exasperation

@exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kinesi Protein⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  The animation is actually slowed down. Kinesin can take something like 100 steps per second. Each step is about 8 nm, and they’ve been observed to move 600-1000 nm per second.

  In reality it wiggles around in Brownian motion but the equilibrium of it “clicking” into place is so attractive that it keeps happening really fast.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨5 tomatoes⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t believe that “watt hours” are more convenient than joules

  Clearly you’ve never had to do the calculations where these things come up, where hours are a much more common unit of measure for time than seconds, so that multiplying and dividing by time is easier when working with hours.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨5 tomatoes⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  it’s more when people are almost using the metric system then fuck it up, like the “Watt Hour” for measuring energy use.

  Energy is just so important to physics and engineering that it will be measured in whatever unit is most convenient to convert in that particular context: joules as the SI unit, watt hours for electricity usage, calories for certain types of heat or food energy calculations, electron volts in particle physics, equivalent tonnes of TNT for explosion energy, things like that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone, is it necessarily hypocritical if you also own investment properties?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I believe in a baseline level of food, shelter, healthcare, and education being provided to all regardless of means. Plus things like parks, infrastructure, physical safety and security, etc.

  But just because I believe that everyone should have enough to eat doesn’t mean that I don’t believe there is a qualitative difference between that baseline level of sustenance and all sorts of enjoyment I can get from food above that level. A person has a right to food, but that doesn’t change the fact I might be able to farm for profit. Or go up the value/luxury chain and run an ice cream parlor, or produce expensive meals, or buy and sell expensive food ingredients. I want schools to provide universal free lunch but I also know that there will always be a market for other types of food, including by for-profit producers (from farmers/ranchers to grocers to butchers to restaurateurs).

  The existence of public parks shouldn’t threaten the existence of profitable private spaces like theme parks, wedding venues, other private spaces.

  So where do real estate investors sit in all this? I’m all for developers turning a profit in creating new housing. And don’t mind if profit incentives provide liquidity so that people can freely buy and sell homes based on their own needs.

  I don’t personally invest in real estate because I think it’s a bad category of investment, but I don’t think those who do are necessarily ideologically opposed to universal affordable housing. It’s so far removed from the problems in affordable housing that you can’t solve the problems simply by eliminating the profit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Say hello to Bary⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Isn’t that canceled out by the pushing you do when you start to jump?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inspiring. Innovating.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Forests cannot grow faster than trees decay forever.

  Maybe not forever as in the heat death of the universe, but I don’t see why timber can’t be a carbon sink for timelines longer than humanity.

  There are structures made of wood that have been standing for over 1000 years. There are lots of structures made of wood that have been standing for over 500 years.

  Hominid-harvested wood still exists in archaeological sites dating back from before homo sapiens emerged as a species

  And coal is basically timber and other plant matter that has been sequestered underground and subjected to pressure, heat, and time.

  Plants can provide a carbon sink that lasts long enough to remove atmospheric carbon indefinitely, especially with modern engineering (making carbon-rich soil with charcoal dust, manufacturing cross laminated timber as a building material that should last centuries, if not millennia, etc.).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inspiring. Innovating.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  But if you kick the can down the road such that the original field where the trees were grown can grow more trees, the your carbon sink can remove atmospheric carbon on net at a rate faster than it releases carbon back into the atmosphere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inspiring. Innovating.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Also, solar and wind are intermittent, and therefore not ideal for dealing with real-time grid demand. However, that may make them ideal for passive carbon capture

  I think that’s a huge part of the long term solution: intentionally building overcapacity so that lower production days still produce enough energy to meet needs, but especially sunny or windy days have surplus that needs to be used. If the intermittent energy surplus meets a carbon-fixing method to consume that surplus energy, then we can have carbon capture without that energy use displacing a reduction of greenhouse emissions elsewhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inspiring. Innovating.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  My question is, wouldn’t the power needed to run these negate the benefits they bring?

