booly
@booly@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on "Theory" of Evolution (SMBC) 2 weeks ago:
We have tons of evidence that it happened but our models for explaining and predicting it are bad at consistently and reliably explaining everything we’ve already seen, and each new discovery seems to break those models even more.
The theory is the model trying to explain how it works. The fact, though, is that we have evidence showing that it did happen, even if we don’t have a unified theory of how it happened.
Imagine a car crash site, where the cars have definitely crashed, but everyone has different debates about what caused the crash. Imagine further that the specifics of any person’s explanation has a few inconsistencies with what we see. So we’d have the fact that a car crash happened, but lousy theories explaining how it happened.
- Comment on "Theory" of Evolution (SMBC) 2 weeks ago:
So anybody who says dark matter doesn’t exist is plain wrong, the discrepancies are there plain as day.
There’s dark matter, the real thing that exists and we can “see”.
No, we have observations that are consistent with the existence of matter that does interact gravitationally with regular matter, but does not appear to interact with light or electromagnetic forces. It’s not like any matter we know about, other than the fact that it seems to have gravity.
General relativity works really well to explain matter in the solar system. Bigger than that, you have to use something else. The general consensus is that dark matter exists, but it’s not strictly proven, as there are alternative theories.
Then, even bigger than that, dark matter alone isn’t enough, you need dark energy to explain some observations, if you assume that cosmological constants are constant. If it turns out that they’re not truly universally constant, we might need to modify some theories (including the proposed existence of dark matter and dark energy).
- Comment on "Theory" of Evolution (SMBC) 2 weeks ago:
Then there’s the theory of gravity, this is our attempt to explain why gravity exists and why it does the things it does.
Not just the why, but also the what. We didn’t observe gravitational waves until 2015. People have proposed the existence of dark matter and dark energy because observed gravity doesn’t behave as our models would predict at certain cosmological scales.
- Comment on Hero 4 weeks ago:
Science was political in non-capitalistic societies, as well. That’s the point of my second paragraph: science requires resources and however a society steers resources to productive uses, a scientist will need to advocate for their research in order for it to get done.
- Comment on Hero 4 weeks ago:
To put it bluntly, science costs money, and persuading people who control money to spend that money is itself a skill.
Or, zooming out, science requires resources: physical commodities, equipment, the skilled labor of entire teams. The most effective way to marshal those resources is with money, and management/sales skills are necessary to get those resources working together in concert.
- Comment on Boring ass planet 1 month ago:
not meant to be consistent with the human eye.
Even then, postprocessing is inevitable.
As the white/gold versus blue/black dress debate showed, our perception of color is heavily influenced by context, and is more than just a simple algorithm of which rods and cone cells were activated while viewing an image.
- Comment on Anon revisits early youtube 1 month ago:
Yeah, plenty of Gen Z memes still make me laugh. They’re just in different forms, including some video “templates” where you just slap some captions on characters in the same scene:
- Starship troopers “I’m doing my part” montage interrupted with Tim Robinson "I didn’t do shit!"
- Diary of a Wimpy Kid scene with kids auditioning from by singing Total Eclipse of the Heart, giving way to some kid who’s actually good.
Are they really that different from some high quality gifs or deep fried memes from the late 2010’s, advice animals from the early 2010’s, demotivational posters or absurd flash animations from the 2000’s, or joke websites from the 90’s?
People will always be funny, and some internet jokes will start fresh before being run into the ground. Remember the ones you like, and then forget the ones you don’t.
- Comment on geoengineering 2 months ago:
I gotta imagine making the Sahara Desert habitable is a lot easier than making Mars habitable. The Sahara at least has breathable atmosphere, a 24 hour day, solar intensity that our plants are well adapted to using, and is relatively close to resupply from population centers on Earth.
- Comment on Anon learns about nuts 2 months ago:
Almonds are a stone fruit, too. It’s just that the part we eat is inside the pit. Ever notice how almonds still in the shell kinda look like a peach pit?
Peaches and plums used to be cherry sized, too (and cherries are stone fruits as well, but selective breeding got the fruit-to-pit ratio better for peaches/plums/apricots/nectarines).
So some recipes call for processing cherry pits, and the flavor is pretty close to almond extract. Because almond extract is just bitter almonds processed in a similar way.
- Comment on degree in bamf 3 months ago:
I agree.
I point out that pretty much everyone in that group experiences it, so even those who aren’t in that disadvantaged group should show some empathy towards the experiences of others, that we may never directly encounter ourselves. Part of that empathy, of course, is to provide support and structures for reducing the likelihood that these things happen, and mitigating them when they do happen.
- Comment on degree in bamf 3 months ago:
these people actually exist
The way it’s been explained to me is that so much of the negative interactions in life come from a tiny, tiny number of offenders who manage to be shitty to dozens and dozens of people. So anyone who has to interact with many different people will inevitably encounter that shitty interaction, while most of us normies would never actually behave in that way.
Of the literally thousands of times I’ve interacted with a server or cashier, I’ve never yelled at one. But talk to any server or cashier, and they’ll all have stories of the customer who yelled at them. In other words, it can be simultaneously true that:
- Almost all servers and cashiers get yelled at by customers.
- Very, very, few customers actually yell at servers or cashiers.
In other words, our lived experiences are very different, depending on which side of that interaction we might possibly be on.
When I talk to women in male dominated fields, basically every single one of them has shitty stories about sexist mistreatment. It’s basically inevitable, because they are a woman who interacts with literally hundreds or thousands in their field. And even if I interact with hundreds or thousands of women in that same field, just because I don’t mistreat any of them doesn’t mean that my experienced sample is representative.
- Comment on Are smart door locks more or less secure than traditional door locks? 9 months ago:
I’ve seen it for keypads that have to send a signal to an actuator located elsewhere, but I think the typical in-door deadbolt (where the keypad is mere millimeters from the motor itself) wouldn’t have the form factor leaving the connection as exposed to a magnet inducing a current that would actually actuate the motor.
Most of LPL’s videos on smart locks just defeat the mechanical backup cylinder, anyway. I’d love to see him take on the specific Yale x Nest model I have, though.
- Comment on Are smart door locks more or less secure than traditional door locks? 9 months ago:
Yup. The backup for battery failure on this model is that the bottom of the plate can accept power from the pins of a 9V battery, held there just long enough to punch in the code.
- Comment on Are smart door locks more or less secure than traditional door locks? 9 months ago:
Things might be different by now, but when I was researching this I decided on the Yale x Nest.
It’s more secure than a keyed lock in the following ways:
- Can’t be picked (no physical keyhole).
- Codes can be revoked or time-gated (for example, you can set the dog walker’s code to work only at the time of day they’re expected to come by).
- Guest codes can be set to provide real-time notifications when used.
- The lock keeps a detailed log of every time it’s used.
- The lock can be set to automatically lock the door after a certain amount of time.
It’s less secure than a physical traditional lock in the following ways:
- Compromise of a keycode isn’t as obvious as losing a key, so you might not change a compromised keycode the same way you might change a lost key.
- People can theoretically see a code being punched in, or intercept compromised communications to use it.
- Compromised app or login could be used to assign new codes or remotely unlock
It’s basically the same level of security in the following ways:
- The deadbolt can still be defeated with the same physical weaknesses that a typical deadbolt has: blunt force, cutting with a saw, etc.
- The windows and doors are probably just generally weak around your house, to where a determined burglar can get in no matter what lock you use.
- Works like normal without power or network connection (just can’t be remotely unlocked or reprogrammed to add/revoke codes if not online)
Overall, I’d say it’s more secure against real-world risk, where the weakest link tends to be the people you share your keys with.