Yeah, the fossil record and dna analysis is such a gradient, any lines we draw are arbitrary. To be fair, those lines were always for our own convenience, in much the same way it’s useful for print designers to specify Pantone 032, but if most people look at the full colour chart they couldn’t even tell you where ‘red’ becomes ‘orange’.
It’s definitely rabbits (or turtles) all the way down.
We’re prokaryotes, and vertebrates, and mammals, and from there some people get bent. Are we apes? Genus homo? Where must we draw the line to ensure we’re not actually animals like other living things and were divinely inspired special creations?
I like simplicity. Life is a beautiful prismatic projection and it doesn’t matter that much what our Pantone swatch turns out to be.
(Sorry, /mini rant)
Not-quite-a-chicken laid an egg containing a definitely-chicken. Actual chicken egg was first.
Slightly larger file size, which mattered in like 2002, but it’s only a few mb, which doesn’t matter at all now.
e: if you’re a professional photographer and saving stupidly high resolution images by the thousands, you’ll want to use jpg, but in that case, you’ll understand why.
It made Fox News in 2015.
A biology paper that same year.
Religious people seem to care.
Biologists have been talking about it.
I didn’t pull this out of my arse.
And re: that citation you asked for:
God created mature birds with the ability to reproduce. So the bird was first, ready to lay eggs.
You’re right, I shouldn’t have said ‘never’. It was a paradox in ancient history, but at least in my lifetime, I’ve read it as basically solved. That may be a relatively recent stance (since 100-200 years ago), but it doesn’t seem useful to continue presenting it as a paradox at this point.
Jpg for photos, png for everything else.
It’s an easy rule of thumb, it hurts that 20 years of repeating it seems to have had zero effect.
Maybe this helps: Jpg fucks up your image, and png doesn’t.
Or: jpg is lossy, png is lossless.
Or: It’s better to save photos as png than cartoons as jpg.
Seriously, I hope some of this breaks through because deep fried images are so fucking unnecessary.
The chicken vs egg question has never been about chronology or science.
It’s been about religion vs science.
Science says the egg came first: something nearly imperceptibly not quite a chicken laid an egg that hatched a chicken. That’s how evolution works, with the egg coming first.
Religion says a god poofed a chicken into existence. The chicken came first, and only ever laid pure chicken eggs. The eggs will forever hatch a chicken and nothing but a chicken.
That’s the chicken vs egg thing. It’s not a puzzle at all, it’s just science vs religion.
e: simplified. I’m too wordy by default.
On a drive when I was ten, I asked my dad why the tall, skeletal towers had blinking lights. He said so planes wouldn’t crash into them. So I asked what the towers were for, and he said to hold up the lights.
That fucked with me for like ten more years.
Numbers and I aren’t friends; not even acquaintances, really, more like antagonists. Thanks for catching that.
Yeah, that’s why I mentioned Paul Bunyan. The time difference is equivalent-ish, and Plato would have fallen into legend by that time. The problem with legendary figures is their stories mix truth and fable so liberally, it becomes impossible to tease them apart.
Every plausible city will have wanted to claim the burial place of such a legendary figure, so until someone actually finds his tomb, it seems extremely premature to claim it’s been found based on a scroll written far after the fact. Look at the huge numbers of Catholic churches claiming to have relics of saints that, with even mild scrutiny, turn out to be hoaxes, or the number of people selling bits of Lincoln’s hair in the decades after he died (if they were true, the man would have to have been a yeti).
It could be true, but it’s a pretty bold claim.
The second half of this experiment is far less wholesome:
To verify their findings, these scientists reran the experiment by cutting off ants’ legs at the knees. Those ants consistently undershot their targets, showing definitively that ants do actually count their steps.
So yay, verified results via torture!
This is awesome and all, but it doesn’t really tell us anything about Plato’s life, death, or anything else except what people in Herculaneum maybe thought about him, which should be taken with an erupting mountain of salt.
Keep in mind there was half a century millennium (I can’t math) between these stories and Plato’s life, and Plato didn’t even live on this island. Taking these stories at face value is like believing the stories of King Arthur today – the stories of Paul Bunyan in the US are far more credible, being far more recent and having happened in a time and place in which such stories were more reliably documented. We’ve mostly decided Paul Bunyan wasn’t ten stories tall and didn’t have a giant neon blue ox, though some theme rides still want to claim so. We’re talking about fables written 500 years after the fact here.
This is a wonderful find, but its veracity wrt Plato’s actual burial place is highly suspect.