  The hardest part about green energy is getting it to the time and place where it can be most useful. That’s why real time solar power prices sometimes dip negative (where the producers are literally paying people to take that excess power off the grid), and sometimes in consistent and predictable ways (e.g., California’s “duck curve” in spring and autumn).

  So with solar power being the cheapest form of generation, but highly dependent on weather conditions, the solution might be to build up overcapacity where production during cloudy days is enough, and then find some way to store the excess on sunny days for nighttime, and maybe using intermittent power sinks that can productively use energy only when the production is high (charging batteries, preemptively cooling or heating buildings and storing that for later, capturing carbon, performing less time-sensitive computer calculations like data analysis for science, etc.)

  If we have systems that produce too much energy, then carbon capture (including through manufacture of fuel or other chemical feedstocks) can vary by time of day to address overcapacity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What age gap is too big of an age gap if someone's in their early 30's?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  while he was a bit “immature” for his age (financially)

  Ok this is now my favorite euphemism I’ve seen

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨2hot2handle⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In this case, though, he’s literally wrong. “Spontaneous” has a precise scientific definition and the astronaut is using it correctly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨2hot2handle⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think would’ve even worked in a reference to “it is Kev’s turn to study statistical mechanics.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨2hot2handle⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  they are really just pedantic twits that very well could have commented the same stupid thing to a man.

  Yes, but men experience this at a slightly lower rate.

  So if an astronaut man were to get, say, 10 of these comments, while an astronaut woman gets 15 of these comments, it’s fair to infer that about 5 out of the 15 comments wouldn’t have been made to a man. Problem is that you can’t exactly tell which 5 they are. But you know it’s happening.

  Of course, if the ratio is actually closer to 50 versus 10 comments like this, then you’ve got a pretty good sense that 80% of the pedantic overexplainers-to-an-expert are doing it because the original poster is a woman.

  And one thing you find for these types of examples with a woman who has clear, unmistakable, objective indicators of expertise (literal astronaut) in the topic at hand is that the ratio is much higher for women than men, in a way that might not have been obvious for lesser credentials (like a high school science teacher). But yet, it still happens.

  It’s a name for a phenomenon that has existed for a long time. It’s a concise way to describe that phenomenon, and I still think it’s a good word to have in the vocabulary.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨2hot2handle⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This post literally has the watermark of the account that creates/posts these. Other people or bots are reposting them, sure, but they’re coming from some kind of aggregation account that has this particular style of recreating Twitter threads in a space that fits into the Instagram preference for square images.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is "human husbandry" called⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Most organizations just call it Human Resources, or HR for short.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨All while the skeletal, crumbling, dusty bones of an econ major pulls business backwards into hell.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah but an MBA is also a post graduate degree. A huge chunk of MBAs have undergrad degrees in something like STEM or humanities.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨All while the skeletal, crumbling, dusty bones of an econ major pulls business backwards into hell.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  10000 times so they preemptively used 4 digits in their username

  Wait it hasn’t been shown that this is a decimal system, it might be up to 65,536 in hexadecimal

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨All while the skeletal, crumbling, dusty bones of an econ major pulls business backwards into hell.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think this is true of most civil engineering majors I know. After getting their degrees, very few actually ended up working in civil engineering because the money was better in software or other tech.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what are the grievances with the "male loneliness epidemic"?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Robert Putnam wrote an influential essay called “Bowling Alone” about the weakening social institutions in American society, and the accompanying rise in loneliness. It was published in 1995 and eventually adapted into a full length book published in 2000.

  It’s not new. But the trend lines that could be seen in the 90’s have only gotten worse, as we’ve lost or weakened many of the social institutions that used to keep us grounded in our communities.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what are the grievances with the "male loneliness epidemic"?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Similarly, carbon=carbon double bonds in fatty acids can have the free hydrogens either on the same side or on opposite sides of the double bond, and are known respectively as cis or trans fatty acids.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what are the grievances with the "male loneliness epidemic"?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  the “all men are trash” type.

