exasperation

@exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨bird based storage⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Your starling enthusiast is named Sterling?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨As Spotify moves to video, the environmental footprint of music streaming hits the high notes⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Mexican food uniquely good with alcohol or have I just been conditioned?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed. I love pizza with light bodied, high acid reds. And all sorts of other great Italian food and wine pairings.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Coldplay actually sounds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re quoting 2 Broke Girls to give cultural critiques to Coldplay?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Mexican food uniquely good with alcohol or have I just been conditioned?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Mexican food pairs really well with lime. Margaritas have a ton of lime.

  Other pairings work really well, too. Most would agree that a great full bodied red wine would goes really well with steak or lamb or other red meat.

  There’s a whole body of study on which drinks pair with which foods, and which foods pair with other foods. If your local library has it, I’d recommend checking out The Flavor Bible by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page, which is a really useful reference guide for looking up an ingredient and seeing what other ingredients go well with it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do we humans love music so?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  And on the flip side, when you’re singing a little improvised song and your coworker prevents you from resolving the melody, it can be frustrating.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨nightshade⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Every plant named in this meme is a nightshade.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do people calculate pi to the hundredth+ decimal place?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re right that using geometry and ratios is only good for a few digits of π. Some ancient mathematicians used to draw polygons on the inside and the outside of a circle, and then use the circumferences of those polygons as an upper or lower limit on what π was. Archimedes approximated π as being between 223/71 and 22/7, using 96-sided regular polygons.

  The real breakthroughs happened when people realized certain infinite series converge onto π, where you add and/or subtract a series of smaller and smaller terms so that the only digits of the sum that changes with each additional term are already way to the right of the decimal point.

  The Leibniz formula, proven to converge to π/4, is 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + 1/9 - 1/11 . . .

  So if you have a pen and paper, you can add and subtract each one in sequence, and eventually they get really small to where you’re adding and subtracting numbers so small that it leaves the first few digits untouched. At that point you can be confident that the digits that can’t change anymore are the right digits.

  Later breakthroughs in new formulas made much faster convergences, so that you didn’t have to make as many calculations to get a few digits. And computers make these calculations much, much faster. So today the computer methods generally use the Chudnovsky algorithm that spits out digits of 1/π, which can easily be converted to digits of π itself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UwU brat mathematician behavior⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Except maybe Electrical engineers.

  Yup, I can count just fine to 10: black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, gray, white.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨USA 🇺🇸 USA 🇺🇸 USA⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I appreciate the message, but I find this presentation style to be unbearable, like a shitty clickbait version of a TED talk: fast cuts with exaggerated audience reactions, playing hide the ball with the actual information being presented. And then they took what I imagine is a normal studio production designed for normal TV screens and cropped it into vertical video, published on Youtube as a short. Gross.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨oops⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Plastics are a broad category. But specific plasticizers, like BPA, have been demonstrated to cause specific endocrine issues, up to and including a causal link to certain cancers, miscarriages, and other reproductive/immune issues. And it’s not just correlations being found, as the research is showing the mechanism of action by actually inducing the effects in vitro.

  And so when a particular plasticizer has been shown to be harmful, the research goes into other chemically similar plasticizers to see whether they have biological effects, as well. BPS is another plasticizer that is being studied, as it is chemically similar to BPA.

  So we haven’t shown that all microplastics are bad. I’m skeptical that these effects would extend to all plastics. But some common compounds that are present in many plastics are a cause for concern, and the difficulty in treating water or waste for microplastics in general means that some of those harmful compounds are present in lots of places where we’d rather not.

  We moved from leaded gasoline to unleaded gasoline based on the specific dangers attributable to lead itself. We can do the same for the specific compounds in our plastics shown to be harmful. Maybe the end result is that we have a lot of safer plastics remaining. But your comment seems to suggest that we not even try.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨oops⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The brushes and loofas also contribute to micro plastic pollution.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I eat a legume for pretty much every meal:

  • Peanut butter on regular rotation for convenience foods
  • Peas or beans or snap peas as a component in pasta dishes or salads
  • Blanched peas or green beans as a vegetable side when I’m eating dinner with a main and sides separate.
  • Edamame with Asianish noodle dishes, including instant ramen
  • Snow peas or snap peas as a component in stir fries
  • Beans in salads (things like kidney beans or black beans)
  • Lentils or beans in fast casual rice bowls of a Mediterranean influence
  • Some kind of lentil or chickpea dish with South Asian food.
  • Beans with Mexican food because duh
  • Dried beans with my braises (cassoulet, chili, other random assortments of ingredients in a braising pot/dutch oven), only you gotta be conscious of how dried beans don’t cook properly in acidic environments.

  I personally don’t care for tofu. I’ll eat it when it’s a component of a dish I happen to already be eating, but I rarely seek it out to be the star of the dish I order or make, with only a few exceptions.

  But adding legumes/pulses to your meals is an easy way to get more protein, including amino acids (like lysine) that aren’t present in traditional grains like wheat or rice. And they’re generally a good source of certain types of soluble fiber good for gut health. I’m also generally less hungry (and get full faster) when I’m eating plenty of fiber and protein, so legumes help with both of those.

  I eat a lot, so I still eat a decent amount of meat overall, but as a percentage of my 3500-calorie diet it’s probably smaller than the average Westerner.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Breaking the generational barriers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Throw it away once it’s cooled. If it’s a solidified fat, you can just scrape it into the trash bag. If it’s a liquid oil, then you can throw it into a disposable container (I have a million takeout soup containers on hand at any given time) so that it doesn’t leak everywhere.

