Not exactly “misheard”, but the lyrics to the Minecraft parody of “Dynamite” stuck more strongly in my head than the original.

You can’t turn pure heat into useful energy. Thermoelectric generators tap into the transfer of heat between a hot reservoir and a cold reservoir.

Literally everything you mentioned has at least had its ban discussed, and most of those have been banned or at least restricted in some part of the world.

I think a 1% chance of permanent health effects manifesting years later is already plenty to get something banned.

DDG works 90% of the time but it does perform worse than Google sometimes

I should try it on anime. I was using it on phone videos.

A “case study” is more formal than an anecdote, but still has the same issues.

Here’s a quote from the end of the “Limitations” section of the Wikipedia article on “Case Study”:

As small-N research should not rely on random sampling, scholars must be careful in avoiding selection bias when picking suitable cases. A common criticism of qualitative scholarship is that cases are chosen because they are consistent with the scholar’s preconceived notions, resulting in biased research.

Another quote from earlier in that section:

The authors’ recommendation is to increase the number of observations … because few observations make it harder to estimate multiple causal effects, as well as increase the risk that there is measurement error, and that an event in a single case was caused by random error or unobservable factors.

The “Uses” section of that article starts with:

Case studies have commonly been seen as a fruitful way to come up with hypotheses and generate theories. Case studies are useful for understanding outliers or deviant cases.

Lower down that section has:

Case studies of cases that defy existing theoretical expectations may contribute knowledge by delineating why the cases violate theoretical predictions and specifying the scope conditions of the theory.

Case studies are used to guide experimental and quantitative research, but are not a replacement for that part of the research process.

Applying that to case studies that appear to involve the supernatural, sufficient convincing case studies should lead to theories about the conditions for supernatural events, which should lead to experiments or quantitative studies to test those theories.

I ran a comparison between libsvtav1 and h264 and h265 and found that libsvtav kinda sucks.

It does produce smaller file sizes at h265, but it tends to add a visible blur.

Compress video to a broadly compatible format:

ffmpeg -i input -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -crf 25 -preset slow -c:a libfdk_aac -b:a 128k output.mp4

This incantation is what I end up needing 99% of the time I do something with ffmpeg.

I don’t think any one anecdote or even a collection of anecdotes would convince me because of the explanations I layed out.

I can think of an experiment, which would be something like to hide a box with a computer that displays one of 3 colors, selected randomly and recorded by the computer so nobody can know what color was displayed until inspecting the computer later. Ask people if they had an out-of-body experience, and if they noticed the box and looked inside. Ask people who answered affirmatively to that what color was in the box, and do a statistical analysis of the results.

Even if you aren’t going to do a controlled experiment, you have to make sure your interviews of patients include every patient who had a near death experience over the course of your study.

Reviews of anecdotes that were only recorded because they are interesting is not a productive way to answer this question.

I’m not saying “rare data in general is not valuable”.

Not observing hawking radiation in a situation where no theory predicts hawking radiation is neither evidence for nor against the existence of hawking radiation. That would be like taking the lack of NDE in completely healthy people as evidence against NDEs.

I’ll try to state my problem with cherry picking anecdotes about NDE more succinctly.

My hypothesis: These NDE stories are the experience of wacky brain activity arising from near death situations.

Supposed evidence against that hypothesis: Some of these stories involve people knowing stuff they shouldn’t have been able to know.

My hypothesis to explain that “supernatural” knowledge:

1. Sometimes people notice things subconsciously, and sometimes other people could have been tipped off about information in ways other people don’t realize.
2. Sometimes people guess things correctly

The problem with relying on anecdotes is:

1. Memory is fallible and people’s accounts of events are often affected by discussion after the fact as well as what they “want” to think about the event
2. This is the confirmation bias part. If you only record correct guesses, it doesn’t seem like they are guessing.

Let’s there’s a tik tok trend and 1000 people ask someone to guess the result of 10 coin flips. One of them gets them all correct! Wow that’s amazing that person must have supernatural powers! (Nope it’s just statistics).

That’s a number I threw out there to estimate how many near death experiences might have happened, studied or not, and that’s why it’s such a problem to only focus on the anecdotal cases that get recorded because they are interesting.

A proper study doesn’t need to include 1,000,000 cases, but it does need to ensure that it doesn’t have bias in the cases it does include.

Confirmation bias is when the outcome could be adequately explained by luck.

In the topic of near death experiences, if there are 1,000,000 near death experiences and 100 involve someone “knowing something they shouldn’t be able to”, those 100 cases are more likely to be remembered or recorded as significant than the other 900,000 cases. This can lead to an apparent statistical significance in correctly knowing “unknowable” information, when really it’s just people “guessing” correctly.

The “black swan” scenario is a bit different but it would be something like if you are more likely to record a swan sighting if the swan is black, you will significantly overestimate the frequency of black swans.

Im not saying the cases of apparent supernatural effects should be ignored, I’m saying they need to be taken in the context of all similar events, including the mundane, to understand if there even is an effect (knowing something that shouldn’t be possible) or if it’s just a handful of lucky guesses.

Near death experiences are a tricky thing to study. There are physiological explanations for much of it, such as weird brain activity is likely to be interpreted as a weird experience.

These people would have no way of having knowing this stuff unless they’ve seen it for themselves, which would have been physically impossible.

The problem of this argument is confirmation bias. An anecdote of seeing information you couldn’t have seen and being right is going to be more memorable than seeing information and being wrong.

when you have several hundred of them compiled back-to-back-to-back it becomes harder and harder to find the willpower required to muster up a skeptical response

The scientific method involves looking at both the cases where it seems like something happened and the cases where nothing happened (e.g. someone said they had an experience but it clearly didn’t match reality). If you cherry pick just the events that “showed” what you want, that’s confirmation bias.

I did some googling of my own and found some studies on the topic from seemingly reputable sources that suggested physiological explanations might not be sufficient to explain the patterns they saw. Several of these had the same first author. I also found plenty of studies suggesting physiological explanations can be sufficient, as well as some specific criticisms of the couple studies that suggested they weren’t sufficient.

It’s interesting for sure that there is a doctor or two who seem to believe in the supernatural. The topic of near death experience seems to be of research interest regardless of any supernatural theories because of what it tells us about the brain.

It seems we will likely arrive at scientific consensus about near death experience in the future. I wouldn’t hold my breath that supernatural theories will survive that process.

events that transpired when they had no brain activity.

I think I saw the case this was talking about during my googling. It said “brain activity was not expected” which is not the same as “there was no brain activity”.

That’s the problem with a book like the one you are describing. It’s deliberately cherry picked, exaggerated, and biased to drive you to a certain conclusion.

I instead urge you to go read scientific papers on the topic, and specifically not just the ones that seem to suggest the outcome you want to hear.

Here’s a place to start.

My locally hosted Qwen3 30b said “Walk” including this awesome line:

Why you might hesitate (and why it’s wrong):

• X “But it’s a car wash!” -> No, the car doesn’t need to drive there—you do.

Note that I just asked the Ollama app, I didn’t alter or remove the default system prompt nor did I force it to answer in a specific format like in the article.

EDIT: after playing with it a bit more, qwen3:30b sometimes gives the correct answer for the correct reasoning, but it’s pretty rare and nothing I’ve tried has made it more consistent.

The problem in this story wasn’t actually the US this time, it was the Swiss insurance company.

It’s also not as stable as they market it to be

It’s worth noting that most commercial multimedia software is also more or less a wrapper around ffmpeg