exasperation
@exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Opinions on Jurassic Park as a Zoo 2 days ago:
If I remember correctly, the book opens with a prologue describing the business/finance hype in biotech, where a bunch of startups are raising funds and racing to get rich revolutionizing how to commercialize the exciting cutting edge in biological science in that era. It has nothing to do with the plot and the characters of the book, except that it establishes the tone, the background, and the incentives at play.
- Comment on Opinions on Jurassic Park as a Zoo 3 days ago:
My favorite moment in the book is where they realize that the computer program for tracking populations had an incorrect assumption and just returned the full count if it counted the expected population for an enclosure. Only, the dinosaurs were breeding, so the system didn’t catch that the populations were actually higher than expected, and therefore didn’t notice when some dinosaurs escaped from their enclosures.
I didn’t get what chaos theory was until like 10-20 years later, but to my 12-year-old self it was the first time I learned about how bad assumptions can cascade in real world failures.
- Comment on Opinions on Jurassic Park as a Zoo 3 days ago:
Michael Crichton was a successful novelist, and his first foray into show business was writing the screenplay for Westworld, about a park where everything goes wrong. It flopped commercially but basically planted the seeds for him to try it again, but with dinosaurs. Spielberg directed the adaptation and then there was a rush to adapt a bunch of other stuff. He was also an executive producer for ER, as it was adapted from a pilot he wrote, based on his own experience from med school (he graduated with an MD but never practiced).
- Comment on Pet rent 4 days ago:
Oldest profession.
- Comment on PUT THE TRAINS IN THE BAG 1 week ago:
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 1 week ago:
Now Dennis, I hear speed has something to do with it.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 1 week ago:
It’s too hard to try to manually control a fast breath rate like that. What you want to do is to naturally push that up by doing a bunch of physical work so that you’re breathing heavily. Then you’ll be exhaling lots of carbon dioxide!
- Comment on PUT THE TRAINS IN THE BAG 1 week ago:
The problem is that population distribution means that almost nobody is going to be getting on or off the train between Minneapolis and Seattle. The population of North Dakota is 800k, South Dakota is 925k, Nebraska is 2 million, Montana is 1.1 million, Wyoming is 590k, Idaho is 2 million. That’s nearly a whole quadrant of the country with less population than the Houston metro area. If we’re building trains, let’s build trains in Houston and serve the same number of people with like a tiny percentage of track that it would take to serve the upper plains states.
- Comment on hyperbaric oxygen chamber 1 week ago:
Call me a Luddite but I don’t like the sound of toxin injections and “shockwave therapy” for my genitals.
- Comment on hyperbaric oxygen chamber 1 week ago:
I don’t know what it is about computer science that makes people so confident they’re always the smartest person in the room, but it does lead to some interesting scams.
It’s not computer science. It’s money and power. Having everyone else in your life falling all over themselves to kiss your ass is toxic to one’s personality, and makes it hard to stay grounded.
The thing with becoming rich and powerful through other avenues, it might happen in a way that you’re less confident in your intellectual capabilities and are used to outsourcing things to professionals. If you’re a pro athlete or actor or musician, you might come up with the understanding that you need your agents and lawyers and accountants to do what they do.
But tech business leaders who become rich feel that they know the tech, know the business, and know the world. The thing they are most confident about is the thing that made them rich.
See also some athletes believing in nonsense about health and fitness, because of their superior athletic performance.
Or artists who descend into terrible rabbit holes, artistically, because nobody is around to tell them no.
Anyone who gets rich off of their smarts is susceptible. Engineers, doctors, bankers, financial professionals, lawyers, etc.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 1 week ago:
In theory we can break down the sense of sight into subcomponents, too. It’s only the visual cortex that processes those raw inputs into a coherent single perception. We have two eyes but generally only perceive one image, even if the stereoscopic vision gives us a good estimate of distance, and one eye being closed or obscured or blinded fails pretty gracefully into still perceiving a single image.
We have better low light sensitivity in our color-blind rods but only have color perception from our cones, and only in the center of our visual field, but we don’t actually perceive the loss of color in those situations.
So yeah, someone putting a warm hand on my back might technically set off different nerve sensors for both temperature and touch, but we generally perceive it as a unified “touch” perception.
Similarly, manipulating vision and sound might very well throw off one’s proprioception, because it’s all integrated in how it’s perceived.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 1 week ago:
Nero
The dude who fiddled as Rome burned?
- Comment on I'm very happy for her. In youth tightness can be a problem 1 week ago:
Mannn it’s the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice!
- Comment on Natural selection at work 1 week ago:
It’s interesting because it’s very obvious, biologically, that the panda has a digestive system that has a carnivore past, and yet, the very plentiful biomass in bamboo forests just waiting to be eaten rewards the animals that can make use of it. So the giant panda may or may not be “optimized” for meat, but has generations that came out of the free food that is bamboo, so that their very survival depends on a herbivore diet.
