9ft of snow?! I only experienced such deep snow in an urban setting while living in Connecticut for a year. I spent a few years in Oregon but the snow in the area never got so deep while I was there. When I was in the US I was not yet able to identify many fungi as I was mainly obsessed with animals (especially salamanders) back then, so unfortunately I did not really appreciate the diversity of fungi there. Although once in Oregon I did attempt to dye some socks using a wolf lichen (Letharia vulpina) and a pressure cooker. That did not end well.

I see. So it is not necessarily that their mycelium are better at surviving the freezing temperatures, but rather that either they fruit quicker once conditions are acceptable or that their fruiting bodies are more cold tolerant. Thanks, it’s interesting.

Cool! I just read their wiki page and it says

A snowbank fungus, it is most common at higher elevations after snowmelt in the spring.

Snowbank fungus is a new term for me. Not sure yet what makes a fungus thrive through snow. Maybe they have anti-freeze proteins?

Does your area get a lot of snow?

Alright! Some other tips:

• Your current microscope is a 160 mm system, so make sure that the objectives are 160 mm and not infinity.
• Make sure the objectives have an RMS thread
• Once you move into higher-end objectives, you will have objectives that are specialized. For example, ‘phase contrast’ objectives have a dark ring inside of them. For the olympus brand their name often ends in ‘PL’. These work with bright-field too. My 40/1.30 objective is actually a phase-contrast objective because I did not know this and ChatGPT told me it meant something different 😂 However, the objective does work well for me and I am now considering upgrading to a phase contrast-capable microscope (the BH2), so I made a good choice by accident.

I first purchased some Plan objectives from China (40x, 60x), and they are alright. More recently I have been looking into objectives with high numerical apertures to increase the resolution of my images, and I think that the best source of good high-quality used objectives is Ebay. The Olympus apochromatic objectives with high NA are listed for a fraction of their original price, but they are still in the $200 - $500 range, so not very cheap.

Wow, those spores are so bumpy, they are very interesting! Thanks for sharing :D

Hello ✌️ 😄

Great find, congratulations!!

I bought a National Instrument’s data acquisition card (PCIe-6535B) not knowing that National Instruments is not very Linux-friendly and I was not able to get it working. At least it was a used card so I did not pay to much for it, but I learned my lesson not to assume compatibility.

Once I also used ‘rm -rvf *’ from my home directory while SSH’d into a supercomputer (I made a syntax error when trying to cd into the folder that I actually wanted to delete). I was able to get my data restored from a backup, but sending that e-mail was a bit embarrassing 😆

Those remind me a bit of when we were putting colors and other stuff into dia frames and then projecting.

Possibly similar type of dynamics going on! I never tried this.

Thank you for your work!

I used 99%. 70% will probably work too. I can test later and let you know.

I continued playing with this concept. Turmeric resin extracted with isopropanol, and now I blended some beets with water and passed the blended liquid through a coffee filter to obtain the purple betains in water. Deposited as layers one on top of the other. Once dried, I added a drop of oil, and then one drop of soap. No baking soda this time.

It is quite fun to see these under the microscope. It looks like a living landscape, with mountains walking across and interacting with each other as turbulent particles whiz inside of them erratically.

Correct!

Happy you find it useful! I added the images that went into the stack for reference just now.

Here, I’m assuming “it” is a conscious perception. But now I’m confused again because I don’t think any theory of mind would deny this.

Yes, the example of such a theory that is common is epiphenomalism. What I am contrasting in my answers is the epiphenomalist/hard-determinist framework with the physicalist/compatibilist one.

stimuli -> CPM ⊆ brain -> consciousness update CPM -?> black box -?> mind -?> brain -> nervous system -> response to stimuli

I can try to explain with such a diagram:

stimuli -> nerves -> brain input ports -> brain filtering and distribution -> Conscious brain processing via causal predictive modelling -> brain output ports -> nerves -> conscious action
                                                                                          |
                                                                                          -- > Unconscious processing -> brain output ports -> nerves -> unconscious action

So, the CPM is a process within the brain. The idea is that the brain is a computer that makes predictions by building cause-and-effect models. What is interesting about the mathematics of causal models is that the underlying engine is the counterfactual. The claim being made here is that mind itself is this counterfactual engine doing its work. The computational space that deals with the counterfactuals or “fantasies” is the essence of the mind.

