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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • As someone who lives in this same town, black bears are more like overweight raccoons.

    Fun fact, our “city hall” is at the tiny community airport, which also had a restaurant with the best chicken wings in town (salt and vinegar wings FTW). The restaurant was still going when this happened in 2019, so my guess is the bear smelled the food and went looking for the kitchen, only to get sidetracked by the city council meeting.





  • Depends. The cheap houses, yeah, there’s as fair bit of noise, but you can’t hear everything. From downstairs, you can hear when someone walks across the room above you, but not when they’re walking in other upstairs rooms. And from rooms on the same level, you can hear if someone is talking loudly in the room next door, but not enough to make out what they’re saying unless they’re yelling.

    Well-built houses or buildings made for occupancy by multiple families usually have better sound insulation between the rooms/floors/units, so it’s not always an issue.

    Edit: the plus side to that is I know all the noises my house makes at night, so as a light sleeper, I know when something is wrong in the middle of the night, and I only need one decent sound system for the whole house, which is great for listening to records while doing housework.


  • NielsBohron@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlTears
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    7 months ago

    It’s more like a mutual friend. There’s a connection to both reactants (aka “binding affinity”), but not as strong as the bond that is formed between the two substrates (if the reaction is forming a covalent bond between the two substrates, anyway)

    Edit: I’m actually saving this meme to show my coworkers that teach biochem, because it’s a pretty decent analogy. You can even extend it to other reaction classes, like a phosphorylase being like a friend who connects your buddy who is selling a guitar with your other buddy who wants to buy a guitar, or a isomerase being that friend who gives you a make-over so that another friend can set you up on a date.


  • So, one observer will see those oscillations happen faster than the other?

    Not quite. In each observer’s frame of reference, time appears to pass the same; it’s only when you try to reconcile the between two objects that are not at rest with respect to each other does relativity show up.

    Basically, when you bring someone back to Earth, the observers will find that their watches don’t match up even though both observers experience time passing the same way as normal (because the oberserver is by definition at rest with respect to their own frame of reference).

    TL; DR: Relativity is a pain in the ass and makes no sense in everyday terms.

    edit: disclaimer - I am not a physicist and have not taken physics classes in a decade plus, but I do teach science at a college. I’m going mostly on half-remembered lectures and some random one-off discussions I’ve had with my buddy in the physics department over the past few years.



  • It’s been a long time since I took modern physics, so I’m not positive, but I think you’re right that the moon would have time moving slower, and if your 50ms/day is right (edit: I based this on the moon traveling faster than the earth, but I don’t know anything about gravitational relativity, so that’s probably wrong) then you’d need to do something like skip a second every 20th day on the moon to keep pace with Earth. We could call it an “anti-leap-second”

    Programmers, that seems pretty simple; what’s the big deal? /s


  • No, the moon’s rotation isn’t on a 24-hour cycle. I’m not an astronomer, but I pretty sure since it’s tidally locked to earth and on a 28-day cycle around the earth, a lunar day is actually 28 Earth days, but I’m not actually sure how that would factor into the number of time zones (I’m pretty sure it would be more complicated than just 24 time zones to match 24 time zones on earth, though).

    Plus, I think the speed of the moon relative to the sun is different enough from Earth that you need to take relativity into effect, which is the real headache here.


  • The idea that humans need the diverse micro ecology of earth in order to not become ill over the course of generations is pretty interesting.

    Really pretty well-supported by current science, too. I teach chemistry at a community college, so maybe I’m an outlier, but I read a ton of current research about the importance of diversity in “gut biomes” and the damaging effects of monoculture on global ecology, etc.

    It seems pretty clear that even if engineers could solve the physical and chemical issues with a generation ship, the limiting constraints are almost certainly going to be biological and ecological, and KS Robinson’s estimates for the upper limits seem pretty reasonable based on current knowledge




  • NielsBohron@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    10 months ago

    Therefore adherents of a religion are also not implicit in extremism, right?

    That’s literally laughable. Religion is a conscious choice to believe in something for which there is no evidence (which is colloquially known as “faith”). Allowing evidence to provide an understanding of how the natural world works is not the same as choosing to be a part of a community that is not based on reality.

    It seems that we’re mostly in agreement that it’s the broad category of humans who are culpable

    Correct. However, we differ in our definition of extremism, which I define as intolerance of others, willful ignorance of the natural world, and desire to restrict the rights of others based on their interpretation of Bronze Age manuscripts.


  • NielsBohron@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    10 months ago

    What term do the people who aren’t “nut jobs” use?

    Evolution. If we’re feeling pedantic or spicy, “the theory of evolution.”

    And you still didn’t address the fact that understanding and believing in a scientific advance does not make one an extremist. It doesn’t place you in the same ideological group as people who use that scientific advance for a crime. People who believe the theory of gravity are not “gravitationalists” or “Newtonians.” Moreover, if I use gravity to commit a crime, that doesn’t implicate everyone else who believes that gravity exists. I understand how nuclear reactions work; does that make me a “nuclearist” and therefore complicit in the bombing of Hiroshima?

    I’d love for you to point me to a community of humans who haven’t done something extreme.

    Secular humanists. There are a number of others I could cite if I felt like pushing your buttons, but I’ll stick with the single option so you don’t get distracted.