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For centuries, the only way to get purple dye in Europe was by harvesting tens of thousands of murex snails from the ocean. TIL the Mayans discovered this independently
  • I don't really have great knowledge on this topic but my understanding is that it wasn't just because it was purple, it was that the resulting purple dye was excellent; it was bright, beautiful and never faded. You can dye stuff purple with cabbage but it's just not a very good dye in those regards

  • How dense would the atmosphere need to be to result in a cataclysmic chain reaction during a nuclear explosion?
  • I don't know what chain reaction exactly they were thinking of, but from modern fusion research, I believe we can confidently say that the atmosphere would need to be interior-of-a-large-star-level dense, and even then I'm not sure you'd get nitrogen fusing with anything without a lot of hydrogen or helium around. Nitrogen-nitrogen fusion seems extremely implausible for sure

  • A cool guide for the lights!
  • Yeah I would say that one could explain the picture here

    Ultimately, the phenomenon is happening much much higher up in the atmosphere, so being a few kilometers closer vertically won't make a difference; but by being further up on the ground, you could see an aurora from further away and through a lot more molecules that could scatter non-red light

  • A cool guide for the lights!
  • That's a cool photo, thanks for sharing.

    For more context why this wouldn't be related to redshift, redshift is a concept in physics for light that's analogous to the Doppler shift for sound. The typical example of Doppler shift is the EEEEE-OO-UUUUUM sound a car makes when moving fast past you. When the car is speeding away from you, the sound pitch is noticeably lower

    Similarly, when a light emitter moves away from you at extremely fast speeds (i.e. hundreds of millions of meters or yards per second), the light you see reaching you will be shifted down in frequency, towards red in visible light. This can happen in other more complicated relativistic situations too but they are less easy to explain and also not applicable here

    I don't know why the people in the photo see this beautiful red aurora but redshift is almost certainly not a related concept here

  • Silmarillion Reader's Guide
  • Honestly, I would recommend the audiobook over the book; having someone else figure out how to say the special names makes it much easier to keep track of them in your mind, I find

  • life pro tip!!
  • Picking a higher density of the material just means the one gram would occupy less volume, it doesn't affect how much energy that gram is equivalent to in terms of E=mc2. For that calculation, as the equation implies, only the mass matters; a gram of feathers is equivalent to the same amount of energy as a gram of lead for that equation. Now, this equation is in fact a simplified assumption; if you launch your feather at relativistic speed, then we're talking

  • Reddit: Return Of The Junk Stock IPO
  • The comparison is even more apt when you remember that the official Reddit app also used to be the most popular and great 3rd-party app called AlienBlue, which was purchased from 1 guy and rebranded a decade ago.

    It's pretty clear that the reason why the official Reddit app isn't good is because a good experience for their users isn't their goal.

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)PH
    phcorcoran @lemmy.world
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