cynar

@cynar@lemmy.world

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cynar,

Some are actually welcoming, and provide a local API. That way your air-conditioning control isn’t web dependent.

Unfortunately, most are quite stupid about it, and insist on using their app. This voids any usefulness of having smart appliances. E.g. pulse a light in a room when the tumble dryer finishes or turn it on and off dependent on your rooftop solar’s output.

cynar,

One of the funnier ones is that the matrix actually did hacking right. It was also so quick you don’t notice it.

When Trinity hacks into the power station, it’s legit. She checks the software version, which shows an out of date version. She then uses a known flaw in that version to reset the password.

It’s the only bit of actual hacking in the movie. They obviously knew that geeks would be checking it frame by frame, so they actually did their homework on it.

cynar, (edited )

It might not be related, but they’ve found mold inside the reactor room of Chernobyl. Apparently it’s evolved a chlorophyll like molecule that captures gamma radiation. It’s literally living of the energy that makes the environment lethal to almost anything else (organic or electronic).

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus#:~:te….

Edit. Just checked and it’s not confirmed how it’s growing. They do know it grows significantly faster in a high radiation environment. They haven’t pinned down the exact biological mechanism.

Oh, and yes, it’s black in colour.

cynar, (edited )

I’ve never used corporal punishment, and I never will. Our worst case punishment is time-out (1 minute per year old). I still remember hearing about her reaction from her grandmother. The sheer horror on her face, when she discovered that nanny knew about time-outs!

Even timeouts generally aren’t needed. It’s been over half her lifetime since we last used it. Her respect and love for us is more than enough to enforce good behaviour. We actually have to be careful, the smallest bit of upset from us creates a disproportionate reaction in her. Knowing she’s disappointed mummy or daddy hurts her more than any amount of beating with fists (open or closed) could achieve.

Just to add.

If people do advocate (even jokingly) for spanking, I take it seriously. I point out I am using the best scientific knowledge we currently have, to achieve the best results for her. If they don’t immediately back down, with their tail between their legs, I point them at something like this :

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3447048/

I do try and be kind with the older generations however. They didn’t know better, and often we’re doing the best they could. That’s no excuse for not adapting their advice to the times however.

cynar,

They definitely are repeaters. I had issues with a Moe’s ZigBee dimmer. It turned out it was relaying off of an IKEA bulb. When that lamp got turned off at the switch, it killed the link. I ended up using a smart plug as a repeater.

What is Something Scientific that you just don't believe in at all?

EDIT: Let’s cool it with the downvotes, dudes. We’re not out to cut funding to your black hole detection chamber or revoke the degrees of chiropractors just because a couple of us don’t believe in it, okay? Chill out, participate with the prompt and continue with having a nice day. I’m sure almost everybody has something...

cynar,

The reason for this is that we tend to sleep deeper now than our ancestors. Because of this, we are more prone to roll onto a baby, and not wake up.

It can still be done, you just have to avoid things like alcohol, that stop you waking. You also need to make sure your sleeping position is safe. Explaining this to exhausted parents is unreliable, however. Hence the advice Americans seem to be given.

Fyi, if people want a halfway point, you can get cosleeping cribs. They attach to the side of the bed. Your baby can be close to you, while also eliminating the risk of suffocating them.

cynar,

A lot of the advice is almost insultingly obvious. You get treated like you have a single digit IQ. After a couple of months, I fully understand why we were treated like that! It’s a fight to keep your iq in double digits!

The baby shaking one is the big one. It’s obvious, you don’t shake your baby. It’s also obvious that they can be safe, even while screaming. After 2 hours of constant crying, combined with sleep deprivation, I fully understand why they reiterated not to shake your baby, the urge was alarmingly strong! It also made sense why they pointed out you could leave them to scream, if you really needed to. So long as they are clean safe and fed, 10 minutes down the garden is completely acceptable.

