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Schmeckinger , in What is the best medium for transmitting sound?

Probably solid hydrogen.

teft ,
@teft@lemmy.world avatar

I would say degenerate matter in a neutron star is a better conductor of sound. It’s densely packed and doesn’t have to deal with pesky things like electromagnetism slowing down the sound wave.

eran_morad , in How far is reverse aging tech?

Sinclair has a well earned reputation as a charlatan.

surewhynotlem , in How far is reverse aging tech?

Sinclair is ok. He wrote a book called “lifespan” that’s pretty well regarded. Also look up Aubrey de Grey. His book, Ending Aging, is also good. He himself is problematic though. If you’re interested in this sort of tech, also look up the SENS foundation (I donate there).

Fair warning, most everything focuses on increasing healthspan, not lifespan. I.e. Being able to be active and alert at 90. There’s no way for tech to guarantee an increase in lifespan within our lives, because we would need a few generations of evidence to guarantee that. So at most you’ll get partial evidence and animal models. But you gotta start somewhere. And if we’re lucky, we’ll stop be around for the ‘proof’ in 200 years :-)

UraniumBlazer OP ,

Wouldn’t healthspan and lifespan go hand in hand tho? Like… I can’t imagine a 99 year old going for a marathon today and just dropping dead tomorrow due to old age. Wouldn’t an increased healthspan also include an increased lifespan?

yuriy ,

Probably? I think the difference is the reasearch is going into meaningful things, such that would keep you healthy rather than just alive. I think it’s just a matter of semantics though.

Limonene , in Why are the graphs for the distribution of light from the Sun as a function of (a) frequency and (b) wavelength not exactly reversed?

There are 2 reasons:

  1. Those two graphs have different scales on the y-axis. One is Irradiance per nanometer of wavelength, and one is Irradiance per terahertz of frequency. Both graph’s y-axis are called “spectral irradiance”, despite being different things. This causes most of the distortion between the two graphs, and can even change the location of the absolute maximum.
  2. The graphs’ x-axis have different units. This causes some distortion too, but wouldn’t change the absolute maximum. It would help if they used a log scale in both cases, because wavelength and frequency are inversely related, so then the graphs could just be horizontally flipped.

So, look at the top graph (by wavelength), and see how much power is in that 1000-2000nm area. It’s still a lot, just spread out over a large area. It’s the same amount of power in the lower graph (by frequency) shoved into the much smaller area from 150THz to 300THz. Since it’s in a smaller area on the lower graph, it has more power-per-unit-of-x-axis.

BackOnMyBS OP ,
@BackOnMyBS@lemmy.world avatar

Thank you. I understand most of your comment, and it makes sense. However, I still don’t understand how the change of units in the y-axis would cause a different maximum. It seems to me that the y-axis for both use the same formula with their respective x-axes: W/m^2/x.

I’m not in STEM by the way.

Limonene ,

It’s because the wavelength and frequency are inversely related. When the wavelength is low and the frequency is high, the wavelength is also moving very slowly, compared to the frequency which is moving very quickly. Since the frequency is changing so quickly, the power-per-unit-frequency is lower at higher frequencies, and higher at lower frequencies (at least relative to the power-per-unit-wavelength).

Let me try and use a car analogy:

You’re driving home through Wisconsin, and you live on the border between Wisconsin and Minnesota. The mile markers on the road decrease as you go, reaching 0 at the state border, where you happen to live.

The cows along the highway are evenly distributed, so if you count the cows as you drive, but restart your count every mile when you see the mile marker, you will reach the same number of cows every mile.

Now, the frequency is inversely related to the mile number. The frequency in this case refers to your children in the back seat asking, “Are we there yet?” They know damn well how far it is to home, because they can just look at the mile markers. Regardless, their rate of asking increases as the mile markers go down. When you’re at mile marker 100, they ask once every 10 minutes. When you’re at mile marker 1, they ask 10 times per minute.

