Tlaloc_Temporal
@Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
- Comment on nuclear 4 days ago:
Uninhabitable? Most of the evacuations were unnecessary, and there would have been less loss-of-life if most people sheltered in-place. In the year following the event, nearby residents received less than 20% of lifetime natural background radiation, about 2 chest CT scans, or a bit more than an airline crew, and less than a heavy smoker.
As for waste, dry casks are plenty good. The material is glassified, so it can’t leach into ground water, and the concrete casing means you get less radiation by sitting next to one, as even natural background radiation is partially blocked. Casks are also dense enough for on-site storage, needing only a small lot to store the lifetime fuel use of any plant. A pro and a con of this method is that the fuel is difficult to retrieve from the glass, which is bad for fuel reprocessing, but good for preventing easy weapons manufacturing.
Meanwhile, coal pollution kills some 8 million people annually, and because the grid is already set up for it, when nuclear plants close they are replaced with coal or oil plants.
Upgrading the grid is expensive, and large-scale storage is difficult, and often untested. Pumped hydro is great for those places that can manage it, but the needed storage is far greater, and in locations without damable areas. Not only would unprecidented storage be necessary, but also a grid that’s capable of moving energy between multiple focus points, instead of simply out of a plant. These aren’t impossible challenges, but the solutions aren’t here yet, and nuclear can fill the gap between decommissioning fossil fuels and effective baseline storage.
Solar and Wind don’t have the best disposal record either, with more efficient PV cells needing more exotic resources, and the simple bulk of wind turbines making them difficult to dispose of. And batteries are famously toxic and/or explosive. Once again, these challenges have solutions, but they aren’t mature and countries will stick with proven methods untill they are. That means more fossil fuels killing more people unnecessary. Nuclear can save those people today, and then allow renewable grids to be built when they are ready.
- Comment on nuclear 4 days ago:
Electrons are suspiciously close to spinning dynamos, so even just moving electrons might be considered spinning something.
- Comment on Looking for answers 5 days ago:
A hot stove has it’s uses as well.
- Comment on Drift!! 1 week ago:
Yeah, hydrocarbons are probably going to be really good energy storage for airplanes and gas turbine generators. Outside of that, I don’t see much use for a rare, dirty, hot, energy source. Rockets I guess.
- Comment on Cats are Healers 2 weeks ago:
One of it’s purrrposes is to shake wounds and increase bloodflow. This is why cats sometimes pur after conflict; they’re licking their wounds in multiple ways.
- Comment on Drift!! 2 weeks ago:
This is a bit of an issue when what they want out of the oil is the energy. If you have enough energy to make oil, why not just use the energy directly?
- Comment on Scientists suck at naming and abbreviating stuff 2 weeks ago:
I’d much prefer those over cursive characters. I can tell those apart when written by hand.
- Comment on Scientists suck at naming and abbreviating stuff 2 weeks ago:
One of my default phone keyboards had them. Either an old bersion of Gboard, or the Samsung keyboard.
- Comment on Smug Viruses 2 weeks ago:
Ah, a definition of life in Namibia for a grade 12 course. Quite the scientific authority you have there.
Here’s a short paper (Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere 32, 387-393, 2002) that refutes your position that a single definition of life is definitively agreed upon.
Here’s a paper (Synthese, 2012) on how a definition of life is impossible and pointless.
There is a species of dog that infects other dogs as a parasite. There are viruses with larger genomes than some bacteria. Obligate parasites and endosymbiotes often lose large portions of their genome and depend on their hosts for their vital functions. Nature doesn’t care about are definitions, and biology hates hard cutoffs.
- Comment on Smug Viruses 2 weeks ago:
Sure, I agree with most of that. Dwarf planets not being planets feels intentionally confusing though, and the definition is basically Major/Minor planet anyway. A planet having hydrostatic equilibrium is such an elegant and applicable limit, yet the current definition specifically counts only bodies that clear orbits (how is poorly defined) around this star. It’s a bad definition in several ways, and many astronomers have already complained about this. Many use planet anyway, particularly planetary scientists.