I was being mostly facetious (I’m not originally from either place, but I lived in Florida for a while and live in Michigan now).
You’re right, and I don’t disagree with you at all. Yes, we’ve had an emotional need for stories – more for connection with one another than for individual understanding, which cultural stories provide.
I’m saying there’s a difference between cultural stories and organised religion. The former is benign and can translate our questions into a semblance of meaning, and the latter which becomes dictatorial dogma that amplifies the worst of us, turning our basest instincts into abhorrent action.
I don’t think we disagree that much, you and I. I used to think organised religion wasn’t something I could get behind, but I thought to each their own.
The more I learned about it and the more I saw the bad influence it did to people I loved, the more I realised it’s nothing but a terrible influence in the world, holding us back as a people, and causing needless suffering and death.
I’m a user experience designer. My favourite story is from aviation engineering. I don’t remember the year or all the details, but the US Navy had put stupid amounts of money and time into engineering a new fighter jet. It was worked out on paper and built to exact specifications. Then, during the first human test of it, the pilot ejected on the tarmac before it took off. The plane crashed, obviously, but the pilot couldn’t explain what happened (apparently he had a concussion from his unscheduled landing).
The plane was built again, and shortly after takeoff, the pilot again ejected without explanation.
What the fuck was going on?
In the retelling I heard, someone finally noticed the design of the cockpit was to blame. In trying to cram all the standard controls plus new ones into the smallest amount of space, the designers had moved the eject lever right next to the lever to adjust the seat position – they’d coloured the eject lever red, but the pilot couldn’t see that since it was below and slightly to the right of his ass, and both levers were the same size and shape. Nobody noticed this was a problem until at least two pilots accidentally ejected on takeoff.
This might be apocryphal, I don’t know, but I learnt it as an example of how things might look good on paper, but you can’t really know until a user fucks everything up.
Wait. We’re unironically calling social media for women Giggle and then we’re surprised it might be sexist? April first was like a week ago…
This bullshit has convinced non-psychotic people to commit atrocities. It’s not a leap to think it convinces actually psychotic people their delusions are true. Especially when they say so themselves.
I abbreviated their story to keep my comment short, and linked the full thing for people who want to learn more.
In truth, the reason she was so susceptible to his offshoot of their religion was because she’d been raised believing in the mainstream religion, which he warped a bit in order to gain followers to his cult. She was primed for it because she couldn’t imagine a reality outside of the belief system in which she was raised, and his cult was only slightly outside that and built upon it.
Look up the story yourself, if you like. That’s why I linked it. My quick summary wasn’t ‘too tidy to be true’, and I can give you links to many, many more stories exactly like that one. Loads of normal people have committed atrocities – often against their own children – because their Christian faith told them to. A great many of them weren’t mentally ill until they became religious. Many committed those atrocities because they became convinced heaven was a better place for their children, that demons were real and trying to corrupt their kids, etc. Google it yourself; I’m not trying to filter knowledge here. These were normal people until they became religious.
Like I said, we should be talking about the damage these fables are doing. We should be talking about the damage done by indoctrinating children so they can’t discern reality from fantasy and right from wrong. We should be questioning our leaders when they say morality only exists in their stories, when the opposite is true. This shot is causing us irreparable damage as a society.
If you’re from Michigan but living in Florida, you, sir, are a moron. I barely care about jurisdictional laws you’re breaking; your lack of judgement is already disqualifying. To be so close to Canada and choosing to spend time tucked beneath America’s ballsack is in very poor taste.
My cat needed to be euthanised last month, and I just received her ashes. They came with a round black sticker. What’s the purpose of this sticker?
They mentioned my chosen urn was suitable for sprinkling cremains (I don’t plan to do that) – maybe it’s related to that?
Thanks.
Back in Apollo, we had a feature where you could long-press on mobile and save a screenshot with options to include usernames, number and levels of parents, and original post, amongst other things. Those were the ones I used. I also remember there was a checkbox for watermark, which defaulted to on, and which I never touched but always respected, because it never condescended to me.
Anyway, I used that feature so much that there was no Apollo without it before the ensittification.
As a user experience designer, Apollo had done a lot right that the big tech names had been doing wrong, and I’d floundered on Lemmy until the Voyager team started from that foundation.
I appreciate everything this team has done for me, but I do miss this feature. It seemed aimed straight at me, so I almost hate to bring it up, but it was beautiful and I loved it.
