troyunrau
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca
Centrist, progressive, radical optimist. Geophysicist, R&D, Planetary Scientist and general nerd in Winnipeg, Canada.
troyunrau.ca (personal)
lithogen.ca (business)
- Comment on Man 'refused entry into US' as border control catch him with bald JD Vance meme 3 hours ago:
Wish you luck 🤞
- Comment on Man 'refused entry into US' as border control catch him with bald JD Vance meme 6 hours ago:
🦟
- Comment on Man 'refused entry into US' as border control catch him with bald JD Vance meme 1 day ago:
gramie already mostly answered in line with what I’d say: there is an alt-right political shift there, where the lunatics are running the asylum and we keep expecting for sanity to re-emerge. Every country has a pocket like this somewhere. Most people in Calgary are perfectly nice, in the same way that most people in Omaha are perfectly nice, until a trans person is on TV.
- Comment on Man 'refused entry into US' as border control catch him with bald JD Vance meme 2 days ago:
Aha, “just south of me”, I saw from a thousand miles away.
If you’re a mountains person, yeah BC is the place to be. But it’s also same-same as what you can see in a lot of places in the US in the mountains. Like, you won’t tell the difference between much of BC and much of Washington.
If you’ve got the time, go straight north from your location. Way way north. Go to Yellowknife, and do it in March – it’s about three days driving. You’ll get there and they’ll have northern lights galore, ice castles on the lake, people driving their trucks on the ice to their houseboats that have just frozen into the ice for the season…
Or go in summer and go fishing there. The lake is 600m (1900ft) deep… Trout like tuna.
Unsolicited advice ends ;)
- Comment on Man 'refused entry into US' as border control catch him with bald JD Vance meme 2 days ago:
Assuming you’re coming from the US, where are you coming from? Driving or flying? Troy’s travel tips and unsolicited advice for free, this evening only!
- Comment on Man 'refused entry into US' as border control catch him with bald JD Vance meme 2 days ago:
Or come to Canada. We’re mostly nice. Ignore those bots in Albertastan
- Comment on (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞ 3 days ago:
We agree entirely.
Without the ability to exert control and therefore reinforce the definition, borders are as arbitrary as any other law. They are created by people, enforced by people, and if we change our mind then they can go away. It’s not some intrinsic property of the planet.
While I’m ranting, the definition of a relic or artifact is equally arbitrary. As well as the definition of a people. And ownership. At any point in history, these definitions will be different. Right now we’ve defined it in such a way that we’ve decided that it is socially acceptable to return relics to people who live inside geographic areas where the relics originated from. This is also arbitrary.
But as long as people, decide to exert force to reinforce this definitions, there is true as any other law.
- Comment on (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞ 3 days ago:
When I was in grad school, the philosophy of science students would egg me on with things like: “I’ll buy you a beer if you can prove the electron is real”. I’d like to think I’m carrying on their tradition in science memes.
- Comment on wtf 4 days ago:
One time, I was in the arctic doing some research. On a snowmobile, in winter, we crest a hill and see a couple of wolves pigging out on a caribou. I’m riding in the toboggan, and I start telling at the driver: “go go go!” They proceeded to chase our snowmobile for like a mile, with no hope at all of catching us, but running anyway. Like dogs chasing tires, I think they had no choice. Instincts are strong.
- Comment on (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞ 4 days ago:
Countries and borders are an arbitrary concept created during the peace treaty of Westphalia.
Those relics belong to dead people.
- Comment on Absolute unit 6 days ago:
By approximately the wingspan of a pterodactyl
- Comment on I Believe in Science—But Not Necessarily Science Journalism 1 week ago:
To be fair…
None of that is good journalism, nevermind good science journalism. Bad journalism is the problem here, not bad science.
Unfortunately, regulating journalism would result in abuse and tyranny (eventually) as it removes the effectiveness of the fourth estate as a check against the government’s power. But damn – wouldn’t it be nice if journalists (and their editors) were required to at least have knowledge of the domains they cover.
