This spider has taken residence in a corner of one of the rooms, I’m not bothered by them but the web is getting a bit too big… can I just remove part of it to keep the size in check without causing harm to the spider?
Because no one expects any better of them. Everyone expects Alabama to be full of KKK cousin-fuckers. The result is that it’s only notable when they aren’t.
Respectfully mention that it’s kinda insensitive, kinda like, “hey man, don’t you think that’s kinda insensitive?” and you’ll probably figure out fairly quickly which one is the answer. Additionally, if they legit don’t know why it’s insensitive, then you can educate them!
Just remember that tone can be difficult to convey on the internet, and sometimes you have to exaggerate the intended tone for it to be understood. Additionally, in my experience, asking the question from the other person’s perspective (“don’t you think that’s kinda insensitive” vs “I think that’s kinda insensitive”) seems to help a lot.
People have the right to say what they want (at least in the US, mostly), which includes people voicing their disagreement with stuff. It’s a two-way street and we’re better off with it that way. You can’t force someone to listen to you, just like someone can’t force you to listen to them.
What you can do, however, is attempt to educate people if they’re willing to be educated. If successful in doing so, you help decrease the amount of bigotry that exists. In my opinion, attempting to engage with an individual to determine their intent is a way of dealing with it. Why stay silent when you could help make the world a better place?
Damn, not sure if this is a joke or speculation, but imagine the shit storm they’re gonna come back to. I kinda feel bad for them if they didn’t intend for this to happen and the cleanup they’ll have to do, but at the same time, they kinda shoulda made sure they had a backup, or at least closed sign-ups while they were gone (assuming it wasn’t a medical emergency).
It might honestly be an issue with liftoff. I’ve been having enough issues with it that I’ve been thinking about finding another app. Regardless, the fact that it didn’t load was kinda funny in the sense that I imagine internet is pretty much non-existent in the antarctic unless you’re on or near a research base.
What if none of us are the main character? What if we’re in a simulation that’s supposed to be history class or something? It might explain why people like trump or musk seem cartoonishly evil.
What? Every chemical reaction within every neuron is still governed by physics. Just because we don’t understand how the physics works doesn’t mean we get to throw physics out the window. Even then, even if we ignore the physical aspect of it, from a philosophical standpoint, you can easily argue that free will doesn’t exist.
Let’s say for a moment that I’m wanting to go get dinner somewhere, and as I’m walking there, I start to cross a street and get hit by a bus. I wake up and Death is laughing. Wiping tears from his eyes he says, “man, that’ll never get old. Listen, I’ll give you a second chance. I’ll rewind time to the moment before you decided to cross the street without looking, and if you make it across, I’ll leave you alone.” I take the offer (who wouldn’t), and time gets rewound. I’m now standing at the curb, getting ready to cross the street, with no memory of the events that transpired after I stepped off the curb. Will I try to cross the street again, or will I decide not to?
spoilerThe answer is that I’ll cross the street again. Why? Time got rewound. I don’t remember getting hit by the bus, nor do I remember talking to death. There’s no reason for me to avoid the street because I have the exact same information I had the last time, so there’s no way for me to come to a different conclusion about which path I should take. I wake up and Death is laughing.
Edit: how the fuck do spoilers work? They don’t show up on liftoff
Do you have anything to back up this belief? I’m genuinely curious. Afaik the idea that we’re affected by quantum phenomenon is speculative. Even so, it wouldn’t necessarily grant us free will. Even assuming that we’re directly affected by quantum uncertainty, it doesn’t mean we have free will unless we’re able to control how it affects us. Our neurons still have to follow the laws of physics, even if the particles within them occasionally appear to ignore them (and that’s assuming we won’t eventually discover that there are rules governing how and when particles are seemingly able to ignore physics).
To be clear, I’m not a scientist, so I was trying to avoid getting into quantum physics, however if I’m not mistaken, there are some processes on the quantum level that seem to be irreversible or wholly unpredictable. As such, going back in time wouldn’t guarantee the same outcome on a quantum level. However, afaik the effect that it would have on humans is purely speculative.
Additionally, it could be that our understanding of quantum phenomenon is similar to our understanding of the universe back when astrology was all the rage and people believed the stars and planets were unpredictable. It could be that we’re working from the wrong frame of reference and as a result, it only appears as though things in the quantum realm are hard to predict if not straight-up unpredictable.
In late July, a couple of startling papers appeared on the arXiv, a repository of pre-peer-review manuscripts on topics in physics and astronomy. The papers claim to describe the synthesis of a material that is not only able to superconduct above room temperature, but also above the boiling point of water. And it does so at...
