Fun fact, they were going to build one in the US crossing the borders of LA, TX, AR. They even dug out the damn hole, but they shit canned the whole project so now we’re just left with a random giant circular hole underground.
Edited AK to AR. That would have been a bit excessive.
Alas, I don’t think he will much care to build a subway-but-shitty between one farm outside Waxahachie, TX, to another farm outside of Waxahachie, TX. Not enough density of mouthbreathing Elon stans there.
Thanks for clearing that up, I thought I was finished or near completion. Glad they decided to stop production when they did but sucks that we didn’t get it.
Zounds, a collider over 3000 miles wide would have been quite the achievement! Here’s hoping they get back to it; that’s gotta be worth a ton of science points.
As a geologist who works in the Appalachians… They’re cool af.
Nothing is more surreal than being a geologist. Just today I was standing on a dirt road in the middle of farmers field. Looking at the ground is an innocuous little outcrop of boring looking rocks. But those rocks erupted at the bottom of a back arc basin off the coast of Laurentia, was buried by ocean sediment for ages, had an entire ISLAND of rock thrust onto it, and then buried 10s of kilometers deep. The history one rock can tell is amazing.
As a non-geologist living next to Lake Diefenbaker (the reservoir formed by damming the South Saskatchewan River), I also like geological history.
I have a standard reply for when I’m asked why we chose to move to this “treeless wasteland”. “I look out at the flat horizon and see how the glaciers planed the earth the way a woodworker flattens a board. I look around me at the river breaks and see how the meltwater from retreating glaciers carved the earth away into shapes that defy imagination.” I don’t know accurate any of that is, but it fits my mental model of what I was taught in high school.
(What we call the river breaks are twisted and braided networks of coulees, some with sides so steep as to require mountaineering equipment. Most still run with meltwater in the spring.)
I have started daydreaming of a career change to geology. There are just so many unanswered questions and its not like space or physics were these questions are tinyor super far away. You can just walk upto a geologic puzzle and hit it with a hammer.
That is not exactly true. My dad was a geology professor. About half his students ended up in oil and gas. The other half were employed as city planners, teachers, consulting geologists, and in , civil engineering firms, environmental services firms, mining and others.
Not sure if my username gave it away or not, but I’m really into applied mathematics. I’m a physics major right now, & while I don’t immediately see myself studying this in grad school, I think that the physics of Volcanism/Plate Tectonics is extremely fascinating. It certainly looks at the history of the world through a very different lens, but I wouldn’t write it off completely!! The physics of our Earth is a beautiful, beautiful thing. :)
Lol wildly exaggerated. Largest height difference on Earth’s surface is 13 miles (including underwater) vs. the 8,000 mile diameter. To quote NDGT, “The Earth is smoother than a cue ball”
People are actually in this thread discussing how feasible this is as if it were a real plan down to calculating specific costs and supporting them with URLs.
I mean, it’s a bummer when the bougie burger places do this, but when the taco trucks and teriyaki shops near me started costing more than $2 a taco or $10 for a plate of yakisoba, I knew shit was getting hard out there.
Just saying the concept works, ppl DO want a simply Sammy for a buck and the ingredients are less as 30% of sales price even with some real decent toppings. But renovation (and extreme rent) only allows multi nationals to compete at busy places like city central stations etc.
Gaslamp district in San Diego had a cafeteria like this years ago, guessing it’s no longer a thing, but simple cheap menu would have steady customers, maybe profitable, it’s the business development people who would oppose.
Makes me wonder what people are paying for bread, Kraft cheese (or a knockoff of the same) and butter/margarine.
Seriously, a single grilled cheese shouldn’t be more than $1, it should be much less… At least in materials… The cost of grilling it and cleaning up and whatnot should still be really cheap. Even if you wrap the sandwiches in wax/parchment paper or whatever and serve it, you should still be able to make a profit per sandwich. Whether you would be better off doing this rather than getting a job at McDonald’s or whatever… That will depend on how popular the food truck is…
There used to be a vending machine in a hosiptal near me that would heat up a premade grilled cheese sandwich for £2. Being a vending machine in a hospital, they had to be making at least enough to cover the costs plus wastage. I’d say that somewhere with high footfall, especially on a cold day, you could make at least some profit from this.
