• 6 Posts
  • 47 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I’ve been missing an alternative to Facebook that I can use for non-anonymous planning of events and communication in hobby groups etc. and I had never heard of any of the “Facebook-type” federated stuff before!

    Now I just need to convince a bunch of people that this is viable to use without being the annoying guy…


  • I absolutely agree that newspapers shouldn’t be allowed to label someone as a criminal before they have been sentenced. My point is that there’s a difference between reporting indisputable facts about an event, and reporting that those facts make someone a criminal.

    Reporting that “Video shows person X shooting person Y”. Is different from reporting “Person X committed murder by shooting person Y”, because in the second case you are reporting that they committed a crime, when they may be acquitted of murder in court for any number of reasons. Reporting that “Person X allegedly shot and killed person Y according to this video” makes it seem like there’s any doubt about whether that happened.



  • Exactly! I mean… some reptiles eat eggs, so we could be talking about something that happened before our ancestors had developed the concept of an ass. I don’t think it’s far-fetched to think that eating eggs may be as old a concept as eggs themselves. In that case, the first egg-eaters evolved alongside the first egg-layers, and were eating proto-eggs before even the modern egg existed.

    Imagine if zebras started evolving very tough placentas over time, and the foals started lying around in them for a couple days before popping out: Lions would keep eating newborn zebras, and no single lion generation would notice that they were slightly different from 1000 years prior. Give that development a million years or whatever and you now have egg-laying zebras and egg-eating lions!


  • I would go even further: Our primitive ancestors likely descended from proto-humans that descended from primates that were already foraging eggs. Some modern apes and other mammals eat eggs as well, we’ve likely been eating eggs since hundreds of thousands of years before the first human evolved.

    In a sense, that line of though is interesting: When we think of “observing other animals eating something, and then deciding to eat it”, we’re almost implicitly forgetting that we are descendants of exactly those types of animals, that “just know” what is safe to eat, and that some of the knowledge we have about food is potentially passed down from even before the first primates evolved.



  • Well, yes. That’s the thing: If you give up, you drown, if you keep going parallel, you never know when the tide might turn. If you’re 24 (that’s how I interpret your previous comment), you’ve only had the option of voting in one presidential election so far. In that election, progressives completed the monumental task of voting out an incumbent proto-facist. And for all of Bidens flaws, there can’t be much doubt that a lot has been heading in the right direction. Of course, there’s still a huge task ahead, but the previous election shows that Trump can be kept out of office, and the past three years show that things can get better.

    Step 1: Forgiving student loans, Step 2: Working to reform the system.

    Step 1: Pardon certain drug-related crimes, Step 2: Work to reform drug laws.

    Step 1: Massive infrastructure investments, Step 2: More investment in public goods

    Step 1: EO’s to protect reproductive rights, Step 2: Legislation to do the same.

    My point is this: Biden has shown that he is working to make progress, and that he can actually get stuff done. The problem is that there’s a whole lot that needs doing, much more than anyone can do in two terms. We need to keep getting the best option into office, and we need to spend the next four years to ensure that the best option next time is better than Biden is now. If Trump gets four years, I fear that we’ll have a near impossible job.





  • Assuming

    • cylindrical human, 2m tall, 25 cm diameter.
    • air displaced from the point you teleport to is instantly moved to form a monolayer (1 molecule thick) on your surface.
    • The displacement of air is adiabatic (no heat is transferred, which will be true if the displacement is instantaneous)

    Volume of displaced air: ≈ 100L = 0.1m^3 At atmospheric conditions: ≈ 4 mol

    Surface area of cylindrical human: ≈ 1.58 m^2 Diameter of nitrogen molecule (which is roughly the same as for an oxygen molecule) : ≈ 3 Å Volume of monolayer: ≈ 4.7e-10 m^3

    Treating the air as an ideal gas (terrible approximation for this process) gives us a post-compression pressure of ≈ 45 PPa (you read that right: Peta-pascal) or 450 Gbar, and a temperature of roughly 650 000 K.

    These conditions are definitely in the range where fusion might be possible (see: solar conditions). So to the people saying you are only “trying to science”, I would say I agree with your initial assessment.

    I’m on my phone now, but I can run the numbers using something more accurate than ideal gas when I get my computer. However, this is so extreme that I don’t really think it will change anything.

    Edit: We’ll just look at how densely packed the monolayer is. Our cylindrical person has an area of 1.58 m^2, which, assuming an optimally packed monolayer gives us about 48 micro Å^2 per particle, or an average inter-particle distance of about 3.9 milli Å. For reference, that means the average distance between molecules is about 0.1 % of the diameter of the molecules (roughly 3 Å) I think we can safely say that fusion is a possible or even likely outcome of this procedure.







  • The thing is this: You wouldn’t have known what kind of activities you enjoy unless you had been exposed to a variety of them at some point. I absolutely think part of the education system’s job is to expose kids to a wide variety of activities, help them push their boundaries regarding what they think is fun, and experience mastering different things.

    I don’t know about your education system, but it seems like there may be a too one-sided focus on some sports. I remember from my time in grade school that we were exposed to pretty much everything from hockey/football (the kind you play with your feet)/basketball to dance/gymnastics/weight lifting/track and field, etc.



  • Yes, but also: In a lot of professions you have a lot of freedom regarding when you work. I’m browsing lemmy now, and getting to work at around 10, but I worked late on Friday, and I’m probably going to be answering some mails after dinner today.

    I think this is just going to become more common: Not paying people for for the time they are at work, but rather for the job they do. That means that if you prefer to work 9-5, thats fine, but if you prefer to leave earlier or start later, and get some of your work done in the afternoon/weekends, thats also fine, as long as you get the job done.

    I very much enjoy having that freedom. Even though it means I may be expected to pull longer days every now and then, it also means nobody questions me for leaving early when the weather is nice.