AbouBenAdhem

@AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you ever simply not understand a piece of text no matter how many times you read it despite the fact that you understand the language and individual words?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can cats see color?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Except that a rose/red filter would pass wavelengths centered around red, while a magenta filter would block wavelengths centered around green. So a magenta filter would let in proportionally more blue.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can cats see color?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They are dichromats—with red and blue receptors—as opposed to most humans, who are trichromats with red, green, and blue receptors. So in terms of colors, they can distinguish roughly the same colors as a human looking through a magenta filter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you think billionaires fear losing their fortune and becoming "a poor"?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Billionaires are almost always created by starting with substantial familial wealth, taking large financial risks, and getting lucky. They then generally misattribute this luck to personal excellence, causing them to underestimate future risks.

  On the other hand, they also induce institutions to change in ways that really do insulate them as a class from the consequences of risk. But both of these factors would tend to reduce their fear of losing their wealth and status.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do rhymes make sense to deaf people?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Along the same lines, do deaf people compose poems in ASL? What aspect of that language plays the part of rhyme?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you have diarrhea and you hold it in will your body retain some of the water?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I thought diarrhea was (at least sometimes) caused by too many of your gut bacteria getting killed by fever so they can’t digest solids enough to extract the water.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If we're living in a simulation, why would the simulation creators allow the sims to ponder and speculate whether or not they live in a simulation?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So instead of a simulation, maybe we’re living inside of some other type of thing we’re hard-wired to be unable to even think of.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When leftists say "landlord are parasites" or similar dislike of landlords, do they also mean the people that own like a couple of houses as an investment, or only the big landlords?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There are lots of kinds of “leftisms” with lots of different attitudes toward landlords—but to take Georgism as a concrete example that exclusively focuses on land ownership:

  Georgists would say that the portion of the rent equal to the market rent of the unimproved lot—including the value generated by the presence of the surrounding community and infrastructure—should go back to the community, but the portion of the rent contributed by the presence of buildings and other improvements should go to the owner of the improvements.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does anyone else think the NYPD photos of the UHC CEO shooting suspect don’t match?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I heard he was wearing a white and gold blue and black coat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Am I the only one who feels uncomfortable about people making such big deal out of whether they're "black" or "white"?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There are three distinct concepts I think you’re confusing:

  • The idea of biological races. Yeah, a given culture’s definition of “race” is historically contingent and biologically incoherent. I think you get that and are assuming that’s all there is to it.

  • Race as a correlative of ethnicity. There are some ethnicities whose members tend to have darker skin colors, and people tend to conflate skin color and ethnicity. Ethnicity (as a set of cultural institutions) is meaningful to some people, and some of them interpret a disregard for “race” as a disregard for their ethnicity, or as an attempt to suppress ethnic identity.

  • Race as a social construct. When the above ideas permeate a society, people with different skin colors experience systemically different treatment—even in the absence of actual biological or ethnic distinctions. So people with similar skin colors can be grouped on the basis of those shared experiences, and the different behaviors resulting from those experiences feed back into the society’s conceptions of biological race and ethnicity. And it doesn’t suffice to counteract such social constructs by ignoring them—social behavior is taken for granted unless people make a conscious effort to reevaluate it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are Increased Colorectal Cancers Rates Linked to Using Laptops on Stomachs?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What increased rates are you referring to? According to the National Cancer Institute, colorectal cancer rates in the past five years have declined by 1% for men and 0.7% for women.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it possible to have a "free speech" platform that simultaneously stops "hate speech"?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends on whether you define a “free speech platform” as a platform that doesn’t impose its own constraints on speech, or a platform that enables speech without constraints. Because there are social pressures that also constrain speech, and hate speech can be a tool of those pressures.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do people say "quote unquote something" and not "quote something unquote" ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah—I think the canonical usage is to hold up your fingers as you say “quote unquote”, then lower your hands when the quote is complete.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If trump appointments someone that doesn't last as long as Anthony Scaramucci do we measure that in fractional moochies or do we abandon the mooch system because it failed us?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a metric scale—just use centimoochies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does sunlight through UV-blocking windows warm you less than unfiltered sunlight?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s glass that doesn’t block UV frequencies—like the glass used in tanning booths, UV lights, and UV cameras.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does sunlight through UV-blocking windows warm you less than unfiltered sunlight?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s true of any material that gets warmed by sunlight, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does sunlight through UV-blocking windows warm you less than unfiltered sunlight?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Infrared is the frequency emitted by warm objects—that doesn’t mean it’s the only frequency that makes objects warm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does sunlight through UV-blocking windows warm you less than unfiltered sunlight?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I would think it would depend on whether the material the light hits inside the window reflects UV light, or absorbs it and re-emits it as heat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How far away are we from someone using AI to create an animated TV show by themselves.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  When you say “by themselves”, you mean one person would still write the scripts manually, and AI would replace the grunt-work animation teams that shows like the Simpsons and South Park employ in East Asia?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can someone give me atleast 5 examples of Democrats being against the working class?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  • Support for slavery before the Civil War