Can a leaf detect the difference in blue light coming from above and green light surrounding it? Can it detect the green and brown light surrounding it? The red light reflecting off a bird sitting above it?
If it’s sensitive enough to the different wavelengths a leaf wouldn’t really be all that much different from an eye.
Its ancient dusty, pre-covid exposure memories, but I took a course as a graduate student covering the quantum physics of photosynthesis, and that’s https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-phyto-080417-045931. In the above image, the peaks on the left at around 400-500 can be thought of as blue light, and the peaks around 640-800 can be thought of as red light. Both of these wavelengths of light are involved in photosynthesis, which you can think of as in a manner, solar fusion in reverse. The plant has to take the light from the sun (the product of fusion), and get that energy reattached to a molecule. In fact, iirc, its basically the same electron orbital diagram. And it does make sense, because physically, that is what is happening.
These days I do much more boring stuff, but I always loved photosynthesis. Its probably one of my favorite chemical reactions. Nah fuck that it is my favorite chemical reaction.
So like, yeah. Plants have a TON of information about their environment. Granted, their photosensors don’t have lenses, but they are constantly gathering and reacting to information about the quantity, quality, and locations of light. Afa resolution? Thats like, actually a super interesting question. Not having a lens is a big drawback.
He drinks water and fuses the hydrogen into helium. This needs some deuterium to start off, which is why godzillas only occur in nuclear testing sites.
Their whaling fleet is a cover for his late night snacks. As near apex predators they have the highest concentration of radiation from Fukushima Daichi. Kinda like DDT and bald eagles.
But luckily we have Gojiro which is a natural sink for radiation 🥳👌🏽✨
I’m not even sure what he’s talking about. Open access journals are the ones who charge authors to publish.
If you publish in a journal that has closed access, there is generally no fee to publish. If you want your paper to be open access, you can tack on an additional open access fee so that your paper doesn’t end up behind a paywall. The last time I looked - and this was several years ago - the going rate for making your paper open access in a closed access journal was about $2-3k. We always budgeted for publication fees when we were putting together our funding proposals.
The fee structure is similar for open access journals, except that there’s not a choice about paying them. For researchers whose work isn’t grant funded, it generally means they’re paying out of pocket, unless their institution steps in.
I had a paper published in a small but (in its field) prestigious journal, and the editor explained to me that he only charges people who can afford it, and uses those funds to cover the costs of the journal. He explained that he had a paper from a researcher who couldn’t cover the publishing fee, and he let me know that I was helping out the other person, too.
What I don’t understand is how anyone how has gone through academia doesn’t know this.
Of course you can put it anywhere you’d like. Services like arXiv specialize in hosting pre-prints of published papers as well as white papers that only have an institutional association.
The problem is that the job of an academic is to publish. That’s how you build credibility and seniority. For it to count as a “published paper” it needs to have undergone peer review so that the people who want to read/cite the paper at least have the confidence that it’s at least been reviewed by other experts in the field.
There are some “journals” that will publish anything as long as they get their fees. Most academics are wise to that by now, but it can still impress people in business for whom a pub is a pub.
This guy probably lives in his own small world. If you want to publish in PLOS as a researcher from say Turkey or Uzbekistan or any other country where the value of your money is nil, you might easily have to pay your yearly salary or half of your funding to get a single paper published.
If you publish in a journal that has closed access, there is generally no fee to publish.
What field are you in? In the life sciences, there’s normally a fee to publish closed-access and a higher one for open-access. My last paper was open access and costed about 3500, compared to 1500 pay walled.
My background is in theoretical biology, but I was mostly publishing in public health, physics, and computer science journals. We paid for every paper because I feel very strongly about research being made available to everyone, especially in the case of publicly funded work. I just make sure to budget for it.
I had a couple of papers in one of the PLOS journals, which afaik are fee-only pubs.
It’s been about ten years since I’ve had to worry about publishing, as o decided to sell out and join a commercial company, and they’re pretty averse to publishing. My information might be out of date.
