Nautalax
@Nautalax@lemmy.world
- Comment on So are they like extinct or something? 16 hours ago:
There is an evil invasive plant called Sida rhombifolia that invades local habitats and is obnoxious to pull over here. Guess what shape the leaves are
- Comment on If dogs have such a great nose, why do they sniff other dogs asses? Wouldn't it smell like shit or not a good smell? 3 days ago:
They have a lot of brain and nose real estate dedicated to processing such smells for useful information and also stronger stomach acid and enzymes in the digestive system to make ingesting poop much less threatening for a typical dog vs. the average person. So they typically benefit from such investigations whereas people would get not much info from such behaviors but would be way more likely to get some awful disease. Better for us to have a body that says “uhhh don’t do that” whereas they have instincts that tell them to go right on ahead.
- Comment on /fit/ finds what works 3 days ago:
Other person handled a source on it but one way to think of it is like x-rays. Gamma rays are more much more energetic x-rays basically. X-rays are used in imaging becuase they easily pass through less dense materials like your flesh but not as much in dense materials like say bone. The difference in the distribution of x-rays that passed through your body to get to the other side can be used to make an image showing those differences in density. The higher the energy of the light in this part of the spectrum increases the penetration (not necessarily the case for light in general but at this end of the pool yes), more penetration means less of a percentage of the energy is deposited along the path so more makes it through. Though, even a fraction of high energies deposited can still be bad for you if enough is shining on you. But anyway human tissue is mostly not dense and gamma rays are best attentuated by dense materials like a lead blanket or something so gamma rays coming from the inside can escape you. If you swallow beta or alpha the size and charge of the particle makes it much harder to escape you so virtually all of their energy would be deposited inside you. And neutrons are well moderated by the materials your body is composed of so they will also dump a ton of energy in your body. Alpha and neutron radiation get multipliers for the biological effect of the energy they deposit that reflect them having a much worse impact on you than beta and gamma.
Alpha emitters have medical applications in the body if well-targeted and immediately adjacent or inside of something you want destroyed. For instance boron neutron capture therapy was developed which entails providing B-10 in a compound that is selectively taken up by tumors but ideally NOT by healthy tissue. They then shine a particular energy spectrum of neutrons that will penetrate to the level the cancer is in and the neutrons are captured by the boron isotope (which is very very good at capturing neutrons). The resulting nucleus is not stable and releases an alpha particle, ideally causing massive local damage to the cancerous cell while the short range spares healthy cells.
First generation for that treatment when it was devised many decades back botched it though and wound up killing patients even faster (though it was introduced on people with brain cancers that were basically a death sentence anyway which I guess is where people were willing to try anything). The boron containing compound didn’t target the tumor as selectively as hoped for so a lot wound up in healthy tissues, the neutron energy was too low so the neutrons didn’t penetrate to the necessary depth to destroy the tumors deep in the skull but did cause a lot of damage to healthy scalp tissue, etc.
That said it underwent a lot of refinement later that made it a much more effective treatment.
- Comment on /fit/ finds what works 3 days ago:
Neutrinos are indeed tremendously penetrating precisely due to very little mass and no charge, many are constantly streaming through the entire world and you at any given moment. They are also way less likely to interact with matter than gamma rays. Since they very rarely do much of anything (you have to build ridiculous facilities to have a chance of detecting their uncommon interactions) they are not really considered as ionizing radiation.
Neutrons have much more mass but are still electrically neutral. Most materials have much more mass than a neutron so they bounce off and barely lose any energy in their collisions, sort of like when you throw a ping pong ball at a wall, which keeps them as highly penetrating in many materials. They only appreciably slow down when they collide with atoms similar in mass to them like the hydrogens in water, think like how a billiard ball will hit another and dump almost all of its energy into the similarly sized ball. So materials like water and concrete are good shielding for neutrons but lead not so much.
- Comment on /fit/ finds what works 3 days ago:
The idea is that it gets mostly blocked by the combo of the layers of clothes and skin so that kind of optimizes you not absorbing dose for that contrived scenario. If you swap beta with alpha then the beta will be doing more damage because it can penetrate the skin while the alpha is still entirely blocked. If you swap the beta with the gamma then the beta will be depositing basically all of the energy inside you and the gamma will not really be shielded at all from being in the pocket so that’s also more dose. If you have the neutron source swapped with the beta then although the beta is no longer a problem the neutrons will be penetrating you and moderating throughout your body which is bad. So beta in the pocket is the optimized option for that scenario even if it’s not necessarily where you would want to keep it in real life… similarly don’t actually go around eating gamma sources lol.
