Spzi @ Spzi @lemm.ee

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Joined

2 yr. ago

First, the researchers excised the larynxes of eight newly deceased domestic cats, all of which had contracted terminal diseases, resulting in their euthanization. (The owners gave explicit consent for this removal.) The larynxes were promptly flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen and stored at -20° Celsius. They were slowly thawed at room temperature the night before the experiments. Each larynx was cleaned, photographed, and mounted on a vertical tube, which was used to supply heated air with 100 percent humidity to the larynx.

The larynxes were stabilized using LEGO blocks and 3D-printed plastic mounts, and mini-electrodes were attached to the thyroid cartilage, one on each side, to record the electroglottographic (EGG) signal. Gradually opening and closing a magnetic valve in the air supply chain controlled the subglottal pressure by pumping in air, which drove the oscillation in the mounted larynxes. (One larynx also underwent standard histological analysis, while another was CT scanned.)

The authors successfully produced purring sounds in all eight of the excised larynxes when air was pumped through them, with no need for muscle contractions—given that all the adjacent muscles had been removed when excising the larynxes. So what was driving the purrs?

Fascinating, this took a few unexpected turns.

Let's just hope no one has to wear a piece of cloth for it to work, or even get the vaccine.

We thought we had eradicated polio, but the anti-vaxxers had other plans.

Capture is needed, but futile if we don't stop with fossil fuels. The math does not check out. We would need to dedicate like 5% of global electricity production to run DAC plants, unrealistically assuming they run at 100% efficiency at the physically possible optimum, just to keep emissions from rising. However expensive and unpractical it might be to stop using fossil fuels, relying on DAC is probably worse.

I really like your vision! Some I knew, some are new.

User curation and tagging - Allow users to tag and organize content instead of relying purely on titles. Improves discoverability.

I would love tags on posts. Many people love memes. I rarely do, and most often am annoyed by the shallow content in otherwise interesting communities. I'd love to filter memes out, and change my mind on an hourly basis. Or follow the Android community, but hide all posts discussing the latest version, which my phone cannot run anyways.

It would be nice if we could connect posts which were not created as cross-posts. And unify comment sections, although that comes with challenges.

This would also go well with the next dream feature:

Advanced search - Support complex search queries with boolean operators, field filters, date ranges etc. Makes finding relevant content easy.

Yes, please! Obviously, support the previously mentioned tags.

Custom feeds - Users can create customized feeds to follow or hide specific users, communities, instances, keywords, etc

I guess this includes community grouping? So instead of subscribing to 20 slightly different or outright redundant game communities, I can subscribe to one game group. I don't see anything stopping the problem to repeat at this next level (slightly differently curated game groups), but I think it would still be an improvement.

And I would add a step on top: Specify how much you want to follow something, expressed as a float between 0 and 1. Zero effectively means "this instance / community / user is blocked". One means "You will always see all activities and updates from that source, no matter how much interesting stuff is going on elsewhere". So I can effectively ignore a community, but rarely see a post which really explodes, or say for another community that I want to see everything with at least some engagement in my feed.

Creating custom feeds is great. This would allow me to filter out exhausting content when I'm rather out to relax, and challenge myself with controversial ideas when I feel strong enough, supporting self care. I would also love to always see new content from certain niche communities.

Finally, I think it could be fun to share these settings with others, also to prevent re-invention of the wheel. Think like shaders are shared in games like Minecraft, which also change the way you filter and see the available content.

I'm not sure how much concern and thought should be put into malicious forms of "follow specific users".

Multi-criteria ratings - Beyond likes, allow rating content on multiple criteria to allow sorting by quality and not just entertainment value.

I kind of like this idea (TED uses a similar system, no?), but am suspicious how well it would work in practice. Say we have 3 ratings for entertainment, information, fact/opinion or whatnot, and a user genuinely hates the post. Normally, this user would leave a downvote. Now, the user can/has to score 0, 0, 'opinion', and probably will. The question is, will users actually use the system honestly? But maybe that does not matter so much, since extreme votes like this don't change the relative scores. Yes, the rated profile will probably still tell me if it's rather entertaining or informative, based on other votes which differentiated.

Affinity system - Connect users with similar interests. Recommend content based on affinity.

Content recommendation would be nice, and also help with community discovery. Maybe even kickstart niche communities! Though I guess, if the above ideas are realized, this one would follow naturally, as one custom feed which subscribes to tags.

