exasperation
@exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on soda 4 days ago:
…Peyton is just a common name in Tennessee. Maybe Peyton Manning helped that trend with his success as a quarterback, but there are a lot of kids with that name in Tennessee.
- Comment on Opinions on Jurassic Park as a Zoo 1 week ago:
If I remember correctly, the book opens with a prologue describing the business/finance hype in biotech, where a bunch of startups are raising funds and racing to get rich revolutionizing how to commercialize the exciting cutting edge in biological science in that era. It has nothing to do with the plot and the characters of the book, except that it establishes the tone, the background, and the incentives at play.
- Comment on Opinions on Jurassic Park as a Zoo 1 week ago:
My favorite moment in the book is where they realize that the computer program for tracking populations had an incorrect assumption and just returned the full count if it counted the expected population for an enclosure. Only, the dinosaurs were breeding, so the system didn’t catch that the populations were actually higher than expected, and therefore didn’t notice when some dinosaurs escaped from their enclosures.
I didn’t get what chaos theory was until like 10-20 years later, but to my 12-year-old self it was the first time I learned about how bad assumptions can cascade in real world failures.
- Comment on Opinions on Jurassic Park as a Zoo 1 week ago:
Michael Crichton was a successful novelist, and his first foray into show business was writing the screenplay for Westworld, about a park where everything goes wrong. It flopped commercially but basically planted the seeds for him to try it again, but with dinosaurs. Spielberg directed the adaptation and then there was a rush to adapt a bunch of other stuff. He was also an executive producer for ER, as it was adapted from a pilot he wrote, based on his own experience from med school (he graduated with an MD but never practiced).
- Comment on Pet rent 1 week ago:
Oldest profession.
- Comment on PUT THE TRAINS IN THE BAG 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 2 weeks ago:
Now Dennis, I hear speed has something to do with it.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 2 weeks ago:
It’s too hard to try to manually control a fast breath rate like that. What you want to do is to naturally push that up by doing a bunch of physical work so that you’re breathing heavily. Then you’ll be exhaling lots of carbon dioxide!
- Comment on PUT THE TRAINS IN THE BAG 2 weeks ago:
The problem is that population distribution means that almost nobody is going to be getting on or off the train between Minneapolis and Seattle. The population of North Dakota is 800k, South Dakota is 925k, Nebraska is 2 million, Montana is 1.1 million, Wyoming is 590k, Idaho is 2 million. That’s nearly a whole quadrant of the country with less population than the Houston metro area. If we’re building trains, let’s build trains in Houston and serve the same number of people with like a tiny percentage of track that it would take to serve the upper plains states.
- Comment on hyperbaric oxygen chamber 2 weeks ago:
Call me a Luddite but I don’t like the sound of toxin injections and “shockwave therapy” for my genitals.
- Comment on hyperbaric oxygen chamber 2 weeks ago:
I don’t know what it is about computer science that makes people so confident they’re always the smartest person in the room, but it does lead to some interesting scams.
It’s not computer science. It’s money and power. Having everyone else in your life falling all over themselves to kiss your ass is toxic to one’s personality, and makes it hard to stay grounded.
The thing with becoming rich and powerful through other avenues, it might happen in a way that you’re less confident in your intellectual capabilities and are used to outsourcing things to professionals. If you’re a pro athlete or actor or musician, you might come up with the understanding that you need your agents and lawyers and accountants to do what they do.
But tech business leaders who become rich feel that they know the tech, know the business, and know the world. The thing they are most confident about is the thing that made them rich.
See also some athletes believing in nonsense about health and fitness, because of their superior athletic performance.
Or artists who descend into terrible rabbit holes, artistically, because nobody is around to tell them no.
Anyone who gets rich off of their smarts is susceptible. Engineers, doctors, bankers, financial professionals, lawyers, etc.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 2 weeks ago:
In theory we can break down the sense of sight into subcomponents, too. It’s only the visual cortex that processes those raw inputs into a coherent single perception. We have two eyes but generally only perceive one image, even if the stereoscopic vision gives us a good estimate of distance, and one eye being closed or obscured or blinded fails pretty gracefully into still perceiving a single image.
We have better low light sensitivity in our color-blind rods but only have color perception from our cones, and only in the center of our visual field, but we don’t actually perceive the loss of color in those situations.
So yeah, someone putting a warm hand on my back might technically set off different nerve sensors for both temperature and touch, but we generally perceive it as a unified “touch” perception.
Similarly, manipulating vision and sound might very well throw off one’s proprioception, because it’s all integrated in how it’s perceived.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 2 weeks ago:
Nero
The dude who fiddled as Rome burned?
- Comment on I'm very happy for her. In youth tightness can be a problem 2 weeks ago:
Mannn it’s the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice!
- Comment on Natural selection at work 3 weeks ago:
It’s interesting because it’s very obvious, biologically, that the panda has a digestive system that has a carnivore past, and yet, the very plentiful biomass in bamboo forests just waiting to be eaten rewards the animals that can make use of it. So the giant panda may or may not be “optimized” for meat, but has generations that came out of the free food that is bamboo, so that their very survival depends on a herbivore diet.
- Comment on Natural selection at work 3 weeks ago:
I remember reading that the common ancestors of all birds was carnivorous. Basically every herbivore bird descended from carnivores.
