asphodele
Joined 1 year ago
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75
Submissions
29
Member since
Sep 2
Recent submissions
Comment · 3 days ago
Comment · 5 days ago
There's the "always on" type of birdwatching as well, that allows you to recognize the birds you see and hear in the course of ordinary life. No patience required, just practising staying aware of peripheral vision and sounds, but equally rewarding when you are lucky enough to have a chance encounter.
Comment · 6 days ago
Classic joke at university was to sprinkle cress seeds on the carpet of someone's room and water it with a fine mist from a plant sprayer. In the morning the inhabitant would wake up to a neat lawn that had appeared overnight by magic.
Comment · 8 days ago
Can you provide a link to the forums you referenced?
Comment · 8 days ago
Trying to explain why music is magical risks killing it with words. A lot of things are best left unspoken.
Comment · 9 days ago
For anyone using the DuckDB PHP plugin and looking to upgrade to v2.0, this is the PR to watch: [1]
Comment · 9 days ago
There's a documentary, "The Last Mountain", about the sister and father of Tom Ballard, who died on Nanga Parbat, going out there to see where he did his final climb. It gives an idea of what it is like to visit.
Incidentally, Tom Ballard was the son of Alison Hargreaves, who died on K2.
Comment · 9 days ago
From the linked article:
"The oyster mushroom is capable of decomposing plastic while still creating an edible mushroom. This opens up doors for its use as an at-home recycling system."
Comment · 10 days ago
Bacteria and fungi are like, "Hold my beer...":
Bacteria: https://microbenotes.com/ideonella-sakaiensis-plastic-eating...
Fungi: https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2021/11/04/plastic-eating-m...
Comment · 10 days ago
It's difficult for humans to comprehend the scale of what it would take to stop the planet from heating up. There are 100+ years of extraction of massive quantities of sequestered carbon from the Earth's crust and burning it now baked into the system, with an approximate 15-year lag on observed atmospheric and ocean temperature increases i.e. the temperatures we are currently seeing are those caused by emissions up to around 2011. Since then, carbon emissions have increased, not decreased, so we have a minimum of 15 more years of temperature rises to come.
As a though experiment, ask people if it would be possible for humans to prevent the tides coming in and out each day. Mostly you will be laughed at. Yet the same people usually think that preventing the Earth from heating up, which is a problem on a similar scale, can be achieved with a bit of recycling, eating less meat and cycling to work.
This single graph [1] is enough to demonstrate that 'solving' climate change is beyond the scale of human capabilities.
[1] https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2
Comment · 11 days ago
Obligatory H.L. Mencken quote, from 1956:
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." [1]
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/27042-as-democracy-is-perfe...
Comment · 11 days ago
> Why do we have so many meetings?
They help people with email jobs to feel important and show everyone else that they're doing something, while simultaneously reducing time available to the people with real work to do, which can then be used by the former group to apply pressure on them.
Comment · 14 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestake_Mine_(South_Dakota)
"The Homestake Mine was a deep underground gold mine (8,000 feet or 2,438 m) located in Lead, South Dakota. Until it closed in 2002, it was the largest and deepest gold mine in the Western Hemisphere. The mine produced more than forty million troy ounces (43,900,000 oz; 1,240,000 kg) of gold during its lifetime. This is about 2,500 cubic feet (71 m3) or a volume of gold roughly equal to 18,677 US gallons.
...
In 1876, settlers Fred and Moses Manuel, Alex Engh, and Hank Harney discovered the Homestake deposit during the Black Hills Gold Rush. The Black Hills had been guaranteed to the Lakota Nation by the Fort Laramie Treaty, but the land was stolen for its gold."
When the illegal miners moved in on the Black Hills, Crazy Horse would on occasion raid them to sieze their gold, after which he would re-bury it.
Comment · 20 days ago
Socrates was put to death for such.
The latter is a comparison of biological organism : biological organism, both of which are the outcomes of hundreds of millions of years of evolution; the former is biological organism : inanimate object.