So, in the fine tradition of using bananas for scale…
Bananas are slightly more radioactive than the background, due to potassium-40 content. So an informal unit of radiation measure in educational settings is the ‘banana-equivalent-dose’, which is about 0.1 microsieverts.
My particle spectrometer saw first light today, and I figure that I could use a banana to calibrate it. Then I noticed that K-40 undergoes a rare (0.001%) decay to 40Ar, emitting a positron. So not only is a banana a decent around-the-house radioisotope source, it’s also an antimatter source.
Truly a remarkable and versatile fruit.
This is some seriously dangerous information to be feeding me bro.
Now… to find magnets able to contain the antimatter…
Bananas are not typically very high on the danger scale except in exotic (and universally embarrassing) circumstances.
In fact, that’s another thing we could use bananas for scale with. Probably driving to work is equivalent to several kilobananas worth of danger daily :)
Anyway, I think the positron should be about 44keV if that helps you calibrate your magnets. The typical banana should produce something on the order of a positron every 10 seconds (although I used much rounding for the sake of brevity). Most commercial positron sources e.g. used in hospital PET scanners, are many times stronger than that!
I learned recently how the James Webb Space Telescope is not orbiting around Earth but literally orbiting around an empty point in space. I don’t think I even quite understand it, but it’s really cool
I’ll bite. I had a brother with special needs pass away a year ago next week. He was born with cerebral palsy, was blind, nonverbal, totally dependent on caretakers (myself, my siblings and mother, his nurses) for literally everything since he didn’t have functionally-independent motor control. We were told he’d live to 10, and he lived to 29; he was a bundle of joy and loved going out when he could. People would stare and kids would ask questions, but we loved sharing his story and my brother liked when people were curious about it.
But, his health started declining in 2014. He had several close calls, and we told doctors each time to try their best with the circumstances they were given. On more than one occasion, his nurses or our mother would actually be with the doctors during hospital stays to assist with him since he was case they didn’t have much experience in and didn’t want to make his issues worse. That said, he had a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) since he had a trache, and was brittle enough to die from chest compressions.
I prepped for my brother’s death countless times over 8 years. We all did. When he passed, we were so obviously distraught. But we were also relieved, in a way, that he wasn’t in pain anymore in the end. We let out our emotions that had been stored for those years, and the grieving process is still continuing. We all put our lives on hold to help him, and he just became our lives; our goal simply was to make him comfortable and let him know he was loved, knowing we couldn’t realistically do more. We spent years watching him in pain, watching him gradually lose his fervor and personality.
If you read this far, thank you. Not really sure what else to say, I just want to share this since it’s occupied my mind a lot.
TLDR; Preparing for the worst outcomes, coupled with grief, over prolonged periods of time really disrupt your emotions and outlooks. Needless to say, my family became stronger proponents of state-assisted suicide after this experience. It couldn’t be granted to my brother, but maybe we can help people in the future that coupd really use it. People understand, but not nearly as many are truly empathetic because they can’t be - they’ve never been through a similar experience. I simply ask that people try to be sympathetic rather than to pass judgement on others.
I understand the weird feeling of relief when someone dies. I know that sounds terrible. My situation was not yours, so I’m not directly comparing. One of my parents had long, slow cancer. Watching them waste away, choosing to fight a symptom or not, was draining and difficult. In one sense, I enjoyed all of those final moments and would give anything to have more. I miss them dearly. However, I’m glad they’re not suffering. It was difficult at the end. Their quality of life was not good.
I wouldn’t say nobody, but I would say the people that dominate the area I’m trying to volunteer and work in.
I work in a healing center where there are 29 women on staff and 1 man.
I cannot get these people to understand that as much as they want to push forward social movements, which I very much agree with, this must not come at the expense of men who are trying to heal.
I will literally have counselors co-facilitating with me, who want to make every point about how women are oppressed, pushed down in the workforce, face issues.
I’m not in denial of those, but no man coming into a healing environment to work on themselves, be vulnerable, and explore their own journey, needs to hear how much men are shitty.
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It’s insane, I even made a complaint to the director who of course is a woman, and she effectively denied that it was happening or could happen.
I told her I don’t even want people not to think these things, everybody who is in their own place of trauma has to get their shit off their chest.
All I wanted was a place where men didn’t have to hear this crap.
And that’s being incredibly neutral in my opinion because there are a lot of opportunities for men to talk about just how insane and shitty women can be. But I don’t want to talk about those things, I just want them to stop shit talking men especially their own clientele.
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Just watched a Tibees video about the possibility of a force like gravity potentially traveling through folded 4D space and affecting something before the light can reach it.
I realize this sort of thing has been thoroughly tested and debunked, but I can’t get it out of my head. What if it’s some force other than gravity? What if Earth just happens to be folded against some empty bit of space - and what if that were to change?
Like, I’ve thought about folded spacetime before, but always in the context of traveling between points (like the classic ant-on-paper thought experiment). I never really considered that something could in theory radiate a force (like gravity) in 4+ dimensions.
