Bags
@Bags@piefed.social
33/M
Interested in self-hosting, decentralization, and learning more about the fediverse.
I also do photography, but with digital cameras from the 90's.
- Comment on Is the periodic table still getting new additions? 2 weeks ago:
It depends on which theorist you talk to. Some say seconds to minutes, others say days to weeks, the nutcases say thousands to millions of years.
And at the end of the day, the electrical properties of these elements probably aren't that interesting or useful, and almost certainly won't be like, semiconductors or anything fun. Just dumb, heavy, really fucking radioactive wire lol.
- Comment on I feel like it was on purpose 2 weeks ago:
I will try and dig through my e-reader to find it, but it was a while ago so I might have purged the file.
On a completely unrelated note, just this week I finished up the last of Greg Egan's works, I've been binging all his stuff. If you haven't read any of his stuff I highly recommend it. They were all so good, but Diaspora and the Orthogonal Trilogy were my standout faves. the Orthogonal Trilogy is so unbelievably deeply technically detailed, it kept me glued to the pages and pages of equations, even if the characters were a little dry. It's all about the universe-building in that one. Egan has an entire website with a massive amount of additional information and details about the physics of that universe.
- Comment on I feel like it was on purpose 2 weeks ago:
Hah, I guess I wasn't thinking far enough into the Trekkiverse.
I had recently read a book that had replicator-like technology but the matter stream was a luxury that not everyone could afford to connect to, it was laid out as an analog to the internet or other services like that, so that's where my mind went. I can't for the life of me remember which book that was...
- Comment on I feel like it was on purpose 2 weeks ago:
I'll put on my best Keiko voice and disappointed stare.
"But Miles, where do you think the matter replicators get their matter from? And where does the power to run them come from? Until a complete and total change in human philosophy regarding the accumulation of wealth, any required resource will become the new vehicle of capitalistic control."
- Comment on Is the periodic table still getting new additions? 2 weeks ago:
The "island of stability" actually encompasses many of the superheavy elements that we have already produced. The "stability" part comes from "magic numbers" of neutrons in the isotopes that are theorized to have some kind of stabilizing effect on the nuclear shells.
The difficulty is that we can theorize the number of neutrons we need to stabilize a certain number of protons, but finding atoms with the right number of protons and neutrons to smash together to hopefully create that total number is... difficult. Sometimes those particular isotopes with the proton/neutron quantities required either just plain don't exist, or are themselves a wholly synthetic isotope with its own set of problems like being insanely slow or difficult to produce, having a crazy short half-life, etc.
- Comment on Is the periodic table still getting new additions? 2 weeks ago:
The elements at the very end of the periodic table are somewhat tenuous as we know "elements" to be, as there has only ever been very VERY small amounts of this material produced, and the isotopes of those materials that ARE produced split apart almost immediately with insanely small half-lives, so it's not like there's any amount of it just kicking around in a jar somewhere in some lab.
There's a ton of interesting reading on the theoretical island of stability in superheavy elements
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stabilityI think there are elements theorized up to around atomic number 125 or 127. Currently the highest confirmed, named, and somewhat categorized is 118.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
FxTec Pro1 X... As someone who has spent years searching for a modern-ish phone with a Qwerty keyboard... How has this flown under my radar for 5 years?!?
I've completely rethought my phone situation recently and it wouldn't really fit my lifestyle, but man I am still tempted to keep my eyes out for a cheap one.