If you instead look at the number of cows between “Are we there yet?” asks, then you will find that the cows-per-ask is much different from the cows-per-mile. At high distances (low frequencies), the cows-per-ask is very high, while at low distances (high frequencies), the cows-per-ask is very low.

Now, the article is looking at power-per-unit-frequency, so you’d actually have to measure the rate in change of how often the kids ask “Are we there yet?” And that would give you a little different result. You might need calculus to correctly calculate the derivative of the number of asks. But hopefully this illustrates that you can get different results, by using a different per-thing to measure your value.

Kethal ,

This covers it all well, but I think a simple explanation is that although “W/m^2/x” looks the same on the axes, it’s not the same. f=1/w, so one axis is W/m^2/f and one is W/m^2*f. The article makes a big deal out of the differences as if the x axis were the only difference, but they’re just very different things being plotted.

rufus , (edited ) in How can you replace your addiction with a more healthy one? And will this lead to a negative spiral? Can you break from an addictive personality?

This is a strategy how to change habits.

For example: You eat too many potato chips and that’s bad for your health. Now you don’t go cold turkey on the snacks, but buy carrots instead and eat those.

How? You do it often enough. Do it for half a year, every other day and it’ll become the new habit.

Negative spiral? I don’t see any.

Gullible , in How can you replace your addiction with a more healthy one? And will this lead to a negative spiral? Can you break from an addictive personality?

The short answer is yes, you can trade one addiction for another and no, it doesn’t necessarily cause spiraling.

The long answer is yes, with a great deal of patience, you can condition yourself into just about anything. Breaking from an addictive personality is far from easy and requires a deep understanding of yourself and your triggers. Introspection and therapy aplenty. There can be relapses or worse if you try to hack together a treatment plan for yourself. Support groups can be helpful and leaning on friends and family, when possible, can make or break you.

Note: not medical or psychiatric advice.

dgriffith , in Are certain typos/grammar errors harder to read than others?

While reading text your brain will bulk recognise what it interprets as common phrases and sentence fragments to build an internal lexical model to then interpret. After a while as you get more proficient at reading this becomes a mostly subconscious operation, which then hands concepts from what it’s read to your front of mind to further deal with.

If you blend contradictory common phrases together your brain will bounce through the phrase/fragment recognition part fine. Then it will trip over the lexical parsing of them, suddenly requiring a lot more mental horsepower to figure out what’s going on. Basically your front of mind task will be interrupted by your subconscious task basically going “what the hell is this!? I can’t make sense of this, you have a look” as it dumps a jumble of words on you.

For example, has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like? That phrase broke the internet about 10 years ago and it’s a pretty good example.

kaupas24 , in Why do many microwave ovens hum in an interval of a minor 7th?
@kaupas24@kbin.social avatar

50 / 60 hz from the transformer under load?

gmtom , in Does everyone learn the same gravity in school or is it different everywhere?

Seeing as the British invented gravity, most places just use our gravity rather than making their own.

Colour_me_triggered , in Does everyone learn the same gravity in school or is it different everywhere?

9.81 in Scotland.

Agent641 ,

Whoa, thats heavy

Drunemeton , in Does everyone learn the same gravity in school or is it different everywhere?
@Drunemeton@lemmy.world avatar

g = 9.80665 m/s^2 at sea level. Higher than sea level lowers the value due to GR (General Relativity).

CanadaPlus ,

Newtonian physics also has gravity decreasing with height, no need to get out the big guns.

andyburke ,
@andyburke@fedia.io avatar

say what now?

citation needed.

CanadaPlus , (edited )

F=Gm1m2/r^2^

G is the gravitational constant, the m’s are the masses in question, and F is the force generated. The r is radius from the center of one body to the other; that is, height. If it didn’t decrease, orbits wouldn’t exist the same way and astronomers would have laughed Newton out of the room.

I could give you a link if you really want, but it’s the Newtonian gravity equation, so it’s probably just going to be “Gravity” on Wikipedia.

pokemaster787 ,

Newton’s law of gravitation. F = G m1*m2/r^2

andyburke ,
@andyburke@fedia.io avatar

Ah, I see. I thought we were talking about the constant.