With the original advice, telling when it will apply to you is harder than you think. The default advice has to be to play it safe. Some can be deviated from, some can’t. Deviations must be consciously made however.

cynar,

It can be worth it to push through. It might just be for a sanity check. However, often, what is a huge issue to you, is far smaller to others. Once you start breaking it down, with someone who knows what they are doing, the problem ends up a lot smaller than it seemed.

cynar, (edited )

The conservatives make pledges to solve social issues, like homelessness, all the time. They almost never actually follow through. Instead they often act to make the problem “go away”, often to the detriment of those they claimed to want to help.

One of those pledges was to cut homelessness in half. However no extra money or resources were actually provided to do this. This sign is a protest of that (and many other) lies. At a glance, it’s one of their normal lies. It’s only when you read it more carefully your brain goes “wait, what?!?”.

cynar,

It is thought to be a safety system from our ape like ancestors. The system is designed to rapidly wake us, and make us latch on, if we start to fall. If you’re sleeping in a tree, this could be quite a critical response.

Unfortunately, sometimes, as we are falling asleep, the brain shuts down the senses etc in the wrong order. As our sense of balance shuts down, we can momentarily feel like we are falling. This triggers the previous response. Our muscles twitch fire, to try and latch on to something, along with a burst of adrenaline to get us awake. This is obviously less than ideal, if you are trying to get to sleep, in a nice warm bed.

I believe there are genetic components, but disrupted sleep is the most common cause. Overtiredness, disrupted circadian rhythms, or sleep disrupters (bright or blue light, caffeine alcohol etc) can all make it worse. If they are excessively common, they could be a symptom of a larger, more serious sleep condition (e.g. sleep apnea). Don’t stress about them, but don’t ignore them either, if they are disruptively common.

cynar,

This always bugs me. Quantum Mechanics isn’t actually that difficult. It has some nasty maths, yes, but that’s mostly slog work, rather than an impossibility. 90% of it is the Schroedinger’s equation + boundary conditions.

The main issue is that you have to abandon the particle model of reality. This is deeply engrained into our brains. If you try and understand it as “Particles + extras”, you will fail. You have to think of it as “Waves + extras”. It then, suddenly makes logical sense.

It does have some interesting implications, however, about deeper reality however. E.g. what exactly IS decoherence, from a physical point of view. Also, what is physically happening, dimensionally, when a wave is complex, or even pure imaginary. These are beyond the scope of QM however.

cynar,

One of my professors, at uni, put it best. You should be able to second guess your calculator.

Also, it’s often faster to do an approximate calculation in your head, rather than getting out a calculator (or phone) and plugging the numbers in.

112 x 9.

By approximation, it’s 100ish by 10ish, so around 1000. This can often be enough. (E.g is a current below 1500mA?)

The calculator should give 1008. If it claims it is 10,080, or 12.4, you know you’ve screwed up, and should recheck your calculations. If you can’t do it in your head, then you can’t check for issues.

cynar,

Weren’t they planning on herding everyone to the roof and blowing it up?

The plan was to do that to cover their getaway. Herd the hostages up to the roof, nominally to stop snipers while they got in a helicopter. Then flow it all up. By the time they sorted the body parts and realized they weren’t there, they would be gone and safe by a different route.

This is also why getting the detonators back was so important. Without them, they couldn’t blow the roof.

cynar,

There’s actually a genetic bias on it. It can be overridden, but you’ll always feel a bit burnt out from it. It also changes with age (teenagers are the latest, getting earlier as you age.

cynar,

Unfortunately, most life will likely be Carbon based, in some manner (synthetic life could be different). The key is forming the large, complex molecules that make life, life. You need an element that can form chains. You also need to attach things to those chains.

The only 2 atoms that can do this are carbon and silicon. Both can form “organic” type molecules. Unfortunately, silicon has an additional reaction pathway that makes the chain easily break down in the presence of water. The conditions for silicon based life are so odd as to be unlikely to happen on the scale needed by natural processes. There might be some work arounds we don’t know about, they would be extremes.

Synthetic life is another story. Once you have active control over your environment, a number of other options open up. The first step is the kicker however, getting from abiotic natural rubble to a working replicator.

