wolframhydroxide
@wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on xkcd #3142: -Style Pizza 2 hours ago:
I disagree with the claim that they are, as a rule, universally applicable, though I certainly do not disagree that this is highly US-normative. There is a significant subset of comics specifically about US issues, stretching back all the way to the very beginning. I can, upon request, provide examples.
- Comment on xkcd #3142: -Style Pizza 2 hours ago:
1:
known mostly for [Citation Fucking Needed]. You clearly are not a regular reader if you haven’t seen his near-constant references to US politics, electoral systems and why the US’ sucks, or literally one of the first and most oft-quoted XKCD comics of all time, which only makes sense from the perspective of a country where, even in the 2000’s, literalist interpretations of religious texts and anti-science narratives are not just ever-present, but were already one of the primary voting issues for the entire country
2: You are not entitled to an excuse for Randall Munroe daring, nay, displaying the absolute temerity to make a comic about pizza. For someone supposedly calling out US-Normativity, you certainly seem awfully clueless about the implicit assumptions you make.
3: I’m sorry that you feel entitled to an apology for an american comic artist drawing a comic about something quintessentially american. I am more sorry, however, for whoever failed to teach you that expecting other people to conform to your normative beliefs when they do something for themselves is a bad thing. He never once said that he would make it non-“US centric”. The only promise he has ever made about it is that it is “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” This comic is both sarcastic and related to the semantics of language. That you feel it is too “US-Centric” is your own concern. As a resident of Ameristan, I can say with confidence that you making that normative expectation is the most american thing you could do. Unless, of course, you were eating a weird slice of “pizza” while doing it.
- Comment on xkcd #3142: -Style Pizza 1 day ago:
To be fair, the comic artist is from Boston. This comic strip had been around for almost 20 years.
- Comment on IF YOU TAKE ENOUGH YOU CAN SEE *THE PATTERN* BRO 2 days ago:
Here, you want a mind fuck? I’ll let you have it for free:
Bell’s Theorem: The universe is not locally real (either the speed of light is violable or properties of things do not exist until observed) Light simultaneously takes all paths, and so does everything else if given the right conditions. We just perceive “Location” as a property things have because of probability. “Everything” literally is “Everywhere, All At Once”. The world that we perceive is nothing more or less than a vast ocean of waves within overlapping fields. The interference between the waves, the troughs and crests, are the objects we perceive. Nothing is truly as you see it, even yourself. Also, gravity doesn’t exist. Time just passes slower near massive objects.
That’s the best I can do for ya. First hit’s free.
- Comment on tall tails 3 days ago:
Thanks for the fascinating read! It seems like it’s still far from certain, by the study authors’ own admission, but I look forward to seeing validation studies by others! Do you know of any? I wasn’t able to find any from a cursory glance around the internet.
- Comment on tall tails 3 days ago:
No, much like how brontosaurus was later discovered to be a mix of bones from various individuals, “Distanceraptor” is actually a conflation of multiple Displacemosaurids.
- Comment on tall tails 3 days ago:
Nah, you’re thinking of the much more dangerous “acceleraptors”. Velociraptors were very different from how they are commonly portrayed.
- Comment on Ditto 1 week ago:
If you don’t want people to eat your genitals, have you considered filling them with deadly alkaloids and neurotoxins? Alternatively, just make your genitals look deeply diseased and likely to kill anyone who breathes near them? These methods seem to work pretty well for most mushrooms.
If you’re absolutely determined to make sure that no one eats your genitals, and you don’t want to learn from the mushrooms, I would recommend registering as a Republican.
- Comment on i 💚 animals. 1 week ago:
Yeah, and there was no explicit text that said “separate, but equal” was about racial purity and whites being the best race. But here, “separate, but equal sciences” is totally normal, right?
- Comment on i 💚 animals. 1 week ago:
I agree that there is not a difference, but this meme is claiming that there is
- Comment on i 💚 animals. 1 week ago:
Given that the very definition of something that makes a meme is that it allows transmission of a specific idea in an encapsulated manner, there are inherent implications of using a meme, whether you explicitly say them or not. This meme is implicitly about a miscommunication between two interpretations of the same term:
I Love Video Games / Me Too is a parody meme format based on an exploitable image macro in which a woman misinterprets a man saying “I love video games” as him expressing love for Lana Del Ray’s song of that name.
