It’s even worse when you bake sourdough. I’ve been cultivating that yeast colony, caring for it, loving it. It thinks I care, but it’s only being prepared for slaughter.
Also, you kill only half of them each time. For the sourdough starter, it’s like a Thanos-snap coin-flip everytime you bake bread. The bacteria in your current sourdough starter come from a long line of statistically lucky ancestors.
I suppose that’s kind of true for all of us, though…
Seeing the edit, yes, but that is also wrong. As the first line of the link says, radiation therapy uses ionizing radiation and not microwaves
It is possible to use microwaves for treating cancer (see www.bmc.org/content/microwave-ablation), but the two aforementioned methods do not use them (with the caveat that both “chemotherapy” and “radiation therapy” are very broad categories)
Yeah, but cost of living differs. Nonetheless, killing people without attributing the actual cause of pollution to the polluters (companies, private or state controlled) is meaningless.
I’m a spatial-visual person, so when presented with this problem as a teenager, I instead solved it spatially. If you stack squares like.
█.
██.
███.
…
To the hundredth row, you get a shape that is a half filled square that is 100x100. Except the diagonal is fully filled in, so you need to add another 50.
So the answer was 0.5x100x100 + 0.5x100. Easy to visualize, easy to solve. 5050.
There’s a similar problem in sports – I was a teaching assistant for our rural school’s gym class so this one also popped up for me as a teenager. If you have 100 teams and each team needs to play each other team once… You fill in a similar grid, with the teams on both the x and y axis. The diagonal gets removed in this scenario because a team cannot play itself. So the answer is 0.5x100x100 - 0.5x100. 4950. Anyone who has ever tried to plan any sort of tournament can probably solve this intuitively, but 25 years ago I though I was the smartest gym class teaching assistant ever ;)
This is why I never succeeded at math. Like why does this shit work?? How can people just take a problem and be like, nah I’m going to just throw numbers all over the place and reassemble them in all sorts of ways and get an answer somehow…
I can’t just memorize arbitrary nonsense that “just is” I need to know how it works or it never sticks and all the math I’ve ever been taught was just “memorize this arbitrary nonsense and regurgitate a specific formula for a specific application that we’ve spent 0 time explaining other than telling you to memorize it. You want proofs and you can’t get proofs until advanced college courses” well guess I’ll just never understand mathematical manipulation then…
I feel like 50/50 school failed me and I failed at math.
It’s not arbitrary. Really try to think about the problem at hand. The ‘why’ is quite apparent. Ask yourself why did they go with 99+1+98+2… in the first place? And why is that the same as 101+101…? What was the benefit of simplifying it to that? How did it save the student time?
You can deduce this yourself and literally no memorization is involved to figure this out. No formulas needed either.
Once you have the idea, seeing that it works if often easy. But coming up with ideas like that can be really hard, which is why gauss was the only one in his class who got it. There is no general method, you just have to think about stuff for a while, but you can get better with practice. And it feels really good when you prove something for yourself, even if it’s relatively straightforward. You can just try to prove some simple things yourself, if you want, the advanced college courses are just for proving really advanced stuff.
The rules underpinning math are axioms in the end, but they’re not completely arbitrary, because if you change them in most cases it just fucks everything up.
The axioms that were chosen were chosen for good reason, and the rules they result in (such as summation and multiplication being commutative so 3x4=4x3 and 3+4=4+3) allow more complex rules to be created.
There’s a lot of philosophy of math at the core of all this , but it’s not really true that this is all arbitrary.
The algorithm gets a little weird if you’re summing the numbers to an odd number, though since there will be a left over number you have to deal with . By calculating 2S it works exactly the same in either case.
The constant barrage of Joe Rogan clips of idiots claming it was impossible to move these huge stones over those distances with the tech at the time was what drove me to disable YouTube shorts.
Honestly, the first and arguably most important step is recognizing how much of online content is specifically designed to get a reaction out of you, primarily in the form pissing you off.
What’s funny (I guess funny lol) is ever since I got my current job about 2.5 years ago, I no longer need to use social media. I am much, much happier without it. But I still get into little fights on forums and I really wish I didn’t. Every now and then I resolve to be less hostile, and things really do improve, but somehow I always get dragged back into old habits. But I’m a little hesitant to completely abandon things like Kbin because they are often my only window into events/what is going on/my hobbies. Idk what the answer is.
