6297 - Thursday trees

I'm finding trees again. And I'm glad these don't have to be in any order. They are in the "let's put this one here" blogger order.

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The roots of a fallen tree.

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6296 - Long joke Sunday

How to Contact Tech Support:

01. When you call us to have your computer moved, be sure to leave it buried under half a ton of postcards, baby pictures, stuffed animals, dried flowers, bowling trophies, and children’s art. We don’t have a life, and we find it deeply moving to catch a fleeting glimpse of yours.

02. Don’t write anything down. Ever. We can play back the error messages from here.

03. When an I.T. person says he’s coming right over, go for coffee. That way you won’t be there when we need your password. It’s nothing for us to remember 700 screen-saver passwords.

04. When you call the help desk, state what you want, not what’s keeping you from getting it. We don’t need to know that you can’t get into your mail because your computer won’t power on at all.

05. When I.T. support sends you an E-Mail with high importance, delete it at once. We’re just testing.

06. When an I.T. person is eating lunch at his desk, walk right in and spill your guts right out. We exist only to serve.

07. Send urgent emails all in uppercase. The mail server picks it up and flags it as a rush delivery.

08. When the photocopier doesn’t work, call computer support. There’s electronics in it.

09. When something’s wrong with your home PC, dump it on an I.T. person’s chair with no name, no phone number, and no description of the problem. We love a puzzle.

10. When an I.T. person tells you that computer screens don’t have cartridges in them, argue. We love a good argument.

11. When an I.T. person tells you that he’ll be there shortly, reply in a scathing tone of voice: “And just how many weeks do you mean by shortly?” That motivates us.

12. When the printer won’t print, re-send the job at least 20 times. Print jobs frequently get sucked into black holes.

13. When the printer still won’t print after 20 tries, send the job to all 68 printers in the company. One of them is bound to work.

14. Don’t learn the proper term for anything technical. We know exactly what you mean by “My thingy blew up”.

15. Don’t use online help. Online help is for wimps.

6295 - Saturday jokes

That feeling you get when you're the tech person in the family and you hear that grandma got a new phone.

If you need the threat of hell to be a good person, then you're just a bad person on a leash.

I know it's hard for some people to believe, but it's entirely possible to have a fulfilling, rewarding life without owning an AR-15.

Technically speaking there is a lot of food in this house.

However, none of it is sweet and none of it is microwaveable.

Therefore, there is no food in this house.

The movie "Reagan" bombed at the box office. But I'm sure the billions paid by moviegoers to watch better movies will trickle down to the "Reagan" box office.

About to pull some steaks off the grill. It’s my neighbor’s grill, but he went inside and I don’t think he can see me.

If there's watermelon, shouldn't there be earthmelon, firemelon, and airmelon? The elemelons.

The leading cause of injury in old men is them thinking they are still young men.

Certain beers give me a terrible hangover. I've narrowed it down and I think it's the 18th one.

Amazon is just a secret plot by cats to get more cardboard boxes.

I have some competition racing geese for sale if anyone wants to take a gander.

Walmart thinks I want to put up my Christmas tree and eat turkey while wearing my Halloween costume.

Counting to ten only makes it premeditated.

If you're in hell and get mad at someone, where would you tell them to go?

Boss: Your performance has dropped recently.

Worker: I know. It finally matches my salary.

The last time I danced like nobody was watching, someone stabbed me with an EpiPen.

Running feels great unless you compare it to not running.

The debate? Normally men have to pay to be dominated like that.

He wears high heels, orange makeup, a girdle, and refers to his hair as strawberry blonde. All we have to do is get him to read a book to children and he’d be kicked out of Florida.

The reason fact-checkers “only went after him” is ‘cuz you only have to fact-check lies.

Them: She had special earrings that made her win.

Us: How would her earrings make him say incredibly stupid shit?

Her ability to stop herself from saying "this motherfucker" on national television requires the kind of willpower most of us could never dream of.

I want a shirt that has a QR code on it for some kind of horrible malware so that if anyone tries to film me in public their phone will scan the code and be reduced to a functionless brick.

Me: The doctor said I should touch myself whenever I feel like it.

Not me: No. He said you could have a stroke at any time.

I set a new culinary milestone today.

I set off the neighbor's smoke alarm.

Most people don't know that the opposite of a Croissant is actually a happy uncle.

