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AOC defeats moderate challenger in Democratic primary
  • That’s objectively bullshit.

    The only other option is trump. Are you trying to get people to vote for trump? If so, why?

  • AOC defeats moderate challenger in Democratic primary
  • I don’t disagree. But we’re living in interesting times.

    I don’t like most of the people on the ticket I’ll be given in November, but you know what’s objectively worse? Actual fascism. Fascism always ends in genocide, and these white Christian nationalists aren’t even trying to hide it, going mask-off even before they have the power to back it up.

    When fascists can be this bold and still keep their seats of power, that’s quite worrying.

    As I saw someone say earlier, we’re in democracy triage.

    I’d vote for Biden’s corpse before trump or not voting. We must wrest all power from the fascists before we can squabble about who’s more left.

  • AOC defeats moderate challenger in Democratic primary
  • I hope people stop believing the bullshit that’s trying to get progressives to not vote or to vote for 3rd parties. Progressives absolutely can win democrat tickets, and that’s exactly why there’s so much propaganda trying to convince people otherwise. Progressives have a lot of political power right now, and the whole system can swing left if people don’t just give up. Progressives giving up is the only play the right has.

  • The US healthcare system is broken...
  • Can’t.

    I’ve had literally insane run-ins with the US healthcare system, and have a bad enough health issue that I’ve been absolutely ruined by it: physically, mentally, financially, and socially. I do mean utterly – that was not hyperbole.

    I have nothing else to add right now, because I have medically-induced PTSD and can’t even think about anything medical without having a panic attack now.

    Just wanted to chime in with how bad it can get, and I know my situation isn’t as bad as it can be. It ruined everything for me and destroyed my family, but I never had to care for a dying child. There are no forbidden depths.

  • Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic
  • Well that seems to have backfired.

    Excuse me, I seem to have facepalmed my eyeballs into the next room. Fuck.

  • Customer service
  • Yeah, but some new tech won’t work at all if you don’t.

    Plenty of people aren’t aware of that, and when you’re buying shit, it often obfuscates that fact.

    Most people will buy shit having no idea the thing will require you to connect it to your wifi.

    e: television is only one of the things. It’s getting harder to name things that don’t require this.

  • All three game console makers, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony, have now abandoned X (formerly Twitter) integration
  • Five people here think Nazi business is fine. Yikes.

    e: wait, 6.

    e2: hey guys! Lemmy doesn’t have vote fuzzing yet! (just noticing. there’s no conspiracy here … or is there?)

  • Agree?
  • It’s been absolutely fascinating watching people catch on to what has happened literally every fucking time we invent paradigm-shifting advances.

  • MAGA then vs now.
  • Fascism's major hallmark is fervent hypocrisy. That's how people could live within half a mile of death camps and just casually brush the ash of burnt people from their hair, then smile like they're going on a picnic as they're led into the death camps at the end of their street, then ten minutes later, after seeing actual corpses stacked like cordwood, they're vomiting and swearing they had no idea.

    We can't let the uneducated masses lead us into that kind of horror again, We need to educate them of what they're advocating for and why that's so horrifically dangerous. We need to stop hedging and beating round the bush, and lay out in detail what they're actually enabling. People die when this kind of nationalistic ignorance is allowed to proliferate. We need to stop this ignorance before it kills people.

  • Chicken vs Egg
  • I like 14-4317 TCX. 😎👌

  • Chicken vs Egg
  • I wasn’t trying to prove the question is about religion vs science; I was responding to the previous comment that said:

    literally no one in the world means that

    My links show lots of people in the world say that. Not everyone, but enough that it does come up sometimes.

    There are multiple facets and perspectives in every philosophical question.

  • Chicken vs Egg
  • Could be. I’m not as familiar with that format – a major strength of png is that anything can open and view it properly. It’s been a standard for decades, so it has universal compatibility.

    e: I’m not going to look into that specific format (I stopped caring about the inner workings of file formats like 15 years ago when I stopped getting paid to care), but I think I could bet you that webp is a document hierarchy wrapper on png, jpg, gif, mpeg, etc, ad inf.

    I had to exit this comment and look again because I couldn’t remember if you’d said webm or webx or webp or whatever. The last I knew, that’s not a file format but a codepage (nowadays, that’s usually a cheap wrapper over code they found and repackaged).

    That’s massively simplified, but if you’re asking that in this thread, I’m worried people are being sold a difference that doesn’t exist.

  • Chicken vs Egg
  • Yeah, the fossil record and dna analysis is such a gradient, any lines we draw are arbitrary. To be fair, those lines were always for our own convenience, in much the same way it’s useful for print designers to specify Pantone 032, but if most people look at the full colour chart they couldn’t even tell you where ‘red’ becomes ‘orange’.

