drosophila

@drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨🍃 🐑⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The really interesting thing about costasiella kuroshimae is that its digestive system branches and goes up into all of those ‘leaves’, which is how the algae makes its way there to have its chloroplasts extracted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Womp womp⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So, I think the whole “well intentioned but hubristic scientist goes too far, tramples on the feet of god!” trope is pretty stupid in a lot of stories (although if executed correctly I think it can still be very good, even if i don’t really agree with the theme as applied to real life). But I also think you really have to consider where the “mad scientist” archetype comes from before you write it off as purely anti-intellectual:

  1. To a large degree the mad scientist is an updated version of the evil wizard. Victor Frankenstein, the prototypical mad scientist, was trained in alchemy as well as chemistry and biology. Very often (such as in this very post) their laboratories are depicted as being in castles or even wizard towers.

  2. Frankenstein was partly based on the sort of people who robbed graveyards. The more modern ‘howie lab coat, rubber gloves, and goggles’ mad scientist exploded in popularity after WWII, probably because of people like mengele and the invention of the atomic bomb.

  There’s other themes present in the archetype of course (I already mentioned hubris and man’s vs god"s domain above, but there’s all the other stuff going on in Frankenstein too), but yeah. The ‘mad scientist’ archetype is a little bit like taking a normal scientist and removing their humanity and morals, leaving only their intellect and ambition/ego behind. A little bit like how a warewolf is a man stripped of all morals and self control, leaving only bestial impulses behind.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨c o e x i s t⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Strangely enough I feel like that crucification isn’t much associated with the Romans. Even though the Romans were the ones who carried it out Judas gets almost 100% of the ire.

  Even Jews are given more blame by antisemitic Christians. Like, no one is starting up a pogrom against Italians because their great great great grandpa might’ve been the guy who stabbed Jesus in the ribs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨c o e x i s t⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  When people think about Rome they usually imagine the roads and the aquaducts and not so much the crucifixions and the slavery.

  I think it’s important to keep both aspects in mind.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pacific Drive | Drive Your Way Fall 2024 Update⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  From watching the opening I didn’t like the writing of the dialogue.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Go already⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But the fact that even just a single rail car holds 360 commuters, equivalent to 180 cars or more on the highway changes the math completely.

  Absolutely. The fact that 3 million people pass through Shinjuku station every day is a testament to that.

  If all of those people lived in a city in the US it would be the country’s third largest, behind NY and LA.(If we’re going by the entire urban area instead just within city limits it would be the 20th, just ahead of the Baltimore-Columbia-Towson metropolitan statistical area.)

  All in a single space that’s smaller than most highway interchanges.

  And that’s not even using two-level train cars (which is where your figure for 360 people per train car comes from I think?).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Go already⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  While things like merging movements and so on is part of the story, it’s not the whole story.

  You see, by saying “traffic jams are caused by merging mistakes and so on” it kinda implies that if everyone drove perfectly a highway lane could carry infinitely many cars. In actually a highway lane has a finite capacity determined by the length of the vehicles traveling on it, the length of the gap between them (indirectly determined by how fast they can start and stop), and the speed they’re moving.

  There are finite limits for gap widths and speed determined by physics and geometry. As the system approaches these limits it becomes less and less able to deal with small disruptions. In other words, as more cars move on a freeway a traffic jam becomes more and more likely. The small disruption which is perceived as the cause was really just the nucleation point for a phase change that the system was already poised to transition into. If it wasn’t event then something else would trigger it.

  It is interesting to note that once a highway has transitioned from smooth flow to traffic jam its capacity is massively reduced, which you can see in the graphs in the above link. Another interesting thing to note is that the speed vs volume graph, if you flip it upside down, resembles a cost / demand curve from economics, where volume is the demand and time spent commuting (the inverse of speed) is cost. If you do this you see something quite odd, which is that the curve curls up around itself and goes backwards.

  This is less like a normal economic situation (the more people use a resource the more they have to pay, the less people use it the less they have to pay) and more like a massively multiplayer version of the prisoner’s dilemma. For awhile the cost increases only slightly with growing demand, until a certain threshold where each additional actor making a transaction has a chance to massively increase the cost for everyone, even if consumption is reduced. Actors can choose to voluntarily pay a higher time cost (wait before getting on the freeway) to avoid this, but again, it’s the prisoners dilemma. People can just go, trigger a traffic jam anyway, and you’ll still have to sit through it + all the time you waited trying to prevent it.

  Self driving cars are often described as a way to eliminate traffic jams, but they don’t change this fundamental property of how roadways work. It’s true that capacity could potentially be increased somewhat by decreasing the gap between cars, since machines have faster reflexes than humans (though I’m skeptical of how much the gap can really be decreased; is every car going to weigh the same at all times? Is every car going to have tires and brakes in identical conditions? Are the roadway conditions going to be identical at all times and across every part of the roadway? All of these things imply a great deal of variability in stopping distance, which implies a wide safety gap.), but the prisoner’s dilemma problem remains. The biggest thing that self driving cars could actually do to alleviate traffic jams would be to not enter a highway until traffic volumes were at a safe level. This can also be accomplished with a traffic volume sensor and a stop light on highway on-ramps.