(I’m sorry for not saying this on Git, but I just can’t right now)
eta: you guys are the best. I love everything you’ve done. <3
This only works by phone. Be nice, but firm. Don’t be satisfied with their first answer – make them escalate you to the retention department. They’re often authorised to give much larger discounts because it’s cheaper for them to retain customers than to recruit new ones.
Removed works include Saul Bellow’s ‘Herzog’ and ‘Black, White and Jewish’; no individual reasoning given for books' removal.
….
The purge of books from Orange County Public Schools, in Orlando, over the course of the past semester is the latest consequence of a conservative movement across the country — and strongest in Florida — to rid public and school libraries of materials deemed offensive. While the vast majority of such challenged and removed books involve race, gender and sexuality, several Jewish books have previously been caught in the dragnet.
Removed works include Saul Bellow’s ‘Herzog’ and ‘Black, White and Jewish’; no individual reasoning given for books' removal.
JTA – A global bestseller by a Jewish Holocaust victim; a novel by a beloved and politically conservative Jewish American writer; a memoir of growing up mixed-race and Jewish; and a contemporary novel about a high-achieving Jewish family are among the nearly 700 books a Florida school district removed from classroom libraries this year in fear of violating state laws on sexual content in schools.
The purge of books from Orange County Public Schools, in Orlando, over the course of the past semester is the latest consequence of a conservative movement across the country — and strongest in Florida — to rid public and school libraries of materials deemed offensive. While the vast majority of such challenged and removed books involve race, gender and sexuality, several Jewish books have previously been caught in the dragnet.
Misinformation was extremely popular in 2023, as bad science often made global headlines. Make sure you the truth behind these 10 stories.
Misinformation was extremely popular in 2023, as bad science often made global headlines. Learn the truth behind these 10 dubious stories.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- While there have been huge scientific advances in a wide variety of aspects of physics and astronomy, there have also been wild headlines that do not reflect at all what's true in this Universe.
- No, we haven't found a room-temperature superconductor, overturned the expanding Universe or Big Bang, discovered that the cosmos is twice as old as we thought, or discovered alien technology on the seafloor.
- There has been a lot of fiction permeating science news this year, and the frustrating thing is that these untrue stories are posing as actual facts.
Here are 10 lies you may want to learn the actual truth behind.
[Article continues…]
Misinformation was extremely popular in 2023, as bad science often made global headlines. Make sure you the truth behind these 10 stories.
Misinformation was extremely popular in 2023, as bad science often made global headlines. Learn the truth behind these 10 dubious stories.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- While there have been huge scientific advances in a wide variety of aspects of physics and astronomy, there have also been wild headlines that do not reflect at all what's true in this Universe.
- No, we haven't found a room-temperature superconductor, overturned the expanding Universe or Big Bang, discovered that the cosmos is twice as old as we thought, or discovered alien technology on the seafloor.
- There has been a lot of fiction permeating science news this year, and the frustrating thing is that these untrue stories are posing as actual facts.
Here are 10 lies you may want to learn the actual truth behind.
[Article continues…]
Excess oxygen is actually harmful to humans, but all the climate warnings are about losing oxygen, not nitrogen edit: but when we look for habitable planets, our focus is ‘oxygen rich atmosphere’, not ‘nitrogen rich’, and in medical settings, we’re always concerned about low oxygen, not nitrogen.
Deep sea divers also use a nitrogen mix (nitrox) to stay alive and help prevent the bends, so nitrogen seems pretty important.
It seems weird that our main focus is oxygen when our main air intake is nitrogen. What am I missing?
edit: my climate example was poor and I think misleading. Added a better example instead.
This is very strange and I’m sorry for multiple issues in one day, but I just switched to my inbox and it’s all someone else’s account.
I’m @lillypip but my inbox currently shows someone else’s account. I won’t post it here, but I have screenshots if a Voyager Dev wants to see them.
I think I can reply to people from there (the buttons seem to work, but I won’t do it for obvious reasons).
Not sure if this is a Voyager or Lemmy issue, but it’s very seriously weirding me out.
e: it’s not even the same server. My account is on lemmy.ca and my inbox is someoneelse@kbin.social (not the actual account, obviously).
e2: my inbox isn’t that person’s inbox, it’s their outbox. All the content is from them, not to them. I’ve never interacted with this person to my knowledge.
e3: I was wrong: I HAVE interacted with them. A few hours ago, I messaged them to say a link they commented was broken. I didn’t recognise the name until I tried to message them as recommended in the comments here. I can’t message them now; it just hangs.
e4: restarting the app didn’t help, but rebooting my phone fixed it. Maybe it was a caching issue? Like I said, it was showing what was in their public profile (comments and posts), perhaps my inbox was stuck showing that? Anyway, it’s fixed now, so it seems like a caching issue, probably?