- Comment on /fit/ finds what works 4 days ago:
So long as you don’t wind up with a piece of the alpha-emitter inside you (ex. by eating it, breathing it, introduction via a wound) they are radiologically harmless. Alpha particles are highly charged and comparatively heavy since they have two protons and two neutrons. That mass and charge means that they make a lot of collisions and dump a ton of energy along a short track… VERY short, like the diameter of an individual cell even. Devastating if they are doing that in living tissue due to massive energy deposition all concentrated in a particular area, but on the outside the layers of your skin will adequately protect you. Or, as memes of old have put it:
They are of more concern as like an airborne gas or dusty contamination since you may not be aware if you are breathing them in or accidentally eating traces after touching a innocuous looking dusty surface and not washing your hands before lunch.
A little thought exercise they tell you when you study radiation: if you were to hypothetically have four equivalent activity sources that emitted alpha, beta, gamma and neutron radiation, and you have only four methods of either putting one in your pocket, throwing it in the trash, eating it, or holding it in your hand, which emitter do you match to which method?
Alpha is fine to hold in your hand since your skin will block the alpha particles; you want to avoid eating it because that would really mess you up. Beta has a bit more penetration so you don’t want to have it in your hand but the pocket is relatively fine. Neutron radiation is very penetrating except for moderators similar in mass to neutrons like the hydrogen atoms in water which the neutrons collide with and dump a ton of energy on; unfortunately you are made up of a lot of excellent moderating material where those neutrons would dump a lot of energy in you so you don’t want those anywhere near you and it’s best to throw that source away. Gammas are also highly penetrating so they don’t care that much about small differences like being in your hand or pocket but through having basically no mass and no charge they aren’t particularly likely to interact with you either so all else being equal they’re the safest of the emitters to have inside you if that’s a forced option.
- Comment on What did you call me? 4 days ago:
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 1 week ago:
$105,411, a household income in the top 10th percentile globally, isn’t enough to afford minimal quality of life?
- Comment on Social Security can be saved. Scrap the cap! 3 weeks ago:
Per Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget scrapping the cap would postpone the trust running out to either 2054 or 2058 depending on whether or not those who pay the now higher taxes would also receive correspondingly higher benefits or if the benefits remain capped. So an extra 20 or 24 years since presently the trust is slated to run out in 2034. When the trust runs out, benefits are going to be cut to match the money coming in which would mean about ~20% reduction to benefits.
Good start and punts the issue off for another generation, but it doesn’t quite save social security all the way.
- Comment on Why Does Everyone Seem Ahead of Me? ??? 2 months ago:
A ton of Instagram content is designed to amp up your insecurities and then sell you some course or whatever… lots of goofy activities going on like influencers banding together to rent massive houses and nice cars as the backdrop for some video about how they’re gajillionaires at 20 and you can be too if you just buy their course 🙄. And as you said for the real people on there who aren’t influencers there is a bias towards generally wanting to post the things that put themselves in the best light.
I only use Instagram these days when an old pal sends me a reel, the influencer to friend ratio is too high nowadays for my taste
- Comment on Newsflash pal 2 months ago:
Yeah ancestral plants that became many crops look almost nothing like their descendants in many cases
The funniest I think are secondary crops like oats and rye. Our forebears weren’t even trying to grow a better version of those, those started off as just weeds that people were trying to get rid of in their wheatfields. In the course of purging them they accidentally selected for more wheat-like plants that people would be less likely to rip out until they became actual decent crops on their own, while also maintaining hardiness in areas that wheat couldn’t handle such that they spun off and became popular on their own rights.
- Comment on I've been using this simple trick to keep cool in the heat wave (UK) 2 months ago:
I figured it was something like that haha just curious what angle you were coming from
- Comment on I've been using this simple trick to keep cool in the heat wave (UK) 2 months ago:
300% reduction would mean you no longer pay for heating and instead get paid twice as much as you used to pay
- Comment on That's bananas! 2 months ago:
What a weird way to open a banana. I always open a seam along the back and pop it out of there.
- Comment on "Linux? Those guys who like to talk about themselves?" 2 months ago:
I don’t get why people on Lemmy care so much about either of them so passionately, I passively see more Linux vs Windows in a week here than basically the rest of my life before joining this site. Is every other person here some kind of computer science enthusiast or something like that?
- Comment on People who work in medical offices, has anyone ever called to verify a doctor note for work or school? 2 months ago:
I don’t think most people would really care about a one off… but if it becomes a regular thing and/or the person has very low credibility then they’ll be more interested on if they’ve been taken for a ride or not.
