General_Effort
@General_Effort@lemmy.world
- Comment on Just a little guy 14 hours ago:
It’s not the sudden stop at the end that kills you. It’s the different times at which parts of you stop.
- Comment on Haha SO TRUE! 20 hours ago:
jabde.com/…/haha-so-true-reply-in-text-theory/
Alternatively, here’s a somewhat similar one: www.sciencedirect.com/…/S0378216616302594
- Comment on Just a little guy 21 hours ago:
Ohh. Effing is a place!
I always thought… Never mind.
- Comment on Petrichor 1 day ago:
Hmm. Seems strangely on point that Ichor is the blood of the (greek) gods. (Petro- means stone, as in Petro-Oleum.)
Fee-fi-fo-fod
I smell the blood of a god
- Comment on It ain't much, but it's a livin' 6 days ago:
So they just… f*ck off and die.
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to science_memes@mander.xyz | 3 comments
- Comment on Half as Hot 4 weeks ago:
Obviously we’d all die but I wonder how exactly. This would make a good question for Randall Munroe.
- Comment on Grindr be like 4 weeks ago:
What are you doing, step stool?
- Comment on Anon watches an old concert video 1 month ago:
- Comment on Preference 1 month ago:
Americans may be seeing serious savings in that picture.
I am seeing serious evolutionary pressure on liver genetics.
- Comment on Throw back time 1 month ago:
Meh. As a german, it just doesn’t make me tingle quite like sending tanks to the east.
- Comment on rabioli 2 months ago:
Much of Europe (ie the rich parts) is free of terrestrial rabies because of such programs. Bats really get around, though.
- Comment on Chemistry 2 months ago:
I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away.
This was, altogether, a remarkable experience - both in its sudden onset and its extraordinary course. It seemed to have resulted from some external toxic influence; I surmised a connection with the substance I had been working with at the time, lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate. But this led to another question: how had I managed to absorb this material? Because of the known toxicity of ergot substances, I always maintained meticulously neat work habits. Possibly a bit of the LSD solution had contacted my fingertips during crystallization, and a trace of the substance was absorbed through the skin. If LSD-25 had indeed been the cause of this bizarre experience, then it must be a substance of extraordinary potency. There seemed to be only one way of getting to the bottom of this. I decided on a self-experiment.
Exercising extreme caution, I began the planned series of experiments with the smallest quantity that could be expected to produce some effect, considering the activity of the ergot alkaloids known at the time: namely, 0.25 mg (mg = milligram = one thousandth of a gram) of lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate.
From LSD: My Problem Child by Albert Hofmann. I will leave it to others to explain all the ways in which this is absolutely hair-raising.
- Comment on Chemistry 2 months ago:
It was 1943 and even in Switzerland fuel was not to be had. Incidentally, it was the same day that the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto began.
- Comment on Chemistry 2 months ago:
Today, LSD would never be discovered. Guy didn’t even use gloves and lived to 102.
- Comment on Large flavored quark 2 months ago:
Huh. I thought I did check OED. Maybe it’s cause I don’t have a subscription. Or maybe I just mucked up the search.
- Comment on Large flavored quark 2 months ago:
The physicist who named the particle apparently liked to come up with nonsense words in his head. Later, when trying to decide the spelling, he came across a quote by James Joyce and spelled it “Quark”. Unfortunately, the particle rhymes with fork, while the german cheese rhymes with Mark.
According to his own account he was in the habit of using names like “squeak” and “squork” for peculiar objects, and “quork” (rhyming with pork) came out at the time. Some months later, he came across a line from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake:
Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he has not got much of a bark And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.
The line struck him as appropriate, since the hypothetical particles came in threes, and he adopted Joyce’s spelling for his “quork.” Joyce clearly meant quark to rhyme with Mark, bark, park, and so forth, but Gell-Mann worked out a rationale for his own pronunciation based on the vowel of the word quart: he told researchers at the Oxford English Dictionary that he imagined Joyce’s line “Three quarks for Muster Mark” to be a variation of a pub owner’s call of “Three quarts for Mister Mark.” Joyce himself apparently was thinking of a German word for a dairy product resembling cottage cheese; it is also used as a synonym for quatsch, meaning “trivial nonsense.”
www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/quark
However, there is another interpretation of the quote.
This passage from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, part of a scurrilous 13-line poem directed against King Mark, the cuckolded husband in the Tristan legend, has left its mark on modern physics. The poem and the accompanying prose are packed with names of birds and words suggestive of birds, and the poem is a squawk against the king that suggests the cawing of a crow. The word quark comes from the standard English verb quark, meaning “to caw, croak,” and also from the dialectal verb quawk, meaning “to caw, screech like a bird.”
www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=quark
This sounds very learned and all, but I can’t find that standard English verb in the dictionary.
- Comment on Large flavored quark 2 months ago:
It used to be, you got 3 quarks for a mark, but then it was 6 quarks, because the euro was 2 marks. Now you only get 2 quarks, though, because of inflation. It’s always just up and down. Stupid cosmologists.
