Sasha [They/Them]

Snakes on a plane, you take a drink every time there’s a snake on a plane. (I can’t remember where I’m stealing this from)

As an alternative, there’s also the idea of collecting a huge amount of solar power to make a tiny black hole using some very very hard to make lasers. A 5×10^9kg black hole is ideal.

Isaac Asimov talks about it a bit in Imperial Earth and from what I remember he uses accretion of matter as a source of fusion energy. Back in my early uni days I did a small research project on this idea, and you can actually get a ton more efficiency by turning the whole thing into something like a NERVA thermal nuclear rocket engine. If you include Hawking radiation in the calculations and are particularly clever with the design, the whole thing becomes suprisingly controllable over a range of thrust, and you get a constant 1g acceleration which resolves a bunch of biological issues around weightlessness.

It does require a little magic. You have to tether the black hole to the ship, and you need to use some pretty intense magnetic fields to contain the exhaust that’s being ejected at about 87% the speed of light (this also turns it into a fantastic way to destroy a planet by pointing it at the surface), but the fuel pumps used on the first stage Saturn V F1 engines are enough to feed it. The main issue imo is the absurd amount of radiation that’ll sterilise all life on the ship, but you can reach Proxima Centauri in about 4 years and the black hole should last for about 1000 before it’s spent (which interestingly is more about it becoming more massive, not less).

Why do that when he could filter his ideas through ungodly amounts of ketamine instead?

Yup, getting skills is just worthwhile pain. It’s been hard trying to convince some of the younger tech interested people I know to put in the effort instead of going down the AI route, but I know exactly where that’ll lead them. You don’t get good at this stuff by succeeding, it’s the endless failure.

When I say the basics, I mean understanding logic and reasoning and what constitutes scientific evidence. Much of it is word association at best, the example that comes to mind is the claim that the pillars of creation prove that creationism is true.

In one example in my copy of the Qur’an, they point to a journalist using the word smoke to discuss the state of the early universe as proof that the Qur’an predicted modern cosmology because heaven was smoke before Allah commanded it to exist. It’s an unproven claim, they’ve just drawn a vague connection and decided that counts as evidence.

Trans nonby software dev who dated a furry artist, my disdain for AI knows no limits.

I use Nobara, btw. (Is Arch good I’ve never looked into it)

You know how you get COVID from being in the same room as someone who sneezes on you or something? It’s that.

Non locality is when you get COVID from someone the next state over.

Can’t say I’m aware of any examples of our modern scientific understanding being present in a religious text. I did a painfully in depth bible study class in highschool and we sometimes discussed that a lot of old testament (and thus the Torah) is very very old and likely comes from people doing their best to understand their world and merging it with myth over the ages. That’s probably the closest you’ll get, depending on what you consider “science.”

One other possibility is that stories like the flood could essentially be “recordings” of historical events. Someone correct me, it’s been yonks since I read into it, but as I recall there are a number of different flood stories that come from the same region (ancient Mesopotamia? if we’re talking Judaism), so it’s entirely possible that it’s based on a real one, perhaps even multiple.

I got a free copy of the Qur’an last year and it’s packed with stuff like this, it’s kinda annoying because I just wanted to understand the actual text. It’s all the same stuff I’ve seen Christian creationists talk about, obviously false if you understand the basics but it’ll probably deceive lots of people who don’t.

One of the most accurate and successful theories in physics contains the single worst prediction and isn’t mathematically rigorous at all.

Doing calculations with it feels like doing vibes based maths, and you spend a lot of time doing things like: “oops divided by zero guess I’ll cancel it out by multiplying by zero” and it works.

I’ve been running from my problems by immersing myself in tech, I’m not sure if that makes me like it more or less but I’ve gotten very very good at what I do.

Last night I set up an event ticketing service so friends can come to an event I’m hosting without me having to schedule them or manage capacity. Then I cried myself to sleep. -2

But I also get to set up stuff for my collectives to use, like nextcloud and wordpress and it’s awesome to be able to turn a grassroots bunch of ratbags into a semi-professional looking bunch of ratbags. +10

I used to fry a pan of frozen veggies with salt and thyme, but these days I’m often lucky enough to be able to get a lot of rescued food for free.