It’s all about how useful the word is, and putting the limit at our star and a vague idea being the biggest thing in one general area feels more like it’s gatekeeping the word “planet” rather than facilitating understanding or discriminating something useful. Planets can change class simply by drifting closer or farther away from the sun, or even be temporarily demoted by a rogue planet.
most would agree that the best definition would be the one that has the biggest consensus amongst biologists, and maybe more precisely microbiologists.
This is precisely the part I disagree with. Consensus isn’t truth, and better definitions are likely possible. Not that consensus even exists here, the specific definition of life is controversial and several definitions are used in different areas. Homeostatic reproducers, replicators, entropy pumps, chemical system that evolve; it’s almost as bad as double-slit interpretations.
And most such definitions you’d find would include “self-replication” as a necessary trait.
Replication? Sure. Self-replication? That’s either an incredibly arbitrary limit seeminly designed to specifically exclude viruses, or isn’t applicable to anything except perhaps the entire tree of life as a whole. Where is the line of “self” drawn? As a human, you can’t replicate yourself, you need other organisms to collect energy for you and to make some proteins for you, and a sexual partner. Tapeworms need their hosts to digest food for them; cuckoos need other birds to feed and raise their chicks; E.coli needs other organisms to feed them and maintain a suitable environment; clonally transmissible dogs need another dog for all nutrients, and protection; and viruses need cells to provide the replication hardware. Some viruses even have some of the genes necessary for DNA copying and protein synthesis, and can be infected by smaller viruses themselves.
- Comment on Smug Viruses 2 weeks ago:
It’s the zip file, it can’t do anything until a system unzips it. The resulting program can be really small and still do a lot, especially if it modifies another program.
- Comment on Smug Viruses 2 weeks ago:
I disagree. At one time, consensus was the Earth was the center of the universe, that the world was just a few thousand years old, that life just sprung into being sometimes, that unwashed hands were perfectly fine to perform surgery with, that some peoples were much closer to other animals than some other peoples, that the universe was static, that light was continuous, and that Ceres was a planet.
Consensus is nice, but usefulness is the gold standard. Is holding metabolism and a complex proteome as the limit of life --excluding viruses, preons, and mechanical reproducers-- useful to expanding our understanding of life and how it functions? Is taking replicators as the most important distinction a necessary step to understanding the origin of life and how we can engineer it ourselves? Will the ability to manipulate certain chemicals and not others help us describe the world? Are edge cases explained better with a genomic, proteomic, or metabolomic base?
I do know that we have a lot left to learn, and I would be very surprised if our current definition of life is fully sufficient for the next century of life sciences.
- Comment on Smug Viruses 2 weeks ago:
Another example; mammals probably developed pregnancy using an Autoimmune virus’ genes in the placenta to prevent the fetus from being destroyed by the immune system.
- Comment on Smug Viruses 2 weeks ago:
And yet, that wasp will die out in a single generation if it’s host disappears. It does most of it’s own processing, but it’s existence is still contingent on a specific host species. Does that make parasites less alive than other life?
Many insects go through a phase of their lives without a mouth or stomach. They can’t eat at all and quickly starve. Are they less alive?
Most life would die out if the sun stopped shining. Does that make chemotrophic organisms more alive than phototrophic life?
Chemotrophic life still needs chemicals to eat, and are completely useless without them. Does that make a Boltzmann Brain the most alive thing possible, coming into existence without any outside action whatsoever?
Plants depend on the sun for energy, animals depend on plants for carbohydrates, we depend on animals and plants for carbs and proteins, mayflies depend on stored energy from their larval stage, parasites depend on other organisms for transportation, food, protection, parenting, and even homeostasis. Viruses depending on other cells for reproduction doesn’t seem out of place to me.
- Comment on Smug Viruses 2 weeks ago:
Complex organisms can also drastically change from point mutations, although such changes are more likely to kill the organism as they grow more complex. Viruses are so incredibly simple and make so many copies that this doesn’t matter.
Many organisms can hybridize, which can make drastic changes with much less chance of fatal errors. Plants especially like this; see farmed maize vs wild maize or the entire brassica genus.
Viruses also hybridize though, and can do so much more drastically. Most of the critical genes are in the host, so virus genomes are free to do whatever, and because they highjack other genomes a very small change can radically alter their behavior.