- Comment on Anon is married 3 months ago:
Yet new housing is built all the time. Why? Because it’s lucrative for those with gobs of money, holding all the housing.
It’s really not being built at the amounts needed (at least, not in the places that need it most) which is why there’s a housing crisis. Those who already own housing benefit more from preventing new housing from being built by anyone other than themselves. Ensuring scarcity of housing while demand is continuing to grow from the population rising and average household size shrinking makes the housing they hold skyrocket in value.
- Comment on Anon is an introvert 3 months ago:
Colombian food isn’t spicy. Spice is high in like Mexico and Central America but that’s not universal across Latin cuisines ex. I know an Ecuadorian who can’t even take a sprinkle of black pepper without having to fan their mouth. Will happily eat vigorously salted green grapes, green apples or green mangos without batting an eye though.
- Comment on Do people really "need" friends? 3 months ago:
hhs.gov/…/surgeon-general-social-connection-advis…
Not having friends has similar health impacts to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Making friends makes you physically and mentally healthier, gives connections that can help you out of rough patches in your life and into opportunities.
You ‘can’ live without them, but probably not as long as you would have otherwise.
- Comment on Guys, I am in need of niche media to larp, any suggestions? 3 months ago:
Kingdom of Dragon Pass / Six Ages is pretty niche and the lore there basically has people larping so hard to re-enact divine stories that the divinity rubs off on them and gets them magic and neat stuff. Or terrible deaths.
Ex. head of the Orlanthi pantheon in myth slays a dragon to rescue a rain god inside it and end a drought:
The “We have that at home” version:
(They have even larped as cows… that one’s on the dangerous side though…)
- Comment on When drawing up the middle east after WW1 and 2 how come the Kurds got the shit end of the stick? 3 months ago:
I’m flattered but I don’t know the first thing about modding and I’m just here to goof off so I don’t want to make it a chore, if that makes sense. I’ll certainly subscribe to that group, though.
- Comment on When drawing up the middle east after WW1 and 2 how come the Kurds got the shit end of the stick? 3 months ago:
Before WWI the Kurdish people were split between the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and a tiny number in the Russian Empire.
The Ottomans entered WWI when a faction within it pulled an ill-advised gamer move against Russia that pushed the whole state into the war. Persia under the Qajar dynasty was very weak and informally controlled in large areas by Russia and the British so although they were officially neutral basically nobody else respected that so they were a battleground also. The Entente basically surrounded the Ottomans except for in the European part and they also had powerful naval forces so there were many fronts to the war. The British got a foothold in Iraq and convinced the Arabs to rebel. The Ottomans were losing ground gradually, especially in the south but fortunately for them the Russians fell to pieces so from there they could rest or advance on the northern Persian and Caucasus fronts and got a really good set-up there. However later on the southern fronts in Syria and Iraq were going badly and Bulgaria sued for peace which then put their now-exposed capital in Europe at risk, so the Ottoman government situated there determined the war was unwinnable and signed an unfavorable armistice that had them retreat from their gains, have some areas to be occupied by Europeans while a peace treaty was hammered out and to demobilize the army. Many of the people and army were incensed at this and would keep fighting at small scale. During this time Ataturk put out a communication that said the country’s independence and integrity was in grave danger, that the government was compromised and that delegates from the provinces should hold congresses in the safest areas of Turkey away from outside influence to determine the path forward. These established a burgeoning rival government to the one in the capital which was hemorrhaging legitimacy since it was being pressured by forces stationed right there to be compliant. As part of the new order envisioned in the newly drafted Treaty of Sevres, in addition to the ceding of land and influence to the British and French, there were also to be cessions to Greece, Italy and Armenia as well as a Kurdish autonomy or independence.
By that point though control of the unoccupied areas had firmly shifted to the Ankara government which did not agree to the terms. It warred with Armenia over their disputed territory and won, then when the Bolsheviks took over Armenia shortly after Turkey series of treaties with them that basically established the current borders and friendly relations (both had similar enemies at the time and wanted some friendly borders which would continue until Stalin fumbled things later). So that border set as Turkish one side, Soviet on the other. There was a small Kurdish population that they would intermittently make an autonomy (“Red Kurdistan”) for when sweet-talking Kurdish groups and then dissolve later, but no intention of independence from the USSR. There had been some earlier instances of Kurds revolting in Armenia and Azerbaijan but that was all squished by the time the Soviets rolled in.