This meme, since its earliest usage, has been used as a statement of purity, which you can clearly see if you look into the history of it. That attitudinal connotation is preserved in the use of this meme, whether you yourself are ignorant of its origins, or simply pretending that it isn’t some sort of purity statement. I don’t disagree with your sentiment, but you are definitively wrong about the implications of the original post.
- Comment on i 💚 animals. 1 week ago:
Though im told that Philosophy’s just math, sans rigor, sense and practicality.
- Comment on i 💚 animals. 1 week ago:
Except that the meme is very specifically used to highlight a distinct qualitative difference between the two “interpretations” of a term which leads to friction or miscommunication between the characters. This meme is doing precisely what you claim it is not.
- Comment on i 💚 animals. 1 week ago:
Wow, “Tell me you never took more than high school level chemistry without telling me you never took more than high school level chemistry”.
- Comment on do what you love 3 weeks ago:
Excellent points!
- Comment on do what you love 3 weeks ago:
Karl Popper, “The Logic of Scientific Discovery” is a seminal work in the modern philosophy of science. It led the way for modern statistical methodology in the form of null hypothesis rejection, proposes to solve the problem of induction, and his proposal of falsifiability is, to my knowledge, the most popular philosophical framework for modern scientific practice.
- Comment on Best strategy 4 weeks ago:
The other commenter is slightly incorrect. Bookworm’s light novel is complete, but the manganese is currently being published. Also, some of the best worldbuilding I’ve ever witnessed, as someone who primarily reads SF & Fantasy for worldbuilding.
- Comment on Microsoft's Windows lead says the next version of Windows will be "more ambient, pervasive, and multi-modal" as AI redefines the desktop interface 4 weeks ago:
Untrue! Let me give you some examples of things that are both ambient and pervasive!
Slime Molds! Entropy! Capitalist violence by the hoarding of wealth and refusal to engage with other humans with empathy Your Mom!
- Comment on Microsoft Is Now Being Sued Over Sunsetting Windows 10 5 weeks ago:
As someone who recently made the switch, DM me if there’s anything I can help with. A lot of the Linux Bros on here will be completely unhelpful out of smug superiority. Also, if you have an HP, you will almost certainly have to do a LOT more work (I had to learn to edit GRUB config files pre-startup). It will be much easier if you don’t have an HP. Anyway, open offer. Also, do Linux Mint.
- Comment on Microsoft Is Now Being Sued Over Sunsetting Windows 10 5 weeks ago:
As someone who recently made the switch, DM me of there’s anything I can help with. A lot of the Linux Bros on here will be completely unhelpful out of smug superiority. Also, if you have an HP, you will almost certainly have to do a LOT more work (I had to learn to edit GRUB config files pre-startup). It will be much easier if you don’t have an HP. Anyway, open offer. Also, do Linux Mint.
- Comment on YSK: US Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem publically bragged about killing her puppy 5 weeks ago:
Legionnaire’s, Lead and a legal amount of raw sewage.
- Comment on Imagine being a billionaire, running one the most powerful, corporations in the United States, and prostrating yourself to Donald Trump in this very public and embarrassing way. 5 weeks ago:
It is. Except that the law doesn’t protect people. People protect the law. If a law is there on paper, but no one will enforce it, then it isn’t a law. It’s just some words on paper.
- Comment on One Angry Man 5 weeks ago:
The exclusive or killed me. Thank you.
- Comment on Apart, low in cholesterine 1 month ago:
That’s more like it.
- Comment on Apart, low in cholesterine 1 month ago:
Story time! Courtesy of my 7th–grade Biotech teacher:
Many years ago, he was working in a bio lab where they were studying the effects of drugs on the brain. Specifically, they were trying to isolate the specific paths and locations in the brain that these drugs would build up in the highest concentrations. That year, they were studying cocaine.