I do think the academic publishing industry is atrocious, however, and I have always encouraged people to check on sites like arxiv, the personal web page of the lead author, and as a final attempt contacting the lead author directly. Most journals that I dealt with permit authors to upload preprints to sites like arxiv, and if you do it with your final revision the only difference would be the formatting. Of course, that doesn’t count as a publication for academic purposes, and it doesn’t get around paying fees for the journals that charge them, but it is an avenue for people to make their research more globally available for free. I’m sure you know of that, I’m just mentioning it for students looking for a copy of a paper.
Depends. Many journals in Evolution/Ecology are still free to publish in non-OA. It’s becoming rarer though because many journals are switching to full (paid!) open access.
I am currently trying to publish in the European Journal of Psychology (EJoP), which is Open Access only. The fee is 750€, if I’m not mistaken, and you can apply for fee reduction. I have no idea how lenient/strict they are with that, or how much effort that would be. The department is covering the costs, obviously.
It depends on the journal. I’ve only published in medical related journals, but some journals don’t charge a fee if the article remains closed access. Some journals just have an embargo period, so you may be free to republish to pubmed central or something similar after a year or two. Open access of course always costs money, or more if they do charge a publishing fee. A lot of nih grants have requirements to make it open access within a year, so some publishers at least are just embargoing for a year now.
Tangential, this is also the best explanation why in Mass Effect the Asari, Batarians and Quarians look so human-like and many other species are sharing similarities with humans: A few cycles ago, a species adept at bio-engineering took special interest in those primates from E-arth and just asked themselves: “What would happen, if we mix their DNA with every other species in the galaxy?”
This belief that Asari use their psychic powers to manipulate people is based solely on a scene of three drunk dudes sitting around a table and watching an Asari stripper. I’d hardly call that conclusive evidence.
Also, if that theory were true, it’d have knock-on effects that quickly spiral out of control. If Asari would use psychic powers to make everyone believe they look like the viewers’ race, then what happens to recorded media? What happens if anyone ever decides to draw how Asari look to them, only to then find out that others see Asari completely different? What happens if you try to touch an Asari? Do Elcor see Asari as Elcor-like? And Hanar see Asari as floating squids? How would that work with the statue on Thessia? And what range would those psychic powers have? And if those psychic powers had a lasting effect on the brain of those affected, how come no doctor or medical computer ever noticed that? And what do people see that watch media of Asari, but had never met Asari in real life?
No, I think the scene in question just shows three drunk guys seeing what they want to see.
If some lady brought out a conversation that fucking awesome, I wouldn’t want a second date either. I’d fucking propose. Well, would have. There’s very little sexier than enthusiasm and a love of knowledge.
And no, not literally propose, and it would hopefully turn into a second date, but that’s no fucking fun to open up with in a comment, ffs, you fucking pedant.
WHOA - The above comment was having edited. This was done incel bot 2000 type of content before and now it’s all slick and not at all in the previous vein of it.
For the incels, it didn’t used to say it was a woman.
2nd edit - the above comment wasn’t edited at all, I’m just drunk and stupid. Still tho - BAM INCEL
Yeah, that’s not my experience at all. Men say they want a girlfriend / wife talking about stuff like that, but it’s just not how they choose their partners.
But here’s what that kind of enthusiasm means in general; passion. Anybody that can love a section of knowledge so much that they can gush about it is a person that can have true passion for knowledge overall.
That’s a sign of an active, usually quick, mind. And that is something that anyone with sense wants in a partner.
I don’t deny that people put women into a little box that says “not of equal mind”, if only by subconscious absorption of that behavior. It happens all the damn time, even by other women.
So, it’s obvious that plenty of men are going to be idiots that default to quiet or otherwise not enthusiastic women. And I’ve seen plenty of lesbians do the same.
But, a year or two down the line, they stop talking to each other, and things turn into this empty, dull rut. They turn into a caricature of a relationship where nobody is truly happy.
That idea is horrible to me. And, I don’t think I’m that big of an outlier. Not the majority for sure, but it isn’t like the idea of wanting to partner with someone that can find joy in learning about something and sharing that knowledge is that unusual. I’ve known too many men that picked a partner with that kind of personality and mind.