User trust levels - Grant privileges based on user reputation to lessen reliance on centralized moderation.

Privileges like what?

My own dreams about a future Lemmy include:

• accounts can migrate to other instances, keeping subscriptions but also post history and still getting notifications for replies on older stuff
• the interface is intuitive to use even for non-tech people, which results in a wide variety of topics in the network
• posts and comments have an instance-agnostic URL scheme, so that I can join a conversation on another instance without searching
• well integrated into other fediverse applications (which ideally all use the same login, if you want)
• bots merely serve with selective functionality (things like TL;DR, unit conversion) and do not create the majority of posts

Generally agreed. Though in a finite world, things happening in parallel can easily come at the expense of other things.

Money spent here cannot be spent there. More construction projects mean more concrete being used, another major source of emissions. Some people also worry some approaches can give false hopes, thereby politically preventing less comfortable but more impactful measures.

I'm also not fully sold why DAC, and not CCS. Both are very similar (they filter CO₂ out of gas, and store it), but the concentration of the target gas makes all the difference. The process becomes much more efficient when the concentration is higher. So physically and economically, it makes much more sense to capture these molecules in the exhaust fumes of large industrial facilities like power plants, instead of waiting until they disperse in the atmosphere, to then tediously catch them again.

I think it's a challenge to settle for the right portfolio. Too few pillars and our foundation could crumble. Too many and we could end up wasting our efforts on approaches which ultimately did not work. Which matters, because time is short and tipping points allow no going back. Though in the political reality of our world, we can probably be happy about anything which avoids or removes any single atom. Or not, because maybe we could have avoided and removed twice that amount for the same effort with an obviously better approach!

a lot of that content is cross-posed from Xitter.

Same here, lots of content cross-posted from reddit. Most of which seems to be bot posts with zero engagement, but lately I noticed many of the human posts, which do generate engagement, are themselves just cross-posts of these bot cross-posts.

So basically we're like 2nd level social media, feeding off what Xitter and reddit pre-filtered for us. To become mainstream would mean to reverse this flow. I'd already be happy if we could shut these bots off and be independent from what we left.

Ah, ClimeWorks. They also operate a plant in Iceland, which I used to offset a few minor car journeys. If I'd ever use a plane, I'd do the same.

That being said, the overall approach is very questionable. Even if the plants are run 100% by renewable energy, the question of opportunity costs remains. Is the whole grid already 100% renewable energy, or do we 'steal' low-carbon electricity from other appliances? Even if the whole grid was fully green, is DAC really the best use for the excess, or should we rather use it to produce green hydrogen, to prevent emissions elsewhere?

Direct Air Capture will be needed to stabilize our climate (or to reach neutrality by 2050 in the first place), which means we need to gain experience with it. But first and foremost we need to keep fossil fuels in the ground! Capture is economically and physically so expensive, it just isn't feasible to see it (regardless how, wether it's trees or fans) as an escape. It never will be. Keep fossil fuels it in the ground.

No single human activity has a bigger impact on the planet than the production of food

A provocative claim which is not supported by the link. It goes on to talk about other thing, which cannot show the claim is true, if it is. For example, while the following sentence might be true, it does not show wether the initial claim was true:

        The production of animal-based foods—particularly beef—is responsible for about half of the food system’s greenhouse gas emissions. 


  

Because both talk about different things. I couldn't find that July 5, 2022, Boston Globe article to check.

The production of food (even in the most sustainable ways) probably still is a good bet, simply because it requires so much land, and more.

Though not sure how it fares against "trade", or the extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

Browsing the wikis, I got the impression research is unconclusive. We don't know if he had a role regarding the theorem, and what it was.

There is debate whether the Pythagorean theorem was discovered once, or many times in many places, and the date of first discovery is uncertain, as is the date of the first proof. Historians of Mesopotamian mathematics have concluded that the Pythagorean rule was in widespread use during the Old Babylonian period (20th to 16th centuries BC), over a thousand years before Pythagoras was born.[68][69][70][71]

The German version also talks about the various roles Pythagoras might have had or not had regarding the theorem, and how research is unconclusive. One such possibility is that this older Clay Tablet applied the theorem without being able to prove it, and Pythagoras or one of his students could have found a proof.

Also:

The history of the theorem can be divided into four parts: knowledge of Pythagorean triples, knowledge of the relationship among the sides of a right triangle, knowledge of the relationships among adjacent angles, and proofs of the theorem within some deductive system.