Maybe you’ve seen this already, but if you haven’t, here’s a wonderfully terrifying thought:
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/universe-fundamentally-unstable/
Ice-9 for the fabric of reality.
Maybe not nobody but most…
The freedom and control and depth and enjoyment in using Linux. I know, I know, shut up I’m answering the question.
There was a question here recently about partitioning, and that got me thinking about inodes and really wanting to understand how data storage works. I went on a deep dive and learnt so much. I feel like I have a real deep understanding of how my system works now.
People don’t understand how wonderful it is to have mastery over things. Most people are just consumers of a thing. I do my own motorbike and car maintenance, and I know where my limits are in terms of skill and equipment. It’s so satisfying, it brings a sense of joy and accomplishment to my life.
I’m baffled that people just… don’t do this kind of thing. Don’t learn about metabolic pathways or companion planting or do careful research and just impulse buy… Like… Life must suck for them. It must be so dam boring to live life like that.
So yeah, I don’t think many people understand that.
I’m the kinda guy who’s aware of how cool Linux and system mastery can be, but also the kinda guy who’s too lazy to care enough about maintaining a dual boot Linux/Windows system so every other year I’ll install a new Linux distro I haven’t used before only to do nothing with it and delete that partition of my hard drive within a month.
Last week I installed Ubuntu!
Yeah. My appreciation for Linux has recently grown a lot. It just seems like the Web and tech companies really are going to shit.
I’m old enough that being free from ads and spying is far more important to me then anything windows can offer.
People don’t understand how wonderful it is to have mastery over things.
I have so many areas of my life that I think in terms of a skill, one of which is Linux, which I’m using now. Another is coffee/espresso, cycling, writing, etc.
Basically all hobbies. But the point is that I can develop mastery at my own pace in so many different areas. Sometimes, it’s slow and methodical, like coffee: I’ll try something new maybe every weeks. And sometimes it’s breakneck speed, like Linux…just do a deep dive and come out knowing a bunch of new stuff.
I fucking love being alive.
Eh, time and effort is limited depending on what the matter at hand is. Sometimes, you are required to just impulse buy or not live at all.
… And yet, I know exactly what you mean. There’s a class of people who just live with a phone for nearly everything they do 14 hours of their daily life, day in day out, 12 months a year. No rest whatsoever. And yet, the moment they find any resistance anywhere in their life, not even on something related to the phone, they just. dont. google. They literally refuse to help themselves and will just do what they know and refuse to do or even concern themselves with better.
I’ve seen a 20-year-old who, when asked to give in their homework on Moodle, like normal people do, instead… wrote everything on a Mac’s Notes app, took a photo and then pestered people for the teacher’s phone number so they could send the shitty photo of their homework on a very popular chat application. When told that this was not going to count, they just shrugged and stopped caring. Again, they used technology daily. That was objectively the stupidest and laziest “functional” person I’ve ever met, a true sheep, and I fear ever becoming like them during onset of dementia.
(and (lisp programming) (libre software))
What are you using lisp for?
What is the mechanism by which gravity “pulls”? Puzzling me for almost 10 years. I think I’ve almost got it.
That’s a pretty massive problem.
I know, right?
Hehe guess what… Nobody exactly knows how gravity works.
So let’s start with Newton. According to his equations, gravity is a force. Why? Well, according to the first law of motion, an object stays in motion in its original direction till a force is applied on it. Newton said, “Gravity is clearly actively changing the direction of an object. Hence, gravity is a force”. As Newton establishes that gravity is a force, we say that it “pulls” objects. However, he couldn’t explain the mechanism behind this pulling force.
Then came Einstein. According to general relativity, gravity is not a force. How’s that possible? Doesn’t gravity change the motion of a given object? Nope! Wait, whaaaaa?! Okay, so according to special relativity, all things in the universe are on a “spacetime”. What’s a spacetime? Well, it’s a four dimensional fabric like thingey that all objects are present on. The four dimensions are time and the three spatial dimensions that we experience. Mathematically, there is no difference between time and the spatial dimensions. However, all objects move only in one direction through spacetime at c, ie., lightspeed through spacetime. If an object moves at c through space, it moves at 0 m/s through time and vice versa. This is how you get the time dilation magic. Cool. Now what if we bent this said spacetime at certain points? The object traveling on this spacetime would be traveling in a straight line always. Hence, no force. Hence, no pulling. Hence, no pulling mechanism.
Cool! So we solved gravity, right? Sike! GR doesn’t work at the quantum level… Aaaaand most of the best models that we have for quantum gravity use a particle called the “graviton”, which has a field that results in an attractive force. How does this force work? The answer is “go fk urself”.
Hence, in conclusion, noone knows whether gravity even “pulls” in the first place, let alone HOW it pulls. Aaaaand we’ve been trying to answer this question for almost 100 years… Cool…
tee hee hee - guess what. I didn’t ask for quantification and prior art.
