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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Thorry84@feddit.nltoScience Memes@mander.xyzWhy?
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    5 days ago

    I once went down the rabbit hole of thinking about how the targeting works on the TNG kind of transporter. Like they need to know to the molecule where your body ends and the rest of the universe begins. And you want it to identify clothing, because you don’t want to end up nude on the other side. Plus it needs to identify what creepy crawlies are a part of you and which were just randomly wandering by. We don’t want any of those pesky Fly problems now do we? This might sound easy, but is actually extremely hard. The human body is very complex and like a ship of Theseus what is part of the body is a bit nebulous and can change. All of the microbiome in our gut is essential for us to stay alive. And more importantly we don’t want to leave behind a puddle of crap every time we transport. Plus what happens if we come out the other end, do our intestines just implode? Or does the transporter fill them with air, leaving you to fart uncontrollably until you die?

    And how does it know what clothes are? If I’m wearing shoes, does it know where the shoes end and the floor starts? What if I’m wearing skies? What if I’m barefoot on a carpet? What if it’s a leather carpet? What if I’m wearing shoes made by folding carpet around my feet?

    The only thing that makes sense is a super powerful AI system that can real-time scan every molecule and figure out what’s what. And it doesn’t only need to be smart, it also needs a lot of real world knowledge. It needs to know what is “logical” to include in every situation. This means it has to be an AGI, has to be superintelligent (at a minimum speed wise) and would most likely be sentient. Them being used for this one and only purpose is really cruel.

    This leads me to the conclusion TNG style transporters are basically slavery and put a whole different spin on the morality of the people in that universe. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.









  • Holy shit, new nightmare unlocked.

    I’ve had some horrific shit done to me for medical purposes. What got me through it was remembering two things. First of all, this is all to fix something else, it may get bad but it will get better. Second of all, pain is only temporary and exists only in my body/mind, it holds no power over me and it will pass.

    Hope you had have fixed whatever was wrong, that makes something like that worth it.

    Stitches that desolve are excellent. I hate the kind that needs to be monitored and removed manually. But I hate it even more when they use the staple kind, there is something just not right in using staples on a human being.


  • I’ve had one of those super long hairs be ingrown. It just coiled in on itself. I thought it was a black spot, so I dug it out with a sharp pair of tweezers. Once I got it and started pulling, it just kept going. Hair and puss came out and it felt terrible. Once I got it out it healed very quickly and felt much better, so I’m glad I did it, but that feeling still creeps me out.


  • Thorry84@feddit.nltoScience Memes@mander.xyzStars
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    12 days ago

    Honest question: Do people think stars look like the star shape because of diffraction spikes in refractor telescopes? I thought the star shape pre-dated any refractor telescope. And I don’t know how many people would have seen refractor images back in the days to make it so culturally engrained?

    The post-processing used in astronomical observations is a really interesting topic. I’m following the debate around the black hole images with great interest. I don’t know enough about the specifics to have an opinion, but it is very interesting and has overlap with some of the things I do for work.


  • This is usually done to keep things going as normal as possible for as long as possible. Once people start noticing something is wrong, the best people start looking elsewhere. Before you know it, not only is the company in financial trouble, but it can’t recover because some of the best people left. At least one time I witnessed, the company was working on layoff plans and even limited bankruptcy, but at the same time negotiating with the investment firm that owned part of the company to get more money. If they got the money, everything would be fine. It wasn’t till that fell through, they had to start laying people off.



  • Well once the US stops support and drops out of Nato and Putin starts steamrolling across Eastern Europe countries after they decimated what’s left of Ukraine, I’m sure all the borders will be closed.

    Not that it does much good. If the option is get tortured and killed or try your luck with an illegal border crossing people will always try. Even if the border police starts shooting like at the North Korean border, people would still try.



  • That’s because of the way these scales work. They use a material that deforms under stress and when it deforms the resistance changes. By putting current through this material and measuring the voltage drop, it can be mapped to how much stress the material is under and thus how much weight is on the scale.

    This is a pretty roundabout way and has a lot of caveats, but it is very cheap. So cheap scales always work this way. That’s why they aren’t super accurate and have deviations depending on things like temperature. Another big downside is any permanent deformation ruins the calibration, giving incorrect results. That’s why you never put more weight on kitchen scales than it says, it will break them.

    The issue you are running into is the way it measures. It applies a very specific voltage and current in order to get the result. The lookup table it uses is only valid within a narrow range. When the battery voltage goes outside that range, it can no longer perform the measurement. Even though there’s plenty of juice for things like the little processing chip and the LCD display. They don’t need a lot of power and can do with low voltages. But it can no longer weigh anything so it just errors out with a low battery warning.


  • I liked late seasons Neelix. I hated his last episode though. Like really? This is the best you can come up with? Somehow there is another set of Talaxians all the way out here. And Neelix just so happens to run into them? And be similar enough in culture to live among them? Can we just get a calculation on the odds of that happening? And Neelix is somehow fine with being left behind? Left behind from the only family he has had for years? People he spent all this time helping out getting home, only to bail just before the finish? Because of the power of boners? Bullshit.

    In my head canon that episode simply does not exist.