Instigate @ Instigate @aussie.zone

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334

Joined

2 yr. ago

It’s often advantageous to prevent catastrophe before it occurs rather than clean up the mess once it happens.

Not all rights are won through violence. In Australia, the union movement has managed to secure the following through peaceful means, specifically through lobbying, striking and peaceful protest:

• 40 hour work week; overtime for hours worked beyond this
• sick leave and annual leave
• maternity and paternity leave
• Medicare, our semi-universal public healthcare
• enforceable safety standards at work
• compensation for injury at work
• our ‘award’-based system of minimum pay and conditions per field
• federally mandated superannuation (forced retirement saving paid by your employer, tax free)
• protections against unfair dismissal

While not all rights are gained through violence all rights are limited and revoked by violence, in particular state-sponsored violence.

Forgive my uneducated arse but is this a problem that cold fusion could solve? Like, could we theoretically create stable isotopes to use in significant enough quantities by fusing atomic nuclei and chucking in or subtracting some electrons from the mix?

Holy shit, is this why lowly assistants are colloquially called gophers?!? I never drew the connection. Sometime we just take weird words or phrases for granted without thinking about their etymology.

Sorry, what? I was agreeing with you. I’m not the other poster you were arguing with.

What you are suggesting is cornering an animal, and then saying “Hey, we should corner it more because it’s acting aggressively.” And then acting surprised when it attacks you.

I really like this line of logic because it highlights how the insipid manosphere’s propaganda directly targets the most animalistic part of the brain - the amygdala - and uses fear and anger to propel antisocial behaviour much as a cornered animal lashes out against its captor. It’s a very apt metaphor beyond the simplistic reasoning it suggests.

it’s more than analog cigarettes

I assume you mean less and yeah, that would make sense on the face of it. It just seems as though there’s no empirical evidence that nicotine specifically causes skin damage - only evidence that it causes blood vessel constriction. Do you have a source that shows a causal relationship from constricting blood vessels to poor skin health? That again would make sense to me, but I just don’t like to base my positions on assumptions - I’m a raw data sort of person.

There’s definitely no world where nicotine is harmless - it causes very clear harms beyond simple addiction that we’ve known for some time - but it’s important to be accurate around how much safer nicotine is in its other forms, particularly as you mentioned that it’s a necessary medicinal quit-smoking aid compound.

If vaping nicotine is the equivalent of five minutes of sun exposure per day without sunscreen, that’s a tolerable risk. If it causes anywhere near 50% of the damage that cigarettes cause, that’s a serious issue.

Thanks four the sources. So there’s evidence that nicotine impacts blood vessels, but not yet that that impacts skin condition? That makes sense, nicotine use in isolation hasn’t been around all that long yet. As I mentioned, that specific link doesn’t appear to have been studied yet to the best of my knowledge, but I don’t have access to journalistic databases that I used to.

Does nicotine specifically cause skin damage? Obviously smoking tobacco does, but I’m not sure it’s necessarily the nicotine component that causes the skin damage. There’s thousands of chemicals in tobacco beyond nicotine and I haven’t yet seen a study that shows that nicotine in isolation impacts skin condition.

So it looks like the frogs mentioned in this meme are microhylids, and for some further info:

Crocraft & Hambler (1989) noted that the frog seemed to benefit from living in proximity to the spider by eating the small invertebrates that were attracted to prey remains left by the spider. The frog presumably also benefits by receiving protection: small frogs like this are preyed on by snakes and large arthropods, yet on this occasion we have a frog that receives a sort of ‘protection’ from a large, formidable spider bodyguard. Hunt (1980) suggested that the spider might gain benefit from the presence of the frog: microhylids specialise on eating ants, and ants are one of the major predators of spider eggs. By eating ants, the microhylids might help protect the spider’s eggs.

This is also super cute behaviour:

Young spiders have sometimes been observed to grab the frogs, examine them with their mouthparts, and then release them unharmed.

Apparently the spiders’ protectiveness can also be pretty overt:

Karunarathna & Amarasinghe (2009) reported how several Poecilotheria were seen attacking individuals of Hemidactylus depressus (a gecko) after the latter tried eating the eggs of the frogs the spiders were sharing their tree holes with.

And some ideas on why this might be an example of mutualistic behaviour rather than commensalism:

…the spider seems to benefit in that the frogs eat the ants that might ordinarily attack the spider’s eggs. Due to their small size, ants are presumably difficult for the spiders to deal with, and they might be effectively helpless against them.

Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/tetrapod-zoology/tiny-frogs-and-giant-spiders-best-of-friends/

He also chomped into a whole raw onion on live tv.

