takeheart

@takeheart@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #2992: UK Coal⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s quite relevant if you consider that coal mining is concentrated to a much smaller area really. Besides the destroyed habitat, the pollution, the dangers of sinkholes and the cost of renaturation you also have to contend with rain and ground water constantly filling in the mining pits.

  Don’t know about the UK but in West Germany’s Rhein-Ruhr area, a former coal mining hotspot, the energy used to operate the pumps that keep the water out will eventually be greater than the energy gained from burning all the coal. Can’t find a source on the quick but I think it might have happened already. Of course it’s not a simple subtraction as all that energy was used to generate more infrastructure and capital that can now pay for the pumps. According to this German source their operation costs around 300 million euros yearly which gives you a rough idea of just how expensive that is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the difference between a proxy and a VPN⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Never knew about transparent web proxies. Neat. Do they play a part in commercial DDOS protection? I’m thinking of those please wait while we’re evaluating your request messages that you get on some sites. But also about any methods used to prove that you are human.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New York Times 1924, Hitler leaves prison⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s well known that the judiciary at the time was very lenient towards right wing extremists. His time in jail was rather cozy and gave him time to develop and write down more of his ideological underpinnings. And come up with a more comprehensive plan for taking over.

  That’s why I find it very worrisome when people like Donald Trump get what amounts to a slap on the wrist for staging an insurrection. Not just that but they actually put him on the ballot again 😱. And this time the people propping him up in the background came up with an elaborate plan for claiming the election and then completely restructuring the executive authoritarian style (aka Project 2025).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come it seems that there are little to no serial killers who are women in the modern age? Are they not caught or is it just the men that make the news?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is true for serial killers in general though. Murders tend to be premeditated. If you are planning a murder you’ll look for ways to maximize your success and minimize the chance of getting caught. In modern times you don’t have to rely on pure strength; there’s a plethora of workarounds from drugs to guns. The actual desire to end a human life (usual enabled by some form of psychopathy) is the limiting factor. A serial killer personality type doesn’t throw the towel just because they are physically weak.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The unpleasantness of mosquito bites is not something useful for mosquitoes, but it *is* useful for the ones who suffer it⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  While mosquito bites are unpleasant in themselves due to the itching and swelling I don’t think it’s common for cultures to have worked out the causal relationship between mosquitos and diseases like malaria. But I’d be happily educated otherwise.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are vegan and gluten free items more expensive?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For gluten free products: the whole production chain needs to use different tools or be sealed off from the rest. You can generally use the same mill, kneader, oven, tray for barley, wheat, rye, etc without meticulous cleaning in between. But if you want it to be gluten free you now need to either do that expensive cleaning or more realistically have an entirely separate set of machinery and ensure it never gets in contact with your main line.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come it seems for the past decades the Catholic Church has been plagued with sex crimes especially among young boys? How long has this been going on? Or did I just miss something up.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Here in Germany it has been revealed that the church set up a whole network shuffling around offenders (or sending them away to south america) and muddling traces. It’s even been shown that the former pope knew about such cases. It’s systemic.

  Basically it’s a combination of supposed moral authority, intransparency, and mutual cover ups. People are willing to look the other way a lot when they perceive of someone as having a higher mission. Think of Donald Trump who’s fraudster-racist-rapist-insurrectionist and yet the MAGA crowd loves him. Maybe celibacy plays into it as well, sexual urges don’t stop just because you don a robe.

  Younger people are less and less religious with each generation. The Catholic Church is unwilling to reform

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why English language is sometimes "lazy", sometimes not⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Law terminology specifically can seem pretty archaic because there’s a high need for terms to be stable over time. In other fields and everyday speech terms can change over time. There’s contracts signed decades or even centuries ago that are still binding today. So it’s practical in a sense if the words within and those used to discuss legal dealings don’t change over time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you know if you have a Habit?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah the locker/towel thing would be a habit especially if you don’t actively think about it.

  You may not have a strong daily routine but all humans have habits and it’s precisely because you don’t actively think about them a lot that it’s can be hard to become cognizant of them.

  They also include behavioral preferences such as scratching your chin with your right hand when lost in thought 🤔, calling your girlfriend ‘honey’ frequently, consuming certain foods/beverages more than others, separating the trash, opening up social Media on your smart phone when bored, or taking your jacket with you when you go outside.

  Those are not the same for everyone but everyone has them useless maybe some severe medical condition is present.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do we intentionally translate ancient stuff and languages to sound old timey as an artistic choice, or is there some other reason?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Tacking on: as far as translation of ancient texts is concerned there is also a selection bias. It is far more likely that an important formal document endured the times than some every day scribble. Of course a political treaty is crafted, conserved and replicated more carefully than a note someone left for their neighbor. Both the skill of writing and the materials required were much rarer and access more prevalent among the upper classes. Finally important formal documents are more likely to be translated precisely because they are important. Imagine that in 2000 years from now you would be one of the few scholars capable of translating English. You would be much more to likely to study and translate the declaration of independence than some mundane Twitter post.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does it really matter if you use white or colour detergent for washing clothes in a washingmachine?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s my point though: to me buying new garments just because they aren’t as white as they used to be is both economically and ecologically wasteful. Ideally you just adjust your sensibilities or else purchase colors, fabrics, patterns less affected by tinging.