    It’s definitely rabbits (or turtles) all the way down.

    We’re prokaryotes, and vertebrates, and mammals, and from there some people get bent. Are we apes? Genus homo? Where must we draw the line to ensure we’re not actually animals like other living things and were divinely inspired special creations?

    I like simplicity. Life is a beautiful prismatic projection and it doesn’t matter that much what our Pantone swatch turns out to be.

    (Sorry, /mini rant)

  • Chicken vs Egg
  • Not-quite-a-chicken laid an egg containing a definitely-chicken. Actual chicken egg was first.

  • Chicken vs Egg
  • Slightly larger file size, which mattered in like 2002, but it’s only a few mb, which doesn’t matter at all now.

    e: if you’re a professional photographer and saving stupidly high resolution images by the thousands, you’ll want to use jpg, but in that case, you’ll understand why.

  • Chicken vs Egg
  • It made Fox News in 2015.

    A biology paper that same year.

    Religious people seem to care.

    More religious people care.

    Biologists have been talking about it.

    BBC Science covered it.

    I didn’t pull this out of my arse.

    And re: that citation you asked for:

    God created mature birds with the ability to reproduce. So the bird was first, ready to lay eggs.

    —Answers In Genesis

  • Chicken vs Egg
  • You’re right, I shouldn’t have said ‘never’. It was a paradox in ancient history, but at least in my lifetime, I’ve read it as basically solved. That may be a relatively recent stance (since 100-200 years ago), but it doesn’t seem useful to continue presenting it as a paradox at this point.

  • Chicken vs Egg
  • Jpg for photos, png for everything else.

    It’s an easy rule of thumb, it hurts that 20 years of repeating it seems to have had zero effect.

    Maybe this helps: Jpg fucks up your image, and png doesn’t.

    Or: jpg is lossy, png is lossless.

    Or: It’s better to save photos as png than cartoons as jpg.

    Seriously, I hope some of this breaks through because deep fried images are so fucking unnecessary.

  • Chicken vs Egg
  • The chicken vs egg question has never been about chronology or science.

    It’s been about religion vs science.

    Science says the egg came first: something nearly imperceptibly not quite a chicken laid an egg that hatched a chicken. That’s how evolution works, with the egg coming first.

    Religion says a god poofed a chicken into existence. The chicken came first, and only ever laid pure chicken eggs. The eggs will forever hatch a chicken and nothing but a chicken.

    That’s the chicken vs egg thing. It’s not a puzzle at all, it’s just science vs religion.

    e: simplified. I’m too wordy by default.

  • Fatherly hazing
  • On a drive when I was ten, I asked my dad why the tall, skeletal towers had blinking lights. He said so planes wouldn’t crash into them. So I asked what the towers were for, and he said to hold up the lights.

    That fucked with me for like ten more years.

  • What's the black sticker for?

    My cat needed to be euthanised last month, and I just received her ashes. They came with a round black sticker. What’s the purpose of this sticker?

    They mentioned my chosen urn was suitable for sprinkling cremains (I don’t plan to do that) – maybe it’s related to that?

    Thanks.

    58
    Time Traveller Guide @lemmy.ca LillyPip @lemmy.ca
    Physicists develop highly robust time crystal

    A team from TU Dortmund University recently succeeded in producing a highly durable time crystal that lived millions of times longer than could be shown in previous experiments. By doing so, they have corroborated an extremely interesting phenomenon that Nobel Prize laureate Frank Wilczek postulated around ten years ago and which had already found its way into science fiction movies.

    The results have been published in Nature Physics.

    Paper abstract – Robust continuous time crystal in an electron–nuclear spin system:

    Abstract Crystals spontaneously break the continuous translation symmetry of free space. Analogously, time crystals lift translational invariance in time. Here we demonstrate a robust continuous time crystal in an electron–nuclear spin system of a semiconductor tailored by tuning the material composition. Continuous, time-independent external driving of the sample produces periodic auto-oscillations with a coherence time exceeding hours. Varying the experimental parameters reveals wide ranges in which the time crystal remains stable. At the edges of these ranges, we find chaotic behaviour with a lifted periodicity corresponding to the melting of the crystal. The time crystal state enables fundamental studies of nonlinear interactions and has potential applications as a precise on-chip frequency standard.

    0
    [Feature request] Long form screenshots

    Back in Apollo, we had a feature where you could long-press on mobile and save a screenshot with options to include usernames, number and levels of parents, and original post, amongst other things. Those were the ones I used. I also remember there was a checkbox for watermark, which defaulted to on, and which I never touched but always respected, because it never condescended to me.