CanadaPlus , (edited )

G is also fixed in GR, although it’s not guaranteed to manifest in a neat relation like that in every situation because spacetime curvature has a lot of components at every point, and they interact super nonlinearly.

Drunemeton ,
@Drunemeton@lemmy.world avatar

“Mom! Canada’s picking on me again…”

Mr_Blott , in [Solved] Trees supposedly take 30 years *before* they absorb CO₂. Why?

Young people - “Oh my god, old people believe everything they read on Facebook”

Also young people - "Some random guy on YouTube said it and I trust him so it must be true "

That’s the end of my Lemmy comment, don’t forget to smash that like button

Knusper OP ,

I don’t know why you’d believe that I’m young, nor why this would be a random guy on YouTube.

Unfortunately, I am very bad with technology and accidentally hit the wrong button on your comment.

Lemminary ,

I subscribed and hit the notifications button

spittingimage ,
@spittingimage@lemmy.world avatar

"Some random guy on YouTube said it and I trust him so it must be true "

OP is trying to fact-check what he heard, though. You could give a little more credit.

ShaunaTheDead , in [Solved] Trees supposedly take 30 years *before* they absorb CO₂. Why?
@ShaunaTheDead@kbin.social avatar

This site: https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/carbon-ecological-footprint-calculators/how-much-carbon-does-a-tree-capture/

Has a little calculator you can play around with to see how much carbon is captured by a tree based on various factors.

Hyperreality ,

Not your fault, but that is the most annoying calculator I've ever encountered, as someone who uses the metric system.

I mean, what kind of maniac describes the amount of oxygen produced in pounds?

Also are those US gallons or UK gallons?

The increments used for the circumference of the tree is also incredibly weird, 7 and 3/4 inches? Really? Clearly converted metric to imperial. Why not include a slider to switch to metric, if that's what you've based your numbers on?

FlowVoid ,

It’s a website written by an American for an American audience, which means the writer uses inches, pounds, and US gallons.

No need to feign surprise that Americans generally don’t like the metric system.

Hyperreality , (edited )

7 and 3/4 inches is (roughly) 20 centimetres.

Why not use 10 inch increments or even 6 inch increments if you're making a site for an American audience?

It's like car sites and manufacturers which list the 0-60 time, but it's actually the 0-62.14 time.

If you're going to use imperial, use imperial. Don't do a half assed conversion from metric.

I am also available if anyone wants to listen to a rant about ecoflush toilets.

FlowVoid , (edited )

Probably because the writer is not reporting her own original research. She is reporting work done by others, they often used metric, and any metric units were converted to common US units because the article was intended for a general American audience.

And why isn’t there a button to restore the original metric units? Same reason why when a newspaper reports a translated quote from Macron or Putin or Xi, there is usually no button to restore the original French or Russian or Chinese: the editor decided that it wasn’t necessary for the intended audience.

rebelsimile , (edited )

deleted_by_author

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  • Hyperreality , (edited )

    *Arse.

    Your welcome. /s

    whyNotSquirrel , in [Solved] Trees supposedly take 30 years *before* they absorb CO₂. Why?
    @whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works avatar

    I usually hear the opposite, that growing trees absorb more, I mean that’s what I hear when I talk about the Christmas trees

    I guess people find the argument in favor of their own comfort, I never checked the facts actually so… I’m not doing better

    heeplr ,

    It’s true. And christmas trees would be fine if they’d end up in long lasting buildings and wouldn’t need a lot of fertilizer which usually is made from oil.

    howrar , in If GPTs only predict the next word how do they decide between "a" and "an". Wouldn't this have massive effect on their abilities?

    If it generates “I ate” and the next word can be “a” or “an”, then it will just generate one or the other based on how often they appear after “I ate”. It hasn’t decided by this point what it has eaten. After it has generated the next token, for example “I ate an”, then its next token is now limited to food items that fit the grammatical structure of this sentence so far. Now it can decide: did I eat an apple? An orange? An awesome steak? etc

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