AbouBenAdhem

@AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is your experience like for Jury Duty in the US?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve gotten a summons almost every year. Most of the time I just call in a few times and don’t have to report; most of the times I do need to report in, I end up sitting in jury pool room for half a day and then going home. Once I was selected as an alternate juror; I spent a few weeks listening to testimony with the regular jurors, but wasn’t needed for the deliberations or verdict.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What paper feels the best when you drag your fingers across it?⁩ ⁨⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Eggshell finish.

  It has a nice tactile feel, but without the visual distraction of linens or laids.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do americans living in Red States really despise american living in Blue States?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They despise the Americans they imagine live in blue states. The ones they meet in real life, probably not so much.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the difference between ignorance and stupidity?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Ignorance characterizes knowledge; stupidity characterizes behavior.

  You can be ignorant without being stupid and stupid without being ignorant, but they tend to be correlated because avoiding knowledge is stupid behavior.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I may be wrong here. Isn't AI only as smart as the user putting in the information or commands? What's the big deal?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Comparing intelligence implies that they’re creating their output by a comparable process, but that’s probably not true—they’re just finding patterns in other peoples’ output. The “big deal” is that they can create new output on the same patterns.

  Human beings can do this too, though—it’s called “bullshitting”. The only difference with AI is that they’re so good at it they stumble onto the right answers more frequently than human bullshitters do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where do I go for unbiased news in the world without it having an ulterior motive or kissing ass to the establishment of said country?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You can get news from just about any source, but the trick is this: the only real information is in the discrepancy between what they say and what you would have expected them to say based on their past reporting and other sources.

  Before you read an article from a known source, try to anticipate what the broad strokes will be. If the article matches your expectation, you’ve learned nothing and can ignore it. If they say something unexpected, it’s because they encountered something unexpected and are trying to accommodate it. So figure out what would make them change their story as they have—that’s the actual news.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Republican Party used to be very big on smaller government. What caused them to turn into the party of big government over reach? When did it happen?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  “Small government” only ever meant the removal of corporate regulations—in all other respects they were already above the law.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨America and it's racism and Israel?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nationalism is the belief that the world should be divided into ethnically-homogeneous nation-states. So it’s perfectly consistent for nationalists in one country to support other nationalist states outside their own.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is ZFC and why is it important?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The more abstract and general a theory is, the more different things it can be applied to. If you can figure out how to describe any problem in terms of sets, you immediately have all the theorems of ZFC at your disposal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In practice, sure—if nothing else, it means they wanted a tattoo.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How accurate can your position be calculated from a photo of the sun you post online?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A correct guess isn’t usually based on a single clue, but on using multiple clues to narrow the possibilities down in different ways. So every potential clue matters and should be considered, instead of assuming it’s irrelevant because there are other clues present as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How accurate can your position be calculated from a photo of the sun you post online?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  At any given moment there’s a full circle of points on the surface of the earth at which the sun has the same given zenith angle. So without any other information, the best you could do is narrow it down to someplace on such a circle.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I stick my head out a car window or a gust of wind hits my face it's like my throat closes and I can't breathe. How come motorcycle riders without helmets don't seem to have this problem?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  One thing that might be a factor is the Bernoulli effect (moving air has lower pressure than still air). When your head is in moving air but your chest is in relatively still air, that would create a pressure differential that makes it harder to draw air into your lungs. On a motorcycle, your whole body is in moving air so the pressure differential wouldn’t exist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I feel like I've never heard of a dog getting pink eye, do they get pink eye? I would have thought pink eye would be more common with dogs constantly sniffing arses?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Pinkeye” has two definitions: bovine pinkeye is a specific bacterial disease that only affects cattle; otherwise, “pinkeye” is a generic synonym for conjunctivitis.

  Dogs can’t get bovine pinkeye, but they can and do get other types of conjunctivitis. It may just be less noticeable in dogs because their eyes don’t have white sclera like humans’ do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If a space Alien landed in the states. And hooked up with one of his or her fellow travelers and had a kid in the US would that kid be a US citizen? Or do we have something in place for it?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It depends on how you (or the Supreme Court) defines “persons”.