  On the flip side, I have never encountered this, and would probably say that roughly 95% of the people I know and interact with are feminists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨human geography⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “they’re the same picture”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨do what you love⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This often cited study from 2012 reported that something like only 27% of those with bachelor’s degrees were working in a field related to their major. It’s over 10 years old but there’s no reason to assume that the general broad principles don’t still apply in the modern economy.

  University educations have never been intended to be mere vocational skills programs. Being able to research, read, and write critically are important broad skills that are useful in life (including in the workforce), and most jobs out in the world don’t actually require significant specialized education.

  People who work in sales, management, design, logistics, event planning, contracting, marketing, advertising, finance, real estate, and things like that don’t need particular degrees to do those jobs, but most of the white collar world has degrees. There’s nothing wrong with majoring in English literature and then going into software sales, or majoring in history and going into logistics, or majoring in philosophy and becoming a journalist. It’s not like you get a free pass to stop learning once you’re in an industry, and keeping up means learning things that weren’t even known when you were in college.

  It’s liberating when you realize that the choices you made at 18 don’t box you in for life. You have the flexibility to make career changes into different industries, different roles, different cities, and different employers when you realize that most jobs can be learned as you go.

  And most jobs suck, so it’s worth finding something that fits your strengths and ignores your weaknesses, so that it’s just easier for you to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK There's a campaign to replace the distorted Mercator world map with the fairer Equal-Earth projection⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The topography is basically not significant.

  The elevation of the highest point on Mt. Everest is 8,848 meters. Compared to the radius of the Earth itself (averaging 6,371,000 meters and varying about 10,000 meters from that average), that 0.139% difference in radius at that mountain not going to be noticeable.

  If you shrunk the entire earth down to the size of a 2 meter diameter ball (1 meter radius), Mt. Everest would rise about 1.39 millimeters from the surface.

  Simple imperfections in polishing a representative globe would represent larger variations in altitude than exist on the Earth itself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why people say they have a "boy cat" or a "girl cat" but when the cat grows up, they don't call is a "man cat" or "woman cat"?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not a lot of cats grow to be 18 years old.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨anyone have personal experience with industrial tourism?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I once took a tour of an Alaskan oil field operation solely for the ability to gain access to the Arctic ocean, and jump in. They talked a lot about the oil stuff but I didn’t pay that much attention. I was there just for the ability to say I’ve been in the Arctic Ocean.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Larry Ellison predicts rise of the modern surveillance state where ‘citizens will be on their best behavior’⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sci-Fi Author George Orwell In my book I invented the Torment Nexus telescreen as a cautionary tale

  Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus telescreen from classic sci-fi dystopian novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus Nineteen Eighty-Four.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the easiest types of internet videos to make that are not slop?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly. I’d much, much rather watch a dinosaur video from someone who really really wants to talk about dinosaurs, and found video as a medium to talk about it, rather than someone who wants to do video and is trying to come up with a topic for the videos he already wants to make.

  Same with cooking, comedy, tech, business, current events, politics, etc. I’d rather watch/listen to someone who cares about those things specifically than someone who wants to “create content.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨bird based storage⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Your starling enthusiast is named Sterling?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨As Spotify moves to video, the environmental footprint of music streaming hits the high notes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s one of my pet peeves, when people use relative comparisons to overstate things that have very small absolute differences.

  55g of CO2 is basically nothing. A gallon of gasoline represents about 2400g of CO2 emissions when burned. So for a typical vehicle that gets 30 miles per gallon, 55g of CO2 is basically the equivalent of driving 0.6875 miles (1.1km).

  It’s less than the carbon footprint of a cup of coffee (60g).

  Or, alternatively, eating a single quarter pound hamburger would be about 3 kg of CO2, or 55 hours of video viewing at this rate.