flora_explora @ flora_explora @beehaw.org

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626

Joined

2 yr. ago

Hahaha lol, I didn't catch that at all but now it is pretty obvious

Not personally my style but hilarious designs!

A post that incidentally showed up just above this one in my feed showing that gay people are not necessarily allies to all queer people:

https://sopuli.xyz/post/13852549

And just because someone is friends with a gay person is even less reason to suggest they are necessarily queer-inclusive.

From Wikipedia:

"The western honey bee can be found on every continent except Antarctica. The species is believed to have originated in Africa or Asia, and it spread naturally through Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Humans are responsible for its considerable additional range, introducing European subspecies into North America (early 1600s), South America, Australia, New Zealand, and eastern Asia." So, depends where you live. Especially South and Central American honey bee populations have been overtaken by the africanized honey bee though, which is a feral human-bred hybrid that escaped the lab in Brazil.

Well, I think the insidious problem about honeybees is that people often say "save the bees" and mean only honeybees. But it is a domesticated species that doesn't need any saving. Meanwhile endangered species get forgotten altogether.

Cannot tell if a serious statement or sarcastic. But sure, there are many invasive species from Europe all over the world. Just as there are many invasive species from all over the world in Europe. And they threaten native species all over the globe. Habitat loss and climate change are probably much bigger concerns to endangered species though... What's so insidious about honeybees is what's mentioned in the meme as well, that they are easily economically exploitable so that companies like to focus their environmental programs on them instead of actually endangered species. Also, people tend to like relatable animals much more so most public campaigns to save endangered species are related to cute or anthropomorphized animals.

Thanks for all the informative sources. First of all, I think you are probably right that it is a political or rather economic problem, not necessarily a scientific one. Capitalism doesn't give any incentive to care for the environment or to recycle anything if it isn't profitable. And politics are heavily influenced if not driven by capitalism.

But then, seeing the various articles you provided about nuclear waste storage, I didn't really get the impression that it is a solved problem. Sabine Hossenfelder spends a very long time talking about what nuclear waste is but only mentions problems with storage for hundreds of thousands of years for a very short time. And also Elina Charatidsou doesn't even mention potential problems of geological changes etc. And the facility she is presenting is still in the research stage. So where are the solutions for a long-term storage that guarantees safety? Nuclear waste may not be as problematic as it is made out, but real solutions look different to me.

Very interesting also the point about recycling nuclear waste. I haven't even heard of it and it sounds like a really good thing to do. We'd still have very high costs handling and storing it, but only for a few hundreds of years at least. Although it seems like actually applying this is still not really planned by most countries and even then the problem of nuclear waste doesn't go away fully.

Yes, I get that. But I think we should just keep in mind that it is no sustainable or long-term solution. Since many people have started talking positively about nuclear energy in the last few years, I think it is important to remind everyone of the problems that arise with it.

Can you show me any evidence for that? I'm really curious how we could develop a technology to safely store nuclear waste for millions of years. I mean, on that time scale you'd even factor in changes in geology and all kinds of other factors. Sure, there are definitely people who say that "it should be fine". But how can you reliably model geology on that time scale? You simply cannot. So I would definitely disagree with your statement that storage is a solved problem.

Yeah sure, coal plants obviously have to go. But why not invest in sustainable energy production?

Nuclear waste cannot just be buried, unless you don't care about polluting huge areas with radioactivity. In Germany, there have been decades long debates where to store nuclear waste and even to this day there hasn't been found a good storage for the waste we produced in the 70ies. And this shit costs billions of euros that the company profiting of the plant doesn't have to pay but that in turn society has to pay.

You're right, this paper is so adorable!! <3

Hm, on the one hand this could be survivorship bias, i.e. only a lucky few scripts in stone have made it through. If you left enough of these glass discs or other modern media in very specific conditions they might also withstand thousands/millions of years maybe?

On the other hand, I think the amount of data and the corresponding resolution is important, too. If you'd try to store petabytes (or more) worth of data you'd have to carve really really tiny scriptures into stone unless you want mountains of stones just to save some bits of data. But the moment you scale your resolution up and your data engraving gets much smaller, you'll also get a much more error prone, susceptible system. So even stones with tiny scriptures would certainly not be able to survive millions of years (at least the vast majority of them).

Oh wow, so even more radioactive waste that will afflict thousands of future generations and the environment for a tiny amount of produced energy now :(

Also that the strawberry is turned up instead of hanging down is another indication of a mock strawberry.

But in any case they should be edible (please correct me if I'm wrong!) :)

Let's say that we have a more recent micro SD card of 1 TB. So to contain the same information in a punch card (with a byte density of 80 byte/156 cm² = 0.512 byte/cm²), we would need a card of 512,820,512,820 cm². If I'm not mistaken that would be a punch card the size of 51 km²!! This is wild :O

Depending on where you live and how dangerous the mosquitoes are, there is a tradeoff with also unnecessarily killing many other flying insects. On top of that, mosquitoes are an important food source to other animals and they are also pollinators. So I'd only go with this solution if the mosquitoes in your area spread diseases.

Well, that's the paradox isn't it? We are our minds but somehow we also are our bodies.

I've spend so much time on learning latex instead of writing my thesis haha (in my department no one ever even heard of latex). But yes, same with the autism connection. It's just so nice to have a certain structure and order in everything :)

"Four men and one beautiful girl" ugh :( But nice effects for that time!

Obligatory crime pays but botany doesn't mention. There is this really cool episode of a huge carnivorous plant collection:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jlp6ecxmYQY