See also the giant panda and the red panda.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
This data analysis seems to suggest that yes, July through October have higher birth rates in the United States, with maybe 10% higher births than similar days between April and June.
- Comment on it's just neat 3 weeks ago:
someone who knew the male in this meme
How can you tell that the parapropalaehoplophorus septentrionalis is male?
- Comment on Anon dates a 19 y/o 3 weeks ago:
Half plus seven is just a rough rule of thumb, that tries to capture some different concepts at play.
Personally, I never liked dating across major life milestone ages like 22, college graduation. The mid 20’s are just an important phase in developing one’s personality and sense of self, and being outside of the school environment is an important transition to learn. So when I was 30 I had a hard cutoff at 25, as I didn’t want to be with anyone who still identified with being a recent college student.
I felt like a very different person as between 18 and 22, and between 22 and 26. But 26 wasn’t that different from 30, and 30 to 35 only saw some slight changes. It’d be hypothetical because I was already in a committed relationship after 32 or so, but when I was 35 my cutoff probably would’ve been late 20’s, and when I was 40 my cutoff would’ve probably been around 30.
- Comment on IF YOU TAKE ENOUGH YOU CAN SEE *THE PATTERN* BRO 3 weeks ago:
Like the Kumail Nanjiani joke about a new drug called “cheese,” made by mixing Tylenol PM with heroin.
- Comment on How Saturday night ended 3 weeks ago:
In other words, really low probability with a substantial risk that even if you do hit it, you’ll have to share the jackpot with others?
- Comment on Anon asks out a friend 4 weeks ago:
This particular fantasy (one day I’ll get to reject the women who rejected me first and they’d never be able to handle it as gracefully as I did) seems somewhat common among young men who have trouble connecting with women.
But the false premise at the center of it is that the man is such a good friend to the woman, and the woman’s dating/romantic life hasn’t found anyone nearly as understanding or kind or empathetic. And part of that belief is some kind of assumption that life is an RPG where everyone is allotted the same number of points to distribute, and anyone who is maxed on charisma must be less intelligent or empathetic or something.
Realistically, men who are friends with women tend to do better with dating and relationships than men who aren’t close to women. The friends of friends angle is a great pipeline for searching for partners, assuming your personality makes your friends comfortable connecting you with their friends.
- Comment on Clock logic 4 weeks ago:
Maybe where you’re sitting. But my frame of reference has had slightly different time dilation than yours.
- Comment on Clock logic 4 weeks ago:
The decimalization of money is its own fun history, with a lot of different countries undergoing their own transitions at different times.
The Spanish dollar, which was the world reserve currency in its heyday, was divided into 8 reals (see how pirates used to refer to money in the form of “pieces of eight”) but issues with the supply of silver led to the introduction of the lesser real de vellón, which eventually settled at 20 to the dollar after over 100 years of uncertainty and confusion.
- Comment on Kinesi Protein 4 weeks ago:
The animation is actually slowed down. Kinesin can take something like 100 steps per second. Each step is about 8 nm, and they’ve been observed to move 600-1000 nm per second.
In reality it wiggles around in Brownian motion but the equilibrium of it “clicking” into place is so attractive that it keeps happening really fast.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 4 weeks ago:
I don’t believe that “watt hours” are more convenient than joules
Clearly you’ve never had to do the calculations where these things come up, where hours are a much more common unit of measure for time than seconds, so that multiplying and dividing by time is easier when working with hours.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 4 weeks ago:
it’s more when people are almost using the metric system then fuck it up, like the “Watt Hour” for measuring energy use.
Energy is just so important to physics and engineering that it will be measured in whatever unit is most convenient to convert in that particular context: joules as the SI unit, watt hours for electricity usage, calories for certain types of heat or food energy calculations, electron volts in particle physics, equivalent tonnes of TNT for explosion energy, things like that.
- Comment on If you argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone, is it necessarily hypocritical if you also own investment properties? 5 weeks ago:
I believe in a baseline level of food, shelter, healthcare, and education being provided to all regardless of means. Plus things like parks, infrastructure, physical safety and security, etc.
But just because I believe that everyone should have enough to eat doesn’t mean that I don’t believe there is a qualitative difference between that baseline level of sustenance and all sorts of enjoyment I can get from food above that level. A person has a right to food, but that doesn’t change the fact I might be able to farm for profit. Or go up the value/luxury chain and run an ice cream parlor, or produce expensive meals, or buy and sell expensive food ingredients. I want schools to provide universal free lunch but I also know that there will always be a market for other types of food, including by for-profit producers (from farmers/ranchers to grocers to butchers to restaurateurs).
The existence of public parks shouldn’t threaten the existence of profitable private spaces like theme parks, wedding venues, other private spaces.
So where do real estate investors sit in all this? I’m all for developers turning a profit in creating new housing. And don’t mind if profit incentives provide liquidity so that people can freely buy and sell homes based on their own needs.
I don’t personally invest in real estate because I think it’s a bad category of investment, but I don’t think those who do are necessarily ideologically opposed to universal affordable housing. It’s so far removed from the problems in affordable housing that you can’t solve the problems simply by eliminating the profit.
- Comment on Say hello to Bary 5 weeks ago:
Isn’t that canceled out by the pushing you do when you start to jump?
- Comment on What age gap is too big of an age gap if someone's in their early 30's? 1 month ago:
while he was a bit “immature” for his age (financially)
Ok this is now my favorite euphemism I’ve seen