As a woman with that level of enthusiasm about niche science info (I got a degree as a science communicator, because I literally can’t help myself sharing interesting info when it seems a good time to do so)…
It’s very very difficult to find people who aren’t intimidated by it, or put off by the enthusiasm about something they don’t begin to understand/care about. Of all the people I talk to randomly, maybe 1 out of 30 people actually likes the enthusiasm past the first 5 min. And even that 5 min can be a stretch. That is to say, they tolerate it, they don’t tend to engage with it or encourage it. Mostly you get “oh, that’s neat”. Which is a great way to shut the entire conversation down, cuz where do you go from there?
I tend to agree that enthusiasm is interpersonally attractive, it’s why I make small talk by asking what thing the other person finds interesting that they learned recently. (Not something they think I want to know, something they are interested in). I don’t think the majority of the population views it that way, though. They only think enthusiasm is good if it’s a subject they already care about in some way. And they don’t want to share theirs in case it’s not something you are interested in, even if all you actually are interested in is whatever sparks their passion.
I guess it could be my area, but I’ve been a lot of places (mostly within the same country ofc) and found about the same whether rural or urban, north or south. Also I don’t think my observation is because I’m a woman, but it could be a contributing factor, idk.
It’s not about them though, it’s about you, and you can’t expect science enthusiasts to submit to the will of ignorant bullies and hide who they are and what they care about to appease other people.
In fact, people like you have fallen for the ruse that science has to submit to ignorant people in hopes of convincing them to not be ignorant, and you can’t see how deeply you’ve been manipulated. It’s a power play. They do it to emotionally blackmail you into not correcting them so they can have power over the conversation.
I’ll take being called a know-it-all arrogant ass than allow obviously abusive, manipulative people to push your’s and society’s buttons in an obvious social dominance power play so they can do and say whatever they want without any consequences.
You misunderstand my understanding that most people don’t care, for being deterred from doing it.
No no. It’s a compulsion. I don’t have a choice but to share things, even at my own social detriment. I mean obviously I could subvert who I am fundamentally for the comfort of society, but that’s a lot of work I’m not willing to do when sharing is more fun, and more rewarding when it does hit. That’s why I got the science communication degree. To facilitate sharing whatever I know with whomever I meet in a way they can relate to. I take that skill very seriously. I was good at it before I got the degree.
I know some people stop sharing when beaten down by society, but I’m not one. When things get awkward I say “my bad I’m a science communicator by trait and training and have trouble not sharing cool stuff as a result” to diffuse the social pressure to conform. It works well enough.
It makes building real relationships more challenging than I assume your average individual has, but the connections that are made under those conditions tend to be really good ones so tradeoff I guess.
Okay, you’ve got the right spirit. Just wanted to be clear.
Most American intellectuals are beaten down through years of emotional manipulation and abuse they’re never educated on the true nature of, both because most people don’t truly understand it and those that do don’t want others to so they can’t be stopped.
All good friend. I wouldn’t call myself an intellectual, though… I’m just a person with specific interests like everyone else. Separating people by, essentially, educational attainment… is a mistake. I barely learned shit in college, I just got a piece of paper saying I was good at what I was already good at so I could get a job (which I haven’t yet, and it’s been a solid while becaue corporate bs is bs and heaven forbid you have gaps! but I can tell people what my degree is for and that’s enough for conversation).
My life has been a series of traumatic events that forcibly removed most of my blinders, and I see things as clearly as anyone really can, washed with propaganda as we all are… and it’s fucking miserable enough to wish I was entirely ignorant. So much easier.
But the rock has been the scientific method, it’s an amazing thing that gives us the tools to share things confidently! And I love telling people about the most recent thing I learned that was based on it. It is so helpful to say “hey what about this cool thing!” And when they go “hmm idk” you can describe the study and results, like being a living scicomm book, and then show them the actual study.
Clearly so, as you taught me a new definition - vulgarization - the act or process of making something, or of something becoming, better known and understood by ordinary people.
I appreciate that. Thanks! :) in that definition (and the more traditionally used one) I’m a vulgar mf!
Unless you want to know about like magnetic tornadoes on the sun or how sponges are colonies of cells often using glass/silicate compounds in various shapes as a common skeleton (wouldn’t want to bathe with those!! But each species has their own unique structure!), I haven’t much off the top of my head without a good conversation to spark some back-of-the brain latent info that’s stored and conversationally relevant. I’m a steel trap for niche science stuff, and it often takes a good conversation to bring it out. How else do you know what info is worth sharing?
