He experienced a visual disturbance in his periphery manifesting as the false perception of a person

Which can’t be explained by an unfocused eye. They do a lot of speculating to come up with a reason why he could possibly see something out of the corner of his eye. But, that’s only the physical part of it. It doesn’t explain why he might think that whatever he was seeing was “a figure” and moved like a person.

That’s like saying that ghosts can be explained by wearing glasses with dirty lenses, then going into detail about how dirty lenses can cause someone to see something that isn’t there, while ignoring the elephant ghost in the room. Except it’s even worse because a smudge on your glasses causing you to “see something that isn’t there” is really easy to test and barely needs an experiment to confirm it’s true. But, low frequency waves causing someone to see something that isn’t there isn’t something that has been tested. It’s pure speculation.

So, pure speculation that low frequency waves can cause someone’s eyes to blur in such a way that the corner of their glasses is mistaken as something that isn’t there. No proof that has happened or can happen, just speculation.

Then ignoring the elephant in the room that just because someone might not see clearly if their eye is vibrating, that is somehow magically interpreted as a figure moving like a person, which they interpret as a ghost.

There’s a humongous jump there from “a certain frequency might cause the eyes to wiggle” to “and therefore that’s why he saw a ghost”.

Ok, that’s a paper that attempts to explain the feeling that a building might be haunted. There’s nothing in there about causing people to hallucinate. They talk about the supposed “resonant frequency of the eye”, but then they say:

The resonant frequency is the natural frequency of an object, the one at which it needs the minimum input of energy to vibrate. As you can see from above, any frequency above 8 Hz will have an effect and some sources quote 40Hz

If the values are that vague, then there is no resonant frequency. There may be frequencies that transmit vibrations to the eye, but with a big enough speaker you can cause anything to vibrate.

The closest the get to hallucinations is to say that "the eyeball would be vibrating which would cause a serious “smearing"of vision. It would not seem unreasonable to see dark shadowy forms caused by something as innocent as the corner of V.T.’s spectacles.” So, no hallucinations, just some blurry vision that might vaguely count as an excuse for seeing a ghost if your eye is vibrating significantly. Notice that that’s all just speculation, saying “this seems like it could be possible” rather than actually testing for that hypothesis.

It’s pretty clear it’s a BS condition. Jimmy even tests him. It doesn’t mean that Chuck is lying, it’s also pretty clear from the show that it’s some kind of Nocebo Effect. He doesn’t want to believe he’s a bad person, so his body effectively comes up with this “solution” to the problem.

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI), a non-profit organization, said that high- and low-frequency sounds emitted by these industrial sites can be heard and felt for hundreds of feet in surrounding areas, with noise levels reaching as high as 96dB for 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

It says “these industrial sites” so it’s making a generalization, it says “as high as” so that’s presumably the maximum they measured at one of those many sites. They also talk about high and low frequency sound, so it may not be the infrasound that is “loud” but the high frequency sound, which doesn’t as easily travel through the ground, etc.

Because sound tends to follow an inverse square law, if they measured that 96 dB at 100m from the sound’s source, it could be just 2% of that level at 800m away.

So, that “96 dB” figure needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The figure as actually measured in some person’s home might be a tiny fraction of that amount.

Again, it doesn’t mean there’s no problem, just that it needs some further investigation.

Anxiety, nausea and sleep problems can be caused by many things. One of those things is believing that a nearby datacenter is making you ill.

Sure, investigate it and see if it is actually happening. But, do a proper double-blind study.

I take this personally because my mother is a conspiracy nut who thinks that everything is making her ill: wifi, chemtrails, street lights, electricity, gluten… if she heard about infrasound she’d add it to the list of things that are hurting her health.

That’s right. Even if the person won the lawsuit it doesn’t mean the science is true. It’s one really frustrating thing about the legal system, sometimes people win lawsuits based on absolutely terrible BS science. A persuasive lawyer has to convince a jury that something is true, not convince a scientist who knows about that field.

Exposure to this level of infrasound

What level is that?

[citation needed]

I fully believe that at times infrasound can result in anxiety, nausea, etc. But, in 2026 so can reading the news. So can thinking that your health is being affected by a datacenter, resulting in you worrying and losing sleep.

This whole thing about the “resonant frequency of the eye” and that causing someone to hallucinate… that smells like utter BS. A much more likely explanation in a basement is carbon monoxide.

What’s interesting is that the Voting Rights Act has been used to gerrymander states to elect more GOP members.

The way you gerrymander is by creating one area that overwhelmingly goes for one party, and a bunch of other areas that very slightly go the other way. It’s often hard to come up with a legal pretext to do that (back when that sort of thing mattered). The voting rights act said that not only was it legal to create districts that would give black voters a majority, it was necessary. How do you do that? You group all the black voters together into one district, thereby creating a strong democratic-voting district. What side effect does that have? It creates a bunch of other districts that are not democratic-leaning so the overall state goes Republican.

If other laws still mattered, Republicans might have been fighting to save the VRA because it was their best tool to legally gerrymander in their favour. But, with the modern “laws don’t matter lol” supreme court, it’s different.

There are many other kinds of salmon though, and some of them are native to parts of Japan, like Hokkaido. It just wasn’t traditionally part of Sushi. Even tuna wasn’t considered sushi-worthy for a long time. It used to be food for poor people.

Also, Salmon sushi isn’t a Japanese thing.

Internet companies have become way too used to hiding behind Section 230 of the Communications Act which allows them to say that anything on their sites was created by a user, not by them, and therefore they’re not liable. This made sense when the Internet was just chronological forums and there was no way for the operator to know that something defamatory or illegal had been posted.

They’ve managed to maintain that fiction, even when hand-picking content they want to show. Now they have algorithms that scan all the content people post, even videos, decide which content is going to generate the most views, clicks and engagement, and choose to prioritize that content, even if it is illegal.