  • Carter’s airline deregulation

  • Clinton’s welfare “reform”

  • Obama’s finance sector bailout

  • Biden blocking a national rail strike

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨USA President term limits⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Legally, yes. (But of course, the Supreme Court has turned interpreting the Constitution into a game of Calvinball.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did 70% of Wisconsin voters just delete their own constitutional guarantee to be eligible to vote?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Logically, yeah—it went from “all X are Y” to “no non-X are Y”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are there any historical or modern day true stories (like the story of The Buddha) of someone born rich and privileged who just walked away from their family and turned down money and an inheritance?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin was born into Russian nobility.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is voting before the deadline in US elections referred to as 'early voting'?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a state-level policy, and there have been a few states that were ahead of the curve.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is voting before the deadline in US elections referred to as 'early voting'?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Historically, all regular voting was done in-person on election day and mail-in ballots were a special exception (e.g., for people with disabilities). It’s only in the last few election cycles that voting by mail became the norm, and most people still use the pre-existing terminology.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do you call your first cousin's child?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  First cousin once removed.

  Maybe the websites saying “second cousin” are actually talking about the children of two first cousins?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Lemmy an effective alternative to Reddit?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It reminds me a lot of Reddit in the first few years.

  I initially joined Reddit because Aaron Swartz’s involvement convinced me it wasn’t going to go the route of other corporate social platforms, but I think Swartz would have been far more at home on Lemmy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I'm stuck in the same area as someone who is clearly sick (runny nose, coughing etc) is there some combo of short/long breaths or nose/mouth breathing that's a better defense against catching it?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  As everyone else is saying, wear a mask if you have one.

  But it seems like the question you’re directly asking is more about the fluid flow of air in the room. With your suggestion of alternating short/long breaths, you might be imagining that you can blow the germs away and then breathe in the clear space left behind, but of course it doesn’t work that way. Breathing quickly creates more turbulence, which stirs up the air and sucks in more air from further away—both of which increase your risk. (Reducing turbulence from your breath is the second function of a mask, besides filtering out particles.) In the best-case scenario, the germs are in large aerosolized droplets which will settle out of the air quickly, but only if the air is still—so you’d want to breathe softly and move as little as possible. (And the droplets can still be infectious after they fall, so wash your hands after touching anything as well.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happens when the US runs out of SSNs?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They are regularly recycled.

  Not according to the SSA’s Q&A:

  Q20: Are Social Security numbers reused after a person dies?

  A: No. We do not reassign a Social Security number (SSN) after the number holder’s death. Even though we have issued over 453 million SSNs so far, and we assign about 5 and one-half million new numbers a year, the current numbering system will provide us with enough new numbers for several generations into the future with no changes in the numbering system.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happens when the US runs out of SSNs?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  We could switch to hexadecimal digits and we’d be good for 68 billion.