So, of I understand correctly, just because one, five, or ten reports of LK-99 lacking superconductivity doesn’t mean that lk-99 can’t be a room temperature superconductor, the issue is that there isn’t a lot known about why it’s superconductive and the specific configuration of atoms required to express superconductivity under ambient temperature and pressure. The process for creating it isn’t an exact process and as a result, it’s hard to control and ensure that the final structure is correct.
Am I understanding that correctly?
Edit: this also makes me wonder (as a non-scientist) if most conductors could be superconductive at room temperature with the correct atomic structure, but due to technological limitations and a general lack of understanding, scientists are having to brute-force superconductivity via extreme pressures and/or temperatures. Hopefully, however, even if this is shown to be too difficult to be consistently replicated, it’ll lead to the discovery of more easily replicated materials.
Absolutely, I’d imagine a lot of money in superconductors right now is speculative, in the sense that most of it is academic funding because any real breakthroughs are thought to be far enough in the future to not be of immediate value. Or to put it another way, I’d imagine it’s not getting as much funding as it should due to modern capitalism being short-sighted. If this turns out to be successful, albiet inconsistent, it’ll suddenly be in range for corporate “money vision” to focus on it.
Edit: I’d imagine the US military will be especially interested in it, which would further assist in development. Since the research is unclassified, it means every decent-sized military will likely be competing in an arms-race behind closed doors to see who’ll be able to adopt it first, because they can all use said research as a stepping stone.
That and the academic overhead I’m referencing is the cut that a university takes of grant awards. Most of the departments I’ve been around take 50% of the grant award, so if you need $100,000 to complete a project, you have to ask for 200 grand (or more if you want to be paid the whole year rather than just 9 months).
Jesus Christ, why do they need 50%? I could understand 20%, or 30%, but 50%!?
Now a lot of this is driven by an outrageous number of administrators with insulting salaries for what they provide (does the vice president of insert some nebulous term here really provide 300 grand worth of contributions to a university, especially so when they set the salary of teaching faculty down around 40~50K and expect applicants with PhDs and years of experience).
I thought that while PhD candidates were poorly paid, most professors with actual PhDs tended to start around 70k~100k depending on the school. Do you have any links to articles that talk about professor salaries? Additionally, I’d be willing to accept the VP of a university making $300k if the professors were making at least $150k (around half of what the VP makes), however that’s not the case.
Wow. That’s horrible. I’ll have to spend a bit more time looking at the salary link because I can’t find a way to filter out non-teaching roles and I’m seeing salaries all over the place (both professor and non-professor), but it sucks that you’ve had to deal with that.
Researchers used electric stimulation to switch on exact genes involved in regulating insulin. Blood glucose concentrations of model mice returned to normal.
When it comes to cancer it’s more likely to come in the form of mRNA vaccines. My understanding is that the silver lining of COVID is that because it radically accelerated the development of mRNA vaccines, it should be fairly inexpensive to modify them to vaccinate against cancer. My understanding is that you get cancer all the time, it’s just that your body normally identifies it as a problem and attacks the cells; in fact, there are some people who may have an immunity to cancer as they’ve been observed healing from tumors without outside help. The cancers that people die from are ones that our bodies don’t recognize as a threat until it’s too late. Supposedly mRNA vaccines could be used to teach the body that it should target certain cancerous cells which it has no prior defense against.
LK-99 is a supposed superconductor that can operate at ambient atmospheric press and below temperatures of 127°c/260°f. In other words, a room-temperature superconductor. The holy grail of conductors. A material that’d completely revolutionize literally everything. Not only that, it’s made out of a lead-apatite, meaning it would potentially be relatively inexpensive to make. We could be on the edge of a new era.
AND HERE COMES THE BUTT
BUT my understanding is that attempts to replicate the experiment are currently inconclusive. There have supposedly been successful replications as well as unsuccessful attempts, however none of the papers have been peer reviewed yet. Additionally, computer simulations have given inconsistent results.
Were all the replications successful? I’d heard the Chinese team claimed success but didn’t show proof, the Russian team claimed their results were negative but there was supposedly evidence that they’d used the wrong material (I’m not a scientist, just repeating what I’ve read) and I hadn’t heard anything about a US team replicating it in a lab (I’d heard there were simulations, but no lab results from US teams). Is there new info that I’ve missed? The fact that some simulations show similar results to the original paper makes me hopeful, but again, those are just simulations.
I’m pretty sure barbenheimer was astroturfed to shit as well. The memes and content people were making didn’t feel anywhere near as natural as the Doom x Animal Crossing stuff did. That trend felt legitimately homemade whereas anything similar that’s come after it has felt incredibly forced.
