Nowadays, categorized by Megabyte, hands-down the dominant activity is Gog-based game distribution. Categorized by time:
My spouse is a reader, hence continually online with Kindle. Cozy police procedurals and legal thrillers, mainly, though recently many books with canine characters (search & rescue, police interdiction,
etc). Once upon a time this activity included reviews for the books read but no longer.
I have also had to search for tradesmen recently; a plumber (to caulk the bathroom), a fencer to repair the boundary, and a civil engineer to do a dilapidation report. If we need something I can't find locally (like we needed some reüsable drinking straws) then I rely on the mad skilz possessed by the better half of my marriage to find stuff on eBay and Amazon.
Personally, I don't like the cartel behaviour of the FAANGs and avoid them whenever possible. I joined a local bookstore to avoid Amazon. (I gave away the loyalty bonus because the bookshop's business model was incompatible with my requirements; they were all about turnover and pumping high volume dross whereas I look for books to keep, books that I can use to refer to later or even re-read for pleasure. When I had asked for particular books I was told they were unavailable and, "Have you tried Amazon?", which was the whole point of the book membership: to avoid exacerbating Amazon's market domination.)
I will not fill in a Captcha. I would rather do without whatever it is on the other side.
I don't listen to music, as a general rule —— unless it is a soundtrack to a game I'm playing —— so I don't have any streaming service. No Spotify and no Netflix. (I am losing my hearing. This computer I bought without a speaker.) I watch free-to-air broadcast television (mainly various news programmes, usually BBC, (USA) ABC, PBS, sometimes Al Jazeera, and the local Australian services, both commercial and government. This makes it easier to spot what the various services choose to omit from their summaries. I watch television almost exclusively with captions and no sound —— always distracting and seldom useful.)
I use the Interwebs much as a library. (In years to come we will all look back on this time as the last moment knowledge was unambiguously, objectively, verifiably based on reality. Deep fakes will make this much more difficult in times to come.)
But mostly I am unconnected from the Internet of Everything. Otherwise, most time would be finding facts in encyclopedias and dictionaries, and a lot of that is on Wikipedia. As a first stop I like it for general information that I can springboard into more specific sources that are usually found therein. (I can spend some time editing, when I have a few moments spare, which I expect is more valuable to the site than any small change I can afford to donate.)
For instance — as I type this my browser is pointed at:
[Neuroanatomy] (Autonomic)
Medulla Oblongata ([Bulb]
(Inhibitory) [Glomerulus]
Golgi cell [GABA] (Inhibitory Purkinje & Excitatory Mossy fibre)
[Medulla]
Deep Cerebellar Nuclei This was triggered when I saw a book about the Cerebellum and I wanted some background —— the cerebellum is a very particular, very neuronally dense component. (Since you asked, it was John Montgomery & David Bodznick (Oxford, 2016),
Evolution of the Cerebellar Sense of Self. I was also looking at these books: Walshe & Sutton (MUP, 2021),
Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate; Hicks (Conor Court, 2019),
Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism & Socialism From Rousseau to Focault; Philps (Headline, 2023),
The Red Hotel: the Untold Story of Stalin's Disinformation War, amongst others.)
[Hindbrain]
Cerebellum (Grey Matter):
[…]
1 Feedforward processing: The cerebellum differs from most other parts of the brain (especially the cerebral cortex) in that the signal processing is almost entirely feedforward—that is, signals move unidirectionally through the system from input to output, with very little recurrent internal transmission. The small amount of recurrence that does exist consists of mutual inhibition; there are no mutually excitatory circuits. This feedforward mode of operation means that the cerebellum, in contrast to the cerebral cortex, cannot generate self-sustaining patterns of neural activity. Signals enter the circuit, are processed by each stage in sequential order, and then leave.
As Eccles, Ito, and Szentágothai wrote, "This elimination in the design of all possibility of reverberatory chains of neuronal excitation is undoubtedly a great advantage in the performance of the cerebellum as a computer, because what the rest of the nervous system requires from the cerebellum is presumably not some output expressing the operation of complex reverberatory circuits in the cerebellum but rather a quick and clear response to the input of any particular set of information."
[
The Cerebellum as Neuronal Machine, p.311]
2 Divergence and convergence: In the human cerebellum, information from 200 million mossy fiber inputs is expanded to 40 billion granule cells, whose parallel fiber outputs then converge onto 15 million Purkinje cells.
Because of the way that they are lined up longitudinally, the 1000 or so Purkinje cells belonging to a microzone may receive input from as many as 100 million parallel fibers, and focus their own output down to a group of less than 50 deep nuclear cells. Thus, the cerebellar network receives a modest number of inputs, processes them very extensively through its rigorously structured internal network, and sends out the results via a very limited number of output cells.
3 Modularity: The cerebellar system is functionally divided into more or less independent modules, which probably number in the hundreds to thousands. All modules have a similar internal structure, but different inputs and outputs. A module (a multizonal microcompartment in the terminology of Apps and Garwicz) consists of a small cluster of neurons in the inferior olivary nucleus, a set of long narrow strips of Purkinje cells in the cerebellar cortex (microzones), and a small cluster of neurons in one of the deep cerebellar nuclei. Different modules share input from mossy fibers and parallel fibers, but in other respects they appear to function independently—the output of one module does not appear to significantly influence the activity of other modules.
4 Plasticity: The synapses between parallel fibers and Purkinje cells, and the synapses between mossy fibers and deep nuclear cells, are both susceptible to modification of their strength. In a single cerebellar module, input from as many as a billion parallel fibers converges onto a group of less than 50 deep nuclear cells, and the influence of each parallel fiber on those nuclear cells is adjustable. This arrangement gives tremendous flexibility for fine-tuning the relationship between the cerebellar inputs and outputs.
[…]
I find information like this appealing. (Science is a progressive understanding based on the inability to falsify particular hypotheses that therefore must be accepted as truth, at least until more detailed falsifications can be performed to refine existing knowledge further.)
Unfortunately it is becoming more and more difficult to manage life offline;
e.g., I haven't been able to locate an electronic dictionary (
scilicet, one with the corpus kept in a local file, rather than an app that talks to a server). If you find one I may buy it!