- Comment on Hawaiian volcanic rocks reveal Earth's core contains vast hidden gold reserves 4 weeks ago:
Smh my head
- Comment on Geologists doubt Earth has the amount of copper needed to develop the entire world 4 weeks ago:
Things like platinum notwithstanding, It will almost always be more expensive to go get things in space than on earth.
Hell, even on earth it is often too expensive to get metals like iron if there isn’t rail or a port nearby. Imagine having to fly iron ingots around and the associated aviation fuel cost. Whatever crazy fuel bill you’re imagining, multiply by a hundred or more if you’re imagining getting it from space.
No, all of those metals in space are best used to build some future version of our civilization _in situ. _
- Comment on Geologists doubt Earth has the amount of copper needed to develop the entire world 4 weeks ago:
Very true. However, it doesn’t add new material to the equation. If we need it to build electrical infrastructure, recycling won’t suffice.
Recycling aluminum is actually literally the best thing you can recycle in terms of environmental impact and cost efficiency. There are other things we recycle, but nothing pays off nearly as well.
- Comment on Geologists doubt Earth has the amount of copper needed to develop the entire world 4 weeks ago:
That alternative material is aluminum. It’s like a top four abundance material in the crust. It’s just super fucking hard to refine from minerals that don’t like to give it up without oodles of energy. Like, turn minerals into plasma levels of energy. So the irony is, to grow our energy economy past the need for copper, we will first need to grow our energy economy.
Should fusion ever actually meet its promise, then this is one of the likely things we could do with this level of energy.
If we ever become a spacefaring civilization, it’ll almost certainly be necessary during the colonization of other planets/moons/asteroids, since the geological processes that concentrate copper on the earth are not present in those places. Whereas aluminum is plentiful any place rocky.
- Comment on science never ends 4 weeks ago:
Understand that science is a name given to both a method, and to a mostly self-consistent body of models that can be used to make useful predictions. Science doesn’t get things wrong. Science gets iterated upon.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
Didn’t notice until you said anything. Getting too used to jpeg
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
Very very
- Comment on It's very friendly and well behaved. 5 weeks ago:
Yeah, if they’re dead serious about it, this is much funnier. In the haha, society is so fucked sense.
- Comment on Law&Crime creates exclusive 'video' recreation of Diddy trial powered by AI 1 month ago:
The horses have left the stable (diffusion)…
Sorry, bad joke.
I agree this will be bad. Dead Internet theory is just the beginning.
- Comment on Lemmy.one will be shutting down 1 month ago:
Any significant communities impacted? Scrolling through my subscriptions list and I don’t have any in my list.
- Comment on xkcd #3087: Pascal's Law 1 month ago:
Down the rabbit hole I go! Send snacks!
- Comment on Does anyone know what's up with lemmy.zip? 2 months ago:
Maximum compression reached
- Comment on Fallout 76 is currently testing the one thing that makes every game better: fishing 2 months ago:
You say pickerel and know about Goldeye. Manitoba or Minnesota or similar? ;)
- Comment on I was a British tourist trying to leave America. Then I was detained, shackled and sent to an immigration detention centre 2 months ago:
That would qualify as work according to the US gov. Because by doing these chores, you are potentially causing someone to not need to pay a nanny or whatever. Be careful how you define work – you don’t need to be directly paid.
- Comment on Fallout 76 is currently testing the one thing that makes every game better: fishing 2 months ago:
I hate fishing games. Just chance games to waste time. But I also hate fishing so…
- Comment on Implementing a spellchecker on 64 kB of RAM back in the 1970s led to a compression algorithm that's technically unbeaten and part of it is still in use today 2 months ago:
Probably mostly AI written.
- Comment on Implementing a spellchecker on 64 kB of RAM back in the 1970s led to a compression algorithm that's technically unbeaten and part of it is still in use today 2 months ago:
Long article for one sentence of trivia and no info on the algo itself. The death of the internet is upon us.
- Comment on 90s band alignment chart 2 months ago:
Fair enough. Allegory can still be sexual though. Layers.