At least half of men don’t wash their hands before leaving a public restroom. Literally everything is covered in dick stuff. Source: 30+ years of using public restrooms as a male.
live smallpox cultures still exist in american and russian labs.
most people born after 1980 are not vaccinated against smallpox and do not possess the natural immunity boost that would come from environmental exposure to the disease.
in the 1500s the introduction of smallpox into the similarly unprotected peoples of the americas caused an apocalyptic population collapse.
True, but we do have the vaccine and the means to mass-produce and administer. That’s why I’m not worried about smallpox.
I’m concerned that enough people might refuse a vaccine to cause our herd immunity to fail, resulting in many avoidable deaths.
2 weeks to stop the spread part 2, wooo!
Thanks to Ed Jenner
Yeah: because getting people to get a vaccine during a pandemic that’s killing millions isn’t going to be difficult.
My name is Aaron
Hi Aaron, how quickly did you get sick of people deliberately mispronouncing your name?
Also, I think your name is very fun to write in cursive.
yes and thanks. I also like the big A. It’s all very circly
There are about 20 supervolcanoes on earth which each have the capacity to kill billions should they erupt.
And suppress global warming for a long time in the process. Yeah, bring it on!
Blocking out the sun is good for us only in very specific doses.
I know about the Yellowstone Caldera but I didn’t realize there were that many more
I found this article interesting on Caldera systems…
https://www.usgs.gov/news/caldera-systems-a-worldwide-family-more-just-yellowstone
Your body generates around 600.000 new cells every second.
Crazy IMO.
Gross I don’t want ‘em
I’ll take 'em if I can choose where they grow! Lol
Butt penis or breasts 😋?
I don’t want a butt penis
I guess that the same number of cells also dies in the same period!
Seems logical!
Not me, I’m getting fatter.
That’s a lot of significant digits.
Let’s just call it six hundred
It’s six hundred thousand.
Sure thing, buddy
I was wrong, but I think you were wronger ^^
https://www.sciencealert.com/your-body-makes-4-million-cells-a-second-and-most-of-them-are-blood
Earwigs can fly…
the silverfish from Minecraft are fucking real
Where are you that has no silverfish?
We get those in the UK. They’ll eat anything!
If I lived in the UK, I would also eat anything but British food.
Spoken like someone who hasn’t had a good roast dinner or cottage pie.
Probably never even tried a Yorkshire pudding…
They’ll eat all British food along with: bricks, books, hair, wood, …
Neuroscience shows that rulers will always become evil.
Getting more power actually changes your brain, suppressing your ability to use empathy. The very powerful will always struggle to remember that others are human and don’t want to be hurt.
Humane behavior and hierarchy are mutually exclusive. Heirarchical organization encourages humans to hurt each other.
I think part of it is that when good people gain power they realize that they have also taken on responsibility. And when you are shouldering a lot of responsibility, and the people around you are not, it’s easy to see them as childish or selfish, or not thinking things through thoroughly (because let’s face it: they’re not).
Plus as a responsible party you have to be responsible for everyone and this can mean limiting your beholden-ness to any one party. That can look like distancing or lack of empathy for that person. “Oh now that you have power you’re too big for me, huh?” Pretty much yes, actually.
If you’ve ever been in charge of something you know what I’m saying. And when I see people blindly bitching about people in power I know they’ve never been responsible for anything bigger than a shopping cart.
It’s not a question of “look[ing] like distancing or lack of empathy”, or just “bitching about people in power”.
Scientific studies that look at your brain itself - not your behavior - show that as people get more power the brain’s empathy centers become suppressed and you are chemically less capable of being a good person.
This is why the US needs to switch to metric.
Eyeing my geometry set suspiciously
The data is skewed. All of the functioning systems we use reward concentrations of power.
Thereby, systems of rule must distribute power and contest the concentration of power. It literally takes a village to save us from ourselves.
David Graeber and David Wengrow introduced me to historical examples of non-hierarchical societies in The Dawn of Everything.
The fact that power results in antisocial behavior has been understood for millenia.
Lots of societies have had cultural infrastructure of equality that attempts to mitigate this weakness in our biology and prevent harmful levels of power accumulation. The basque village layouts that Davids Graeber & Wengrove talk about, or the practise of ‘insulting the meat’ of successful hunters.
Which is why I feel that for humanity to succeed we will eventually need an entirely new form of societal governance to replace capitalism & communism, just as those systems replaced feudalism and tribalism. Something like technoism where decisions are made and enacted by machines, incapable of self motivation; or geneticism where leaders’ selfish impulses are either bred or edited out of them. We are still many, many years off from technology being able to accomplish this, but the only way to overcome the human factor is to… well… remove the human factor.
You have fewer male ancestors than females ones. Think about it for a moment… there it is. Yes. Now you know.
I don’t get it
Means great^20 grandpa did the deed with great^19 grandma and made a baby
Oh, yikes
…or, more likely, a great^20 grandpa got with multiple great^20 grandmas. All it takes is one harem merging branches somewhere to tip the scales.