AC’s use electrical energy to take some heat energy, and move it outside. You can kinda reverse the process in certain types of heat pumps to generate power, but it’s not even close to worth it, the efficiency is horrible.

You need a temperature gradient to capture heat energy, basically a cold thing and a hot thing, you harvest the energy as it moves from hot to cold. You’ve cooled your house down, and want to use the waste heat to create power, you’ll either have to find a very cold place somewhere nearby (unlikely to be cold outside if you’re using AC) or you can use the fact that your house is cold. So now you’ve both lost energy and heated up your house, because that lost energy has been added to the heat you originally tried to remove.

The simplified but always true rule of thumb is that whenever you use energy to create something from which you can harvest energy, you’ll never be able to harvest more than what you spent. In reality you’ll pretty much always lose energy trying to do this, I’m not aware of anything that’s 100% efficient in both directions (or even one honestly).

I’m afraid I can’t answer your technical questions, I’m really not that knowledgeable about this. All I know is you ideally want the frequency curve to be flat, I don’t think it matters much where it sits relative to that line.

Honestly, that Danon dropping off at the low end is pretty typical though it’s one of the better ones. You’d really just have to test it I’m afraid, it might be totally fine to chop off the bottom for some things but maybe it’s necessary for certain heart conditions, I wouldn’t know. If it were an option I’d say the best bet is to always stick to the analogue, but I’m absolutely with you on hating traditional stethoscopes, they’re so painful…

You probably can just leave the crushers on your neck with the volume maxed out, but I’m really not sure if that’ll work. In all honesty the speaker might be worse due to the way the acoustics in the room can change what you hear, it’s really hard to say.

Rtings.com provides frequency response charts when they test speakers, let me see if I can find one that goes low enough for you.

As for the bonus question, absolutely love it. I love when people come up with cool solutions to life’s problems, and this lets me hear my own heartbeat? Hell yeah!

Here’s an easy way to check a bunch of them quicky, the Denon home was the best I found in terms of the very low end. I’m sure someone else can do better, I’m not that much of an audiophile and know very little about speakers.

Probably worth noting that they stretch out the low end of the chart so they tend to go lower than it seems (I assume it’s a logarithmic scale). You might be able to go to a store and ask to test them yourself.

Second edit: if headphones are at all a possibility (they might be better for patients who don’t want to hear their own heartbeat) then can I recommend Skullcandy crushers? They’re completely ridiculous as regular headphones, they basically just have a metal plate they vibrate for the bass, but it goes all the way down to 20Hz, and you can crank it waaaaay up with a slider on the side. (I use these daily for music because I’m a bad audiophile who wants to have fun sometimes, I have a proper wired setup if I want the audiophile experience.)

I started a free writing journal to help generate ideas and learn to get a little more creative. It’s basically just a regular journal at this point, I just write in it whenever I have a thought that I feel I should keep. It’s been invaluable for coping with mental health stuff too. I don’t think I’ll ever stop, it’s not something I have to force myself to do any more.

I’ve got mini metro, something called shapez that I’ve not played, functional ear trainer which I’m classifying as a game cause it kinda is, and NYT games which is the only one I play regularly.

Not everyone likes the way these images are built, but the liinuxserver.io containers are so easy to use. You can replace so many cloud services using these, I’ve replaced:

• All streaming platforms
• Google drive
• Google photos
• Every note app
• The library (sorta, I just host an ebook server for manga that won’t fit on my reader)
• Grocery lists
• Exercise tracking apps

Plus I’ve setup some awesome new stuff like a website for one of my collectives and a few things to automate server maintenance.

You need somewhere to host your services (I’m using an old PC) and a little linux experience, but it’s absolutely worth giving it a crack. I might work in the industry but I learnt more making my little server than I ever did on the job.

I stopped using Reddit when I joined Lemmy, but I’ve still got a Facebook account because the family chat is in messenger, and I use Instagram because that’s where a lot of important information about things like rallies and mutual aid are disseminated (it’s a bonus that it’s also where I find cool gigs too).

I’ve also got Tumblr and mastodon, but I don’t use them much at all, I live here more than anywhere else.

Oh wow, I wasn’t expecting that! Sounds like fun