AbouBenAdhem
@AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
- Comment on Why do people say "quote unquote something" and not "quote something unquote" ? 20 hours 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? 3 days ago:
It’s a metric scale—just use centimoochies.
- Comment on Does sunlight through UV-blocking windows warm you less than unfiltered sunlight? 3 days 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? 3 days 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? 3 days 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? 3 days 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. 6 days 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? 1 week ago:
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Support for slavery before the Civil War
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Carter’s airline deregulation
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Clinton’s welfare “reform”
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Obama’s finance sector bailout
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Biden blocking a national rail strike
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- Comment on USA President term limits 1 week 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 weeks 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? 4 weeks 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'? 4 weeks 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'? 4 weeks 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? 4 weeks 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? 5 weeks 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? 5 weeks 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? 5 weeks 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? 5 weeks ago:
We could switch to hexadecimal digits and we’d be good for 68 billion.
- Comment on How is the calories meter on exercise bikes accurate 1 month ago:
A calorie is a unit of energy—it’s used to measure how much energy is contained in the foods you consume, and how much energy your body outputs in the form of physical work. These are objective measurements that have nothing to do with your body’s internal biology—you could measure the energy input and output of a robot or a car the same way.
- Comment on Is it okay to fake Vitiligo makeup for a cosplay?? 1 month ago:
Just do it subtly enough that you notice the character first and the vitiligo second.
- Comment on How modern is it to have "sympathetic" portrayals of Hell? 1 month ago:
The Gnostics associated the Old Testament Jehovah with the Platonic concept of the Demiurge—an imperfect or misguided lesser deity who created the material world but botched it up and included evil as an unintended consequence—as opposed to the New Testament “God” who was the Platonic principle of transcendent Goodness or Unity. So the Gnostics didn’t need a separate Satan, since Jehovah was already covering that role.
- Comment on How modern is it to have "sympathetic" portrayals of Hell? 1 month ago:
The idea of Satan as the embodiment of evil is arguably an early medieval borrowing from Zoroastrianism. In the Book of Job he works in conjunction with God as a tester of souls, and his roles in the garden of Eden and the temptation of Jesus aren’t inconsistent with that. A lot of the popular folklore associated with him originates from morally-ambiguous trickster figures from other traditions that were absorbed into Christianity.
- Comment on If I was a secret immortal how long could I keep the same US ID for before I get taken away for study. I'm thinking 150 years. 1 month ago:
The circumstances where you’d be most likely to run into issues is where age plays an active role—e.g., Social Security or insurance. But those are probably avoidable if you’re careful. For anyone else where the date of birth wasn’t relevant to their job, they’d probably just ignore it or assume it was a typo.
- Comment on The 42 year old new hire at your job confesses to you that he has had 48 different jobs in his life. What is your opinion on that? 1 month ago:
Maybe he worked a few years at a temp agency?
- Comment on How do our brains process reality? I heard our eyes were just low-res cameras and our brains were doing all the heavy lifting in 'rendering' reality. 1 month ago:
The theory you’re referring to sounds like the free energy principle (or a variation of it).
- Comment on Why does my beard grow back faster after shaving? 1 month ago:
The rate at which your hairs emerge from their follicles is constant, but the rate of increase of the total length of the hairs slows down and eventually stops because the hairs naturally wear down over time.
Imagine that your hair is like pasta being extruded into water, and that it slowly dissolves over time. The more time the pasta is in the water, the faster it dissolves—and it eventually reaches an equilibrium where the length stops increasing at all. But if you cut off the pasta at the extruder and time the new pasta coming out, it will be the full extrusion speed instead of the extrusion speed minus the dissolution rate.
- Comment on Do all there former Republican leaders endorsing Harris do her any good? 2 months ago:
In part it might be anticipating trouble during and after the election with Republican state officials interfering with the election process—they might be more hesitant if they see other Republican leaders supporting Harris.
- Comment on Why are people on the internet (and Lemmy) so quick to say someone "deserves to die" 2 months ago:
I think there’s a part of our brains that treats these stories as fiction—in particular, the kind of folk fiction used to reinforce community mores. The strength of our reaction to such stories signals how strongly we support the standards, not necessarily what we think should be done in real life to those who violate them.
- Comment on Have police finally overstepped enough that reform could happen? 2 months ago:
They’ve been overstepping enough on a regular basis for the last fifty years—the real problem is that they’ve subverted the “reform” process so that reforms that seem adequate to the general public get neutralized or twisted to work in their favor.
That’s why you have more-experienced reform advocates eventually pushing things like “defund the police”—they’re shooting themselves in the foot in terms of popular perception, but it comes from a long history of frustration with lesser reform efforts.
- Comment on Ok so coffee is made from coffee beans. And beans are *also* made from beans. Why is nobody making, like, black bean coffee? 2 months ago:
Coffee isn’t a true bean—it’s more closely related to gardenias.