There’s a reason we are looking in Goldilocks zones, they are the most likely environment for the only process that seems viable.

cynar,

I’ve also heard theories that our empathy is actually a hunting tool. If we were to lose our prey, say in the brush around a water source, we could put ourselves in its mind. From there, we could empathize and predict their actions, and so follow them, even without tracks. From the prey’s perspective, they finally lost us and escaped, they are exhausted and overheating, but alive. Suddenly the predictor re-emerges, and the chase is back on.

Vegetarianism being a fairly unique human trait suddenly makes sense, from this perspective. A lion doesn’t really need to get into the mind of their prey, and so empathising with them is actually a negative. For humans it was a critical tool. It’s only secondary that we turned it on each other, allowing for super-tribes to function.

cynar,

It depends what you are hiding from. If you want to avoid notice from random encounters, you would want to head out to sea. So long as you’re over the horizon from any shipping lanes, you’re as close to invisible as you can get.

If your goal is to evade an active military search, you want clutter, and a lot of it. Military radar can sweep vast areas quickly. Satellites can spot ships at sea, so long as the sky is clear enough. Islands and coastline can mess with these however. Get into an out of the way bay, and throw up camo netting, and your ship is now just another bit of rock to the satellites, and it’s part of the noise to radar. The cost of this cover is that it is also attractive to random tourist boats, or fishing boats.

cynar,

Talking from the other side, it’s far harder than you think. Children can be incessant. They seem to be energy vampires. They suck the energy out of their parents, then funnel it right back, in the form of questions, chatter or desire for amusement. Maintaining the correct mindset is absolutely exhausting.

One of the hardest things is balancing being a “parent” with being “you”. If you try and just be a parent, you will burn out, and be a REALLY shitty parent. You need the balance between the two.

I don’t begrudge parents grabbing a few minutes of “me” time, when they can. Unfortunately, some don’t (or can’t) properly plan it into their lives. They then burn out and just grab whatever they can. This leads to the sort of behaviour you mentioned.

cynar,

I didn’t really expect them to answer. 90% of the time you just get to watch them scuttle off to hide, like cockroaches from the light. 9% of the time you get soundbite diarrhea, which is easy to debunk.

The last 1% can be interesting however. A well thought out counter argument to something I believe. It is a good check, to make sure I’m not the one in the bubble. It also lets me understand those on the other side of a debate. It’s reached the point where 1% is being generous, however.

cynar,

Can you give an example? All the ones I’ve seen are either from the (far) right, or a direct reaction to the (far) right bucking traditional rules.

cynar,

Unfortunately, that is so stripped down that it’s impossible to analyse it in any reasonable way. It sounds like more run-of-the-mill corruption rather than bucking tradition though. Corruption is a problem of humanity, rather than just one side. Though even that seems a lot more prevalent and egregious in the right, right now.

cynar,

So long as it’s done humainly, and properly, eating horse is no worse than eating beef. The only main difference is things like not letting horses that have been treated with Bute etc into the human food supply.

It’s quite hard to justify being against one, but not the other.

cynar,

The steps actually mattered.

The first superconductors were weird, and required EXTREME conditions to function (generally liquid helium). These allowed for the first MRI machines, and some other tech.

“Type 2” superconductors changed the game. They function at far higher temperatures. This means that liquid nitrogen is enough to keep them functional. These allowed for the large scale roll out of smaller, cheaper MRI machines. You no longer needed a small factory to keep them from self destructing.

The holy grail was room temperature superconductors. These wouldn’t need special conditions to function. Unfortunately, they didn’t account for pressure. It turns out that superconductors can be made roon temperature, if the pressure is EXTREME. While this is very interesting from a science perspective, it’s completely useless to technology improvement.

Hense the newer category, room temperature and pressure. It’s what the holy grail should have been, but no one accounted for the pedants.

If this material performs as claimed, it’s a big deal. A lot of sci-fi like tech suddenly becomes viable. Much of it centered around power generation, storage, and distribution.

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