So there were lots of meaningful steps one could achieve without actually deriving the theorem. Maybe people were happy to just use math because it works, and a thousand years later someone bothered to prove why.

Even his role regarding the proof seems unclear. It was interesting to browse the Wiki articles about this theorem's history. Could be him, or one of his students, or neither.

Oh, wow. Ok, then what's the point of holding Crimea? And then, what's the point of the whole war anyways? Make peace, go home!

Ok, so what does this mean? Is the idea NATO should accept all countries who apply? Should not reject applications?

Yes, "all practical civilian and military cooperation between NATO and Russia" was suspended by NATO on 1 April 2014, in response to Russia annexing Crimea, which also broke the Budapest Memorandum.

No country has the right to join an alliance with other countries. You can ask, they can reject.

Try to include arguments instead of personal attacks, if you can.

Yeah, this post might be a bit clickbaity, luring people with false expectations. I suppose OP has not spoken a word with the devs, and they won't look at this thread, nor do they see a need for a poll of some sorts. Or maybe I'm wrong, but the wording is suspiciously vague.

Thanks for pointing out what actually works; GitHub issues and bounties.

"For agencies like the FTC to seriously consider action, there has to be harm to customers. But the sneaky formula that mobile developers have pioneered is one where the app itself is free, and the gameplay technically does exist in the application, so where's the harm? Any rEaSoNaBlE viewer won't be harmed. They will see and uninstall, and there's disclosures, so who cares? But these companies aren't targeting 'the reasonable customers', they are targeting the people with addictive personalities who get easily sucked in from a deceptive ad to a predatory product."

Damn, that's insane and evil. Like a drug cartel distributing free candies after school, with crystal meth inside. They just weather the storm, well knowing a few "customers" will stick.

I still don't understand how this can work so well, which apparently it does given the numbers and scale. I have questions:

• Why bother making a "main product" at all, if people come for the mini game? Why not make the mini game addictive and predatory, save even more development costs and get less negative reviews as a bonus? Like, why bother with the candy when you can legally sell meth?
• Why is this exclusive to the mobile market? The same games, ads and arguments could be made for any other platform with "free", downloadable content like PC. Why don't they share their crack candies at college?

Scaling small units up is not an issue. Just use multiple of those units. Much like a car battery can consist of thousands of individual cells.

Scaling large units down, however, can be a challenge with limits. So I would say finding a thing which works well at small scales is gold. If you want more, you're free to either house multiple units in one building, or distribute them along the shore. Although it may well be possible that another design is more beneficial at other scales.

It's also interesting for mobile use cases like naval vessels. I could even imagine some road train truckers having one of these in their emergency gear when crossing deserts, just in case.

I think that's a helpful analogy and comment. Please remember this while I go on to nitpick. I'm aiming at in both fields, there may be more math-leaning scientists and concrete-leaning workers, with the engineer being somewhat in the middle.

Declaring bridges safe probably involves a lot of math and tables in the background. I guess we don't actually run a million trucks but estimate the safety theoretically, with a few experimental tests. Likewise, a security specialist can define the edge cases against which the tests should be run. That may be the same person who also implements the test, but I want to emphasize it's two different roles. And we might consider one more of a scientist, and the other more of a worker.

So how much your activity resembles that of a mathematician, or a traditional engineer probably depends on your specific task, and how much your team requires you to generalize or specialize.

I'm all for collecting information, keeping it up to date, making it accessible and sharing the workload to many people.

For me, that screams WIKI!

There is a Wiki which could very well use more contribution and updates: https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_Lemmy%3F

I think a proper Wiki is the correct place for these things. Compared to a repository, a Wiki is more accessible for more kinds of people. It also allows better cross-referencing of information along with other relevant functionality.

That being said, let's not argue too much about where the best place might be. Getting things done is more important, so go ahead! It should be easy to copy the content to a Wiki at a later point.

The Wikipedia article is also very comprehensive and nuanced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock

Easy fix, just dig down that 26 meters!

All the way across the length of the canal.

I’m sure a couple dudes with shovels could knock it out in a week.

Why shovels when you can use plowshares?

Proposed uses for nuclear explosives under Project Plowshare included widening the Panama Canal, constructing a new sea-level waterway through Nicaragua nicknamed the Pan-Atomic Canal ...

Or maybe we should stop messing with our climate.