jadero

@jadero@mander.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Study: Dark matter does not exist and the universe is 27 billion years old⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you could consider all of physics or even all of science to be made up of placeholders meant to keep things moving until a better explanation comes along.

  I agree. I would add that intuition, common sense, and ideologies are also just placeholders in our journey to a better world.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I've noticed that people make the 'surface of the sun' temperature comparison a lot⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So is it merely a lame joke to compare this to two’s complement math or is there something fundamental to be learned?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mentally Deranged Behaviour⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s what 3D printing is for…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mentally Deranged Behaviour⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think for maximum uselessness, they should not be overlapping spheres, but deform at the interface, like soap bubbles or rubber balls. As long as the spheres are the same size and modelled with the same “surface tension” or “elasticity”, the “intersection” of two sets would then circular interface with an area proportional to what would otherwise be an overlap (I think). If the spheres have different sizes or are modelled with different surface tension or elasticity, one would “intrude” into the other.

  Multiple sets would have increasingly complex shapes that may or not also create volumes external to the deformed spheres but still surrounded by the various interfaces.

  Time to break out the mathematics of bubbles and foam. This data ain’t gonna obscure itself!

  Might there actually be utility to something like this? Scrunch the spheres together but make invisible everything that is not an interface and label the faces accordingly. I suppose the same could be said of the shape described by overlapping. (Jesus, you’d think I was high or something. Just riffing.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mentally Deranged Behaviour⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is my first exposure to a plain text Venn diagram. Genius.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Massive Study Finds a Link Between Commuting And Poor Mental Health⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  When we moved from the city to the middle of nowhere, our commute went from 8 km to 22 km each way. It still took about 20 minutes. But “rush hour” was the occasional herd of deer or elk instead of a bunch of drivers who were either too aggressive or too passive. A “traffic jam” was one vehicle, ours, waiting for a piece of farm equipment to move out of the way a few times a year instead of the weekly transformation from roadway to parking lot.

  Even when I switched over to driving school bus, I could count on one hand the number of other vehicles I interacted with each week.

  It’s impossible to express how much that improved our mental states.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Read the Effective Activist Guide | Effective Activist⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks. Sometimes overviews are the most important things to create. It’s tough to know where to start without a map!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Read the Effective Activist Guide | Effective Activist⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I read the introduction (linked page) in detail and skimmed the next two chapters. That’s not enough to form a concrete opinion, but plenty to judge this worthy of my reading list.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ancient methane escaping from melting glaciers could potentially warm the planet even more⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Permafrost, yes, but I don’t know if the land under glaciers had been included even though it might still be permafrost.

  When I hear “permafrost”, I think not of land under glaciers, but the underground layer of ground that stays below freezing even when the topsoil thaws in summer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨He did though.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I read that as:

  For decades, Nestle has been patenting milk proteins.

  They’ve been doing it for a long time, not somehow getting extra-long patents.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Earth-like"⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My favourite is the idea that it takes time to build out the “infrastructure” that allows for life. Basically, no supernovae, no life, not enough supernovae, extremely low probability of life. Even if that doesn’t put Earth’s life near the leading edge, we may be on the leading edge of technological civilizations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Behold: Pufferfish Bones⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting. That page says “few vertebrae”, but the image makes it look to me like a full set.

  On the other hand, if I found an animal with no ribs and pelvis and only the rudimentary limbs typically found in fish, I’d tend to say that the skeleton was missing. Or at least, ahem, skeletal.

  Thanks. My first impression was that there was some funny business, but then I found what I thought was a decent article.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Behold: Pufferfish Bones⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you serious? They really have what amounts to an exoskeleton? Or maybe it’s more accurate to call it a whole-body rib cage?

  Just searched and found this fun article. Not really a skeleton but a collection of really stiff hairs or feathers (loosely: the genes are the same ones responsible for “other skin appendages” in vertebrates).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hummingbird feet⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  All great things start in a bar. Or coffee shop. Or in the shower. Or in a dream. But never in a meeting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Outliers⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  New word! Thanks.

  I made a half-assed guess as to its meaning based on the fact that I’ve heard of an elite basketball player by that name. I got pretty close, according to urban dictionary.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Outliers⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  All roads lead to PIE. Or is that from? Oh, and maybe not “all.”

  But seriously, I went through a linguistics phase in my reading and came away with the sense that Proto Indo European is a lot closer to us than it seems at first glance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Me teaching Excel this week.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Gotta lock those cells, even when the sheet never leaves your control.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Me teaching Excel this week.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I used to teach Excel at an adult vocational college. When I moved into the corporate world, I quickly learned why the University of Hawaii’s research found that well over half of spreadsheets have critical errors. Even the people treated as Excel experts were often clueless.

  I’m not saying that spreadsheets should be banned from the workplace, but they definitely need to be very tightly controlled.

  Oh, and always, always lock formula cells, even in sheets that never leave your control. :) If possible, make use of Excel’s native data forms, too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pigeons⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There word “sticks” is being used in the sense “adheres”. So the “coo” doesn’t bounce around in a series of reflections, but instead remains attached to the first surface it strikes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Extremely worrying’: Argentinian researchers reel after election of anti-science president⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Current forecast for my location in southern Saskatchewan is 11°C (52F) for a high. About 6 weeks ago, we got a proper start to winter with a few cm of snow (maybe 1.5 in) and thought was given to plugging in the block heater. That was it.

