MIT discovers the location of memories: Individual neurons
OMG, it's the ultimate mechanical_fish pet peeve collection! TL;DR: I rant.ONE: I can't find the citation of the scientific paper on ExtremeTech. (Let alone a link. Who would dare to dream of a link?) They do refer obliquely to "the paper" once. (What paper?)And they link to MIT's press office, whose brand is really solid, so everything they write is almost like science! And there you can skim the article twice and finally spot the citation:Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at MIT and lead author of the study reported online today in the journal Nature.Okay, gotta go find an online Nature subscription to find out what's going on. There's an hour of my day spoken for. At least they're trying to ensure I get some exercise.Why is the actual journal article important? Just look at this thread here on HN. We have people doubting all sorts of things, but these may well be things that are addressed in the actual work. The content of the popular articles means very little: They leave out most of the details. The details matter. The whole point of this study is to try and tease out more details.)TWO: But, wait, there's more. I first tried to read ExtremeTech on an iPad (original edition). The article popped up in one of those insufferable iPad-only JS-powered "mobile editions" with Swiping Action. Unfortunately, there was only the first page of the article. It cut off in midsentence. I tried pressing the giant button marked "Next" on the right side of the screen. I got a big white screen. I flailed around with my fingers. A completely different article eventually rendered itself. I flailed around with my fingers some more. Eventually the original article reappeared, still incomplete. Fortunately, one more roundtrip to the next article and back and I finally got the whole thing to render.Then I pressed the back button and everything seemed to hang. I closed the browser window and thanked the gods for my escape.Why on earth do publications use these broken things, when simple web pages render so nicely on the iPad? The site does have something like a dozen tracking cookies on it; does this imply that they have data showing that swipability is so important that it doesn't even have to work in order to attract more ad impressions/clicks/Tweets/whatever? Or does it merely suggest that they are so busy struggling with glass-cockpit syndrome that they can't perceive that their site is broken on the iPad?