I'm still amazed at how many people can confuse the term '...doing their research' with the action '...conclusion-shopping their insane hypothesis'.

If you carve a pumpkin in September, it's called premature ejaclolantern.

6294 - Thursday trees

I went for color today.

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6293 - Cravings

Summary: Researchers have developed a dynamic method to track rapid brain activity changes, especially related to craving. Unlike traditional neuroimaging, which captures only a snapshot of brain activity, this approach provides a real-time view of how craving fluctuates.

The study found that people who experience strong cravings spend more time in brain states that amplify craving while failing to engage brain networks that reduce craving. These findings could improve understanding of neurological disorders like addiction and highlight the importance of brain network engagement over time.

Key Facts:

Individuals with strong cravings stayed longer in brain networks tied to craving.

A lack of engagement in brain regions linked to reduced craving was observed.

The study reveals rapid changes in brain activity, helping to understand disorders like addiction.

Source: Yale

Communication between regions of the brain is constantly in flux, but the neuroimaging technologies used to analyze these interactions typically provide only a snapshot representing several minutes’ worth of changes in brain activity, obscuring moment-to-moment changes.

Using a more dynamic approach, Yale researchers were able to observe rapid changes in brain activity — particularly related to the experience of craving.

The reduced engagement of the negative craving network may be particularly important, researchers say. Credit: Neuroscience News

This more nuanced view, researchers say, provides a better understanding of how brain activity shifts over time and how it might go awry in neurological disorders.

The findings were recently published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

Previous research has shown that activity between brain regions can, among other insights, predict the intensity of a person’s “craving,” or their strong desire for something such as food or alcohol.

“But on top of identifying what brain regions are involved in craving, I think how people engage these networks of brain regions over time also has implications,” said Jean Ye, lead author of the study and a Ph.D. student at Yale School of Medicine (YSM). “In this study, we wanted to investigate whether people who experience stronger craving engage and stay in certain brain networks more than people with less craving.”

Ye works in the labs of Elizabeth Goldfarb, an assistant professor of psychiatry, and Dustin Scheinost, an associate professor of radiology and biomedical imaging, both of YSM and co-senior authors of the study.

For the study, 425 participants — including healthy individuals and people with alcohol use disorder, cocaine use disorder, prenatal cocaine exposure, or obesity — underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while either viewing neutral images (such as landscapes) or descriptions of relaxing situations (sitting in a park or reading a book, for example).

During these periods, participants were also asked to rate their level of craving for alcohol, cocaine, or food on a scale that ranged from no craving at all to very strong craving.

Then, to evaluate brain activity related to craving specifically, the researchers combined two methods. First, they used a portion of the fMRI images — as well as the participants’ craving scores - to train a machine learning model that identified brain activity networks related to craving.

The model found two networks: one in which stronger connectivity between brain regions predicted stronger craving (positive craving network) and another in which stronger connectivity predicted weaker craving (negative craving network).

Then, the researchers applied a technique to detect rapid changes in activity between pairs of brain regions.

“We saw that people who experienced stronger cravings spent more time in the network state that is more positively associated with craving. They seemed to show ‘sticky,’ persistent engagement of this positive network state,” said Ye. “At the same time, they were not dwelling in or engaging as much in the negative craving network state.”

The reduced engagement of the negative craving network may be particularly important, researchers say. That network included brain regions involved in sensory processing and initiation of movement.

In previous studies, crosstalk between those regions has been found to be associated with decreased impulsivity and reduced cocaine use. Recruiting the negative craving network, therefore, may lead to more self-regulation and inhibition of habit-based behaviors linked to substance use.

The combination of getting “stuck” in brain activity linked to strong craving and the inability to tap into the activity linked to a weaker sense of craving suggests an imbalance between cognitive stability and flexibility, said Ye. And that might indicate impaired cognitive control, which is closely linked to substance use.

Another takeaway, said Ye, is that how one engages these types of networks over time plays a key role in experience and behavior. This is likely true for other states such as stress, which the researchers are looking into now, or rumination, a dwelling on negative thoughts or feelings.

“For instance, we’d like to know whether people at risk for or diagnosed with depression engage in rumination brain networks more and stay engaged for longer periods than those without depression,” said Ye.

“Those are the kinds of questions we can ask with this approach.”