That is a kind of visual hallucination, and isn't what is normally meant by mental imagery. Mental imagery is under more-or-less complete control. Think of X, remember Y, imagine Z, and the image appears. Occasionally images will pop into one's mind, often when distracted -- these events are nominally called daydreaming. Just as your hand doesn't (typically) move on its own, neither does your mind's eye, although, again, there are exceptions. We sometimes hear of solutions to problems just popping into view, and ascribe that to our subconscious working on them. But beyond exceptions like that, and to reiterate, being able to control what one sees is a part of mental imagery.

It also turns out that reading of degraded text uses a form of mental imagery, as we have informally shown in my laboratory. Moreover, that particular skill is eminently trainable to the point where a second observer would swear the trained subject could not possibly be reading because the text is too degraded, and yet the subject is able to visualize the complete text with confidence.

This comment is such blatant propaganda that I'm surprised it was upvoted at all.

There are sectors that are amenable to remote work, and there are sectors that are not. Most notably, sectors where there is some physical resource used by employees, especially a centralized one, are not amenable to remote work. Manufacturing is the most obvious of those. Order fulfilment (cheekily known as Amazon) is another. Healthcare is another. None of these sectors are small. Yes, many companies in these sectors will have operational aspects that are amenable to remote work -- management, finance, etc. -- but to say that "Restricted-To-Office (RTO) offices have markedly lower business and productivity performance," is so clearly incorrect when stated without qualifications as in the parent posting that it can only be assumed the author is pursuing a political agenda, rather than being objective.

That's called a Lobster Salad, served as it should be, with lettuce on an untoasted hot dog bun. It is a reasonably accurate depiction. You're clearly not from New England where it is a tried and true delicacy that evokes reverence, loyalty, and heated arguments like you might get about pizza in New York. And if any of you prefer it on a toasted bun or without lettuce, then get thee back, heathen!

1. Get a cup of coffee
2. exchange Good Morning banter with colleagues
3. log in
4. review headlines from last 24 hours
5. start actual work

You are cherry-picking the results and ignoring the other three metrics which were not positive. If you are going to give unequal weight to your metrics, then that needs to well-justified, otherwise it's bias, plain and simple. Ignoring outcomes that don't agree with your expectations is prima facia evidence of flawed scientific inquiry.

You have revealed your bias, which is what I was warning against.

Or, if you want to be biased in the other direction, you could have written the same as,

Which would be a pessemistic interpretation suggestive of a broadly failed experiment, rather than the pollyanna view quoted in the summary. Be aware of bias, and take any sociological study with extra helpings of salt.

Negative latency? They've invented time travel? SIGN ME UP!

Wow, just wow. While the figure does appear to be somewhat in poor taste, it isn't supposed to be representative, but, instead to provide better detail of the subject of the paper. If the rat's kidney, or foot, or heart were enlarged like that, to show detail, do you think the image would have been subject to such attention?

Using AI-generated graphics in this case is no different from farming out your diagrams to a human-run artistic service who knows little more than the AI would about exactly what they are drawing. I've used services like that in my work, and they do a much better job than I possibly could, but they need substantial coaching in order to make a correct illustration. That does not seem to have happened adequately in this case, no matter how the diagram was generated.

The diagram in question is also being interpreted wildly out of context. And if it were generated by an artist, there would be no gnashing of teeth.

1.5 ton of TNT -- that's still a huge amount of explosive force. Far more than I want to be around.

I was at a New Year's Eve celebration where they lit off single sticks of dynamite. ... And in came the ambulances.

Hydrogen is explosive at STP. Gasoline is not. There are many, many good reasons the primary fuel of choice is gasoline for internal combustion. Ease and relative safety of handling are among them.

To each his own. I want my leaders to be the best and the brightest. I want my leaders to have a top-notch education, not bottom-third just because of some misguided romantic ideal that they need to have felt the pain of the masses in order to be in touch with them. I want them to have the very best tutors. I want my leaders to be brilliant. Geniuses. To have vast levels of expertise in multiple fields.

The US hasn't had that for a few decades, with the possible exceptions of Obama and Carter, but neither lived up to their promise.

Clinton and Reagan were the sort of working-class bubbas you are describing and, well, neither of them worked out so well, did they?

You need to reach back to Kennedy to find the last one with the magic combination of smarts, vision, education, and elocution. Every US president since JFK has been trying to repeat that same speech, and all of them get it wrong, most often because they don't have the smarts to back it up.

Let me get this straight: you think that the leader of a country (even if only titular) should NOT go to the best schools, and SHOULD be put in harm's way? Given that the monarchy is a hereditary position, and the probable succession order is known well in advance, you want NOT to prepare and protect them as best as possible? Seriously?

I guess that means you're in favor of disbanding the Secret Service detail of the President of the United states, too.

Your visual system does not give you a perfect rendition of reality. It has limitations as far as brightness and contrast ranges, that, as you experienced, contemporary digital imaging has been able to expand beyond.

But, oddly, we don't think of the myriad of transformations and distortions that our eyes and brain impose on our view as misrepresenting reality, even though we can clearly demonstrate cases where that is true (search for visual illusions and you'll have examples by the dozen). We understand those limitations and acknowledge them, but the far wider world of digital imaging, which includes an astonishing level of potential manipulation, is so new that we don't yet understand how to recognize what is, and what is not, reflecting reality.

I get unsolicited applications to join my lab on an almost daily basis. Many of them come from the parts of the world mentioned by other posters, like China, Iran, Russia, etc. I scan their CVs, just on the outside chance there's a hidden gem, and I am stunned by the number of publications they have --- in journals I've never heard of before. Sometimes, for fun, I check the impact factor of these journals and they're at or below 1. That means no-one is citing those papers. They're junk.

Things like curation by journal editors and measurement of that through impact factor *are* still useful.

It would be far more worrying if running a rail road required an application that needed 8 GB of RAM to run. That would mean seriously poor programming was involved.

I've written industrial planning systems that are reducible (in the theory-of-computation sense) to rail road planning. They just aren't that complicated. Far more importantly, when failure means potential for serious financial loss or even loss of life, as in a rail road, there is a very good reason to avoid the modern-shiny when the old-dull works well.

Tell me, exactly, what is wrong with an MS-DOS application to run a railway? Is an arduino application somehow better? A browser-based app running on a modern OS that can decide to go into update mode at any moment and so saturate its network connection that it ceases normal functioning, or that pops up a modal dialog that arrests the application until a human clicks OK? No thank you.

The old IBM PCs were built like brick outhouses. As long as you replace the capacitors once a decade after they start failing, blow out the dust from the chassis and clean the floppy drive heads, they should last indefinitely.