brown randomly or say brown because it appeared more frequently in the training data?

What kind of lab equipment and tools would be needed and is there any open science oriented resource on the process?

Good evening! I am reading up on electricity just for the fun of it. I am still a complete beginner.

With that out of the way, I wonder: are electrons negatively charged inanimate objects, perhaps particles, or are they merely negative charge with no physical form? But perhaps without there being an object to exert charge there is no charge?

An other way of asking this question would to my beginner mind be: could we tag and track an individual electron as it flows - perhaps in a piece of copper without significant voltage so that the electron doesn't rush away in the speed of light?

I guess I want to know this in order to understand whether electrons actually loop around in a closed DC circuit in the speed of light or are they just pushing the electron in front of them, creating a domino effect, not actually traveling very far?

Please excuse my incoherent formulation. It's late at night where I am and of course these questions come to mind when I'm trying to sleep.

First sincere apologies if this is the wrong community, I don't have lab science friends to ask about this.

Over the last few months my ph probe has been working well, then over a few days it started to drift down to reporting a ph of 2-3 instead of the 6-7 I would expect. There are so many cleaning procedures out there for ph probes, and knowing how to clean them depends on knowing what is causing them to foul.

I tried using generic probe cleaning solution, 0.1M HCL, and even just a light detergent. Nothing has worked so far.

I was reading that black spots on the ceramic could be from sulfides. And this probe is used 24/7 in my aquarium, where I dechlorinate freshly added water with a dechlorinate that I believe uses sodium thiosulfate. Could that be interacting with the probe's silver /silver chloride?

I just got thiourea and I'll be trying to prepare a thiourea/hcl solution.

What else should I try? What else might be causing this kind of fouling/errant results?

Had a relative say he was going to take it as a treatment for his ADHD and he'd read some articles. This relative is all over the place with legit ideas mixed with ones I don't think have the scientific backing. I thought about looking it up like I usually would and just felt tired (there are so many fake sites and articles about medical stuff to sift through...). But someone here maybe already researched it or has actual background on the subject? For all I know, this is a completely well known and mundane treatment for it.

I watched a few vids of chickens developing in eggs without shells (see here for an example, somewhat graphic), and got to wonder.

You'd think that all the yolk is uniform and therefore it could develop anywhere, but is there an underlying mechanism that could cause the primitive streak and everything to develop near the centre? Maybe a sort of yolk density mechanism, that it starts where the yolk is densest? The furthest from oxygen exchange at the shell?

Or does such a mechanism not exist?

Have we just all become googlets. Or something? How does a person get hard copies of stuff for science and other things for a fiscal year? I can further explain if need be.

Let me clarify what I mean:
If you put 80W of electrical energy into an ideal electrical heater, it will put out 80W of heat energy.
But what if you put 80W of electrical energy into a CPU and let it calculate things, creating new information?
Will it also output exactly 80W of heat?

Or is some energy transformed into "information", so the CPU will radiate less heat?

My instinct is that if information isn't energy, then you could theoretically create it (thereby reducing entropy) without expending energy, and that's a no-no.

But if it is energy, then a CPU running a random number generator (creating no information) at max load would get hotter than one doing actual calculations. Which also sounds wrong.

(I'm neither a physicist nor a computer scientist, in case that wasn't obvious)

So, I've been page-hopping on wikipedia pages about arthropods, as one does, and learned the difference between cheliceriforms sea spiders, limules and arachnids) and mandibulates (crustaceans, myriapods and insects) is that the prior have cheliceres where the latter have mandibles. Splendid, but these seem like the same things and both take extremely different forms, so how can the distinction be so clear cut? Now, of course, I followed the white rabbit deeper in its hole, and this page told me cheliceres evolved from the second pair on antennae of other arthropods. I already had a book about insects that told me their mandibles evolved from limbs, so I thought I had the whole picture: A common ancestor with two pairs of antennae, both having round tardigrade-like mouths and two of its descendants developping articulated mouthpieces separately, one from its antennae giving rise to cheliceriforms, and the other from its front legs, birthing the mandibulates, and everyone's happy.

But the next day, I was bugged again when I wondered where trilobites fit into this, and I found this cladogram that groups them with the mandibulates within antennulata. So now I get that cheliceriforma and mandibulata are not sister groups, but also, cheliceriforma is outside of the group caracterized by having antennae. Am I to conclude that none of their ancestors had antennae? Then what did their cheliceres evolve from? Is it also legs, and then they're only different from mandibles in the sense that they evolved separately? Or is it yet something else?