Astronomy is one of my bigger interests, but I don’t know about magnetic tornadoes on the sun. Is that a regular occurrence ? Is the naming a callback to regular tornadoes because they form the same way or something ? I would suppose they’re magnetic fields that take on a helicoidal shape. Is that possible ?
Concerning sponges : just like coral !!
How else do you know what info is worth sharing?
I wouldn’t know… when you send me off on an interest of mine, I lose all track of social cues, and I tend to go on and on and on,…
They aren’t uncommon persey, it’s just another form of solar prominance, or material lifted above the surface by magnetic field liness. However, the tornado-like appearance rather than a full arc of material that connects to the surface in 2 places is rather uncommon, and it’s even possible that it’s an artifact of the way the sun is photographed (the lenses filter based on temperature, essentially, and material further from the surface may cool to the point it doesn’t get picked up with any of the filters, making it effectively invisible), or the angle at which the photos are taken in relation to the prominence (if we are looking at it head on, we wouldn’t see the second anchor point).
How they form is an ongoing mystery with many models, like all solar prominences, and it probably isn’t disconnected on one end like a cyclone would be, but visually it resembles a tornado, and the material does seem to rotate around the magnetic field lines, much the same way a tornado rotates in air. We see the same rotation in more typical coronal loops, which are what cause coronal mass ejections when it releases. They are absolutely massive when they do form, 10+ stacked earths in size, and can last days, weeks, months.
It’s one of my go-to water-testing facts because almost everyone likes the sun, is at least vaguely familiar with tornadoes, and can envision a “10 earth tall tornado of plasma on the sun”. Which is a damned cool image to envision - the reality is also spectacular but a bit less so.
The one linked below is actually from March this year, which is neat! I didn’t even know it happened again! This one was 14 earths high and exploded at the end of its cycle! How cool! I hope they got some really good data on how it works! I’ll have to do some looking :)
Mesmerizing… the pictures in the article are breathtaking too. I remember looking at a real time feed of the sun as shot by a specialized telescope in southern France,-which was always pointed at the sun during the day- and learning that it rotates faster around the equator than it does near the poles. Before then, my mental picture of the sun was that of a naively solid object, like a rocky planet.
Observation biases like you mention are fascinating. Because in astronomy we can never move around to see things from an angle, or remove an obstacle from our field of view, we have to get exceedingly clever. I assume if the sun ejects matter in our direction, and then this matters gets cold, there’s no way to observe it? -isn’t it going to get overblown by the sheer power of the sun surface behind it?
Yeah, the coolest thing about the sun, imo, is that while a particle of light only takes a few minutes to reach earth, it can take millions of years to escape the tumultuous interior of the sun to radiate in the first place. That activity is what prevents the sun from collapsing under its own gravity.
We can’t change our earthly perspective, no, but we do have numerous satellites that do have the ability to see certain angles we can’t currently on earth. We can’t see the backside of it (from our current perspective, it rotates and we orbit so we do see all of it), really, because we’d never get good signal from our craft, but we can get some decent side angles.
We just don’t necessarily have the tools to see what we want to know with those specifically, but we put out great new tools on a regular basis, so it’s very possible they will make new tools just for that purpose.
As for the other question about not being able to detect it - not really. The stuff we have focused on the sun mostly works with hot material, but the universe itself is very cold, and we can detect things from every wavelength we are aware of, it’s just a matter of what’s usually focused on the sun specifically to catch these things.
(Disclaimer for anyone who might read this: do not ever look at the sun through a telescope without a certified solar filter, you will burn out your eye. Guaranteed.) If you have a telescope, on a sunny day you can watch the sun indirectly by facing the eyepiece toward paper or a wall. It works like a projector. It’s black and white just because it’s bright out when you project it, but you can watch sunspots and stuff. :) and now is a great time to do it a we are approaching the solar maximum, when the most interesting things tend to happen.
Ah, right. (There’s also the fact that we can take avantage of the parallax caused by our orbit. Just remembered.)
I guess we’d need some sort of relay if we really wanted to communicate with a craft orbiting opposite to us relative to the sun.
