Lyrl
@Lyrl@lemm.ee
- Comment on 'vegetative electron microscopy' 1 day ago:
Maybe more with less is possible, but we are currently doing less variety of skill with way, way more energy. From humanbrainproject.eu/…/learning-brain-make-ai-mor…
It is estimated that a human brain uses roughly 20 Watts to work – that is equivalent to the energy consumption of your computer monitor alone, in sleep mode. On this shoe-string budget, 80–100 billion neurons are capable of performing trillions of operations that would require the power of a small hydroelectric plant if they were done artificially.
- Comment on Is 33 cents a small amount of money? 1 week ago:
A lot of US benefits have “benefit cliffs” where making $1 more substantial reduces or even completely disqualifies a person from SNAP (food stamps) or childcare subsidies or Medicaid. ncsl.org/…/introduction-to-benefits-cliffs-and-pu…
It’s not surprising people whose families are directly affected by, or who know people affected by, benefit cliffs think the lawmakers set up taxes the same way.
- Comment on I don't envy the humans pre-dentistry 1 week ago:
they’ve been shrinking as we
evolvedchanged our dietNo genetic changes (evolution) happened. If as children we ate only very tough meat and lots of chewy vegetables - no bread or rice or potato softness - our same genetics would result in much larger adult jaws.
- Comment on Having a baby? Use this one weird trick! 2 weeks ago:
A quick internet search suggests 36 weeks (eight months), which is well into the third trimester, is the most common start of restrictions, and many airlines will accept a doctor’s note the woman is low risk even past that. It was a 2008 election blip when the media got ahold of Sarah Palin flying while in labor because she wanted her special-needs baby delivered by the medical team that had prepared for him, which suggests even the written restrictions in airline policy are not consistently enforced.
- Comment on That explains a lot 4 weeks ago:
There is a surprising amount of empty space between atoms, and even inside atoms between the eleftron orbitals and the nucleus. Small black holes are so dense they mostly fall through this empty between-atom space and don’t actually hit anything. Even in a matter-rich environment like inside the Earth, you’d need a black hole with more than half the mass of the moon to be large enough to eat matter faster than it loses matter to Hawking radiation.
- Comment on That explains a lot 4 weeks ago:
It’s wild that there is so much space between atoms (and inside them, between the elctron orbitals and the nucleus), and black holes are so incredibly dense, that a small black hole can fall all the way through the Earth and not hit enough matter to gain appreciable mass.
- Comment on Sun God 4 weeks ago:
There was a time people thought Mercury would have some “twilight” acreage that was always at habitable temperatures. Then we learned that, while yes it is tidally locked with the Sun, it is locked in a 3:2 resonance so it does rotate with respect to the sun, and everywhere gets both scorched and frozen to uninhabitability.
- Comment on Algae Rock! 1 month ago:
It’s not just the uptake, it’s whether it stays at the surface, ultimately releasing the carbon back into the atmosphere via decomposition gases, or sinks to the ocean floor, thus locking up the carbon in oceanic rock.
We have a good handle on understanding the uptake. It’s the float vs sink part that has the critical uncertainty.
- Comment on Algae Rock! 1 month ago:
To work as a carbon capture mechanic, iron fertilization-driven algae blooms would have to die and sink to the bottom of the ocean, thus locking up their carbon in oceanic rock.
The concern is they would die and float, releasing all that carbon back into the atmosphere via decomposition gases. Then we would have all the effort of the fertilization, all the ecosystem disruption of the algae bloom, and maybe negative benefit as far as carbon since the ecosystem disruption could mess up carbon sinks that were actually working.
- Comment on be a good neighbour 2 months ago:
Also cultivate plants caterpillars feed on! We won’t have any butterflies if the only food available is only edible by adults.
- Comment on Fucking pigeons 2 months ago:
I sometimes come across a dead baby pigeon inside my work building, a large manufacturing structure many pigeons find their way into. Presumably the death is from falling out of the kind of nest in OP’s image.
- Comment on Anon's lacking pissing habits 2 months ago:
It’s quite low in bacteria when fresh, so in situations clean water is unavailable fresh urine can substitute in a pinch. But it’s not fully sterile, and given even a couple of hours outside the body it grows significant colonies.
- Comment on Bat Drip 3 months ago:
Estrus in bats - some bloody discharge while in the fertile part of their cycle. Only great apes have menstrual cycles (shedding unused uterine lining at the end of a cycle, NOT fertile when discharging blood).