    Anyway, I used that feature so much that there was no Apollo without it before the ensittification.

    As a user experience designer, Apollo had done a lot right that the big tech names had been doing wrong, and I’d floundered on Lemmy until the Voyager team started from that foundation.

    I appreciate everything this team has done for me, but I do miss this feature. It seemed aimed straight at me, so I almost hate to bring it up, but it was beautiful and I loved it.

    (I’m sorry for not saying this on Git, but I just can’t right now)

    eta: you guys are the best. I love everything you’ve done. <3

    9
    [LPT] Call and threaten to cancel your subscription services once a year; their retention department will give you a better rate

    This only works by phone. Be nice, but firm. Don’t be satisfied with their first answer – make them escalate you to the retention department. They’re often authorised to give much larger discounts because it’s cheaper for them to retain customers than to recruit new ones.

    17
    Florida district pulls many Jewish and Holocaust books from classroom libraries

    Removed works include Saul Bellow’s ‘Herzog’ and ‘Black, White and Jewish’; no individual reasoning given for books' removal.

    ….

    The purge of books from Orange County Public Schools, in Orlando, over the course of the past semester is the latest consequence of a conservative movement across the country — and strongest in Florida — to rid public and school libraries of materials deemed offensive. While the vast majority of such challenged and removed books involve race, gender and sexuality, several Jewish books have previously been caught in the dragnet.

    Article continues…

    12
    Florida district pulls many Jewish and Holocaust books from classroom libraries

    Removed works include Saul Bellow’s ‘Herzog’ and ‘Black, White and Jewish’; no individual reasoning given for books' removal.

    JTA – A global bestseller by a Jewish Holocaust victim; a novel by a beloved and politically conservative Jewish American writer; a memoir of growing up mixed-race and Jewish; and a contemporary novel about a high-achieving Jewish family are among the nearly 700 books a Florida school district removed from classroom libraries this year in fear of violating state laws on sexual content in schools.

    The purge of books from Orange County Public Schools, in Orlando, over the course of the past semester is the latest consequence of a conservative movement across the country — and strongest in Florida — to rid public and school libraries of materials deemed offensive. While the vast majority of such challenged and removed books involve race, gender and sexuality, several Jewish books have previously been caught in the dragnet.

    Article continues…

    4
    bigthink.com The 10 biggest physics and astronomy lies from 2023

    Misinformation was extremely popular in 2023, as bad science often made global headlines. Make sure you the truth behind these 10 stories.

    The 10 biggest physics and astronomy lies from 2023

    Misinformation was extremely popular in 2023, as bad science often made global headlines. Learn the truth behind these 10 dubious stories.

    KEY TAKEAWAYS

    • While there have been huge scientific advances in a wide variety of aspects of physics and astronomy, there have also been wild headlines that do not reflect at all what's true in this Universe.
    • No, we haven't found a room-temperature superconductor, overturned the expanding Universe or Big Bang, discovered that the cosmos is twice as old as we thought, or discovered alien technology on the seafloor.
    • There has been a lot of fiction permeating science news this year, and the frustrating thing is that these untrue stories are posing as actual facts.

    Here are 10 lies you may want to learn the actual truth behind.

    [Article continues…]

    1
    bigthink.com The 10 biggest physics and astronomy lies from 2023

    Misinformation was extremely popular in 2023, as bad science often made global headlines. Make sure you the truth behind these 10 stories.

    The 10 biggest physics and astronomy lies from 2023

    Misinformation was extremely popular in 2023, as bad science often made global headlines. Learn the truth behind these 10 dubious stories.

    KEY TAKEAWAYS

    • While there have been huge scientific advances in a wide variety of aspects of physics and astronomy, there have also been wild headlines that do not reflect at all what's true in this Universe.
    • No, we haven't found a room-temperature superconductor, overturned the expanding Universe or Big Bang, discovered that the cosmos is twice as old as we thought, or discovered alien technology on the seafloor.
    • There has been a lot of fiction permeating science news this year, and the frustrating thing is that these untrue stories are posing as actual facts.

    Here are 10 lies you may want to learn the actual truth behind.

    [Article continues…]

    0
    eurovisionworld.com Eurovision 2024: Visual artwork revealed

    The EBU and Swedish broadcaster SVT have revealed the theme artwork for the Eurovision Song Contest 2024 in Malmö, Sweden

    Eurovision 2024: Visual artwork revealed

    The visual artwork for the Eurovision Song Contest 2024 has been revealed by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and Swedish broadcaster (SVT). The visual identity is inspired by the northern lights and sound equalizers.