  Since then, temperatures have been a bit below freezing overnight and a bit over freezing during the day, with quite a few days like today, where it’s way above freezing. Any sloughs and dugouts that had started freezing over are now pretty much ice free. The last few days have been nice enough for people to put their boats in to go fishing.

  We heat with a pellet stove. So far, our pellet consumption is about 50% of last year’s, about 30% of our worst year, and about 35% of our 15 year average.

  And apart from a “cooler” day tomorrow with a small chance of snow, there is no end in sight. Even assuming that we get back to something normal by Xmas, it could be February before it’s safe to go ice fishing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AAAAtoms⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And Canada, but we’re really messed up. Most people I know across multiple generations use Fahrenheit for indoor temperature, cooking, and water you might swim in. Celsius is for outdoor air temperature, mostly, I think, because that’s how weather is reported. There is a fair amount of variation, but I don’t think I’ve heard anyone using Celsius for cooking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US accused of sending fake Roman mosaics back to Lebanon⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That, too! I’ve taken to using any autotldr as a substitute for a “proper” title and author summary. If the autotldr looks like there might be based on something I find interesting, I’ll go read the article.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New hardiness zone map will help US gardeners keep pace with climate change⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Canada’s Plant Hardiness Zone maps are in the process of being updated.

  Two interesting points:

  • USDA uses only 1 variable, extreme low temperature, while Canada uses 7 (lows, highs, rainfall, snowpack, wind, etc). To make comparisons easier, Canada publishes maps using both methods. The maps using USDA methods look a lot more forgiving than the Canadian ones. Both have 19 zones, although USDA is 0-9b while Canada’s is 0a-9a.
  • That website has links to interactive maps, including historical maps. Looking at old versions and current versions makes the northward shift of zones very obvious. Even regional variations in that shift are visible. Maybe I’m not looking closely enough, but it looks like the most dramatic shifts are at longitudes running from Western Alberta through Western Ontario.

  The Canadian maps are calculated using 30-year windows with a 10-year overlap. I would be very interested in seeing these maps calculated with an annual 30-year sliding window to show the northward march as an animation. Assuming it’s moving enough to make sense when rendered annually.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US accused of sending fake Roman mosaics back to Lebanon⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I sympathize. I’ve been caught out a couple of times by depending on autotldr as a substitute for reading the actual article. My own casual comparisons between autotldr and source articles suggest that autotldr is probably about 80% faithful to its source, on average.

  I don’t know if it’s real or in my own mind, but it also seems to me that autotldr is faithful to the article inversely proportional to the quality of its source material. That is, the better and more complete the article, the more likely it is that autotldr trashes it.

  Now that I’ve written it down, it strikes me that that may be an insurmountable problem. If we think of good articles as being “high information” and garbage articles as “low information”, summarizing will always be more likely to cause important “damage” the higher the information content. Thus, hitting 95% on a good article might trash it, while hitting 60% on a trash article is just fine. This might be especially true if you consider that the best articles might already be as compact as is reasonable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Machine Thinking - Origins of Precision⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I find it interesting that our current definition of the inch is based on an industrial standard that had been in use for decades. And that that standard was, in effect, created by one man.

  tldr: Carl Edvard Johansson was a Swedish manufacturer of gauge blocks who built his one-inch blocks by ignoring the differences between the UK standard inch and the US standard inch. Those standards were only a few millionths of an “inch” (pick one!) apart anyway, so throwing away most of the decimal places must have seemed like a good idea.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can't we just talk about it without the maths? Guys?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What is this stop business? I have it on good authority that it’s turtles all the way down.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Michael Mann: Yes, we can still stop the worst effects of climate change. Here's why.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for helping me look at things from a different angle!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Michael Mann: Yes, we can still stop the worst effects of climate change. Here's why.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I understand that point of view as well.

  I guess my real issue is my own selfishness. I think the problems will ultimately be solved, but at my age, I doubt I’m likely to see anything other than the “worse” in “things will get worse before they get better,” no matter how aggressively we act.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Michael Mann: Yes, we can still stop the worst effects of climate change. Here's why.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The pessimism I experience and most frequently encounter has nothing to do with the scientific or even the technical possibility of dealing with the problem, but the social and political.

  We’ve known of the need to do something since the mid-1980s and earlier. Before internet! I gave my first presentation on anthropogenic climate change (when it was still known as global warming) to my high school’s science club in 1973.

  We know what we need to do. We know the majority of how to do it. And we’ve known the what and how for almost as long as we’ve been aware of the need.

  My pessimism arises from the fact that those who are greedy for power, resources, and/or money are also, by definition, selfish assholes who tolerate nothing that affects their agenda and who have the resources to con the general public into following their agenda.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We’re All Math People: Some of the power of math lies in the very fact that it’s made up.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is what word problems are.

  Things may have changed since my graduation in 1974, but my experience was that word problems were contrived scenarios with little or no relevance to my life. I was pretty good at math and had very good reading comprehension, so I never actually struggled with any of it.

  But not once was I ever asked to calculate the storage requirements for a collection of toys, where on the teeter-totter to sit to balance it, how long a ladder needed to be to safely used to get on top of a given roof, or safe maximum driving speed given standard reaction times under various conditions of low visibility.

  Instead, it was all stuff that sounded like a surrealist riddle. (If a chicken-and-a-half can lay an egg-and-a-half in a day-and-a-half, how long will it take for a frog with a wooden leg to kick through a pickle?)

  And besides being pretty good at it, I actually enjoyed math once other interests and working with my dad in the shop showed me just how useful it can be.