deo

@deo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
0 Post – 59 Comments
Joined 8 months ago

We actually kinda do perceive a fourth dimension: time. Sure, we infer it from our memories and come up with cause and effect relationships to help us understand it. But we do know it's there.

He wasn't even done giving the deposition that he literally volunteered to give...

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But this proposed law does not ban abortion 15 days after ovulation — it bans abortion at 15 days gestation, counted from the first day of a woman’s last menstrual cycle… which means it would ban abortion before some woman have even had conceived.

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And signed into law by then-governor Reagan, no less!

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It's like saying "no offense" after saying something totally offensive!

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Pretty sure it's the beaters (assuming that's an electric hand mixer type-thing, i've never heard them referred to by that term) that made them gummy. Over mashing will break up the cell walls too much, releasing the starches and ruining the texture. Cooking chopped or whole doesn't matter as much, since the number of cells broken by chopping is negligible. And the skin is water permeable anyway.

You gotta mash by hand, that's all.

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with another deposition scheduled for Saturday... don't forget that part. he wasn't even done giving evidence.

i think it's a play on the word "bisque", which is a type of soup.

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A bunch of people in here without something solid two feet to the left of them seem to be assuming that there is a perfect them-shaped vaccuum that they will be teleported into. That's not the case. There is air there, and you'll be just as dead as the guy sitting next to the family refrigerator.

Unless you are an astronaut currently in space, the only correct answer is "dying of multiple simultaneous embolisms, with or without widespread traumatic amputations, and 'gross dismemberment' (SFW, only text) from instantaneous pressure changes inside the body."

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Ok. I get it. There are people in the Americas that are not from the US. But do you call people from the United Mexican States "Unitied Mexican Stateans"? No, that sounds ridiculous. I think that it's silly anyway to call everyone from either Americas "American" anyway; they are two different continents! "North American" or "South American" would be better, if you must get so broad with your adjectives (but really, continent-wide generalizations of people are rarely useful anyway). Sorry for the rant.

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Due to some poorly placed quotes, I managed to create a subdirectory named ~ in my home folder. You can imagine what happened next. Luckily, I had just gotten my backup system up and running the day before, so nothing was lost.

For real. I'm over here having a mid-life crisis since I was 27.

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Yup. There's no number of scratchers you can buy that gives you a 100% chance of winning. Sure, your chances go up the more you buy, but it never reaches 100%.

The formula is: 1 - (1-p)^N where p is the chance of winning and N is the number of scratchers you buy. Basically, you have to NOT win for N scratchers, so we multiply (since this is an AND condition, ie: you must lose scratcher A and scratcher B and scratcher C, etc) the chance of not winning (1-p) by itself for the number of scratchers bought. That's the overall chance of not winning, so we subtract that from 1 to get the chance of winning. You could instead use the chance of winning directly, but the formula is much longer (until you simplify the equation, which would give you the same answer as above) since you'd need to add (in this case we are using OR conditions) the chances of winning 1 scratcher or 2 scratchers or 3 scratchers, etc.

1 in 30 is a 3.33% chance of winning (a 96.67% chance of not winning, for those still following along). If you buy 30 scratchers, your chance of winning is only 63.83%. For 300, it's 99.9962%. The chance will never reach 100% because you have a number between 0 and 1 raised to the power of a positive number in the formula. The chance of winning at least 1 of N scratchers can only be 100% if the chance of winning a single scratcher is already 100%, and they don't sell those.

However! There are rules dictating the distribution of winning scratchers in a roll. It's obviously not 1 every 30 exactly, but it's also not perfectly random (which could lead to long strings of losing scratchers or long strings of winning scratchers). That's why sometimes you'll have to wait in line behind someone while they make the gas station attendant open a whole new roll because they want to buy 100 contiguous scratchers and there were only 99 left in the old roll.

Turns out, humans don't think true randomness "feels" random. There's actually a game design trick where you tell the player odds that are lower than reality because the true odds "feel" lower than the reported number. Pokemon did not use this trick, so Hyper Beam (reported accuracy of 90%) feels unfair, since you remember more strongly all the times it missed when you really, really needed it to hit vs. all the times it hit.

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Because "tasteless" also has the alternative definition, meaning "gaudy", "tacky", or "pretentious". So, I think they did indeed think about it, perhaps even longer than you did before getting all worked up over it.

OH! I see it! It's a little guy saluting

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Our pastor did a whole six-week long study of Acts, talking about how we needed to give more so we could fund mission trips and whatnot. I got caught up in it all (he was quite the orator, I'll give him that) and donated a decent chunk of the money I'd been saving up to get a new iPod.

My sister went on one of the mission trips and had to pay for literally everything out of her own pocket. Despite the plentiful donations for, allegedly, that express purpose.

Cherry on the cake was that they soon broke ground on a new youth group building (which we didn't need), complete with a coffee house (with prices and menu comparable to Starbucks). All I could think of was Jesus getting pissed at the vendors and money changers in the temple and flipping tables over. "'My house will be called a house of prayer', but you are making it 'a den of robbers'."

platformers very often include coyote-time to make jumps feel better and to account for imprecise reaction times of players, but that would be cool to see it as a legit mechanic

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While i do think life exists elsewhere in the universe, I think the chances of extraterrestrial biological entities coming to our planet is exceedingly unlikely. Space is just too big, and there isn't any hard evidence that faster-than-light travel is even possible.

Although, the universe isn't just big -- it's old. There could be some ancient civilization from an ancient planet that became uninhabitable long ago. If they were technologically advanced enough to escape their solar system before things went tits-up AND were able to live multiple generations fully in space AND they just so happened to set out in our direction, I guess it's possible that they found us. Even then, i would expect any UFOs or whatever would merely be probes, not the actual biological entities themselves.

or cut the size but keep the price the same, then release a new "jumbo size" that's as big as the previous size (with the new and improved higher unit price), then discontinue the "standard" size.

