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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I tend to read it as “they do not speak for me”. If you don’t speak up, then many people believe you agree with them, by default.

    By apologising, you are saying you actively disagree, but don’t want to get bogged down in the details. You might not stand directly with the victims, but you do stand beside them, against the abusers, and want them to know.



  • Vitamin D helps if you are dealing with S.A.D (seasonal affective disorder). Basically, our brain gets to go into a state akin to hibernation. Unfortunately, modern life isn’t compatible with this. The effect is tiredness and low mood.

    SAD seems to be triggered by low vitamin D, low exposure to sunlight, and the cold. The exact trigger levels vary from person to person.

    If you’ve not tried it yet, a daylight lamp could help a lot, combined with the Vitamin D, it trucks the brain into thinking it’s still warm and bright outside. You want a hot in the morning, as well as one in the mid to late afternoon.

    Failing that, accept your need to hibernate, and plan it in. It’s not ideal, but not fighting it will also help your mood.


  • There’s a lot more to teaching than just good explanations. I do enjoy trying to explain complex science in more understandable ways however.

    As for struggling, we all do at times, pushing through is how we get better. Also science is a little like a spider web. If you look closely, at just a few strands, they don’t make obvious sense. It’s only when you build up a broader picture that it becomes obvious and easy. Building that picture, unfortunately, requires pushing through the “what the hell, I can’t make sense of this!” stage.


  • It would be a mix of relative rates and the exact energy.

    If you pick an area of “empty” space where you expect very little dark matter, you will get a baseline reading. When you aim at an area expected to be dense in dark matter, you will expect to get a higher reading. E.g. 10 counts a day, Vs 100 per day. This is basically how radiation detection works on earth, so the maths is well studied.

    The other thing is energy levels. 2 electrons hitting have a distinct energy. It will vary upwards slightly, due to kinetic energy, but not that much. We also know the annihilation energy of other forms of matter, from earth experiments. A reading distinct from anything normal would be a good signature of an unknown type of matter annihilating.

    There are also extra complications from things like red shift, but those can be measured in other ways, and corrected for.

    The order of theory and discovery also helps. “Finding X that happens to support Y” is a lot weaker than “Predicting X from theory Y, then going and finding it”. If you run 1 million experiments, a 1 in a million result is quite likely by pure fluke. A 1 in a million result from a single, focused experiment is a lot more powerful.


  • In a short summary. Something is wrong with the spin of galaxies. There is more mass than we can account for, and it’s distributed wrong.

    Either the laws of gravity are slightly wrong, or there is something out there with mass, but no interaction with other matters (light particularly).

    More recent, more detailed studies have shown that the error is not consistent. Therefore either the laws of physics vary from galaxy to galaxy (very unlikely) or it’s something physical, rather than a law error.

    That leaves dark matter, sometimes called W.I.M.Ps (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). They don’t seem to interact with electromagnetism at all, and even any strong or weak force interaction is minimal. It only interacts gravitationally.

    We know the interactions at minimal due to gravity mapping. It seems to form a cloud around galaxies, rather than collapsing in. To collapse in, they must interact to exchange momentum. If they only interact by gravity, that collapse will be extremely slow.

    That is most of what we can be fairly sure of. There’s a lot of speculation around this, and we might be barking up the wrong tree completely. However dark matter via WIMPs seems to be the most consistent with the evidence right now.

    Edit to add.

    This experiment seems quite ingenious. It assumes that WIMPs have a mix of both matter and antimatter. Ever so often a matter/antimatter pair get close enough to annihilate. This creates a pair of gamma photons. The existence of these would help back the existence of physical WIMPs. The energy would also tell us something of their mass (photon energy = mass energy + momentum energy). That will help narrow down where to look in our particle accelerator data.


  • cynar@lemmy.worldtoAutism@lemmy.worldI do this
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    10 days ago

    I’m a member of a maker space. It’s a fun game to “nerd snipe” other members, as they are leaving.

    It can backfire however. We’ve had the sun come up on us, while chatting in the car park. That was a mutual win/loss.


  • The type G was designed when things were designed to do their jobs. Any pain inflicted by user error was considered a learning opportunity.

    The cord coming out the bottom means the plug can’t pull out. Combined with the big, chunky plug and pins, means the cable will likely fail first if pulled. It will also fail at the live core first, leaving a safe plug in the wall.

    But yes, the foot pain is… impressive. It’s just blunt enough to not generally penetrate the skin, but it can happen.






  • Most areas of our brain can only do 1 task at a time. If you try and do more, it flips rapidly between them. Basically, you would “watch” vaguely 30-50% of each show, with your brain trying to fill in the gaps.

    Interestingly, you can do 2 tasks that don’t share significant resources. This is how you can both drive a car and listen to a podcast. It’s also why you suddenly need to turn down the music when you need to navigate, or park. Those require use of general cognition, which the music/podcast was using.

    An interesting example of this is time keeping. Some people can talk and keep an accurate mental timer. However they will lose track when looking at images. Others will be the reverse, or something different.

    It turns out that humans don’t have a consistent time keeping mental circuit. We hijack other systems. If you “hear” the time passing, you will struggle to also hear someone talking without issues. If you visualise a clock, you can talk, but your visual cognition is now occupied.