I was going to argue that it could go the other way, but then I remembered Ghengis Khan.
It never could go the other way, you can’t make a baby using two dads’ sperm. You can get twins (which is incredibly rare). But that just means two people with different fathers and doesn’t matter when you look at a specific one. At best, if there wasn’t any incest, you’d get equal male and female ancestors.
It could - if a woman has a child with her own son.
Now, many many years ago
When I was twenty three
I was married to a widow
Who was pretty as could be…
Yeah, I was referring to the incest.
Maybe you have ;-)
*anecdote
I wash my hands before I piss because my dick is the cleanest surface in that bathroom. Touch nothing afterward without a paper towel barrier
‘Was there anything else on the dinner menu?’
‘Vole-au-vents and Cream of Rat,’ said Gimlet. ‘All hygienically prepared.’
‘How do you mean, “hygienically prepared”?’ said Carrot.
‘The chef is under strict orders to wash his hands afterwards.’
The assembled dwarfs nodded. This was certainly pretty hygienic. You didn’t want people going around with ratty hands.
- Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett
I have bad news, most (?) paper towels, toilet paper, and even the toilet seat covers are microscopically transparent, meaning there are plenty of gaps for microbes to get through.
Paper towels folded over on themselves absolutely create a barrier between my hand and the door handle. I’m not talking about flushable paper or toilet seat covers
Paper towels are able to absorb water because of cellulose’s natural gaps and spaces:
Most bacteria are about 1 micron, and these gaps range from around 1-10 microns.
Especially if damp, it can be argued that they don’t stop the transfer of bacteria. It’s possible that your bacteria transfers through it and vice versa. This is all before the fact that paper towels can already harbor bacteria on their own.
That being said, paper towels do block some. You just shouldn’t think of them as sterile or a magic blocker for bacteria.
I’d be interested to culture petri dishes off my hand after I use a new paper towel to turn off the faucet vs grabbing the wet handle with my entire hand and shutting it off and then drying off my hand…
The McKelvey–Schofield chaos theorem proves that, if an electorate is presented with a series of proposed policy changes and everyone votes according to their honest preference, the proposals can be fashioned and ordered in such a way that any policy can be made to win—even one that no voter prefers to the starting point.
Could you source the “even one that no voter prefers to the starting point” part?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKelvey–Schofield_chaos_theorem
There will in most cases be no Condorcet winner and any policy can be enacted through a sequence of votes, regardless of the original policy. This means that adding more policies and changing the order of votes (“agenda manipulation”) can be used to arbitrarily pick the winner.
The article doesn’t explicitly say that this includes policies not preferred by any single voter, but it’s implied by “any” and “arbitrary” (and can be verified by the original theorems).
I’m not too familiar in the field, but doesn’t a policy have to appeal more to a specific base than its appeal to another base to cause a Cordocet tie?
Yeah, the Condorcet criterion is a lot more restrictive in the space of policies (where you can make incremental changes in any direction) than in elections for a discrete set of candidates. (Which is why they say that in most cases there won’t be one.)
Yeah, so in my understanding of that, doesn’t that mean the winning policy has to appeal more to a voter base than one that appeals to another voter base?
That’s true for any pairwise vote, but not for the entire sequence.
As in the Condorcet paradox, voter preferences are intransitive: voters preferring A to B and B to C doesn’t imply that voters will prefer A to C. But where the Condorcet paradox shows how this can lead to a cyclical subset of candidates where no candidate can beat all other members of the subset, the chaos theorem shows how this can lead to a series of votes that ends absolutely anywhere.
But if it is a paradox, then every proposal that still stands has to have beaten another proposal at least once. Thus I don’t see how it could be one nobody has preferred at the start.
deleted by creator?
Here’s one more:
Dark Forest Theory as a solution to the Fermi Paradox.
This theory was around long before Lee Cuixin and done much better. Saberhagen’s Berserker series is a much better example, and has the added bonus of believable character development in his books.
Hell, Battlestar Galactica was the same thing done 5 years before TBP came out, and way more interestingly.
I’d read that David Brin reviewed something similar in '83, but I didn’t chase it down to Saberhagen.
In following the links provided in the Wiki article, for the Berserker Hypothesis, there is the following:
The Berserker hypothesis is distinct from the dark forest hypothesis in that under the latter, many alien civilizations could still exist provided they keep silent. The dark forest hypothesis can be viewed as a special case of the Berserker hypothesis, if the ‘deadly Berserker probes’ are (e.g. due to resource scarcity) only sent to star systems that show signs of intelligent life.
So, silence is survival in the Dark Forest. The Berserker Hypothesis seeks and destroys.
e: Nice call on BSG as well! Though, that considered only human and Cylon life.
And, for my part, Cixin Liu’s second book was a really solid read. The first book, Three Body Problem, suffered all of the hallmarks of the pains taken to establish a story and a world. The last book, Death’s End, while mostly good, also suffered in needing to bring the grand story to a close.