Man, the Abbott days were pretty funny when following political commentary.

I feel like a lot of people haven’t ever played Rogue and so struggle understand what Roguelike actually means. Fair call, it’s a very old game with essentially no graphics, but to understand the genre properly everyone needs to give it a go at least once in my opinion.

Side note; love me the whole Mystery Dungeon franchise. I still need to pick up the Shiren the Wanderer series.

Sounds like you’re the sort of person who does well in candid pictures. In order to get a great profile picture, have someone you know take photos of you while you’re having a coffee and a chat with a friend for fifteen minutes or so and try to ignore the camera as much as possible. I definitely look much better candid than posed; I honestly believe that most people do!

I’m not sure that your two categories of gamers are necessarily mutually exclusive. I’d consider myself somewhere in both of those camps. For instance, I have hundreds of hours logged each on a range of open world games like Skyrim, BotW, WoW etc. but I also love to play incremental games which satisfies my mathy brain. I’m generally a min/maxer and completionist and in RPGs this often means exploring every location, killing every enemy and collecting every item before progressing the main story, so as to be maxed out at all points in time. I’m not a big PvP fan, but when I do engage in PvP I tend to find some balance between whatever the meta is and whatever my personal playstyle ‘feels’ is right.

Anyone who’s studied high school physics will also remember one of the biggest blunders of modern experimental physics: the Michelson-Morley Experiment which infamously attempted to prove the existence of the aether but rather gave them a pretty clear confirmation of a lack of the aether. It actually ended up helping form one of the basic tenets of Einstein’s Special Relativity, which is that the speed of light is constant within an inertial frame of reference.

They floated their interferometer setup on a sandstone slab measuring 1.5m x 1.5m x 0.3m in a giant circular trough of mercury in order to provide near-zero friction and reduce vibrations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment

The US needs a a legitimate grassroots movement that is well-funded (fucked if I know how to be honest, hopefully it’s just a lot of small donations from regular people) that consistently lobbies for voting reform. The following changes should be up for debate:

• Replacing FPTP voting with ranked choice voting
• Instituting proportional representative voting where appropriate, particularly for state senates
• Referendum on changing the number of federal senators per state to better represent population
• Referendum on abolishing the Electoral College and instituting a simple, ranked choice popular vote for president
• Systematic review of every single electorate by an independent organisation to unwind gerrymandered districts; this organisation then sets the districts on an ongoing basis in an apolitical way
• Expanding ease of access to voting by every sensible measure possible (much of what AG Garland is doing now) and then considering mandatory voting
• Real-time full disclosure of all political donations to all political bodies (especially PACs)
• Sensible caps on political donations
• Truth in political advertising laws

I’m sure there are plenty of others but if all of those things were managed to be achieved, the body politic’s state and Overton Window of the US would shift dramatically.

I like your idea of using 3 as an approximation to get ballpark figures - if you wanted to add a smidge of extra accuracy to that you can just remember that in doing so, you’re taking away roughly 5% of pi.

0.14159265 / 3 ≈ 0.04719755

Add in around 5% at the end and your approximation’s accuracy tends to gain an order of magnitude. For your pizza example:

108 in^{2 x 1.05 = 113.4 in}2 which is accurate to three significant figures and fairly easy to calculate in your head if you can divide by twenty.

You could even fudge it a little and go “108 is pretty close to 100. 5% of 100 is obviously 5, so the answer is probably around 108+5=113”

Yeah it’s totally worth it though. They’re extremely diligent by industry standards when it comes to ethical sourcing of cocoa.

The blocks are a bit weird, the segments are an odd geometric tessellation where no two pieces are identical. Great chocolate though.

My copy of Beetle Adventure Racing on N64 went through the washing machine after it got picked up with my bedsheets. Left it in the sun for an hour afterwards and popped it back into the console and it kept working perfectly. I don’t know why any console devs ever decided that discs were better than cartridges; it’s just objectively untrue.

What percentage of all games released before download updating became the norm had game-breaking bugs? I really don’t remember that many, certainly not so many that it was considered to be a widespread issue.

Yeah, unpatchable games tended to be buggier in general, but there’s also a sense of charm and intrigue that comes with discovering a bug or exploit and utilising it to your advantage. I still remember playing the fuck out of Morrowind and discovering that you could exploit the Corprus disease to get essentially infinite Strength and Endurance which was awesome.

I think stating that “many” games were unbeatable is hyperbolic, but I guess that depends on your definition of “many”. If you define it as being more than five, then sure. If you define it as being a statistically significant percentage? Maybe not.