- Comment on Natural selection at work 1 week ago:
I remember reading that the common ancestors of all birds was carnivorous. Basically every herbivore bird descended from carnivores.
See also the giant panda and the red panda.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Actually I was off by a factor of 1000. That Camry needs to be raised to 7.3 km. Or you need 1000 of them. Or some combination of increased weight and height.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
You’re absolutely right.
I don’t know why I thought to use grams instead of kilograms. I knew kg was the base unit for these conversions but just slipped for some reason.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Sorry whoops I was off by a factor of 1000 because I used grams instead of kilograms. The Camry needs to be raised 7.3 km. Or you need 1000 of them in one house.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
is it really easier and cheaper to store the energy needed for a home in a chemical battery?
Yes. A 5kwh battery is about 50kg and smaller than a carry-on suitcase. String 6 of them together and you’ve got 30 kWh stored with no moving parts. Anker has that for about $15,000, maybe $30k installed.
How much does a 3-story elevator cost? What about one that can capture the stored potential energy on the way down, and not break down?
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
This data analysis seems to suggest that yes, July through October have higher birth rates in the United States, with maybe 10% higher births than similar days between April and June.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Potential energy (in joules) is mass (in g) times height (in meters) times 9.8 m/s^2 .
So in order to store the 30 kWh per day that the typical American house uses, you’d need to convert the 30 kWh into 108,000,000 joules, and divide by 9.8, to determine how you’d want to store that energy. You’d need the height times mass to be about 11 million. So do you take a 1500 kg weight (about the weight of a Toyota Camry) and raise it about 7.3 meters (about 2 stories in a typical residential home)?
And if that’s only one day’s worth of energy, how would you store a month’s worth? Or the 3800kwh (13.68 x 10^9 joules) discussed in the article?
At that point, we’re talking about raising 10 Camrys 93 meters into the air, just for one household. Without accounting for the lost energy and inefficiencies in the charging/discharging cycle.
Chemical energy is way easier to store.
- Comment on it's just neat 2 weeks ago:
someone who knew the male in this meme
How can you tell that the parapropalaehoplophorus septentrionalis is male?
- Comment on IF YOU TAKE ENOUGH YOU CAN SEE *THE PATTERN* BRO 2 weeks ago:
Like the Kumail Nanjiani joke about a new drug called “cheese,” made by mixing Tylenol PM with heroin.
- Comment on How Saturday night ended 2 weeks ago:
In other words, really low probability with a substantial risk that even if you do hit it, you’ll have to share the jackpot with others?
- Comment on Evolutionarily speaking, wouldn't premature ejaculation be considered the desired trait? 2 weeks ago:
Not many species will be receptive to sex outside of their fertility windows. Bonobos will, but not chimpanzees. I don’t think gorillas or orangutans will, either.
- Comment on Evolutionarily speaking, wouldn't premature ejaculation be considered the desired trait? 2 weeks ago:
The authors modeled a 3d penis and vagina and showed that the penis is able to scoop out paste from the vagina. They then interpret it as that it’s “possible” for the penis to have evolved the way it has to scoop out rivals’ semen.
The obvious counter to the claim is that anything can be used as a shitty scooping spoon if you try hard enough.
The starting point is the focus on ways in which human sexual behavior is different from those of our closest living relatives, other primates and apes, and how the observed sexual behavior of those other species correspond with physical characteristics in their genitals.
I found this paper to be pretty interesting, and it has a decent summary of why the semen pumping theory sticks around despite some pretty significant issues. It proposes its own theory for the glans penis, but the discussion of the history of the displacement theory is good background on its own.
Basically, species with low sperm competition (where each female tends to mate with only one male) have smaller testes and smaller sperm midpieces (the motor unit that actually drives movement), and species with high promiscuity and high sperm competition, like chimpanzees, tend to have larger testes and larger sperm midpieces. And on these metrics, humans sit towards the less promiscuous side of the spectrum.
So any theory of intense sperm competition is pretty inconsistent with other observed characteristics of human genitals and sperm.
But there also aren’t good alternative theories for human penis shape, when comparing all the primates that do or don’t have similar features.
- Comment on Evolutionarily speaking, wouldn't premature ejaculation be considered the desired trait? 2 weeks ago:
Humans are unusual that females don’t show easily perceptible signs of ovulation and willingly fuck outside of that window.
- Comment on Clock logic 2 weeks ago:
Maybe where you’re sitting. But my frame of reference has had slightly different time dilation than yours.
- Comment on Clock logic 2 weeks ago:
The decimalization of money is its own fun history, with a lot of different countries undergoing their own transitions at different times.
The Spanish dollar, which was the world reserve currency in its heyday, was divided into 8 reals (see how pirates used to refer to money in the form of “pieces of eight”) but issues with the supply of silver led to the introduction of the lesser real de vellón, which eventually settled at 20 to the dollar after over 100 years of uncertainty and confusion.
- Comment on Kinesi Protein 3 weeks 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.