- Comment on [deleted] 4 months ago:
It’s important for vote counts to to be independently checked. Having who voted publicly available means an investigative journalist can prove the county clerk’s claim that dead people voted and so they can’t certify the election is false. Or catch attempts at fraud. Both as a double-check on government in the case of officials who are lying or have acquired false beliefs, or as outside help if the issue isn’t caught internally due to under-resoucing.
- Comment on beds 11 months ago:
It’s such a creepy biological characteristic. Bedbugs are mildly social, and prefer to sleep near other bedbugs. But the traumatic insemination seems to be unpleasant for the females, and after enough holes are poked all over their bodies, they will leave the main colony. A single inseminated female hitchhiker is normally how they infest new places.
- Comment on Continental D r i f t s 11 months ago:
It has a lot of dissolved water that, if exposed to atmospheric pressure, boils off. So it could be said to have components that are boiling?
- Comment on beds 11 months ago:
Beds predate language. Non-human apes build “nests” - beds in trees - to sleep in.
- Comment on beds 11 months ago:
Haha, but batbugs and birdbugs - bedbug cousins that prefer the blood of bats or birds - are a thing. Bedbugs and their preference for specifically human blood evolved alongside primates starting to build sleeping structures.
- Comment on banaynay 11 months ago:
Considering the size of the Canadian tomato industry (all greenhouse), it does seem like bananas should also solve. Just bananas can’t pack as densely as tomatoes, but maybe throw one banana tree in every dozen rows of tomatoes or something. A girl can dream.
- Comment on banaynay 11 months ago:
Ha, poor kitty.
Fun fact, a banana is technically an herb and not a tree.
- Comment on banaynay 11 months ago:
It’s more likely they ship poorly. Same reason the tastiest tomato or strawberry varieties are not the ones grown commercially.
- Comment on banaynay 11 months ago:
I live in the Midwest, and had a coworker with a banana plant (I think a Cavendish). He cut it down and dug up the root ball to bring inside every winter. Every few years, the weather was warm enough long enough the thing actually made bananas.
- Comment on banaynay 11 months ago:
It is sad that while there are so many interesting banana varieties all around the world, only two of them ship for crap. In addition to cool-sounding fruit varieties, one variety is so starchy it used to be the base starch the diet of local people instead of a grain, how neat is that?
- Comment on We have found it. 11 months ago:
Modern industrial farming is not sustainable for the next hundred years, no, but there are a lot of levers to work to transform it into something that will reliably feed future generations.
One lever is amount and kind of meat in the average diet. It takes something like seven pounds of grain to make one pound of beef. Modern chicken breeds are amazingly efficient at converting feed grain to chicken meat, but even they are something like two pounds in to one pound out. Reducing the percent of meat in our diets would make our food go significantly further.
- Comment on We have found it. 11 months ago:
The plants use energy from the sun to turn carbon dioxide from the air into edible calories. When our animal bodies “burn” the food we eat, that turns it back to carbon dioxide, which we exhale.
- Comment on We have found it. 11 months ago:
The energy input is the sun, and most of the calories come from the air (carbon dioxide). Given so much external input, harvesting from a plot without reducing soil fertility is totally possible. With nitrogen-fixing crops (soybeans being the poster child), even the nitrogen fertilizer comes from the air.
- Comment on CFCs 1 year ago:
The ozone hole size is influenced by the strength of the polar vortex, the Antarctic temperature, and other things in addition to the concentration of CFC molecules. It’s barely shrunk, but CFCs are so long-lived that was expected - the critical point is it stopped growing over 20 years ago. I believe they expect to start seeing shrinking within the next decade.
- Comment on I can't argue with his point. 1 year ago:
So says Robin Red Breast, the bird with orange belly feathers
- Comment on What is an average person living in the US supposed to do about corporations raising prices? 1 year ago:
To an extent, this is already happening. I work in manufacturing, and the last couple of years there was more demand for our product than our factories were physically capable of producing, and prices were raised to weed out the number of customer orders to what we could handle. Projections for this year are for softened demand, and sales expects to have to offer significant price cuts to keep enough orders for our manufacturing lines to stay busy.
Collective “we have enough stuff and will buy less” at work.
- Comment on Task failed successfully? 1 year ago:
Or hold on for two years. At least in the US, the non-payout for suicide is only allowed the first two years of the policy.