exasperation

@exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do we humans love music so?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  And on the flip side, when you’re singing a little improvised song and your coworker prevents you from resolving the melody, it can be frustrating.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨nightshade⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Every plant named in this meme is a nightshade.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do people calculate pi to the hundredth+ decimal place?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re right that using geometry and ratios is only good for a few digits of π. Some ancient mathematicians used to draw polygons on the inside and the outside of a circle, and then use the circumferences of those polygons as an upper or lower limit on what π was. Archimedes approximated π as being between 223/71 and 22/7, using 96-sided regular polygons.

  The real breakthroughs happened when people realized certain infinite series converge onto π, where you add and/or subtract a series of smaller and smaller terms so that the only digits of the sum that changes with each additional term are already way to the right of the decimal point.

  The Leibniz formula, proven to converge to π/4, is 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + 1/9 - 1/11 . . .

  So if you have a pen and paper, you can add and subtract each one in sequence, and eventually they get really small to where you’re adding and subtracting numbers so small that it leaves the first few digits untouched. At that point you can be confident that the digits that can’t change anymore are the right digits.

  Later breakthroughs in new formulas made much faster convergences, so that you didn’t have to make as many calculations to get a few digits. And computers make these calculations much, much faster. So today the computer methods generally use the Chudnovsky algorithm that spits out digits of 1/π, which can easily be converted to digits of π itself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UwU brat mathematician behavior⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Except maybe Electrical engineers.

  Yup, I can count just fine to 10: black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, gray, white.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sloth Demon⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I learned in my 20’s that my ideal mix of interests with a significant other needs to include:

  • Shared interests that we already loved before we met, that we can connect and bond over for that initial spark.
  • Her interests that she introduces to me, and my interests that I introduce to her, so that we can build on something together and appreciate how the other has enriched our own lives.
  • Some new interests that we can both pick up and grow in together, and further reinforce our enjoyment of spending time together and growing together.
  • Our own individual interests that never really click with the other, so that we can each continue to do things that reinforce our individuality and self identity distinct from that particular relationship.

  For me and my wife, we already loved food and dining and cooking before we met each other. Easy thing to build early dates around: “have you been to so and so restaurant, I’ve always wanted to check it out.” We also loved a lot of the same TV shows (mostly single camera sitcoms like The Office, Arrested Development, etc.), and had easy couch time for quiet nights in.

  She introduced me to style and fashion, and I appreciate a lot of the things about clothing and accessories and even makeup that I never bothered with before the age of 35.

  I introduced her to football, and we enjoy going to games together.

  We both introduced each other to a lot of musicians, TV shows, movies, and other entertainment we now both like.

  We both picked up an interest in wine, whiskey, cocktails, and learned about this stuff together (and have planned memorable vacations centered on the places where people produce that kind of stuff). We also really learned to appreciate architecture and interior design, going as far as to go on tours and visits to specific places and cities and museums for these types of things. We became really particular about silverware and dishes at some point, too, which was a bit of an extension of our love of dining and our love of interior design.

  And we still like our own stuff. She likes golf and tennis. I like basketball. I like all sorts of techy nerdy things that she has no interest in. She loves certain types of books and movies that I just do not care about. Our fitness routines have basically no overlap (yoga and spin versus powerlifting and Crossfit-style functional fitness workouts). She likes home improvement and garden stuff and I barely tolerate occasionally doing a few things around the house.

  And it works. Having both distinct parts of your life and shared parts of your life seems to strengthen the bonds overall.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is not satisfied⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s still a distinction between enjoying it in the particular moment versus enjoying the entire sum of all the moments, looking back.

  In food testing there are different preferences for how much someone enjoys a single bite of something versus enjoying an entire serving of that same thing. So even if someone prefers a sip of Pepsi over Coca Cola, they may nevertheless prefer an entire can of Coke over Pepsi. Same with all sorts of other consumer preferences.

  With online activity, there’s a lot of stuff out there that is the equivalent of digital junk food, where you may enjoy a specific moment but feel shitty about spending an entire day on those individual moments. The payoff that can come from some of the long term patience can sometimes be more satisfying than an endless stream of instant gratification.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨USA 🇺🇸 USA 🇺🇸 USA⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I appreciate the message, but I find this presentation style to be unbearable, like a shitty clickbait version of a TED talk: fast cuts with exaggerated audience reactions, playing hide the ball with the actual information being presented. And then they took what I imagine is a normal studio production designed for normal TV screens and cropped it into vertical video, published on Youtube as a short. Gross.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨oops⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Plastics are a broad category. But specific plasticizers, like BPA, have been demonstrated to cause specific endocrine issues, up to and including a causal link to certain cancers, miscarriages, and other reproductive/immune issues. And it’s not just correlations being found, as the research is showing the mechanism of action by actually inducing the effects in vitro.

  And so when a particular plasticizer has been shown to be harmful, the research goes into other chemically similar plasticizers to see whether they have biological effects, as well. BPS is another plasticizer that is being studied, as it is chemically similar to BPA.