Yeah, the coolest thing about the sun, imo, is that while a particle of light only takes a few minutes to reach earth, it can take millions of years to escape the tumultuous interior of the sun to radiate in the first place.
Whaaat ! you mean photons bounce about inside the sun for this long?? but how would we measure the time it takes for a given particle to escape it? I imagine this number comes from a theoretical model?
Well, as much as I hate to say it, most people are so busy looking for their turn to talk that it wouldn’t matter how interesting what you’re saying is.
Which, I get. I’m not immune to eventually losing attention to unfamiliar material. But that’s why you listen; you pay attention and ask about what they just said if you aren’t familiar with it. If nothing else, let your brain perk away while you listen and wait for it to ring the bell of association! Until you get into some really arcane subjects, there’s almost always going to be a point where something relates to something you already know, so it’s just a matter of being patient.
But, sadly, I think you’re right. Women simply get ignored, even by other women. Doesn’t matter how much they know, how high their degree of expertise is. People tend to rank anything coming out of a woman’s mouth as less important. It certainly isn’t the entirety, but I would agree it contributes, as you said.
Not uncommon for stem majors to have poor English. My freshman brochure for my engineering college had “enlish 20”. Which I found ironic they misspelled the spelling class lmao
My late partner studied English as an undergrad and when he applied for his MA his email said “Please find attached my application for the MA in Creative Writning” and it makes me sad he’s no longer around for me to relentlessly mock him about it.
I run languagetool locally, and it’s actually really good, but the browser extension is closed source even though I can point it at a local server, I don’t know if it’s logging what I type.
But libreoffice has built in support, which is great.
I’m aware but I don’t care too much lol. It’s helped me quite a bit and you don’t want to see the alternative. I have enough trouble expressing myself, I’ll take the help as I can get it.
While that may be true, it’s a reasonable indicator of a person’s capacity to hear new information and then incorporate that into practice. If they’ve been told that they’re spelling a word wrong but then either can’t integrate that new knowledge or actively choose not to follow it, you’ve got someone who is either wilfully ignorant or lacks some capacity to integrate new information. Either that, or dyslexia.
Also, it genuinely depends on the work you do. My role has me writing up anywhere between 5-10,000 words worth of reports per day - proper spelling and grammar is key for competence in this role. I’ve seen reports where seemingly innocuous spelling mistakes completely change the meaning of text. Writing ‘can’ instead of ‘can’t’ and vice versa is an immediate example that comes to mind. I know this is an engineering grad, but clear communication is important in every role that includes managers, teams or other stakeholders.
Dyslexia is pretty common. Written language wasn’t common among the human population till a few hundred years ago, using that as your measure of intelligence is a very poor fit. No it doesn’t say anything about their ability to incorporate new information. Judging people based on spelling is just not a good indicator for anything except for the very narrow task of spelling and doesn’t say anything meaningful about their intelligence in other areas. Using it as a way to discriminate in the workplace is especially bad as your are just being needlessly discriminatory to neurodivergent individuals. Neurodivergent people are constantly gatekept from promotions by neurotypicals for shallow surface indicators that actually have no bearing on their ability to perform in the role. It’s just ableism.
I never stated nor implied that spelling and grammar are a marker of intelligence - just a marker of being able to retain and use simple information. This was absolutely directed towards neurotypical people, and I probably should have mentioned dyslexia as an example of where this logic doesn’t follow.
It needs to be used to discriminate in fields that require abundantly clear communication urgently. I’m a child protection caseworker who does nothing but write up reports all day; if I had dyslexia I’d need serious accommodations to be able to perform the role at the level expected by the taxpayer who pays my salary. It absolutely can be done, but they’d likely need to hire a whole other person just to scribe. Have a look through my comment history; I’m well aware of dyslexia and its effects as I used to scribe for a friend in uni.
I quite enjoy resting a thought upon the pronunciation of a misspelt word. Not to mock the occurrence of the mistake but to enjoy the novelty of the familiarly unfamiliar. Geospatically speaking it provides a moment’s grammatical geospatical sabbatical.
This is in a similar lexical vein to the recent Lemmy post about enjoying nich names.
I don’t know why I’m about to submit this reply as it’s utter nonsense…
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