  Of course trains don’t suffer from any of this prisoner’s dilemma stuff by default. If a train car is full and you have to wait for the next one that’s equivalent to being stopped at a highway on ramp. People can’t force their way into a train and make it run slower for everyone (well, unless they do something really crazy like stand in the door and stop the train from leaving).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I just got out of the shower. what is with the product placement ?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  lol, because that’s definitely the shut-in stereotype.

  “Honey I’m really worried about our son, not only has he not left the house for weeks, this morning I found a bag of coffee beans in his room that was produced by a worker owned coop in Honduras!”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is asking the difficult questions⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean it’s basically anything that massively affects your living situation or how you outwardly present / function as a person.

  Want to live in a hole in the desert, or a cabin in the woods, or in a semi-legal squat? It would be pretty hard to maintain a relationship with a partner whose not also into living that way.

  Want to convert the interior of your house to look like a Star Trek set? Better find someone that wants to live on the USS Enterprise.

  Are you into extreme body modification? Better find someone whose alright with their partner surgically altering themselves to look like a Klingon.

  There are also plenty of interests that are just risky or disruptive, like doing urban exploration, running a home chemistry lab, building tesla coils, etc. Tesla coils are just loud, urban exploration can get you arrested (though it’s unlikely anything of consequence will actually happen to you), and two of the amateur chemistry YouTube channels I watch have been raised by the police because the amount of glassware they bought set off an alarm (neither of them were charged with anything though). If you do any of those and your partner isn’t interested in them at all I can’t imagine that not being a pain point, considering that risk/disruption is also on top of you spending significant time / energy / cash on a hobby they have nothing to do with.

  Finally, there are more benign hobbies like through hiking or immersive historical reenactment where, if your partner’s not coming with you, they’d have to be okay with you disappearing for weeks at a time and not being able to talk to them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is asking the difficult questions⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you might be underestimating the intensity of some people’s interests and how much of their being is defined by them, especially non-neurotypical people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mythbusters⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Elephants are wonderfully kind creatures

  So long as they’re not a bull in musth.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon thinks about CPUs⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The thing about real world processor design though is that all those abstractions are leaky.

  At higher levels of design you end up having to consider things like the electrical behavior of transistors, thermal density, the molecular dynamics of strained silicon crystals (and how they behave under thermal cycling), antenna theory, and the limits and quirks of the photolithography process you’re using (which is a whole other can of worms with a million things to consider).

  Not everyone needs to know everything about every part of the process (that’s impossible), but when you’re pushing the limits of high performance chips each layer of the design is entangled enough with the others to make everyone’s job really complicated.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hero⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed. I’m not going to pretend it’s a good thing though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hero⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In my personal experience I’ve had to go out of my way to find every quality product I’ve ever purchased, from dishwasher detergent to heat pumps, and none of them were the ones with the highest advertising budgets. You’re right that we all have limited time and can’t possibly evaluate every single thing that exists, but hype men don’t help with that. The professional liars and manipulators that work in advertising only add to the noise and make it take longer to arrive at a conclusion. For example the fact that there are the 12 different brands of space heaters that come in different sizes and shapes and at different price points despite all performing the exact same way. It’s like that with literally everything, from bar soap, to maple syrup, to sunscreen.

  I think this way because I am autistic. I honestly cannot imagine feeling the need for hype men. The phrase “you need hype men” sounds to me like “you need your abuser, you cannot live without them”.

  Something like 35% of autistic people attempt suicide because of what the original post describes (and not just in science, but in every aspect of the world). And yeah, I think if I had to work for someone Steve Jobs or Elon Musk I would as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hero⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “Asshole” is the word for a guy who likes to cut people off in traffic. I think there’s probably a more appropriate word for someone who emotionally manipulates you over the course of years so you’re continually a nervous wreck and can be destroyed any time it’s convenient for him. Seriously if you haven’t watched the interview I linked at least look at the first couple of minutes.

  And at the end of the day, who did this behavior actually benefit? Steve helped make Apple a lot of money, sure, but where did most of that money go? It didn’t go the employees he abused, that’s for sure. But maybe Apple products ended up benefitting society as a whole, and without Steve we wouldn’t have had that? Well you already said that more often than not Apple’s success didn’t have anything to do with technical superiority.

  The fact that people like this (Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etc) often head successful companies isn’t an example of how beneficial they are, it’s an example of how broken our system is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hero⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s funny you use Woz and Jobs as an example when Jobs regularly emotionally manipulated and abused his employees and stole Woz’s money.

  I wonder why schmoozers have a bad rep 🤔