Turkey continued with wars against the occupying powers and after forcing back a Greek attempt to push for Ankara the French agreed to settle the border (some modication would occur later w.r.t. Hatay state) in exchange for Turkey recognizing Syria as French in a 1921 treaty. There was a small Kurdish population in Syria at the time but more would flee there from turmoil in southeastern Turkey later. That was great as far as the French were concerned and they encouraged that since they figured that would boost the economy and simultaneously weaken the issue of Arab nationalism plaguing them in Syria (the Terrier Plan) but they wanted to control Syria themselves, not to give it to the anyone. Neither did Syria later on though under Assad rule it did allow Kurdish separatist groups aimed at Turkey to use some areas as training grounds safely out of Turkish reach so it would have leverage to make demands on other matters. Way way later on the SDF was able to control a decent chunk of Syria in the chaos of the Syrian civil war but they recently saw much of their majority Arab territories swap over to the new Syrian government and with a really bad situation if it goes to military means again they are integrating now.
The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne officially canceled the Treaty of Sevres and confirmed the border Turkey had with French Syria but the border with British Iraq was more contentious and was left tbd since both sides wanted the Mosul area (which was expected to be rich in oil). It was referred to the League of Nations which settled in favor of the area belonging to Iraq in 1926. Turkey was miffed but the British agreed to give them a part of the oil revenue and some other sweet rights and benefits so the Turks signed a treaty with them on it. The British did not want an independent Kurdistan because the oil was necessary for their navy and King Faisal of Iraq (a Sunni Arab) wanted to be able to have a higher Sunni population to balance against the many Shia Arabs in his kingdom. The Barzanis especially tried many many many times to get Kurdish state off the ground. Such attempts have been helped out at times by Turkey, Iran, the US etc. whenever they wanted to tweak the British/Iraq and presently they have an autonomous region albeit smaller than it was before the failed independence referendum.
Anyway in the meantime relations between Turks and Kurds had gone way south. For some background Sunni Kurds had for centuries been favored by the Ottoman governments and granted many traditional rights (albeit eroded in the latest Ottoman modernization campaigns) in exchange for serving as the first line of defense against the Shia leaning Qizilbash Turks who were often aligned with the various Iranian dynasties. After Turkey won back control of Thrace and Istanbul it had ended the monarchy but maintained the role of the former sultan as Caliph. The Caliph went into exile and his cousin was subsequently elected as new Caliph but it was a powerless position. He asked for more money and foreign scholars asked for him to have more power, but aggressive secularist Ataturk (who does not want religious influence entering politics) seized on this potential channel for “foreign influence” as grounds to actually abolish the Caliphate as well and force the Caliph and his family out of the country. He made many secular reforms in an attempt to shift from religious based identity to a Turkish national identity and promoted the Turkish language in line with that nation-state model.
All of that was quite toxic to Sunni traditionalists, and to ones who were also Kurdish it was viewed as sundering the only link that tied them together so that was an extra twist of the knife. Sheikh Said called all Muslims to rise up but he was only really answered by Kurdish groups (though notably some Kurdish Qizilbash who had previous been a big pain for the Ottomans opposed Sheikh Said). They laid siege to Diyarbakir but ultimately the rebellion was crushed. It was very expensive and worrisome for the Turkish government which commissioned a report on what to do. The Report for Reform in the East made many extreme recommendations on what to do that kicked Turkification into overdrive, established martial law in eastern areas and so on and made life very difficult for Kurds. In my opinion it sowed the seeds of many future problems ex. Dersim massacre. But as of yet despite insurgencies and the like, no Kurdish autonomy or independent state has been allowed from Turkey.
Qajar Iran was kind of a doormat that everyone stepped on. Much of it was basically occupied by the British and Russians and at times in WWI the Ottomans were making serious incursions. The Ottomans and early Turkey supported a revolt by Simko Shikak in western Iran (who had earlier fought them) who was eventually put down and forced into exile in Iraq by the new Pahlavi dynasty. Later on as described before Kurdish relations had gotten worse and rebellions were becoming a problem in Turkey so Turkey and Iran agreed to delimit the border more strictly which set the modern borders (very similar to older ones excluding ex. loss of Iraq) in 1937. In WWII Iran got invaded by the British and Soviets accompanied by some revolts. At the end of the war the British and the Soviets were supposed to leave but pro Soviet governments were declared in Mahabad (Kurdish) and Tabriz (Azeri). Tribes in the British occupation zone were not interested though and these attempted states collapsed when the Soviets blinked under American pressure and withdrew to leave them to Iran’s mercies. Some support flowed from the USSR and even Saddam’s Iraq to Kurdish groups in Iran (which similarly meddled back in Iraq) with a big revolt after the Iranian Revolution. Of course as you’ll know this didn’t work though some Kurdish insurgent groups exist to this day.