  They might technically have to become corporations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If a virtual particle dips or blips out of existence then where do they go? Do they come back at a different point showing movement when the blip occurs? Are they some how different when returning?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Think of particles as bundles of conserved quantities like charge, energy, mass, etc. In interactions, these quantities can be re-bundled into different particles—but the re-bundling isn’t creating or destroying the conserved quantities themselves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If a virtual particle dips or blips out of existence then where do they go? Do they come back at a different point showing movement when the blip occurs? Are they some how different when returning?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Virtual particles appear and disappear as part of the interactions between real particles. The general phenomenon of particles appearing and disappearing in interactions happens with both real and virtual particles; the interactions are such that momentum, charge, etc. are conserved. So the things you should expect to see persisting in existence aren’t particles, but those conserved properties.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Was there ever a solid or scientific answers to which came first chicken or the egg?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Every egg that hatches was previously fertilized (at least for sexually-reproducing organisms). The animal that hatches from the fertilized egg became a genetically distinct organism when its egg was fertilized, not when the egg was hatched or laid.

  In the case of chickens, eggs are fertilized before being laid; when we talk about “unfertilized eggs”, we usually mean eggs that were not fertilized before being laid. Such eggs were not part of the discussion until you introduced them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Was there ever a solid or scientific answers to which came first chicken or the egg?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A quote isn’t “literal” if you insert a word that completely negates its meaning.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Was there ever a solid or scientific answers to which came first chicken or the egg?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What’s your point? Unfertilized eggs don’t hatch, so they’re not part of the scenario in question.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Was there ever a solid or scientific answers to which came first chicken or the egg?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No, but the fallacy is in thinking the new species appears when the egg hatches, rather than when it’s fertilized. The egg is already the new offspring.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Was there ever a solid or scientific answers to which came first chicken or the egg?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The egg is the same organism as the individual that hatches out of it.

  It’s like saying “which came first, the child or the adult”?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why can’t we swap our minds today?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s not a hard-coded wiring diagram of how the neurons from the brain connect to the rest of the body—everybody’s wired a bit differently, and the brain normally figures out how to work with what it’s got during development. So there’s no one-to-one way to connect the nerves from one person’s brain to those in another person’s body—and if it doesn’t get the signals it’s expecting, it will just seem like noise.

  Besides which—if I remember correctly, you can’t generally reconnect severed nerves. Instead, the remaining portion of the nerve cell has to grow a new axon that retraces the route of the old one, and it can only trace the old path for a limited distance (like, if it’s close enough to receive chemical signals from the original site). But I’m not sure I’ve got all the details right on that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the easiest way to convert latitude and longitude to a point on a jpeg map?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you use a plate carrée projection (in which all lines of latitude and longitude are rectangular and equal), it’s a simple linear formula:

  x = (longitude + 180) * (map width / 360)
  y = (latitude + 90) * (map height / 180)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do doctors not seem to give a fuck about pain? Is this just an American doctor thing, or is it universal?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  • The side effects of medication can interfere with diagnosis and treatment

  • Pain can be a useful diagnostic indicator itself

  • They see people in pain all the time, so it doesn’t seem like an exceptional state to them

  • People with low pain tolerance are overrepresented in the population of people seeking medical care, so experience biases medical providers to assume that as a factor

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a parenthesis gesture like there are air quotes?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You turn to the side and talk to the camera.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is the old testament handed down from GOD (which is my favorite book) but the New Testament was written by a man (King James) ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  • King James didn’t write the New Testament—he commissioned an English translation of both testaments from originals that had already existed for over a thousand years in Hebrew, Greek, and Syriac.

  • Most Christians hold that both the Old and New Testaments were “divinely inspired” but created through human intermediaries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why The Economist hates wealth taxes.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Shifting the tax burden from the working class to the wealthy reduces the ability of the wealthy to influence politics—that’s how you get leaders willing to prioritize workers over owners.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Kava root.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can energy be associated with/related to spacetime ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  In plain terms, energy has gravity.