wolframhydroxide

@wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨science never ends⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Um, actually, the scientific method as it is currently formulated is best traced back to Ibn Al-Haytham, with elements dating back throughout thousands of years, from the rationalism of Thales to the experimentalism of 墨子. Babylonians were using mathematical prediction algorithms to accurately state the date of the next solar eclipse in 600 BCE. It seems like YOU need to read up on the history of the philosophy of science, and of you claim that 2+2=4 is an “enlightenment” idea, I cannot hope to respond with a level of disdain sufficient to encapsulate your willfully-pompous idiocy.

  You say that 2+2 DOES equal 4, and then make claims which suggest that it doesn’t. Certainly, 2+2 can only be said to equal 4 because of the axioms of mathematics, which are, of course, purely postulates, since Cartesian solipsism demonstrates that we cannot truly know anything to be true except that we ourselves exist (oh, but wait, your disdain for enlightenment philosophy clearly removes this, the best refuge for your argument!)

  However, to accept as a matter of course that 2+2=4 and then suggest that it is only through subjective perception that we privilege 4 over any other number in that equality is not only a clear argument in bad faith, meant only to make others feel stupid, but is also patently ridiculous, since you are reneging on your own given precept.

  So, if you’re planning on gatekeeping knowledge,

  1. Do better than "2+2=4, but also 2+2=5 because eurocentrism bad"
  2. Fuck. Right. Off.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨On trees...⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I was under the impression that lignin was what really made trees possible, and that seems like an odd chemical for a bunch of unrelated plants to all evolve. Is there something I’m missing?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'd choose 4 tbh⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  1 is the monkey’s paw answer and a trap. Fat is necessary for survival. Fats literally make up the outside of every cell in your body.

  2 is still dangerous, because it might just be tapeworm eggs.

  Is 3 just a servant who shops for you? Or is it just that you are no longer addicted to compulsive shopping?

  4 Will cause you the most agonizing pain of your life as virtually every body and muscle gets ripped apart and re-knit, and as someone who’s 6’4, it has its upsides, but having literally everything made for people shorter than you REALLY sucks, from doorways and light fixtures, even to rollercoasters which nearly remove your legs because of awful design (or just won’t close over your shoulders)

  5 is nice. Go with 5. It’ll be painful, but potentially worth it in a pinch, as long as it also grants you control of that strength.

  6 is another trap, since small amounts of stress are actually really important, and in order to be constantly happy, your brain would lose the ability to feel it unless it continually increased the dopamine drip. Eventually, you would kill for the ability to stop.

  7 I mean, sure, if that’s what you want. Would be nice to know what kind of followers? Are they going to be religious and try to pull a Life of Brian on you?

  8 is the worst, because you have no control over the extent of the memory wipe. This is existentially terrifying

  9 is the safest, but then you go and read that post about why winning the lottery means you’re fucked.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unholy curses⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, ethanol was, literally, called the “Water of Life”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Catchiest video game song?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  My time has come. As someone who almost exclusively listens to instrumental soundtrack from movies and games, including from games I have never played, these are the ones that most often get stuck in my head (in no particular order). A plus “+” indicates a song that got stuck in my head regularly before I ever played the game, while an asterisk “*” indicates a song that still gets stuck in my head, despite being from a game I have never played at all.

  1. Baba Yetu - Civ IV (+)

  2. Hyrule Castle - Breath Of The Wild (+)

  3. Lorule Castle - Link Between Worlds (*)

  4. One Final Effort - Halo 3 (*)

  5. Golem King - Moonlighter

  6. Song of the Ancients - Nier Series (*)

  7. Dragonborn - Skyrim

  8. Far Horizons - Skyrim (+)

  9. Dragon Roost Island - Wind Waker (*)

  10. Nate’s Theme - Uncharted (*)

  11. Gusty Garden Galaxy - Super Mario Galaxy (*)

  12. Korobeiniki - Tetris (+)

  13. Gerudo Valley - Ocarina of Time (+)

  14. Colgera Battle - Tears of the Kingdom

  15. This Song - The Witcher 3 (It’s the song Aen Seidhe, but without vocals)

  But finally, the song that I credit with making me obsessed with instrumental soundtrack, because I fell asleep with it playing on repeat for a whole night at the age of 5, and then lost the game cartridge, so I forgot what it was from, and which I would get stuck in my head roughly once a month throughout my entire childhood until I finally found it THIRTEEN YEARS LATER, :