  So we haven’t shown that all microplastics are bad. I’m skeptical that these effects would extend to all plastics. But some common compounds that are present in many plastics are a cause for concern, and the difficulty in treating water or waste for microplastics in general means that some of those harmful compounds are present in lots of places where we’d rather not.

  We moved from leaded gasoline to unleaded gasoline based on the specific dangers attributable to lead itself. We can do the same for the specific compounds in our plastics shown to be harmful. Maybe the end result is that we have a lot of safer plastics remaining. But your comment seems to suggest that we not even try.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨oops⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The brushes and loofas also contribute to micro plastic pollution.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨we are creators⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  the flushing kind or the hole in he ground kind?

  Any kind. There’s further breakdowns in access to flushing toilets, dry latrines, composting toilets, etc., but this is part of a long standing project to get people to stop open defecation in places where untreated human waste will mix into drinking water, food supply, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨we are creators⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  India basically introduced toilets in a single generation.

  According to this article, in 1993, 70.3% of the Indian population did not have access to toilets. By 2021, the number dropped to 17.8%. So literally more than half the population of India got access to toilets within 30 years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Breaking the generational barriers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Throw it away once it’s cooled. If it’s a solidified fat, you can just scrape it into the trash bag. If it’s a liquid oil, then you can throw it into a disposable container (I have a million takeout soup containers on hand at any given time) so that it doesn’t leak everywhere.

  Oil is compostable, but only in proper ratios to the overall organic material being composted, so it’s fair game to put into compostable containers for industrial composting, or maybe small quantities in your backyard compost, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you know what you’re doing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨All downhill from there⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  One big advantage is that we can run while breathing out of sync with our steps. Four legged running pretty much requires each inhale and exhale to sync with the compression and expansion of the torso with each stride. Humans, on the other hand, can run full speed while taking multiple steps per breath, depending on terrain and fatigue, which gives more options for pacing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jupiter⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  From what I remember, the taunt predates women overtaking men in college completion (which happened in approximately 1995). It’s pretty old at this point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jupiter⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not uncommon for space images to be color-enhanced. On the one hand, it may feel less authentic. On the other hand, the visible light levels in space may be insufficient for our expectations and uses anyway.

  Another thing to consider is that human perception of color in celestial objects is often just wrong, so enhancing the color of certain objects is more true than what we often see ourselves.

  The sun is the same color all the time: white, consisting of a broad spectrum of all the wavelengths in the visible light range. But our atmosphere scatters the different wavelengths differently, so we see a blue sky and we see yellow, orange, and red sunsets. The atmospheric effects are happening all the time, with all the other light that happens to hit our planet, like the moon seeming to change color while reflecting the same white sunlight.

  The stars in the sky are all sorts of different colors, but appear white to us, because our color-blind rods are much more sensitive than our color-sensitive cones, and the dimness of starlight just all looks like faint white lights regardless of whether the star happens to be red, yellow, blue, or white.

  Meanwhile, relativistic effects might actually shift wavelengths and resolution, too, whether we’re talking about redshift or gravitational lensing, and asking what the “true” image is supposed to be.

  So when we take a long exposure of something in space, that itself may represent something that the human eye can’t see. Using colors to represent the different wavelengths actually present may also require adjustment of what physical filters are used on the capture, and how the actual sensor is configured to account for different wavelengths (including potentially wavelengths not within the visible spectrum), and to account for literal noise captured by the sensor.

  Astrophotography needs to make choices about how to translate sensor data to an actual human-visible image displayed on a screen with its own limited color space of what its pixels can display, or printed on paper with its own limited color space of what inks are available for printing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Listen here, Little Dicky⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I always needed practical examples, which is why it was helpful to learn physics alongside calculus my senior year in high school. Knowing where the physics equations came from was easier than just blindly memorizing the formulas.

  The specific example of things clicking for me was understanding where the “1/2” came from in distance = 1/2 (acceleration)(time)^2 (the simpler case of initial velocity being 0).

  And then later on, complex numbers didn’t make any sense to me until phase angles in AC circuits showed me a practical application, and vector calculus didn’t make sense to me until I had to actually work out practical applications of Maxwell’s equations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cursed⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And the solutions we have for 5 or 10 appear elegant: perfect 45° angles, symmetry in the packed arrangement.

  5 and 10 are interesting because they are one larger than a square number (2^2 and 3^2 respectively). So one might naively assume that the same category of solution could fit 4^2 + 1, where you just take the extra square and try to fit it in a vertical gap and a horizontal gap of exactly the right size to fit a square rotated 45°.

  But no, 17 is 4^2 + 1 and this ugly abomination is proven to be more efficient.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sadge⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  she got a blood transfusion from Banner

  The existence of blood transfusions implies the existence of blood cisfusions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hurdler Wins 400-Meter Race Despite His Dick And Balls Falling Out Several Times⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  FitnessGram Pacer Tests, obviously

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨wtf⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Cats keep rodents under control so that our stored grain isn’t destroyed or contaminated.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨wtf⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.