  Oil is compostable, but only in proper ratios to the overall organic material being composted, so it’s fair game to put into compostable containers for industrial composting, or maybe small quantities in your backyard compost, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you know what you’re doing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In California, plans to move low-income neighborhoods off of gas advance⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Natural gas is abundant and cheap in North America, and transporting gas overseas has always been inefficient and expensive, so each continent tends to have their own price for natural gas.

  Electricity is expensive in California in large part because the transmission lines cause devastating wildfires, so the rates now includes the cost of preventing fires by continuously trimming trees and other vegetation near power lines, and paying off past liability for billions of damage in previous fires.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In California, plans to move low-income neighborhoods off of gas advance⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Right now in California natural gas is about $14-15 per thousand cubic feet (yeah it’s a stupid unit), which is about 1 million BTUs (another stupid unit of energy). That translates to about 290 kWh.

  The average residential price of electricity in California is about 30 cents per kWh. So the same amount of energy in electricity would be about $87, about 5.8 times as expensive as gas per unit energy.

  If a heat pump is 4 times as efficient at heating than a gas furnace, then we’re still looking at higher heating costs for heating a home.

  And things like stoves and hot water heaters tend not to be as efficient as heat pumps, so you’re still looking at a 4-6x cost difference from electrification on those.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hurdler Wins 400-Meter Race Despite His Dick And Balls Falling Out Several Times⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  404 is great, too, for coverage of those topics.

  Defector is worth a special mention in large part because it’s one of the few places on the internet that still makes me laugh out loud. It’s ostensibly a sports site, but when they stray off topic it’s some of the best stupid shit on the internet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hurdler Wins 400-Meter Race Despite His Dick And Balls Falling Out Several Times⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Defector is fucking great. It’s the team that made Deadspin magical, who all revolted when Deadspin got bought by private equity and run into the ground, and banded together to form an employee-owned outlet whose authors are just all great writers.

  The editor in chief of Deadspin, who fought the dumb decisions when private equity took over, ended up resigning if a blaze of glory by posting this article on the site as she left.

  She also has a great new book out on how private equity breaks things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a California Kong, which is two California kings tied together with gorilla leather.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The cell wall is the wall of the cell.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  All of us who learned Spanish in the U.S. also know “¿Dónde está la biblioteca?”

  Just a bunch of canned phrases like that kicking around in our brains.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of young people don’t realize just how difficult post-school dating was before online dating. Once we exhausted the pool of 5-10 single people who were friends of friends, that was basically it. We’d have to go find strangers at the bar.

  That conditioned everyone to be slightly more willing to settle for less perfect matches, knowing that there wasn’t necessarily a replacement available. That could be a good thing (people more likely to have the patience to let a spark develop) or a bad thing (a higher percentage of couples who just resented each other).

  I can see an argument that things were better before online dating for some subset of people. But having lived that period, I can say from experience that it wasn’t easy then, either. And for someone like me, who is a better writer than I am a speaker, especially over the phone, the rise of text-based communication was helpful for navigating the early stages of relationships when that became the norm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oranges? In this economy?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Obvious Plant puts fake products on shelves.

  True Wagner puts absurd flyers on telephone poles and bulletin boards.

  This is more of a True Wagner situation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨wtf⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a few things that stem from bipedalism:

  • We can run and breathe entirely separately. Most quadrupeds lack the ability to run and take breaths independently of the pace of each step. Watching cheetahs sprint, for example, show that they have no choice but to exhale every time their legs come together and inhale every time their legs push apart.
  • Running on our hind legs only frees up our hands to be able to use tools and weapons, maybe even water containers for drinking on the go.
  • We can see further by standing up, and can make tactical decisions based on terrain, while still running pretty much full speed.

  Combined with our unusual ability to cool ourselves by sweating, this gives us an advantage over pretty much any animal in the heat. Wolves and horses can still outrun humans in the cold, but lack the cooling mechanisms to maintain pace in the same heat that we can.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dear Kevin⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  When I learned about taxonomy in the 90’s they hadn’t really sequenced many genomes, so taxonomy was still very much phenotype driven, rather than the modern genetic/molecular approaches. I just assumed that everything I learned has become out of date.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dear Kevin⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Gray sex.

  You know, sex between people of Pierce’s age.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dear Kevin⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Black, brown, then the fucking colors of the rainbow in order, gray, white.

  If you need a mnemonic to memorize that, you’re gonna have some trouble actually building out your lookup table in your head of immediately knowing that red=2, yellow=4, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are drink coasters for people who frequently spill their drink or have trouble drinking without dribbling down the cup?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Is there another kind of table?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are drink coasters for people who frequently spill their drink or have trouble drinking without dribbling down the cup?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s the possibly apocryphal origin story of Spanish tapas, too: a slice of bread to cover the wine glass between sips (hence the name “tapa,” which means a “cover”), then a few things to dress up that slice of bread, maybe a piece of meat or cheese. So traditionally a single tapa is served for each glass of wine you order.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  10 digits gets the diameter of the earth to within an inch.

  Put another way, 10 digits means that your error will be caused by your imprecise model of the Earth’s shape, rather than imprecision in the value of pi.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What would be the “n” in that Big O notation, though?

  If you’re saying that you want accuracy out to n digits, then there are algorithms with specific complexities for calculating those. But that’s still just an approximation, so those aren’t any better than the real-world implementation method of simply looking up that constant rather than calculating it anew.