exasperation
@exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Hurdler Wins 400-Meter Race Despite His Dick And Balls Falling Out Several Times 4 days ago:
404 is great, too, for coverage of those topics.
Defector is worth a special mention in large part because it’s one of the few places on the internet that still makes me laugh out loud. It’s ostensibly a sports site, but when they stray off topic it’s some of the best stupid shit on the internet.
- Comment on Hurdler Wins 400-Meter Race Despite His Dick And Balls Falling Out Several Times 5 days ago:
Defector is fucking great. It’s the team that made Deadspin magical, who all revolted when Deadspin got bought by private equity and run into the ground, and banded together to form an employee-owned outlet whose authors are just all great writers.
The editor in chief of Deadspin, who fought the dumb decisions when private equity took over, ended up resigning if a blaze of glory by posting this article on the site as she left.
She also has a great new book out on how private equity breaks things.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 days ago:
It’s a California Kong, which is two California kings tied together with gorilla leather.
- Comment on The cell wall is the wall of the cell. 5 days ago:
FitnessGram Pacer Tests, obviously
- Comment on wtf 5 days ago:
Cats keep rodents under control so that our stored grain isn’t destroyed or contaminated.
- Comment on wtf 5 days ago:
This study analyzes historical results of three different man versus horse races (in Wales, in Virginia, and in California). The data shows that human performance decreases with temperature, but less so than horses, so that 30°C is approximately where the best humans can start outperforming the best horses that year.
I would think that even with 15 minutes of intermittent pauses/checks, that time is still productive for cooling the animal and would add less than 15 minutes to the theoretical total if they were allowed to run the whole time.
- Comment on wtf 5 days ago:
In order to make a firearm from scratch you must first create the universe.
- Comment on The cell wall is the wall of the cell. 6 days ago:
All of us who learned Spanish in the U.S. also know “¿Dónde está la biblioteca?”
Just a bunch of canned phrases like that kicking around in our brains.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
A lot of young people don’t realize just how difficult post-school dating was before online dating. Once we exhausted the pool of 5-10 single people who were friends of friends, that was basically it. We’d have to go find strangers at the bar.
That conditioned everyone to be slightly more willing to settle for less perfect matches, knowing that there wasn’t necessarily a replacement available. That could be a good thing (people more likely to have the patience to let a spark develop) or a bad thing (a higher percentage of couples who just resented each other).
I can see an argument that things were better before online dating for some subset of people. But having lived that period, I can say from experience that it wasn’t easy then, either. And for someone like me, who is a better writer than I am a speaker, especially over the phone, the rise of text-based communication was helpful for navigating the early stages of relationships when that became the norm.
- Comment on Oranges? In this economy? 1 week ago:
Obvious Plant puts fake products on shelves.
True Wagner puts absurd flyers on telephone poles and bulletin boards.
This is more of a True Wagner situation.
- Comment on wtf 1 week ago:
It’s a few things that stem from bipedalism:
- We can run and breathe entirely separately. Most quadrupeds lack the ability to run and take breaths independently of the pace of each step. Watching cheetahs sprint, for example, show that they have no choice but to exhale every time their legs come together and inhale every time their legs push apart.
- Running on our hind legs only frees up our hands to be able to use tools and weapons, maybe even water containers for drinking on the go.
- We can see further by standing up, and can make tactical decisions based on terrain, while still running pretty much full speed.
Combined with our unusual ability to cool ourselves by sweating, this gives us an advantage over pretty much any animal in the heat. Wolves and horses can still outrun humans in the cold, but lack the cooling mechanisms to maintain pace in the same heat that we can.
- Comment on Dear Kevin 1 week ago:
When I learned about taxonomy in the 90’s they hadn’t really sequenced many genomes, so taxonomy was still very much phenotype driven, rather than the modern genetic/molecular approaches. I just assumed that everything I learned has become out of date.
- Comment on Dear Kevin 1 week ago:
Gray sex.
You know, sex between people of Pierce’s age.
- Comment on Dear Kevin 1 week ago:
Black, brown, then the fucking colors of the rainbow in order, gray, white.
If you need a mnemonic to memorize that, you’re gonna have some trouble actually building out your lookup table in your head of immediately knowing that red=2, yellow=4, etc.
- Comment on Are drink coasters for people who frequently spill their drink or have trouble drinking without dribbling down the cup? 1 week ago:
Is there another kind of table?
- Comment on Are drink coasters for people who frequently spill their drink or have trouble drinking without dribbling down the cup? 1 week ago:
That’s the possibly apocryphal origin story of Spanish tapas, too: a slice of bread to cover the wine glass between sips (hence the name “tapa,” which means a “cover”), then a few things to dress up that slice of bread, maybe a piece of meat or cheese. So traditionally a single tapa is served for each glass of wine you order.
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 1 week ago:
10 digits gets the diameter of the earth to within an inch.
Put another way, 10 digits means that your error will be caused by your imprecise model of the Earth’s shape, rather than imprecision in the value of pi.
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 1 week ago:
What would be the “n” in that Big O notation, though?
If you’re saying that you want accuracy out to n digits, then there are algorithms with specific complexities for calculating those. But that’s still just an approximation, so those aren’t any better than the real-world implementation method of simply looking up that constant rather than calculating it anew.
- Comment on All this produce is going to spoil at the food bank where I volunteer 2 weeks ago:
If you’re accommodating another group of people you should produce enough to always feed them, too, not just sometimes in surplus years. The whole point is that you’ve gotta plan for a surplus, otherwise you risk starvation in bad years (and it doesn’t make it any better, morally, if the people who bear the risk of starving are “another group or people”).
- Comment on All this produce is going to spoil at the food bank where I volunteer 2 weeks ago:
how does waste prevent a shortage from becoming a famine ?
Making the expected production a higher number than the expected need will give the headroom necessary to deal with a shortage without people starving.
If you’re aiming to produce food for a population of 100,000, but have the capacity to make food for 200,000, then you can afford to waste half of your food without starvation. You can also accommodate a 50% drop in production without starvation.
So that buffer is expected waste, but it’s also starvation resistance.
- Comment on Well whenever you notice something like *that*, a wizard did it 3 weeks ago:
Predate rationalism? Modern rationalism and the scientific method came up in the 16th and 17th centuries, and was built on ancient foundations.
Phlogiston theory was developed in the 17th century, and took about 100 years to gather the evidence to make it infeasible, after the discovery of oxygen.
Luminiferous aether was disproved beginning in the late 19th century and the nail in the coffin happened by the early 20th, when Einstein’s theories really started taking off.
- Comment on Well whenever you notice something like *that*, a wizard did it 3 weeks ago:
Science is a process for learning knowledge, not a set of known facts (or theories/conjectures/hypotheses/etc.).
Phlogiston theory was science. But ultimately it fell apart when the observations made it untenable.
A belief in luminiferous aether was also science. It was disproved over time, and it took decades from the Michelson-Morley experiment to design robust enough studies and experiments to prove that the speed of light was the same regardless of Earth’s relative velocity.
Plate tectonics wasn’t widely accepted until we had the tools to measure continental drift.
So merely believing in something not provable doesn’t make something not science. No, science has a bunch of unknowns at any given time, and testing different ideas can be difficult to actually do.
Hell, there are a lot of mathematical conjectures that are believed to be true but not proven. Might never be proven, either. But mathematics is still a rational, scientific discipline.