I’ve only noticed this in the past few days. Not sure if it’s a new issue, but I feel I wasn’t getting this before last week. (Eta: I’m on the latest update) Most Lemmy image links in comments are doing this now.
Sorry if it’s been posted already; I tried searching and didn’t see anything.
Thank you for all your hard work – I LOVE Voyager! ❤️
Zero G makes America's bravest heroes fart up a storm and pee without warning.
Becoming an astronaut is a fairly romanticized career path, but there are a lot of less-than-romantic aspects to working 50 miles or more above the Earth’s surface. Case in point: just being in zero G makes the human body do all sorts of embarrassing things.
A new story from the New York Times exhaustedly points out that living in space comes with all sorts of “bodily indignities” which should give even the most eager potential space explorer pause. It turns out, it’s not just deadly radiation or muscle loss due to weightlessness astronauts traveling to spots in our own solar system will have to put with:
> In microgravity, however, the blood volume above your neck will most likely still be too high, at least for a while. This can affect the eyes and optic nerves, sometimes causing permanent vision problems for astronauts who stay in space for months, a condition called spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome. It also causes fluid to accumulate in nearby tissues, giving you a puffy face and congested sinuses. As with a bad cold, the process inhibits nerve endings in the nasal passages, meaning you can’t smell or taste very well. (The nose plays an important role in taste.) The I.S.S. galley is often stocked with wasabi and hot sauce.
> These sensory deficits can be helpful in some respects, though, because the I.S.S. tends to smell like body odor or farts. You can’t shower, and microgravity prevents digestive gases from rising out of the stew of other juices in your stomach and intestines, making it hard to belch without barfing. Because the gas must exit somehow, the frequency and volume (metric and decibel) of flatulence increases.
> Other metabolic processes are similarly disturbed. Urine adheres to the bladder wall rather than collecting at the base, where the growing pressure of liquid above the urethra usually alerts us when the organ is two-thirds full. “Thus, the bladder may reach maximum capacity before an urge is felt, at which point urination may happen suddenly and spontaneously,” according to “A Review of Challenges & Opportunities: Variable and Partial Gravity for Human Habitats in L.E.O.,” or low Earth orbit. This is a report that came out last year from the authors Ronke Olabisi, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of California, Irvine, and Mae Jemison, a retired NASA astronaut. Sometimes the bladder fills but doesn’t empty, and astronauts need to catheterize themselves.
A play-by-play from inside Fox reveals how the network poisoned politics — and lost $787.5 million.
I’ve searched every way I can think of and can’t find anything.
I remember it played a nursery rhyme like a music box when both armrests were gripped.
That’s my sister and I visiting my great-grandmother in her infirmary in *1975. The chair wasn’t meant for visitors, but for children housed in the infirmary.
The chair had metal armrests that acted like actuators, and a metal box under the seat that played nursery rhyme songs like a music box when both armrests were gripped and the chair rocked.
Was this a common thing, perhaps mass-produced, or just something jerry-rigged by some guy?
Have you seen anything like this? Thanks!
(Sorry for reposting; my post went wrong last time.)
Self-explanatory, I think. I miss being able to flag users in Res – I usually used it to mark known trolls or experts in a subject so I could easily see them in threads. I sometimes used it to mark people who were especially witty or the like.
I think it was all client-side, because I had to import/export when changing clients.
It greatly contributed to my overall experience, and I think it would be a very valuable addition to Voyager.
Thank you, you’re awesome! ❤️
I’ve tried several Lemmy apps for iOS, and just switched to Voyager based on a recommendation here.
Oh my god, it’s fantastic!
I was a loyal Apollo user from beta till the enshittification, and your app makes me feel like I’m home again. It’s beautiful, has the features I so loved, and then some.
Thank you for your hard work and attention to detail. I love your icon/logo, too. You’re the best! <3 <3 <3
e: the only thing I don’t see is the Tip Jar. Am I just missing it?
Shortly after this picture was taken, we were on a float with my mother for the bicentennial parade. She made both our outfits of a (very itchy) polyester gabardine, and she wore a dress to match.
The apples my sister is holding meant something, but I don’t remember what and now I can’t ask her. I’d be very interested if anyone knows the significance of the apples during the US bicentennial.
I was 5 and my sister was 3.
I haven’t seen this with any other characters (lvl 46), but Sam Coe does this all the time. It’s so very creepy.