Tic Tacs say 0g sugar in the nutrition facts, even though they're mostly sugar. They can do this because they aren't required to report quantities of sugar below 0.5g, but the serving size is 1 tic tac or, conveniently, 0.49g.

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I think it's because English isn't super consistent with the spelling of vowel sounds. Consider also "choose" (rhymes with "lose") and "chose" (which doesn't rhyme with either).

I guess really the vowel sound in loose/lose is basically the same; the difference is whether or not the "s" makes a "s" sound or a "z" sound... It is admittely odd that the presence or absence of an extra "o" would affect the sound of an adjacent constant (especially when we have a perfectly good "z" character available).

Which reminds me of my pet peeve: when people use "breath" or "cloth" instead of "breathe" or "clothe".

i live in a red state, so much so that some races in the general election are uncontested. if i don't vote in the republican primary, i essentially don't have a say in anything because i will be out-voted in the general even if there are multiple candidates. so i hold my nose and try to find the least bad option in the republican primaries. I did vote in the democratic primary in 2016 and 2020, though, b/c i had to support the Bernie man, so it depends on the circumstances. This is what our FPTP voting system has reduced me to.

How much could one habanero weigh, Michael? One pound?

best case, you're releasing extra CO2 into the atmosphere that would have at least been locked up in the landfills/seas of microplastics. worst case, you're also releasing unstudied and most likely carcinogenic incomplete combustion products.

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i'm a big fan of "hectomillionaires" (the term, not the system that allows hectomillionaires to exist to the detriment of us all, of course)

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I certainly wasn't intending to imply your work is not worthwhile, and I apologize if i came off as combative or dismissive. Plastic recycling is such a scam, I do think burning it makes sense in the short term (especially with the scrubbers you talked about, those sound cool and will at least help with the microplastic problem). I guess it's just that the marketing push to conflate "clean" with "green" has been bothering me recently, and, while perfect should not be the enemy of the good, we're running out of time (or possible have already run out of time, depending on how depressed i am when you ask me) for incremental change to be sufficient. But, you are right. We can only do what we can to make the world we're currently in better, not simply will it into perfection overnight (despite how much I hate not being able to do that...).

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Sometimes i'll do this in the winter. We try to minimize heat/AC energy usage, and i get cold easily, so once i'm in the nice warm shower it takes a minute to work up the courage to make the mad dash to get my clothes back on lol

indeed. urine with high sugar content has been associated with diabetes since at least the 5th/6th century BC.

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Yeah, i think working dogs and highly social breeds seem smarter, but that's just because they have been trained and/or bred for aptitude in tasks we humans deem important. If my metrics of intelligence included being an annoying little shit, I'd think chihuahuas were the smartest breed.

If you tap on it you can zoom in. en passant confirmed

it means we can change it enough that it will no longer support US, but life continues at its own rhythm, we are oarr of that rhythm, not separate from it

We are not the first instance of life forever changing the environment to the point of mass extinction. When early cyanobacteria figured out photosynthesis, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere they produced as waste killed off massive numbers of other species for which oxygen was toxic.

However, we are the first instance of life capable of understanding our place in the ecosystem enough to do something about how we as a species affect the biosphere and the pressure we are putting not just on other life forms but on ourselves as well. We are not mindless cyanobacteria pooping out oxygen to the detriment of all others; we can and MUST do better.

A huge part of that is understanding exactly what you pointed out: we are part of the ecosystem, not separate from it. I just wish someone could get the mega-wealthy and fossil fuel CEOs and politicians to understand it. There is no safety for them; their money and power will not save them.

my thinking goes that the longer a particular ticket has gone without hitting, the closer it is to a winner

If the tickets were perfectly random, this would not be true. But they are not really random at all.

In reality, everything about the game has been carefully designed to control payouts and entice the consumer.

There's also a long list of descriptions from sightings over the years, as well as summaries of scientific hypothesis attempting to explain the phenomenon. There's even an emission spectrum published in 2014. I for one can learn stuff without having all the answers completely figured out (which is good, since almost everything has something unexplained about it if you dig deep enough). For example, I learned I can make plasma balls in the microwave! Very cool.

I agree that it's nonsense, and thanks for pointing out that I can look up European nutrition facts -- i'm gonna start doing that. I wish we'd do the per 100g thing, but we don't which makes it easier for companies to game the system. My point was that nutrition facts don't always tell the whole story, especially if your country's regulatory bodies have been lobbied into submission by the companies they are supposed to be regulating, so finding out if your tea has added sugars may not be as simple as looking on the box.

I'm in favor of not using plastics at all (or at least only used in medical and scientific applications in which it is absolutely necessary). My point was that burning it is trading one set of problems for another.

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in this context, i meant it as "paradoxical". since i can work hard and persevere, but i'm also a bit lazy about it all. Like, have you ever dropped your phone on the floor when lying in bed and come up with some absurd bodily contortion to reach it without physically leaving the bed? But you could have just gotten up and grabbed it and laid back down in much less time with much less energy spent overall? That's the kind of diligent slothfulness that I am quite prone to.

Not the first. The cyanobacteria that first figured out photosynthesis put so much oxygen into the atmosphere so fast that it cause mass extinction of much of the anaerobic life (and most things were anaerobic life back then). They also caused a literal rust belt (since many metals up to that point were now able to be oxidized en masse), and that rust layer can be seen in really old rocks ("banded iron formation").

Great Oxidation Event

Coincidentally, -196°C is the boiling point of Nitrogen