- Comment on Aldi announces wage increases up to $23 an hour; hiring thousands of employees 2 months ago:
You think the managers at Aldi work for the satisfying feeling of serving their community or what? Aldi cut costs in any way possible and greeters are simply a very visible way.
Aldi isn’t really a direct competitor of Walmart. There are other more similar (hypermarket) chains in Germany that directly offered the same as Walmart. For its attempt to enter the german market, Walmart bought up a bankrupt chain of such hypermarkets. The stores were in worse locations than those of their competitors. Basically, it was unwanted left-overs. The Walmart, closest to me, was right next to its competitors but on the far side. It was just a little less convenient. If they had been able to offer better prices or quality, that might have made it worth it. But they couldn’t. There were only greeters and packagers.
- Comment on Aldi announces wage increases up to $23 an hour; hiring thousands of employees 2 months ago:
It is telling that Aldi is successfully expanding in the USA while keeping the same model that made it big in its home market of Germany and the rest of Europe.
When Walmart tried to gain a foothold in Germany, it hemorrhaged billions before giving up. The managers responsible covered their asses with bullshit about cultural differences or unions, but the truth is that they just couldn’t offer competitive prices. Looks like, even in the US, shoppers favor low prices over wasteful frills like greeters.
- Comment on Nature is blunt. 2 months ago:
Publications in peer-reviewed journals are how a career in science is built. It’s impossible to measure the productivity of a scientist. What is done, is that one looks at their publications. How many publications do they have? How often are they cited? What is the quality of the journal?
This creates very bad incentives, leading to things like publication bias. It also means that you must publish in prestigious journals. You don’t have a choice but to accept their terms. Libraries don’t have a choice but to stock these journals. It’s a straight-forward monopoly racket. These publishers make fantastical profits.
All that money can be used for PR campaigns and lobbying to keep the good times rolling.
- Comment on stop 2 months ago:
Believing that animals are just like us s hardly and outlandish belief, on the facts. We’re evolutionarily closely related. We have basically the same skeleton. Skull, spine, rib cage, hips, 4 extremities. Arms and legs go: 1 big bone, 2 smaller bones, and lotsa little bones. It looks to be the same with the brain.
We expect vegans not to blow up slaughterhouses or such. Fair enough. But expecting them to shut up about their beliefs is a bit much, no? Expecting them not to tell people how they feel, not to kiss in public, or hold a pride para… Sorry, wrong prosecuted minority.
I’ve heard these takes about vegans for literal decades now, and not once has an actual vegan popped up to tell me that I’m a murderer.
- Comment on stop 2 months ago:
Ok, so that’s why you’re not making any sense. You have no idea what’s going on.
Look, it’s very simple. Vegans are a small, harmless minority. So some people bully them. Of course, it’s their own fault. They wouldn’t mind them if they weren’t “out and proud”. It’s always the same story. There’s almost no variation.
I thought you were saying that it’s ok to bully them because they believe the wrong thing. That’s what @redisdead is saying. He compares them to “right wing cunts” when they speak their beliefs. Fascis get bashis. Just like vegans, I guess.
Watch the company you keep.
- Comment on stop 2 months ago:
Vegans believe that animals have the same rights to live as humans. A nazi believes that the “others” do not have the same right to live as “his people”.
I don’t think you’ll be able to convince me that these are morally or ethically equivalent positions. But I see the point. They both believe the wrong thing. The out-group sucks. Yes, I know how humans tick.
- Comment on stop 2 months ago:
Ok, I understand. You don’t like them because of their beliefs.
- Comment on stop 2 months ago:
At first, I was confused. Isn’t the fact that you believe something the only justification for saying something? I mean, otherwise you’d be lying. But you’re saying you disagree with the belief in the first place, right?
- Comment on stop 2 months ago:
Well, it’s what they believe. What exactly is the problem there? I have never been called a murderer. There just aren’t that many vegans around. I don’t know in what kind of circles this would be a common occurrence.
- Comment on stop 2 months ago:
They are a small, harmless minority. Isn’t that enough? Maybe it’s made worse by the fact that they are perceived as non-violent and effeminate, because of their strong opposition to suffering, even when the victims are helpless, like animals. There is no personal risk in bullying them. It’s like the hate for environmental activists, trans-women, or liberals in general. I wouldn’t know that vegans aggressively proselytize their life-style if people didn’t aggressively tell me so; something that they share with “the gays”.
- Comment on Explosions in the Sky 2 months ago:
I hate that this is popular. This is a creationist level understanding of the big bang.
You ever use a spray can for a while and the can gets cold? It’s more like that.
- Comment on Is there a house advantage in a "double-or-nothing" coin flip game? 2 months ago:
That looks like the St. Petersburg Paradox. Much ink has been spilled over it.
The expected payout is infinite. At any point, the “rational” (profit-maximizing) decision is to keep flipping, since you wager a finite sum of money to win an infinite sum. It’s very counter-intuitive, hence called a paradox.
In reality, a casino has finite money. You can work out how many coin flips it takes to bankrupt it. So you can work out how likely it is to reach that point with a given, finite sum of money. Martingale strategies have already been mentioned.