We’re going to have to disagree on those books. I found the first one amateurish and hand-wavy SF with terrible character development, and the second one was just a ridiculous deus-ex-machina plot point that invalidated all the rest of the previous and possible future plot pivot points, with continued terrible character development. I wouldn’t know about the third, by this point I was done giving him any more of my money.
I’m surprised about Brin’s article there, because all his work has been pretty upbeat about galactic species generally getting along, though with its rough points.
Personally, I chalk up the great silence to very short species lifespans after achieving spaceflight. Maybe they all go post-singularity and become undetectable, or run out of resources and go primitive again. Or just die off/suicide, which seems like where we’re headed. If we have a century of relatively powerful transmissions, what’s the chance of anyone being close enough in that short period of time to detect us?
I guess we are going to have to disagree. The writing style and, as I perceived it, motivations within the text were clearly not of the Western tradition. It’s true, in lending the benefit of doubt, I may have enjoyed it more precisely because I disregarded standard writing mores, tropes, and conventions because it was a translated work.
I’m curious: Did you also try Murakami’s 1Q84? I found that I had to suspend expectations there in much the same manner.
I think I’d agree with you wrt. short species lifespans after developing telecommunications, space flight, and highly concentrated energy sources. The leap in capacity for attendant social distortion — and extortion — has brought us to the brink of global destruction many times since Signal Hill in 1901. The Kardashev Scale comes to mind here. The leap from about Type 0.73, ostensibly where we are now, to Type 1.0 is fraught.
As for the communications we have sent, the early ones were low-power and, over a distance of 100 ly, would significantly degrade against background EM radiation. At a range of 50 ly, where our first, more powerful and higher fidelity digital transmissions have reached, there are relatively few star systems — about 1300 (source). This source uses data from 1991, so there may be more, but not many, that are magnitude 6.5 or brighter.
1Q84: never ran across it, but from the wikipedia article:
novel’s excessive repetition, clichéd writing, clumsy styling and unyielding plot.
Which is pretty much where I was with TBP, so I can’t imagine I’ll rush out to read this.
Regarding translation: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/s3zm9t/the_threebody_problem_is_not_good/izxm5l2/
I’ve read other chinese authors translated by the likes of Ken Liu and I see nothing like that, enjoy them well enough, before and after reading TBP. So the usual “your closed western mind can’t conceive of the Chinese style” argument kinda pisses me off when I get it back in discussions of these books. But I’m used to that reaction, so I don’t take it personally anymore.
Yah, I was thinking of the attenuation issue there, and not to mention that eventually the powerful transmissions go away in order to use low-power, high-bandwidth satellite bouncing instead of blaring away at 1kW to communicate. I imagine we’re already much quieter than we were 20 years ago.
No accusation intended. Related my experience and seeking yours. Thanks for sharing what you have read about it.
Then, help me out if you feel inclined. Point me in the direction of some solid sci-fi, written in another language, with good translation to English. I’m always looking for the next read. I could Google it. But, instead, I’m looking for a recommendation from a strong critical eye. As guidance, I’m a pretty big fan of space epics, political intrigue, and/or social
Also, thanks for the language on attenuation. I’ve done a bit more reading on it, and I’ve seen the math. What I’ve learned is that most regulated radio transmissions in the Western hemisphere are capped at 50 kW. There are several transmitters that are in the 150 kW range, and, back in the 30s, there was that one titanic tower in Florida that kicked out 500 000 kW.
Heres two:
The ratio between cells of your body that belong to you vs. cells on or in your body that are microorganisms is about 1:1 — slightly favouring the bacteria.
If the Sun were destroyed, we would not know about it until more than 8 minutes after it happened.
I actually thought we had way more microorganisms vs are cells because they are so small.
thanks. I hate this kind of thing because im sitting there like. why did I think that. hopefully this whole thing will burn the more up to date info into my brain.
I claim ownership of the microorganisms in and on my body. I am not merely human; I am a glorious amalgamation of trillions of distinct beings, working in harmony to bring you shitposts!
This is one of the larger plot holes in the 1980s remake of The Fly, in my opinion.
Cronenberg is a countryman. I’ll hand him a pass on that one.
At birth there are usually more males than females. Around adulthood age they are roughly equal, and around our death there are way more females than males.
Another one, kinda romantic as well. Most life long couples, when one of them dies due to old age, the other one follows soon. Despite women having a longer life span than men.
Another interesting one, most relationships end within 7 years. Once the 7 year period has passed, the likelihood of that relationship lasting till death increases significantly. It’s called 7 year ick.
9 years going strong I’m in the clear
Most doesn’t mean all
Hey, congratulations! We just made nine years over here too
My marriage is up after exactly 7 years. Granted we were together for more like 11-12, but the marriage 7
Meanwhile here I am washing before and after, just because I saw it on House.
(Despite the fact that he makes a big deal about it in the first episode and in the numerous times we see him go to the bathroom following that he never once does it again. (Yes. I checked.))
First episodes almost always don’t count as far as lore goes, even if some things do carry over.
Uh-oh Spagetti-O’s