But, now, with AI, they’re actually the ones generating that content. There’s no user to hide behind anymore. Let’s hope that the courts say that section 230 doesn’t protect them here and that they’re liable for all false claims made with AI, just as they’d be liable if it were an employee or the boss who posted it.

I mean… I don’t think long-chain gluten molecules can do computations. But, there are other ways to combine AI and bread. There’s all that waste heat being generated by AI computations. It could be used for baking…

I bet people would be a lot less opposed to datacenters if everyone of them had a bakery built in and the delicious scent of sourdough wafted out whenever anybody was making out with their AI waifu.

Ovens produce extreme heat and for a much longer time than toasters, and they’ve had some form of electronics for decades.

Having said that, they don’t tend to have touch screens, and for a very good reason.

The Internet-connected part is just an attack surface for no possible benefit. It’s a digital photo frame when not in use? Who the hell is in their kitchen thinking that their life would improve if only their toaster could show them photos. Live, local weather forecast? On your toaster? Surely you have other screens where that is more appropriate. A clock? A modern kitchen without any smart products probably already has at least 2-3 clocks already.

A screen could be vaguely useful, showing exactly how toasted bread should look, rather than a dial where you have to figure out just how brown the “3” setting is. Maybe special modes for toaster pastries, or other non-toast items. But, it seems like overkill.

But, a touch screen? A kitchen is just about the worst possible room for a touch screen, with the possible exception of the bathroom. I listen to podcasts while I cook, and I skip commercials, and inevitably I have to clean some goop off my screen at some point. And often the touch doesn’t register because my finger is too wet, or I dripped some water somewhere else on the screen. My mother used to have an oven/stove with a simple LCD display and those plastic-covered buttons that are common on microwaves. Even without being a “touch screen”, it was a major pain in the ass. It was in the splatter zone of the stove, so it had to be wiped down, and virtually every time it was wiped down one of the buttons was activated. If it was the “cancel” button, it could turn off the oven. If the oven was turned off it “forgot” the temperature it had been set to, so you’d have to look up the recipe again to figure out what temperature to use when you turned it back on. So, never mind touch screens, I won’t even buy an oven with bubble-type buttons rather than normal dials.

I can actually see the value in screens / Internet access on a lot of devices.

On a refrigerator? That’s great. Especially if there are cameras inside and it scans things as you put them inside. Then you could have your fridge show you items that were going to expire within a few days so you’d know to use them. You could check with the fridge while you were shopping and it could tell you if you needed to buy more milk. You could even have the fridge start your shopping list for you based on what items you used and how frequently you used them.

Naturally, I’d want control over this process and it would need privacy protections. But, with all that it could be really useful. $100 in electronics would probably pay for itself in under a year just by letting you use things before they went bad, and preventing you from overbuying.

A smart thermostat / heat pump / air conditioner makes sense. A smart oven is a bit more dangerous but could be useful. Smart lighting is a great idea. But, a smart toaster with Internet connectivity? Are we really expecting innovations in the millennia-old technology of “bread” that requires a firmware update? Do you need to be informed that your toast is done while you’re not at home? Or do you need to get your toast started early so it’s ready exactly as you get home, rather than having to start it after you arrive?

Not just “worried about losing their jobs to automation”. They were trying to get the government to enforce laws that protected their jobs, but the government refused to do it.

As with most manufacturing at the time, there was a guild system in place where new workers went through an apprenticeship and after they proved their mastery by creating a masterpiece, they were acknowledged as master craftsmen and could work on their own. This was enforced by laws like the Statute of Artificers of 1562/1563 that required that apprentices work for a mandatory 7 years before they could move up.

The workers didn’t mind jobs being done by machines. They just wanted the machines to be controlled by people who were in the right guild and had gone through the proper period of apprenticeship. That would result in the quality of the end product meeting the standards of the guild.

Because the government refused to enforce those laws, the guilds took matters into their own hands. They led loud protests and strikes. In France the workers at these protests often wore wooden work shoes called “sabots”, so the French coined the word “sabotage” for these protests. Since the protests weren’t enough to get the government to enforce the laws, the workers attacked factories that were producing low-quality textiles made by low-paid employees who weren’t members of the guild and broke the machines by smashing them with hammers.

Instead of convincing the government to enforce existing laws, that resulted in the government passing new laws protecting the machines (stocking frames) used to produce the textiles, and eventually passed a law allowing the death penalty for smashing a stocking frame. As a result, the workers didn’t want their real identities revealed while they destroyed the machines. So, they claimed they were following the orders of “Ned Ludd” or “King Ludd”, who lived in Sherwood Forest.

It’s true that, to a certain extent, the workers were trying to stop technological progress in order to protect their jobs. But, mostly, it was an attempt to keep their fair share of the profits from doing the work. They didn’t mind that the machines existed. They just thought that the machines should be operated by a master craftsman instead of an orphan child, and that the final product meet the quality standards that the guild demanded. Meanwhile the owners of the factories and machines were basically trying to use the machines as a way to break the control the guilds had over the manufacturing process and to have as little money possible go to the workers, and as much as possible go to the owners of the machines.

In case there are innovations in bread.

Is there anything about dead languages that is different from current languages?

On one hand, there shouldn’t be. Anatomy hasn’t changed. The language didn’t “evolve” to something better, it’s just that people stopped speaking it.

OTOH, I know that certain things have changed about languages in living memory. For example, the loss of thee / thou in English, Mexican Spanish dropping “vos”, and in French using “tu” more often than the more formal “vous”.

What I hate is when I’m searching for a word in another language I speak and it comes to me, but it’s just the English word said with a different accent, so I don’t trust it, but it’s actually right.