Of course, you couldn’t be experimenting with cocaine on humans, because that would lead to everybody having too good a time, I guess, and the federal government wouldn’t stand for it. As such, they were injecting cocaine into rats. Now, giving these little guys the time of their lives was still not the purpose of the research, so they needed a way to easily find out where the cocaine was going in the rats’ brains. As such, they tagged the cocaine. In order to ensure the tagging didn’t affect the binding and distribution in the body, however, they had to tag it, not with a dye, but by making it radioactive, at which point they could use whatever Magical Machine™ to take a 3D scan of their heads and find the radiation (though It’s possible he was simply leaving out the bit where they dissected the rat brains to find where they were radioactive, which I now think far more likely)
Unfortunately, aside from getting these rats literally blitzed out of their minds on a one-way-trip to the land of cheese and honey, no super-rats were created by what otherwise sounds like a plot straight out of an offbeat MCU movie.
No, the practical upshot of this was that it was some poor sod’s job to actually mix radioactive cocaine into solution for injection. Since they needed to do it a LOT, they needed a lot of solution. So, in their infinite wisdom, they had the following setup:
- a refrigerator, where they kept the saline and radioactive cocaine (and whatever else they were using to make the solution)
- immediately to the right of the fridge, a fume hood, where they would actually do the mixing.
- atop the fridge, two unlabelled beakers: in one, the saline, ready for mixing, in the other, the radioactive cocaine solution, prepared and ready for injection.
This was the point at which an entire crate of lab rats was toppled, releasing all of them onto the floor…
Of course, the entire lab is suddenly in chaos. One person is trying to use a net they had prepared for such an occasion to catch the rats that are running around the desk area, while two more are trying to tag-team a rat that ran behind a bookshelf. My teacher, though, is chasing a rat. A rat that is running straight for the cozy space under the fridge. With all the alacrity of a wastrel postgraduate who has never heard the term “dexterity” outside the context of tabletop games, he runs headlong into the fridge, and suddenly feels a splash on his head and the shattering of glass.
While it didn’t take too long for them to pull out the Geiger counter and determine that he was not going to get a supervillain backstory (with the high of his life and cancer on the side), you can bet they labeled those beakers after that, and kept them in the fume hood.
And that, dear friends, is how we learned about Lab Safety in my school!
- Comment on Apart, low in cholesterine 1 month ago:
As a chemistry teacher who regularly ignites Hydrogen gas, I cannot even imagine how dangerous it would be to ignite a hydrogen belch. That shit POPS.
- Comment on Apart, low in cholesterine 1 month ago:
Chemistry teacher here! Hydrogen would only acidify it if it dissociated. Much like how you can dissolve oxygen or nitrogen gas into water, any gas can be dissolved into water. They don’t break apart, they just float as molecules inside the water. It’s just like when sugar dissolves. Salt breaks apart, because it’s ionic. Sugar, most organics, and diatomic gases like H~2~, N~2~, and O~2~ don’t have enough affinity with the water molecules to dissociate (or, at least, not sufficient to dissociate appreciably)
When you get something gnarly is if you have a molecule containing something that does have stronger affinity with the water. Carbon Dioxide, Sulfur Di- and Trioxide, Nitrogen Oxides, and other oxygen-bearing covalent gases react with water because the central atoms attract the oxygen in the H~2~O, while the oxygens surrounding them have partial negative charges from the unpaired electrons, attracting the hydrogens in the water. This causes the water to be ripped apart, creates oxyanions such as CO~3~^2-^, SO~3~^2-^, SO~4~^2-^, NO~2~^-^, or NO~3~^-^. Same goes for elemental Chlorine, Fluorine and Bromine. All of these rip the water apart and create the hypo- oxyacid and the hydroacid of the specie (e.g. Cl~2~ + H~2~O --> HClO + HCl)
- Comment on Apart, low in cholesterine 1 month ago:
Chemistry teacher here. No way do those hydrogen molecules ionize. If they ionize, that would require making the entire solution positively charged, or filled with singlet hydrogen. Just like dissolving oxygen of nitrogen in water, the gas will dissolve, but not dissociate.
- Comment on Everybody gets one [choose wisely] 1 month ago:
You find yourself suddenly 3 meters up in the air, which is sufficient to change your personal gravitational acceleration by 0.00001 m/s^2. As you can imagine, it is not fun to fall 3 meters. You do anyway.
- Comment on Everybody gets one [choose wisely] 1 month ago:
That is, canonically, almost exactly what Saruman’s robes are supposed to look like:
“I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours…” - Gandalf the Grey, The Fellowship of the Ring