    0
    eurovisionworld.com Raiven will represent Slovenia at Eurovision 2024

    Raiven will represent Slovenia at the Eurovision Song Contest 2024 in Malmö. Her song will be released on 20 January

    Raiven will represent Slovenia at Eurovision 2024

    Slovenian broadcaster RTVSLO has just revealed their artist for the Eurovision Song Contest 2024.

    Raiven will represent Slovenia at the Eurovision Song Contest 2024.

    The song that Raiven will sing on the Eurovision stage is titled "Veronika" and will be released on 20 January.

    0
    Netherlands: Joist Klein to Eurovision 2024
    eurovisionworld.com Netherlands: Joost Klein to Eurovision 2024

    The Dutch broadcaster has just revealed their artist to compete at the Eurovision Song Contest 2024 in Malmö: Joost Klein. His song will be released at a later date

    Netherlands: Joost Klein to Eurovision 2024

    Dutch broadcaster AVROTROS has just revealed their artist for the Eurovision Song Contest 2024.

    Joost Klein will represent the Netherlands at the Eurovision Song Contest 2024 after being selected internally from over 600 potential participants.

    The song that Joost Klein will sing on the Eurovision stage in Malmö will be released at a later date.

    0
    Why are we so concerned with oxygen production yet we never hear about nitrogen production, though we actually need 78% nitrogen vs 21% oxygen to survive?

    Excess oxygen is actually harmful to humans, but all the climate warnings are about losing oxygen, not nitrogen edit: but when we look for habitable planets, our focus is ‘oxygen rich atmosphere’, not ‘nitrogen rich’, and in medical settings, we’re always concerned about low oxygen, not nitrogen.

    Deep sea divers also use a nitrogen mix (nitrox) to stay alive and help prevent the bends, so nitrogen seems pretty important.

    It seems weird that our main focus is oxygen when our main air intake is nitrogen. What am I missing?

    edit: my climate example was poor and I think misleading. Added a better example instead.

    33
    France wins the Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2023

    The 21st edition of the Junior Eurovision Song Contest was broadcast live from Nice, France.

    16 countries competed at this year's edition, and once all was said and done Zoé Clauzure from France was declared the winner of the Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2023 with the song ‘Cœur’.

    Zoé Clauzure from France was crowned winner based on voting from national juries in all 16 competing countries. For the seventh time, viewers from around the world could also vote for their favorite songs in two windows: Online voting before the show, where the voting was based on snippets of rehearsals, and online voting during the show, where the viewers could vote during the 15 minutes after the last performance.

    [Article continues with embedded video and results table…]

    0
    Time Traveller Guide @lemmy.ca LillyPip @lemmy.ca
    Is Time Travel Possible? – Scientific American
    www.scientificamerican.com Is Time Travel Possible?

    The laws of physics allow time travel. So why haven’t people become chronological hoppers?

    Is Time Travel Possible?

    In the movies, time travelers typically step inside a machine and—poof—disappear. They then reappear instantaneously among cowboys, knights or dinosaurs. What these films show is basically time teleportation.

    Scientists don’t think this conception is likely in the real world, but they also don’t relegate time travel to the crackpot realm. In fact, the laws of physics might allow chronological hopping, but the devil is in the details.

    […]

    If a person were to hang out near the edge of a black hole, where gravity is prodigious, Goldberg says, only a few hours might pass for them while 1,000 years went by for someone on Earth. If the person who was near the black hole returned to this planet, they would have effectively traveled to the future. “That is a real effect,” he says. “That is completely uncontroversial.”

    Going backward in time gets thorny, though (thornier than getting ripped to shreds inside a black hole). Scientists have come up with a few ways it might be possible, and they have been aware of time travel paradoxes in general relativity for decades. Fabio Costa, a physicist at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, notes that an early solution with time travel began with a scenario written in the 1920s. That idea involved massive long cylinder that spun fast in the manner of straw rolled between your palms and that twisted spacetime along with it. The understanding that this object could act as a time machine allowing one to travel to the past only happened in the 1970s, a few decades after scientists had discovered a phenomenon called “closed timelike curves.”

    “A closed timelike curve describes the trajectory of a hypothetical observer that, while always traveling forward in time from their own perspective, at some point finds themselves at the same place and time where they started, creating a loop,” Costa says. “This is possible in a region of spacetime that, warped by gravity, loops into itself.”

    “Einstein read about closed timelike curves and was very disturbed by this idea,” he adds. The phenomenon nevertheless spurred later research.

