But there's a delightful span between seeing someone post something on HN unrelated to AI, Cryptocurrencies or startups selling VS-Code extensions and the moment when I satisfy myself something outlandish (like space starfish) hasn't happened. During that time, all things are plausible.
[Edit. Which is not to say I disparage or discourage posting cool things you've found on the net. That's kind of what many of us are here for.]
It's happened to me several times where I doubt it could be simply recency bias coupled with chance of topics, due to the specificity and narrow directed-ness of the graph.
on one hand, i feel like this is a text-book example of the Bader-Meinhoff illusion [0].
but... there's an actual causal mechanism that could drive it.
show an interesting article to the HN crowd -> some subset of HN readers are inspired to go down a wikipedia rabbit hole and post some cool thing they found back on HN -> people that saw the original interesting post will not only see the related followup post, but they'll upvote it and cause even MORE to see it
A couple weeks ago there was one about leeches:
"You shouldn't salt a leech that's sucking your blood" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45001005
"How Leeches Made Their Comeback" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45045235
"Leeches and the Legitimacy of Folk-Medicine" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45009629
"This is my brain on leeches" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45037109
(HN feature request- community calendar)
Anyway if I do that, there must be others who do so too, and probably not just a few.
My impression is that this isn't exactly settled science. If you look in the history for the article you can see that it's mainly written by the lead author of the main citations. He also did the cute illustrations that everyone loves
Fun speculation: Maybe we started with no crossover (which gives avoidance behaviour, keeping the organism free-swimming). This still works for a while as the axial angle between eyes and muscle groups increases, so there's no real penalty for having a bit of a twist. As the twist increases, it starts acting a bit like a discriminator, where we avoid small things less than large things, which seems good if we want to eat small things. Past 90°, we start spiraling towards things instead of away from them, which admittedly makes us crash into large things more, but we can chase moving things. Hunting has evolved!
The spinal cord handles rapid reflexes (pulling away from a hot stove), leaving the brain for slower non-immediate tasks. By crossing nerves before they reach the brain a standardized delay is introduced, giving the brain a predictable offset to filter against. The optic chiasm follows the same logic.
And I think this is necessary to keep same-side brain-body pairs from over-optimizing (direct nerve connection from the right hand to the right brain hemisphere) their paths at the expense of balance, preserving biological symmetry.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/61/Fi...
Where there is uncertainty is about what has happened to the head.
According to the supposition presented in the linked article, most of the head has preserved the same orientation as in most other animals, either because it never took part in the rotation of the rest of the body, or because later it has made an additional half-turn rotation, which has brought it back to the initial orientation. Among these 2 alternatives, I think that the first is more plausible, because in that case the environment would have retained a constant orientation with respect to the principal senses, even if the posterior body rotated.
While this theory supposes that most of the head of the vertebrates has the original orientation, also all competing theories must accept that at least a few parts of the head either have never participated to the body rotation, or a subsequent rotation has brought them back in the original position, e.g. the mouth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contralateral_brain#Visual_map...
It just made me think, whether it's related or not, shouldn't the "natural" resting position of human heads be "upwards" like the rest of the animal world?
I mean if you consider the worm/fish template, it's
o--->
o--->
| |
o—--v