This is not in any way a solution to the hard problem of consciousness. Rather, it is one of many frameworks compatible with physicalism, and it is the one I personally subscribe to. In this framework, it is a postulate that conscious experience corresponds to the brain’s counterfactual simulations within a generative model used for predicting and guiding action. This postulate does not prove or mechanistically explain consciousness. No physical theory currently does.

I’m going to stick with the meat of your point. To summarize, …

That is not quite how I see it. The linear diagram “brain -> black box -> mind” represents a common mode of thinking about the mind as a by-product of complex brain activity. Modern theories are a lot more integrative. Conscious perception is not just a byproduct of the form brain -> black box -> mind, but instead it is an essential active element in the thought process.

Ascribing predictions, fantasies, and hypotheses to the brain or calling it a statistical organ sidesteps the hard problem and collapses it into a physicalist view. They don’t posit a mind-body relationship, they speak about body and never acknowledge the mind. I find this frustrating.

That text was probably written by a materialist / physicalist, and this view is consistent within this framework. It is OK that you find this frustrating, and it is also alright if you don’t accept the materialist / physicalist viewpoint. I am not making an argument about materialism being the ultimate truth, or about materialism having all of the answers - especially not answers relating to the hard problem! I am specifically describing how different frameworks held by people who already hold a materialist view can lead to different ways of understanding free will.

Scientists often do sidestep the hard problem in the sense that they acknowledge it to be “hard” and keep moving without dwelling on it. There are many philosophers (David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Stuart R. Hameroff), that do like getting into the nitty-gritty about the hard problem, so there is plenty of material about it, but the general consensus is that the answers to the hard problem cannot be find using the materialist’s toolkit.

Materialists have is a mechanism for building consensus via the scientific method. This consensus mechanism has allowed us to understand a lot about the world. I share your frustration in that this class of methods does not seem to be capable of solving the hard problem.

We may never discover a mechanism to build consensus on the hard problem, and unfortunately this means that answers to many very important questions will remain subjective. As an example, if we eventually implement active inference into a computer, and the computer claims to be conscious, we may have no consensus mechanism to determine whether they “really” are conscious or not, just as we cannot ascertain today whether the people around us are conscious. In my opinion, yes, it is physically possible to build conscious systems, and at some point it will get tricky because it will remain a matter of opinion. It will be an extremely polarizing topic.

Oh, wow! I didn’t know about this microscopic difference between monocots and dicots. So cool!

that was a bit confusing at first (where is the crop factor!), i have never really messed with by-x lenses

Haha, I think I have a good idea of why… When thinking about general photography, common scenes involve many different types of objects of varying sizes and distances. In this context it makes sense to define the “field of view” of a lens in terms of the visual angle, and to think about differences between equipment in terms of a “reference” - that’s where the ‘crop factor’ comes in, when comparing to a 35 mm film as a standard to measure relative to. It is a bit silly to ask a question such as “how many cats can fit into the image that gets projected into the camera sensor?”

When one gets into macro photography things start changing. The distances between the camera and the subjects are defined more narrowly and the size of the subjects one tries to capture is closer in size to the camera sensor’s size. In macro-photography you hear about things like a “1:1” lens, meaning that the image of an object placed at a specific distance will be replicated 1:1 at the camera sensor’s position. It becomes then meaningful to think about the camera sensor size in absolute sense, because a sensor will capture a scene of its own size (for 1:1). You can still think in relative terms using the crop factor, but it is not as useful to make relative comparisons anymore because the absolute scale is already giving us information that we can work with directly.

For microscopy this trend continues - the distance to the subject is well-defined and we can think in absolute terms about the magnification of the image that gets projected into camera sensor.

Then i got sidetracked on how microscope rulers are being made.

I have not looked into this! I am not sure… I will look it up.

I reckon you have your setup calibrated.

I do have a ruler but I misplaced it and I have not used it in a while. So, not really, I wouldn’t say it is “calibrated”. I did take some photos of the ruler that I can use to get a good rough estimate if I can find them.

I would appreciate that!