- Comment on the council 2 weeks ago:
They had a huge amount of diversity between the Cambrian and the Carboniferous periods, then all but a single order (Nautilida) died out when land animals became a thing, and only a single genus survived the Triassic extinction. They went on to flurish globally until only 20 million years ago, when specifically seals appeared. Nautiloids went extinct everywhere seals existed, leaving the only living species in the Indo-Pacific.
Their shells have a tendency to float huge distances, with some floating for over a decade. So not only are they a “living fossil”, their shells are found even when they are not.
- Comment on Pluto's Orbit 3 weeks ago:
There’s also not that much rock, only 73% of the mass. The rest is ice and mud, with half it’s volume being water in some form.
- Comment on Pluto's Orbit 3 weeks ago:
Dwarf planet is a planet!
IAU names aren’t the best, “planet” should be major planet.
- Comment on Anon thinks the French are posers 4 weeks ago:
Arabic numerals came to Europe from India via Arabia. The Sine function does too, but it’s name is garbled and doesn’t mean anything.
Venetian blinds came from Persia via Venice.
Spanish Flu was everywhere, but everyone at the time was lying about it due to being at war, except for Spain.
Many First Nations peoples are known by what other peoples called them (often pejorative names) rather than their name for themselves.
Words usually aren’t authoritative declarations of truth, but rather snapshots of what was a useful distinction to someone somewhere a some time. Did the French think their style of kissing was a unique cultural phenomenon? Will Skibidi be known about in 500 years? No one documents graffiti, was it “discovered” by Pompeii?
We live in a truely unique age, where nearly any question can have a relavent answer of some kind in moments. We can see people streaming everyday things from around the globe, or find the best research about what we know about ancient people’s daily lives. Is any of this worth carving into a monument though? How many copies of an archeological journal are going to survive the ages vs copies of Game of Thrones? I’d say there are countless things about our lives we think are special to today that even prehistoric people did, it just isn’t notable enought to build monuments to or copy manuscripts of.
- Comment on Cat Calibration 4 weeks ago:
That happens regularly whenever the bones start to solidify. It’s analogous to the “strech” function on other platforms, but functions significantly differently.
- Comment on I've got a double peen AMA 4 weeks ago:
I think you missed the reasoning behind the “dead” part.
If the hammer doesn’t bounce when it hits, it’s not as lively, and lands like a dead body.
- Comment on I've got a double peen AMA 4 weeks ago:
Well it does have a claw, but it specifically has the nail holder.
- Comment on Owl Pellets 4 weeks ago:
I think most if not all tetrapods should have the 1-2-3-4-5 hierarchy for their arms and legs (although the later branches often fuse together).
I just checked, and mice have the 1-2 pattern for front and hind limbs. It’s just the arms that are weird, but this mouse’s arms have always been weird.
- Comment on Guerrilla Women 4 weeks ago:
And wild curves of extrapolation, and wild planes of extrapolation, and wild queues of extrapolation, and…
- Comment on But yes. 5 weeks ago:
Some cells are getting 47%, which is ridiculous for a generator! The theoretical maximum efficiency for solar cell from the sun as it appears in the sky is about 68%, so that’s pretty good!
However, how expensive is that cell going to be? How much maintenance does it need, and how fragile is the system once deployed? It’s very obvious that PV efficiency has beed skyrocketing recently, and I don’t thinks it’s stopping soon, but a commercial PV panel available today is just breaking 20% efficiency. Luckily, sunshine is quite abundant.
- Comment on But yes. 5 weeks ago:
Ooo, good call.
There’s also radioisotope piezoelectric generators, where the electrons are caught by a cantilever and then released in regular pulses. An electron waterwheel if you will.
- Comment on Kermit :) 5 weeks ago:
Kermi Tree Frog
- Comment on It ain't much, but it's a livin' 5 weeks ago:
Lots of metamorphic bugs do this. Even the ones that eat as adults often die that same year, after 3-20 years as a larva.
- Comment on But yes. 5 weeks ago:
The only really new kinds are thermocouples (mostly garbage) and solar panels (poor efficiency, but abundant fuel).
Some fusion might end up using magnet pumping, which is basically just a plasma powered piston.
- Comment on Oopsies 5 weeks ago:
I feel like this is more an issue of poor healthcare than personal choice. It seems like rather than the U.S. chosing to be opt-in, they are physically unable to give everyone the choice to opt-out.