    Science began to take time travel seriously in the 1980s. In 1990, for instance, Russian physicist Igor Novikov and American physicist Kip Thorne collaborated on a research paper about closed time-like curves. “They started to study not only how one could try to build a time machine but also how it would work,” Costa says.

    [Article continues…]

    0
    my inbox is someone else's account (maybe a caching issue)

    This is very strange and I’m sorry for multiple issues in one day, but I just switched to my inbox and it’s all someone else’s account.

    I’m @lillypip but my inbox currently shows someone else’s account. I won’t post it here, but I have screenshots if a Voyager Dev wants to see them.

    I think I can reply to people from there (the buttons seem to work, but I won’t do it for obvious reasons).

    Not sure if this is a Voyager or Lemmy issue, but it’s very seriously weirding me out.

    e: it’s not even the same server. My account is on lemmy.ca and my inbox is someoneelse@kbin.social (not the actual account, obviously).

    e2: my inbox isn’t that person’s inbox, it’s their outbox. All the content is from them, not to them. I’ve never interacted with this person to my knowledge.

    e3: I was wrong: I HAVE interacted with them. A few hours ago, I messaged them to say a link they commented was broken. I didn’t recognise the name until I tried to message them as recommended in the comments here. I can’t message them now; it just hangs.

    e4: restarting the app didn’t help, but rebooting my phone fixed it. Maybe it was a caching issue? Like I said, it was showing what was in their public profile (comments and posts), perhaps my inbox was stuck showing that? Anyway, it’s fixed now, so it seems like a caching issue, probably?

    9
    Lemmy webm image links showing as downloadable files (iOS 16.6.1)

    I’ve only noticed this in the past few days. Not sure if it’s a new issue, but I feel I wasn’t getting this before last week. (Eta: I’m on the latest update) Most Lemmy image links in comments are doing this now.

    Sorry if it’s been posted already; I tried searching and didn’t see anything.

    Thank you for all your hard work – I LOVE Voyager! ❤️

    11
    jalopnik.com In Space, No One Can Smell Your Many, Many Farts

    Zero G makes America's bravest heroes fart up a storm and pee without warning.

    In Space, No One Can Smell Your Many, Many Farts

    Becoming an astronaut is a fairly romanticized career path, but there are a lot of less-than-romantic aspects to working 50 miles or more above the Earth’s surface. Case in point: just being in zero G makes the human body do all sorts of embarrassing things.

    A new story from the New York Times exhaustedly points out that living in space comes with all sorts of “bodily indignities” which should give even the most eager potential space explorer pause. It turns out, it’s not just deadly radiation or muscle loss due to weightlessness astronauts traveling to spots in our own solar system will have to put with:

    > In microgravity, however, the blood volume above your neck will most likely still be too high, at least for a while. This can affect the eyes and optic nerves, sometimes causing permanent vision problems for astronauts who stay in space for months, a condition called spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome. It also causes fluid to accumulate in nearby tissues, giving you a puffy face and congested sinuses. As with a bad cold, the process inhibits nerve endings in the nasal passages, meaning you can’t smell or taste very well. (The nose plays an important role in taste.) The I.S.S. galley is often stocked with wasabi and hot sauce.

    > These sensory deficits can be helpful in some respects, though, because the I.S.S. tends to smell like body odor or farts. You can’t shower, and microgravity prevents digestive gases from rising out of the stew of other juices in your stomach and intestines, making it hard to belch without barfing. Because the gas must exit somehow, the frequency and volume (metric and decibel) of flatulence increases.

    > Other metabolic processes are similarly disturbed. Urine adheres to the bladder wall rather than collecting at the base, where the growing pressure of liquid above the urethra usually alerts us when the organ is two-thirds full. “Thus, the bladder may reach maximum capacity before an urge is felt, at which point urination may happen suddenly and spontaneously,” according to “A Review of Challenges &amp; Opportunities: Variable and Partial Gravity for Human Habitats in L.E.O.,” or low Earth orbit. This is a report that came out last year from the authors Ronke Olabisi, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of California, Irvine, and Mae Jemison, a retired NASA astronaut. Sometimes the bladder fills but doesn’t empty, and astronauts need to catheterize themselves.

    Link to NYT article (paywalled)

    16
    www.politico.com ‘Tons of Crazy’: The Inside Story of How Fox Fell for the ‘Big Lie’

    A play-by-play from inside Fox reveals how the network poisoned politics — and lost $787.5 million.

    ‘Tons of Crazy’: The Inside Story of How Fox Fell for the ‘Big Lie’
    8