Just for your convenience, then, here are all the statistics from the paper:

• Research in the United States has shown that 66% of men and 41% of women consume pornography on a monthly basis.3 An estimated 50% of all Internet traffic is related to sex.4
• Sixty-four healthy male participants (mean [SD] age, 28.9 [6.62] years, range 21-45 years) were recruited.
• Because the distribution of the reported PHs [hours of pornography use per week] was skewed and not normally distributed (Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Z=1.54; P<.05), we transformed the variable by means of square root (Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Z=0.77; P=.59).
• The overall Internet Sex Screening Test score was positively correlated with the reported PHs (r64=0.389, P<.01). On the Sexual Addiction Screening Test, participants scored 1.35 on average (SD, 2.03). A positive correlation was observed between PHs and Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test score (r64=0.250, P<.05) and Beck Depression Inventory score (r64=0.295, P<.05).

And just because it's so important to the science, the rest of the results:

When correlating PHs (square root) with GM segmentations, we found a significant negative association in the right striatum, namely caudate nucleus (based on the automated anatomical labeling atlas34; peak voxel: x=11, y=5, z=3; P<.001; corrected for multiple comparisons) (Figure 1A). When we used a lower threshold of P<.005, an additional cluster in the left caudate reached significance (x=6, y=0, z=6), showing that the effect is not clearly lateralized. We refer to the cluster as the striatum; however, for the subsequent discussion, it is noteworthy that the cluster overlaps with a reward processing literature-based probabilistic region of interest of the ventral striatum, created by means of in-house software35 (predominantly monetary-incentive delay task, see eAppendix in Supplement for details).

As for alternative hypotheses, the only one they present is "Individuals with lower striatum volume may need more external stimulation to experience pleasure and might therefore experience pornography consumption as more rewarding, which may in turn lead to higher PHs."

That may call into question cause, but not consequence; if pursuing a drug addiction causes behavioural changes (which alcoholism certainly does, even when sober) then it is not unreasonable to assume some alteration in activity or structure of the striatum comes as a result of this. The paper cites previous work on the topic, saying that alcoholism (and drug addiction in general) is indeed correlated with changes in the striatum, so I wouldn't really question that part of it too vigorously. My complaint is basically that they seem to be violating a triangle inequality: the brain change is tightly correlated with two addictive behaviours in the sample, but they're only weakly correlated with each other. It sounds to me like porn is correlated with novel changes in the same region.

Now that I've had a chance to sit down and read through both the study and a few other things... you're correct, but it's not completely clear-cut, at least in my opinion, that the changes under consideration actually relate to reward-seeking, addict-like behaviour and aren't simply, say, a lack of sexual development due to being single.

They found a variety of different features in their test subjects (actual anatomical differences, differences in activity level within the caudate, differences in interconnectedness between pudamen and caudate...) and saw these were strongly correlated with level of pornography use, on the basis of addiction. However, there were some people in the study who used alcohol in a mildly problematic way. They showed only a r = ~0.25 (weak positive correlation) with porn usage. That strikes me as pretty inconsistent—if these are pathways strongly implicated in addictive behaviour, why didn't the drunks line up more neatly with their data? They don't mention alcoholism again in the discussion, except to draw parallels between porn usage and various forms of drug usage, and to suggest psychiatrists should ask about porn usage.

Don't assume it means anything—the striatum's primary function is coordinating motor control. If there is a meaningful causal link and this study is not just a p-value fishing expedition, it is so convoluted as to be incomprehensible.

And it's even been used for transit—Charles Stross's Neptune's Brood has cyborgized humans using the growth of new bodies as a substitute for light-speed travel.

I guess you missed this article from two days ago, then? (The classic "mystery" in neural nets is how they distribute weights during learning, the answer to which is "rarely better than a human would, and according to the algorithm they train by.") I know you saw this one; you commented on it. Or perhaps you were talking about computer-automated proofs? Those aren't sophisticated, merely long-winded; the result of applying simple propositional logic over and over again.

If we had algorithms that were actually capable of exceeding human comprehension in a meaningful way—and not just outpacing or outlasting us at regression and tree search—the world would be a much different and more exciting place. It is very unlikely we will have AGI until the human brain is almost fully understood, simply because we don't know what direction we really need to be pushing in. Given that there's now evidence that the brain's neurons could be DNA computers, that definitely has a long way to go.

As a researcher in machine learning: lol nope.

I believe Advantech will still happily sell you ISA backplanes. At the same time I put these things together, I had to reverse-engineer and fabricate some old I/O cards which had "unique" (incompatible with readily available cards) interrupt register mappings, also with EAGLE - great software!

I should mention: the MS-DOS system has outlasted three replacement attempts (two windows-based applications were from the original vendor who sold the MS-DOS system). There's just something completely unbreakable about the old stuff.

Any advise on using monitors for PCB layout under Eagle?

Over half my computer hours are Eagle hours.

Thank you for the link, CSI! I did not know about that one. It looks like a very handy little board that can retrofit into other ISA systems. ( Yes, I can get desperate enough to fire up Eagle and layout a custom ISA motherboard for something like this if the dying dinosaur is important enough ).

Thanks!

I was wondering why my ThinkPads would not see these.

Many industrial computers have CF-card slots for this very application. I put together a few MS-DOS systems using SanDisk CF cards around 8 years ago and they're still going strong, using a variant of one of these cards which has a CF slot built-in (so no need for a CF -> IDE adapter): PCA-6751

I was looking into that when I was checking out alternatives to sub-gigabyte hard drives to keep legacy systems ( DOS and the like ) alive.

Sandisk's CompactFlash memory cards ( intended for professional video cameras ) seemed to make great SSD's for older DOS systems when fitted with a CF to IDE adapter. I can format smaller CF cards to FAT16 ( using the DOS FDISK and FORMAT commands very similar to installing a raw magnetic drive ). With the adapter, the CF card looks and acts like a magnetic rotating hard drive. I had a volley of emails between SanDisk and myself, and the gist of it was they did not advertise using their product in this manner, and they did not want to get involved in support issues, but it should work. They told me they had wear leveling algorithms in place, which was the driving force behind my volley of emails with them. I was very concerned the File Allocation Table area would be very short lived because of the extreme frequency of it being overwritten. I would not like to give my client something that only works for a couple of months - that goes against everything I stand for.

So, I have a couple of SanDisk memories out there in the field on old DOS systems still running legacy industrial robotics... and no problems yet.

Apparently the SanDisk wear-leveling algorithms are working.

I can tell you this works on some systems, but not on others, and I have yet to figure out why. I can even format and have a perfectly operational CF in the adapter plate so it looks ( both physically and supposedly electronically ) like a magnetic IDE drive in one system ... but another system ( say an old IBM ThinkPad ) won't recognize it. However a true magnetic drive swaps out nicely - albeit the startup files may need to be changed from one system to another.