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How likely do you think it is that there might have been a person in a the last 2000 years who solved one of life's great mysteries but never reported/recorded it?
  • Well just in case this ends up being a solution to some mystery I've not come across, here's a genuine (albeit seemingly pointless) finding from a research project I did a while back:

    When saltwater is poured into the soil around the roots of a tomato plant, the plant's internal electrochemical response oscillates with a 0.1hz frequency.

    I'm not sure what mystery that will solve but now nobody can accuse me of not reporting/recording it!

  • English is such a peach.
  • These are called orphaned negatives and English has loads of them. A great article about them is here: https://stephenliddell.co.uk/2021/03/17/a-gruntled-look-at-orphan-negatives/

    As a slight tangent, a similar peculiarity in English (which I don't know of a name for) is where you can use the opposite words for similar actions, e.g. you can chop a tree down and then chop it up.

  • What's your best "right place, right time" personal story?
  • When I was a teenager I had a variety of joint problems, including my knees. Walking down off a mountain one day the weather took a turn for the worse and a strong gust of wind knocked me off my feet and I landed knee-first on a rock. Nothing broken, but couldn't walk on it. We'd barely seen anyone else that day but it just so happened that a couple were just approaching us as I fell. The wife was a nurse, the husband was ex-special forces.

  • Am I the only one getting agitated by the word AI?
  • In my first AI lecture at uni, my lecturer started off by asking us to spend 5 minutes in groups defining "intelligence". No group had the same definition. "So if you can't agree on what intelligence is, how can we possibly define artificial intelligence?"

    AI has historically just described cutting edge computer science at the time, and I imagine it will continue to do so.

  • Former religious lemmings, what made you quit religion or stop being a believer?
  • Leaving church life behind is very hard indeed. For me most of my social circles were built around church. Home group, Sunday services, university CU. It took a long time to get into new ways of meeting people socially and I'm still certainly not as close to as many people as in my church days.

    I have no real advice to pass on here, just saying you're certainly not alone in finding it tough to leave that side of life behind.

  • 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/)TH
    the_stat_man @lemmy.world
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