Well, the fact that you have the self awareness to realize is a great place to be. Not sure what to say other than try to treat your body with respect and your mind will follow.
I honestly I’m surprised how much of a problem this is for people. All I’ve done is made sure to hit the “not interested” type buttons on YouTube and tiktok whenever they pop up, and I’ve run into next to nothing after like 3 times of doing that. Sometimes I’ll watch something the algorithm thinks is adjacent to ragebait or alt-right bullshit so it’ll try to feed it to me, and after not-interested’ing the video it goes back to feeding me the stuff I actually want…
Do people just not use those features or is my experience with the algorithms really that different?
Did those trees, before there were decomposers, have access to nitrogen fixing bacteria? Where were they getting ammonium and nitrate?
Just stuff built up from lightning, nitrogen and oxygen?
Edit: Looks like land dwelling soil forming bacteria started in the Cambrian. Then, in the Ordovician the first land plants. Then, in the Silurian vascular plants and trees appeared.
The only book my mother wrote for (with several other colleagues), had her credited with her initials and her married surname (my father’s), from whom she divorced later. Happy times! :D
Yes. I felt pretty sorry for her when she showed me the book. This was one of the reasons I urged my (now ex) wife not to take my surname when we married.
Given how curious we are, I think being scared of aliens is odd. I would assume that a civilization capable of interstellar travel is fairly chill.
And a sufficiently advanced alien civilization could sterilise earth from the comfort of their home star system, so if advanced aliens wanted us dead, it would not be hard, we wouldn’t even see it coming.
I think the scary part stems from looking at ourselves. We’re well on our way “out there” but still kill each other in the cruellest ways. Our sadistic qualities only limited by our means to perpetrate them.
Hawkins shared his thoughts on this subject and, although less morbid, still quite scary.
A civilization capable of interstellar travel would be a lot more advanced then we are. If we but this in perspective, we as humans don’t really care about other species that much. Imagine a species that is more advanced tham we are compared to chimps. Some people respect chimps, but we keep them in zoos and destroy their living spaces. An interstellar civilization could see us even lower than that, just some primates living on a rock. They might not even think us intelligent, we only just have ‘understood’ quantum theory.
I think that is an overly bleak view. An interstellar civilization is likely on a similar evolutionary ladder spot as us and I would imagine that they would recognize this. I don’t think that there is much difference between us and them in that scenario, except how far we have developed our idea space. Supposedly with the help of such a civilization we would be able to accomplish the same feats as them in a fairly short time. No monkey is going to engineer rockets, no matter how long you try to teach them.
Ye, the civilization might see us as potential rivals even and to be exterminated before we reach their level. It would be very naive to think that any interaction with a more advanced species is gonna be positive for us
The difference between us and a mouse is only 50 million years. The difference between us and a smart ape is maybe only 200k years. Now imagine a civilisation that has been around for 1 billion years. And then apply the same exponential growth curve that life and technology have on earth. The distance between us and them could be absurdly huge.
There’s a Sci Fi trilogy about that. All aliens are omnicidal.
The main rule is “don’t ever get spotted by another civilization”. If another nearby civilization wants to conquer you, you could stop them by threatening to broadcast both our and their locations more broadly, a kind of mutually assured distruction.
They may have stupid politics like us and need us as a common enemy to unite their factions/be racist at. So even if theyre not naturally genocidal, they might choose to “for the greater good”. Plus our sweet sweet natural resources/scrap.
The best estimates of how many intelligent civilizations there should be suggest that the galaxy should be teeming with them. If any of them evolved mere millions of years before we did, given our pace of technological improvement they should have figured out interstellar travel by now, and they should be broadcasting communication across the galaxy like we’re doing. Yet we’ve detected nothing. Why?
A possible explanation is that an advanced civilization is exterminating all other civilizations, perhaps to avoid competition. It seems like a sensible approach to lie low until we can figure this out, just in case.
That is a solution, there are multiple other solutions all equally or more likely that don’t involve murderous aliens.
One just as out there would be a sort of galactic zoo - there is simply an agreement not to interact with intelligent life before they reach a certain step, say establish global unity or develop a certain tech.
