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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Genie was locked up at 20 months old. I don’t think they locked her up because of her mental illness. They locked her up because of their mental illness. I reference Genie because she’s the most documented “wild child,” which is a completely disgusting term.

    I was going off old college memories - after looking it up, it sounds like her father thought she was mentally disabled and began/increased his neglect because of it, despite her only outward health issue being delayed walking due to a hip problem.

    Also re: “wild child”. I agree, and thanks for pointing it out. That’s what they were called in my books, but catchy rhyme aside it’s a horrible way to refer to a victim of such abuse. I’ll edit my original comment.

    Language is universal to all humans, even though it is multifaceted. Humans also have massive brains that require extra care to bring to fruition in comparison to other animals. Language is one of those things. You can learn other languages at any age, but you first need learn a language.

    It would be fascinating to know what inner thoughts look like without the construct of language to frame them in. Unfortunately there’s no ethical way to find out, short of uplifting a non-sapient species and asking them.


  • There was an old study showing that London taxi drivers develop enlarged hippocampi, the part of the brain used for navigation, to deal with the labyrinthian London streets. The growth continued over several years even in mature adults as they used those navigation and memorization abilities. I’d like to see a study of the brain of an adult prospective language learner over a long period to see if any similar plasticity exists for the brain’s language centers.

    (I’ll admit I’m horribly biased. I was exceptional at picking up new languages as a teen, but let that knowledge decay into nothingness as an adult. I’d hate to have wasted such a useful talent.)


  • Given the success of foreign exchange students, I’m willing to bet the age factor is much less important than people claim.

    People bring up the abused or abandoned children that had trouble learning to speak when introduced to society later in life, but usually fail to mention the reason they were neglected/abandoned as children was due to mental disabilities, so they aren’t really a viable data point.





  • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlFavourite sandwich?
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    15 days ago

    The best sandwich I ever had was a panini I randomly threw together for a snack at three in the morning. The next day I went to make it again since it was so delicious, but realized I’d forgotten some of the ingredients I used. I was in the middle of a sandwich-making phase at the time so I had like a dozen types of bread, meat, and cheese to pick from.

    This was a decade ago and I’ve never been able to recreate that perfect sandwich despite several attempts. It’s my culinary white whale. The only ingredients I am sure of are the spread (light mayo in one side, applewood-smoked bacon mustard on the other) and the meat (honey-smoked turkey), and that it was only a simple meat-and-cheese. The bread and cheese continue to elude me.









  • We could also have “karma” on Lemmy, but while technically tracked the environment is better off without it being public in my opinion. I view voting records similarly.

    It’s strange that they removed total account karma visibility a while back but are now thinking about making votes public.

    I think a good compromise (since Lemmy already tracks that data) would have been to show the upvote/downvote ratio a user receives on their profile page, without showing their total karma. That’d help you spot toxic users without incentivising karma whoring.

    Similarly, a display of how often a user upvotes versus downvotes others would help spot bots and trolls without completely obliterating privacy like their suggestion would.

    (But ultimately none of this solves the problem of privacy on the Fediverse being one federated bad actor away from nonexistence)