  I have to admit though I’m looking at this from my own biased perspective of a single household though. I do basic separation of light, dark and hygienic (anything that needs high temperatures to kill germs) but also spontaneous mixed loads depending on what’s in the laundry bin and what I need soon. If you’re in a big household you can actually do real nice sorting like all the reds together, all the sports wear together, all the rags and towels, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does it really matter if you use white or colour detergent for washing clothes in a washingmachine?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly I’m more in the “buy durable fabrics and treat them well but if they acquire a tint or lose color over time so what” camp. Good linen shirts for instance will still look great after a long time, never mind any fading. For some stuff it can even enhance the optics like the famed worn out jeans look.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does it really matter if you use white or colour detergent for washing clothes in a washingmachine?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Dunno about the bleach part, that might be in some as well, but typically white fabric detergent contains optical brightener that counters the typical yellow tint of worn garments by emitting extra blue light (and your eyes perceive the full presence of the spectrum as white). That’s also why this whitening effect will fade off if you then use detergent that doesn’t contain brighteners: you are washing out those blue light particles once again.

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_brightener

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨\_🫨_/⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, hieroglyphs aren’t just pictograms. Some are, but the bulk you can pronounce .If you were versed in the language you could read out aloud what’s on that slate just like you can read out aloud this comment. Try doing that with the wall of emojies.

  That being said, emojies do much enhance our communication potential 🥳.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Introducing linkblocks, the Federated Bookmark Manager⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t seen an app that does it really well like some libraries or ontologies do but I’m certainly not well versed with all of them. Back in the day I used Evernote which was at least a start, as you could create arbitrary hierarchies (nest tags within tags).

  So ideally you would want to be able to nest tags like this:

  news.politics.europe.denmark

  of course another person might prefer the hierarchy

  politics.elections.news.denmark

  There’s no strict right or wrong here but often over time some consensus forms. Bonus points if there are equivalency classes, ie “recipe”, “recipes”, “cooking recipe”, and even the Spanish versions “receta” and “recetas” all refer to the same thing.

  By meta tags I mean the ability to describe and classify certain tag groups. For instance “politics”, “cats” and “Hollywood” are content tags while the tags “English”, “Danish” and “French” are language tags. “PDF”, “MP3” and “HTML” are file format tags but “video”, “music” and “text” are content form tags while “2023”, “2004-04-03” time-line tags

  Meta categories allow you for instance to search for pages that are about the English language, but not necessarily in English and surely not written by people who happen to have the last name ‘English’. Now some systems encode this information inside the string of the tag itself like so: “language = English” or “topic = cats”, but I think the most elegant solution is really to let a tag have categories or tags on its own which describe what it’s used for (thus meta tags).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Introducing linkblocks, the Federated Bookmark Manager⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The current demo is quite limited. I hope they add (nested) tags and meta tags at least.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why don't people say mega meters⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My physics teacher once told us that this was due to the influence of disciplines that calculate with huge masses, say in astrophysics the weight of a planet or the the amount of oxygen within it. Don’t know how much of it is true but the basic tenet of everyone preferring the numbers that they work with on a daily basis having as few prefixes as possible as it makes mentally handling and remembering them easier.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why can animals eat grass that they have pooped on, but humans would get sick?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, rabbits as a species are not only tolerant to eating their own poop pellets but also gain calory extraction benefits from it. Usually mammals don’t completely break down food they eat, ie there is still energy to be gained from it. Microorganisms have the necessary biochemical pathways to do it but for mammals it’s not efficient.

  Basically animal has only a few ways to into crease its energy budget. First it can simply eat more or more rapidly. Second it can find ways to make use of resources that are less contested (think of a giraffe reaching for the top of a tree or a koala being able to digest eucalyptus leaves). Third it can simply be more efficient: that’s the slow metabolism of a sloth, but also a rabbit eating it’s own feces alongside fresh food. It’s basically an evolutionary strategy to extract more energy from the environment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I notice Indians speaking English tend to speak very fast. Are the Indian languages simply spoken faster?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Podcasts, being prerecorded and edited, don’t really fit this model. It’s more for a conversation with a back and forth where both interlocutors don’t know ahead of time what the other person will say. So they need to observe/listen, reflect while also coming up with answers and putting effort into being properly understood. So basically the natural context in which inter human communication evolved.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why don't people say mega meters⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  weirdly enough SI unit for mass is kg not grams

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you tell the difference between dream and reality?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The jumping one is quite interesting to me. I used to have a period of lucid dreaming in my life and found that in my dreams I can jump off the ground and then jump again while mid air (kind of like a double jump in a video game). In reality this obviously doesn’t work because your feet have nothing to push against while in the air but somehow my dreams didn’t care about that.