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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 8th, 2024

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  • Just a bit of history, in WWII the Allies didn’t know for certain that the Holocaust had occurred. Remember that it was the 1940s, information could travel quickly but only so much. It wasn’t as easy for them back then to pickup the metaphorical ‘signal’ of the Holocaust happening to the ‘noise’ the rest of the war was making. So while there were rumors of mass executions of Jewish people as early as the summer of 1941, it’s often said that the Allies didn’t know about the Holocaust until winter 1945. Now when the Allies went from ignorant, to suspicious, to all but certain but with doubts and finally to certain without a doubt has been debated for decades and will probably be debated until the sun expands and swallows the earth whole. There was definitely a lot of hateful rhetoric being spouted about Jewish people in the 1930s that maybe should have been stopped before it nearly took over Europe, but looking back at history we have the advantage of hindsight.


  • It depends on the bacteria, when in it’s lifecycle half of it is killed, and what half is killed. To keep things short, the odds are in the bacteria’s favor. Suppose if half the bacteria in your gut died right now how long do you think it would take for the bacteria population in your gut to return to pre-snap levels? A month? A year? Decades? How about less than an hour. Bacteria reproduce exponentially and on average, a bacterial generation lasts 20 minutes. Meaning that every 20 minutes the population doubles, assuming there are no deaths in the population during this time. If there is space for bacteria to grow, they will.


  • The part that really shocked me is that it got even upvotes and downvotes… Mask off, I absolutely admit that was a troll shit post, I didn’t take it seriously but I also took it seriously enough to not add a /s. I expected to be downvoted to oblivion, I didn’t expect it to be on par. That’s a litmus test for ya.

    Edit: Until I downvoted myself that is, now it’s 6 up and 8 down. Seriously though, glad you pushed back against that.



  • How difficult asbestos remediation can be depends a lot on the situation. Regardless of the situation people working near or on asbestos require respirators, bunny suits, many vacuums, and more to handle asbestos safely. Not the best conditions to work in but definitely not the worst.

    Where the work is being done says a lot about how difficult it’ll be. As an example take a single detached house, asbestos remediation wouldn’t be too difficult. The residents can leave the home so there’s less concern about inadvertently exposing the public. It gets a lot more difficult when the work is being done in say a train terminal for example. The terminal cannot be closed for a month so work must be done alongside the public. Now a whole system needs to be put it place. It becomes a lot easier to just leave the asbestos alone, as long as it’s not turned into a dust it’s not dangerous.


  • InputZero@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzHmmmm
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    5 days ago

    Unfortunately there’s a bit of pressure to osbficate the core idea of a publication in academia. While the ideal academics try to hold themselves to is to freely exchange information, for researchers who are paid to study very neiche topics there’s an insensitive to put some resistance into others entering their field. There is only so much funding and one more team means more competition. So some researchers who find themselves in that position will intentionally complicate their published work as a way to create a disincentive to others from crowding their field. It sucks but the reality is that funding and money come before the faithful pursuit of knowledge.

    Also, some people just suck at writing.






  • Yeah I’m going to agree with you on this one. It blows my mind that as a species we have changed the night sky. When I was a child seeing a satellite dart across the sky was exciting because it was as rare as a shooting star. Now I look up and see a satellite every few minutes. That said, there have been a few times recently that Star Link was the only method of communication I’ve had in remote areas. It has been very helpful. I think as poorly of Musk as much as the next person but I can at least recognize the ingenuity SpaceX and Star Link.


  • I can’t find the source but I remember an article thatdiscussed the rate solar energy is adopted. The researchers made lower and upper bound predictions, and what if all solar PV development stopped immediately. The worst case scenario based on availabile data suggested a three fold increase in solar PV electricity generation, the number used by the article you cited, to a best case scenario of solar PV increasing to the power of three, really big exponential growth. Now the optimistic model seemed a bit too optimistic for me, but it at least suggested that there is a lot more capacity to build out solar PV. If that capacity is realized or wasted was the biggest unknown factor in that study, which like duh. Still, I took it to mean that the future will probably be a little bit more optimistic than the most pessimistic projections. It’s a small comfort.




  • So scientists are not entirely certain about the heat death of the universe. The heat death is the most reasonable prediction given what we know but there could be a force acting across the universe that may very slowly reverse the expansion of the universe that we have yet to discover and cause a big crunch over a ridiculously large amount of time. The fact is predictions that far in the future aren’t really very useful.


  • While there can definitely be some legitimate discussion and ambiguity over which culture/country gets to inherit Mayan artifacts, for example, saying that the British, for example, should inherit it is a very weak argument. It’s not like the entirety of an extinct societies people just dropped dead. Some survived and after some time rebuilt new societies. Using Mayan artifacts as an example, Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras have a better claim to them then the British. It’s not propaganda or useless to say that items of cultural heritage should be returned.

    So how about this what about-ism, if you live in the United States, the British took cultural artifacts from your lands too and aren’t giving them back right this moment. Where did you think all those native American artifacts in British museums came from? They didn’t make them and it’s not like North America was spared from British plundering. Might be nice to get that stuff back.



  • There is no moral grounds for stealing cultural artifacts. Even if it means the culture that rightfully possesses it wants to destroy it. That choice is entirely that cultures decision to make. Even if we disagree. It’s one thing to clutch your own pearls but so much worse to do that to someone else’s.


  • I’m as frustrated as the next person here when it comes to how AI is crammed into products, but translation between languages is one of the few things AI can be good at. A lot gets lost in translation, sure, but everything is lost when it’s not translated at all. Are we expected to have official translaters for everything? I use it most often translating explanations of how to fix a chunk of code. Someone else solved the problem except that it’s not in a language I understand, one quick AI translation and I can understand what their solution was and deploy it myself. I couldn’t do that ten years ago. Most AI is hot garbage but I find translation AI very useful.