I mean, would you vote in Texas? Where everything’s so gerrymandered that attempting any kind of blue takeover requires extensive cooperation with rural areas. And sure, you might say that gerrymandering doesn’t apply to the governorship, however it does apply to the accessability of polling locations. Combine that with a general feeling that democrats see Texas as a lost cause and aren’t interested in actually sending their best, and, well, you really shouldn’t be surprised when most Texans are so disillusioned with the system that they can’t drag themselves out to vote.
Edit: didn’t realize this was in a Texas community. The sentiment still stands though.
I also live in Texas, and I do vote, but it’s hard to get myself to do so and even harder to believe it’s actually making a difference. I didn’t mean that democrat voters feel that it’s a lost cause, it feels like the party itself views Texas as a lost cause or is treating Texas like a heel. The reason is because the politicians they send tend to either actively push for gun control or have done so in the recent past. That’s an extremely hard sell in Texas. Sure, you could say, “oh, but people would still vote against them because they’ll just assume that said politician is anti-gun 'cause they’re blue” but that itself seems like a bit of a lost-cause mindset.
Idk, I guess my point is that it feels like the democrats are putting forward politicians without actually looking into what would be successful in Texas. Combine that with me having become cynical and jaded, and I have a hard time believing that they’re actually trying if not straight-up using Texas as a heel for more liberal states.
If an alien wanted to visit the Earth, they would actually die hundreds to thousands of years before they would ever get here.
Not necessarily.
A) that’s assuming they have similar lifespans to humans. They could be significantly shorter. They could be significantly longer. They could be artificially extended via medical science.
B) that’s assuming they’re travelling on a small ship and not a multi-generation colony ship. Such a ship would be designed for people to be born, live and die in space.
Now, if aliens actually had warp drive technology, millions of years in the future from our technology, they probably aren’t even going to bother visiting us because we’re so archaic.
Not necessarily. First of all, humans nowadays aren’t a whole lot more intelligent than humans 6,000 years ago. The reason why we seem to be more intelligent is because there is more which is known about our universe, we put more emphasis on knowledge, and because we have more ways of expressing that intelligence.
Secondly, I’m skeptical that it’d truly take millions of years to develop warp/warp-like technology. Tbh I think it’s more likely that we’re far closer to developing it ourselves than we realize, it’s just that we have to be more active in space to see what we’re missing.
However to connect this to my previous statement about intelligence, most scientists put ftl-like travel (I’m talking about the FTL-but-not-really technologies like warp or wormholes) a couple thousand years away. Now, again, I’m skeptical that it’d really take us that long, and I’m pretty sure they’re just throwing out a really big number to make the point that you shouldn’t hold your breath, but let’s pretend that they really meant it. If ftl-like tech is really thousands of years in the future, that still potentially puts aliens in the realm of “near human-like intelligence”.
At the end of the day though, this is all conjecture. None of it can be proven (yet), so it’s all speculative. That being said, open your mind. Imagine other possibilities. There’s so much stuff around aliens and future tech where people assume this, or assume that, but the truth is that we don’t know shit. Aliens could be exactly the same as us. They could be so different that they can’t be understood by us. They could be somewhere inbetween. They could be far more advanced than us. They could be less advanced overall, but got very lucky with a handful of technologies. We don’t know.
deleted_by_author
Can I remove part of the web a daddy long legs has woven without harming them?
This spider has taken residence in a corner of one of the rooms, I’m not bothered by them but the web is getting a bit too big… can I just remove part of it to keep the size in check without causing harm to the spider?
Why doesn't the obvious racism in Alabama get more attention? (www.cnn.com)
Mosquitoes (lemmy.world)
When someone makes a crude joke on the internet (lemmy.world)
Lemmy.world Rammy Statement
We recently received a message from a concerned Rammy user regarding their instance not having an active admin team....
Anon sees the world as it is (feddit.de)
felt
Biden expected to create Grand Canyon national monument to block new mining, sources say (www.washingtonpost.com)
The Arizona monument would be aimed at safeguarding areas near Grand Canyon National Park that local tribes want to protect from uranium extraction
Deep and pertinent title (lemmy.world)
What’s going on with the reports of a room-temperature superconductor? (arstechnica.com)
In late July, a couple of startling papers appeared on the arXiv, a repository of pre-peer-review manuscripts on topics in physics and astronomy. The papers claim to describe the synthesis of a material that is not only able to superconduct above room temperature, but also above the boiling point of water. And it does so at...
Scientists Control Human DNA with Electricity (www.vice.com)
Researchers used electric stimulation to switch on exact genes involved in regulating insulin. Blood glucose concentrations of model mice returned to normal.
Which side are you placing your bets on? (lemmy.world)
[Texas Observer] The ‘Death Star’ Bill Is About Kneecapping Democracy in Texas (www.texasobserver.org)
From the article:...
"Unidentified"? More like "Don't ask, don't tell" (sh.itjust.works)