To make a long story short, the folks altering the maps were generally looking to do so in their own favor. Kurdish independence was mostly something to support somewhere else that you didn’t plan on annexing yourself and that would cause a power you were concerned with to be distracted. These were largely very poor tribal areas so with a poor economy they don’t have much ‘oomph’ so to speak in a prolonged war themselves so they would need support… which is also hard to provide because as they’re landlocked a ways in from the water you need the backing of a neighbor to actually get arms and supplies to them. And all the countries currently with a large Kurdish population - Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey - share an incentive to not actually want an independent Kurdish state that would may be ideologically inclined to provide a safe haven for their separatists to retreat to and strike back from. Plus Kurdish people are ideologically divided with constellations of parties with different objectives.
- Comment on Why do you post here or other social media? 3 months ago:
I got permabanned from Reddit for supporting terrorism because I posted an ISIS flag in a comment while pointing out how the part of it depicting Muhammad’s seal is based on a forgery some Europeans made as part of a fake relic to scam the Ottomans out of cash… which imo makes ISIS look like morons rather than somehow lending them support but apparently whoever reviews appeals can’t be bothered to read.
- Comment on Not even a big melon 3 months ago:
- Comment on I guessed 3 months ago:
- Comment on I guessed 3 months ago:
They are extremely overpopulated in much of the US, in part because most of the natural predators capable of keeping their numbers down have been killed off and there has been a huge artificial increase in field/forest interfaces where they thrive. Huge amounts of starving deer abound and descend on diminishing native vegetation with a voracious appetite while generally ignoring weird invasive foreign plants. Many native plant gardeners are vexed by their tendency to gnaw native plants and shrubs to death unless those are caged in and some got a taste for venison out of revenge haha.
Would be cool if we could re-introduce red wolves and the like to keep a lid on the deer without like half of the predators ending up shot or run over
- Comment on Spooooookyyyyy Scaaaaaaaarrryyyy 3 months ago:
Mozambique has you covered
- Comment on [deleted] 3 months ago:
12 inches isn’t that bad as far as subsidence issues can get. The ground below you is filled with very tiny holes and gaps that water seeps down into and fills and flows through, kind of like a sponge. While water fills those pores it’s difficult to squish down the soil.
If a heavy weight is on them like a building, though, that can put on enough pressure to push the water out of those pores and flow down out and around. A mix of soil and voids/air give much less resistance to weight than a mix of soil and water filling the gaps so then the voids get compacted down and the ground sinks. Different soils in different conditions may not evenly subside and that can give you a situation like the Leaning Tower of Pisa where one side was subsiding faster than the other side. In modern construction people try to get the water out and compact the ground ahead of time so that it acts more consistently and doesn’t make big changes when a heavy object is placed on it.
Here’s a picture from an agricultural area in California illustrating ~30 ft of subsidence that occurred in that area over a half century of pumping out the groundwater to water the crops.
(This also makes flooding worse… ground that used to be filled with holes that could channel the water down and away into large aquifers is now compacted such that those holes are gone. So instead water piles up on the surface in huge sheets that flow and wipe out whatever is between them and a lower elevation.)
- Comment on Anon needs a job 4 months ago:
After a spell of being a NEET I managed to wiggle my way into my old job despite being a fresh out of college grad … they were desperate to hire because they couldn’t hold onto people willing to be regularly on-call, occasionally flipping to nights and working twelves at random and extended times in the worst site of that industry in the worst state of the union, AND it was legally required so they had to have it. Each time they hired someone they had to not only spend usually two years training them while they were on intro engineer salary before they could become useful, but also spend a few tens of thousands of dollars on contractors to teach classes and the valuable time of qualified people as mentors. Then after the trainees got qualified it was like coin flip odds of them either staying for a couple years or instantly booking it and the whole investment wasted.
The bosses were constantly showering the qualified people remaining with promotions, raises and golden handcuffs and so on to placate people to please stay and not have them do more rounds of interviews, even when the people weren’t that good. Of course, that also meant it was a great way to develop the resume for an exit artificially early too.
Talked to a doctor there, there was a deal for foreign doctors to be stationed in undesired places like that in exchange for progress towards getting a green card. On finishing their time the department they joined could be on the verge of dissolving from the older people ditching so then BOOM program director by attrition rather early in their career. Which then looks great on their resume when sent to someone else so the cycle continues lol.