It could be that we are in fact a statistical outlier or are simply wrong in our probability calculations.
It could be that intelligence develops but spacefaring is rare. It could be that intelligent life simply has a tendency to collapse before it gets there. It is certainly still possible for us and it is not like we are making super meaningful progress towards space colonisation.
It could be that there are not great viable interstellar travel options, almost every option we have thought of that makes sense time wise has big ifs attached to it assuming we have a good idea of physics. Of those probably relativistic travel is the most likely and even then it would take quite a decent chunk of time to span the galaxy, going to war on those timescales is basically non-sensical.
I expect that any civilisation capable of cooperating at scale to achieve meaningful interstellar travel would also be developed enough in ethics to most likely not pose a danger to us.
A civilisation capable of waging war like that is probably around a K2 civ and the idea that a single planet somehow threatens them is also silly. Even a fully K1 civ to them would be close to a stadium packed full on earth in terms of relative size.
Absolutely, there’s lots of possibilities. But I don’t think that negates the point that the most sensible approach to any unknown situation is to be cautious and lie low until you fully understand the situation.
Of course, flawed as we are, we’re not doing that, as we aren’t responding to other potential existential threats.
I went and looked this up, turns out drinking acetone isn’t as outright dangerous as I expected. Our bodies produce a little of the stuff when breaking down fat, into ketones. It’s only a problem when there’s too much of the stuff for the liver to process.
I don’t think your comment emphasizes enough how like drinking rubbing alcohol drinking acetone would be. Rubbing alcohol (isopropanol) is, in fact, metabolized directly to acetone when ingested. The acetone can be metabolized further, but a good chunk is also simply exhaled.
All right then, chemically and metabolically speaking, (this is hypothetical and I never have any intention of drinking rubbing alcohol or acetone), what is the maximum amount of these liquids a person could drink before it becomes dangerous?
¯_(ツ)_/¯ I was just trying to highlight a fun fact about how they act similarly metabolically.
But since you asked, according to wikipedia, the oral LD50s for acetone and isopropanol (taking average of values for rats, mice, and rabbits) are 4713 and 3655 mg/kg, respectively. Extrapolating to a 75 kg human, that’s 451 and 349 mL for a 50/50 shot at permanent night-night. For comparison, ethanol is ~7300 mg/kg -> 694 mL by the same metric.
Nothing probably compares to the sheer plastic waste of a large commercial kitchen. Everything comes in plastic from Cisco. And you wrap everything in plastic and just toss it over and over again.
Did you know the bite force of a hippo is 1820 psi? For comparison, the bite force of a lion is 650 psi, which could easily crush your rib cage as it can only withstand 630 pounds of force.
There is a method of execution known as pressing, which was the crushing of someone under immense weight. One famous example occurred during the Salem witch trials where a man, not a woman, got so sick of salems bullshit that he refused to talk when questioned and so the town tried to get a confession out of him by stacking rocks on top of him, with the only response being “more weight”. He eventually died from the crushing pressure of the rocks. Another famouse example involves an elephant crushing a person, though it was common to crush the limbs then the head.
The reason he refused to talk is that they were demanding he plead guilty or not guilty for being a witch. The accusers wanted his land, and if he was found guilty his land would be forfeited. But since he refused to plead, he couldn’t be legally found guilty, and his land was inherited by his kids. He was looking out for his family even if it meant a torturous death.
This is functionally a case of affirming the consequent or something similar. “Ball is life” is really expressing something more like “there is no life worth living except one involving ball”, so “fuck it we ball” is needed to keep living a worthwhile life if you assume that, but it’s not really an endorsement of living itself.
It’s like how, if I believe “drinking is the only reason I live”, saying “I want to drink” only endorses “I want to live” incidentally at best, rather than the two statements being equivalent. It’s like, in a mundane context, saying you want to eat. Eating is a condition of living, but the desire to eat is not identical to the desire to live, and a suicidal person can still be hungry and eat not to live but merely to relieve the pain of hunger. So too can the alcoholic lifestylist drink and the baller ball for the sake of their enjoyment of the respective activity (or aversion to how they feel without it) without there being a direct desire to live as such.
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