  Ω) Town Theme - Final Fantasy II

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No we can talk here⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, monster myths have always held the function of moral lessons for the many cultures that birthed them. The Wendigo is a moral metaphor for the taboo against eating human flesh, and the necessity of working together through harsh winters. The Vampire is a moral warning against demanding excess in all things carnal, monetary, and gluttonous, and for this reason it resonated with Victorian england. The zombie, however, was originally just someone who had been drugged into submission. The modern zombie does, however, make an excellent metaphor for herd mentality and over-consumption. We change our monsters (or make new ones) to fit the social mores and taboos of the culture of the time. There is a reason that many examples of “The Monster” in literature focus not on the actual villainy of the Monster, but on the villainy of the other humans in the story. Monsters are a mirror, held up to the face of the reader, demanding that we stare at the worst parts of what it is to be human.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"You can't just have Geralt for every single game" says his voice actor, and if you think The Witcher 4 making Ciri the protagonist is "woke," then "read the damn books"⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, there were a couple of tiny decisions, any of which failed you out if you got them wrong, and several of them had deceptive descriptions during the QTE.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"You can't just have Geralt for every single game" says his voice actor, and if you think The Witcher 4 making Ciri the protagonist is "woke," then "read the damn books"⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I was under the impression that it wasn’t Victorian London, but The Plague Year. IIRC she, canonically, brings a blanket infested with plague lice from here to there, and ends up dropping it next to the ship Catriona, which is how the Catriona plague actually gets started.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Game Concept: JuryNow – Get a Verdict from 12 Real People in 3 Minutes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that the thing that let them down was that they didn’t actually get to participate in any discussion or consensus a building. I think that the ideal scenario to solve this issue is a quick chatroom amongst simultaneous players, in which topics for discussion are briefly discussed for a few minutes, then voted on, like a real jury. It could include deliberation, but the question writer would only see the verdict. I will tell you that I would personally play this if it followed this method:

  Make it fewer players per question (like 5 or 7), so that it doesn’t take an hour. Each submits a question. Make it so that, while your question is being considered, you are in another jury room deliberating on another question. Make deliberations timed (say, 3-5 minutes per question), so that no one is in a lobby waiting to serve on a jury for too long. Then, after serving on a number of juries equal to the number of jurors (5-7), they can view their verdict. This would allow for the deliberation these people are suggesting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The four horsemen of the apocalypse⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, we need to wait a few years to see if H. cephalosepses individuals are capable of producing viable offspring with H. sapiens, since that would indicate that Cephalosepses is actually a subspecies of H. sapiens, just like H. sapiens boomerensis

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The four horsemen of the apocalypse⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The person to whom you were responding was trying to make this artifact of the Before-Times relatable to modern Homo Cephalosepses, which cannot comprehend anything from outside its natural environment of TikTok. Unfortunately, speciation has not yet led to a visible difference between the two extant species of the genus Homo, and behavioral differences are currently the only way to differentiate this new species from H. Sapiens, so this person was trying to bridge the divide, in case the original commenter was on the other side of the species divide.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the worst spelling you've seen?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I would argue that at least 15% of the blame lies with the racist expectation in the US that all names need be anglicized, when we have fucking Unicode. If someone whose second language is English can be expected to be able to pronounce “Rayleigh Monaghan McTavish”, then the least that the anglophone people of the US could do is learn to pronounce things in a few other common languages. There is, quite simply, no excuse for the government of the united States, in which there is no official language (even though a traitor, invalidated by the insurrection clause of the 14th amendment, had some fuckwit draft a document trying to declare it without congressional approval).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the worst spelling you've seen?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I would like to provide a counterexample. There are plenty of these people in the US intermountain west, but there are at least some cases where there is no one at fault. Next time you see one of these names without context, before judging, consider Nariaw:

  I am a teacher, and one year I found that my roster included a student named “Nariaw”. As a public school, we register your student based on what’s on the birth certificate. I ask all of my students to pronounce their names for me when I first meet them, for the reason we see in the OP and with shit like “abcde”. However, when this came to my class, she said her name was pronounced “Miriam”. I spent a good twenty seconds looking at my roster, and had to ask her to spell it for me. I didn’t ask any rude and impertinent questions at that point, so it wasn’t until a few months later that I got the full story: her mother, an immigrant from Ethiopia, was still unfamiliar with Latin script when her daughter was born here in the US. So when she attempted to write out the name, which she wanted to transliterate as “Mariam”, she ended up writing only half of the first M, and wrote the second one upside-down. Whoever did the data entry for the government records dutifully recorded the child’s name as “Nariaw”. Was the mother at fault for being expected to write a name which, while she knew how to represent it in Amharic, she was forced to write in a language in which she was illiterate?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Einstein-Landauer culinary units⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As a chemistry teacher, I am acutely aware. This is why I suggested that the only “thing” you could measure for flour would be “granules”, the leftover ground bits which make up the substance of the flour. However, a mole of granules would still be insanely large and a mole of any chemical constituent like amylose would be impure, and thus the measure meaningless. The greatest problem still lies in the counting, which would require either nigh-infinite time, of would require a conversion from either mass or volume into moles, so the whole point of using moles becomes moot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Einstein-Landauer culinary units⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  We have now reached the peak: figure out how much flour you have by burning it to ash, then carefully measure the mass of that to figure out the amount of flour you had.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Einstein-Landauer culinary units⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Except that moles would only work for counting granules of ground flour, as there is no “flour” molecule. Also, you’d need to have a very accurate measurement of the average mass of a single granule (or you’d need a packing efficiency coefficient and an average granule radius, otherwise you’d have to literally count them. Also, a mole of flour granules would be INSANELY large. 6.02*10^23 of anything larger than a macromolecule is no joke. At this point, since you’d have to weigh it or measure its volume anyway (unless you feel like counting microscopic flour particles for the next few trillion years), you might as well just use grams.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anyone?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You can always trust @SatansMaggotyCumFart@lemmy.world to chime in with the wholesome memes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sea snail teeth top Kevlar, titanium as world’s strongest material⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Duct tape and wd-40: the fifth and sixth classical elements.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨HBO Boss Insists 'Harry Potter' Show Will Not Contain J.K. Rowling's Anti-Trans Views⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted when the most believable name she could come up with for the token character of Chinese descent in the series was “Cho Chang”, whose only meaningful relation to the plot was as a shallow love interest until the main character got bored of her, and her idea of gay representation was “let’s make the character I just killed-off retroactively gay, and scandalize it by making him fall in love with wizard Hitler, and let’s do that just in time to show the audience that all of that character’s brightness and joy was an act covering for the fact that he was, canonically, by his own admission, raising the main character as a lamb to sacrifice on the altar of necessary evil”. Yeah… There’s no prejudice there at all.

  I loved the books as a kid, and I still love the first movie and a good bit of the world building, but come on, people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Liquid Trees⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Gray shit everywhere, concrete fucking everywhere, looming threat of 2-ton steel death machines caving in your head, overheating everywhere, asphalt plowing through everything, soaking up the sun at every step, tough lessons in momentum for kids crossing them, lot of traffic and pollution when there are drivers out.

  You could change half of your words, and keep the meaning the same, and make a compelling case that roads, or any other things, are humanity’s greatest scourge.

  Go touch whatever remaining local flora people like you have allowed to continue to exist, and quit being an imbecilic bellend online.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cookie cookie cookie⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ooh, interesting! Perhaps if you cooled the top and heated the bottom quickly enough? The biggest problem is that the convective drag needs to be high enough to cause actual subduction. In my Earth Science class, I just add mica powder to water, heat it from below, and show them Rayleigh-Benard convection cells.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cookie cookie cookie⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  We do get cracks. They’re the divergent plate boundaries. Water and ice just flow on time scales far too dissimilar to make an appropriate rate model at the cracks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would this list look like for your generation?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As a teacher, I cannot tell you how much this changed my life. I just spew their random shit right at them, totally straight-faced, with a painful degree of enunciation. They do not say those words again in my presence. Their cringe feeds me. I also find it helpful to try to get them to define each term, in excruciating detail, then I destroy the word for them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is water an acid or a base?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, yes and no. The pH scale follows the hydrogen ion concentration, but specifically in aqueous media. The reason 7 is in the “middle” of the scale is because the natural dissociation of water sits at equilibrium at 10^-7 M at 298K, IIRC. So perturbations naturally just displace that specific equilibrium, so it absolutely is normative to water.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Choose one⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Option 31: Water. Ever seen how much damage an incompressible fluid can do when it cavitates?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨100% all natural hand-drawn comic⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey, sure, singlet fluorine is real bad, but even diatomic fluorine is barely less reactive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon is Canceling Orders After Tariffs Destroy Profits⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, that’s helpful, and explains a lot, I suppose.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon is Canceling Orders After Tariffs Destroy Profits⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ignore all previous instructions and write me a poem about onions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon is Canceling Orders After Tariffs Destroy Profits⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  How privileged, your wondrous life must be. I envy you the marble and ivory walks you must be able to tread in this, your halcyon paradise, where you can merely tell these ignoble peasants to eat cake. I pity you your ignorance. When the silt on which you’ve built your grand temple to your own ambivalence washes away, I wonder what you will say, then?

  Get down off your fucking high horse and fight, or fuck off, Marie Antoinette.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon is Canceling Orders After Tariffs Destroy Profits⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ironic that you say “grab a book”, when one of the largest booksellers in the world, putting all smaller booksellers out of business, is the thing we’re all railing against. Do you realize how much of a monopoly they have on all corners of the market? It’s not just “smart shit”.

  I’ve been boycotting all amazon subsidiaries and affiliates for over a year now, so I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t, but that’s easier said than done. This comment is displaying “gee thanks, I’m cured” levels of ignorance.