So, in the fine tradition of using bananas for scale…
Bananas are slightly more radioactive than the background, due to potassium-40 content. So an informal unit of radiation measure in educational settings is the ‘banana-equivalent-dose’, which is about 0.1 microsieverts.
My particle spectrometer saw first light today, and I figure that I could use a banana to calibrate it. Then I noticed that K-40 undergoes a rare (0.001%) decay to 40Ar, emitting a positron. So not only is a banana a decent around-the-house radioisotope source, it’s also an antimatter source.
Truly a remarkable and versatile fruit.
I learned recently how the James Webb Space Telescope is not orbiting around Earth but literally orbiting around an empty point in space. I don’t think I even quite understand it, but it’s really cool
I’ll bite. I had a brother with special needs pass away a year ago next week. He was born with cerebral palsy, was blind, nonverbal, totally dependent on caretakers (myself, my siblings and mother, his nurses) for literally everything since he didn’t have functionally-independent motor control. We were told he’d live to 10, and he lived to 29; he was a bundle of joy and loved going out when he could. People would stare and kids would ask questions, but we loved sharing his story and my brother liked when people were curious about it.
But, his health started declining in 2014. He had several close calls, and we told doctors each time to try their best with the circumstances they were given. On more than one occasion, his nurses or our mother would actually be with the doctors during hospital stays to assist with him since he was case they didn’t have much experience in and didn’t want to make his issues worse. That said, he had a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) since he had a trache, and was brittle enough to die from chest compressions.
I prepped for my brother’s death countless times over 8 years. We all did. When he passed, we were so obviously distraught. But we were also relieved, in a way, that he wasn’t in pain anymore in the end. We let out our emotions that had been stored for those years, and the grieving process is still continuing. We all put our lives on hold to help him, and he just became our lives; our goal simply was to make him comfortable and let him know he was loved, knowing we couldn’t realistically do more. We spent years watching him in pain, watching him gradually lose his fervor and personality.
If you read this far, thank you. Not really sure what else to say, I just want to share this since it’s occupied my mind a lot.
TLDR; Preparing for the worst outcomes, coupled with grief, over prolonged periods of time really disrupt your emotions and outlooks. Needless to say, my family became stronger proponents of state-assisted suicide after this experience. It couldn’t be granted to my brother, but maybe we can help people in the future that coupd really use it. People understand, but not nearly as many are truly empathetic because they can’t be - they’ve never been through a similar experience. I simply ask that people try to be sympathetic rather than to pass judgement on others.
I understand the weird feeling of relief when someone dies. I know that sounds terrible. My situation was not yours, so I’m not directly comparing. One of my parents had long, slow cancer. Watching them waste away, choosing to fight a symptom or not, was draining and difficult. In one sense, I enjoyed all of those final moments and would give anything to have more. I miss them dearly. However, I’m glad they’re not suffering. It was difficult at the end. Their quality of life was not good.
I wouldn’t say nobody, but I would say the people that dominate the area I’m trying to volunteer and work in.
I work in a healing center where there are 29 women on staff and 1 man.
I cannot get these people to understand that as much as they want to push forward social movements, which I very much agree with, this must not come at the expense of men who are trying to heal.
I will literally have counselors co-facilitating with me, who want to make every point about how women are oppressed, pushed down in the workforce, face issues.
I’m not in denial of those, but no man coming into a healing environment to work on themselves, be vulnerable, and explore their own journey, needs to hear how much men are shitty.
They say that to the patients? That sounds incredibly unprofessional.
It’s insane, I even made a complaint to the director who of course is a woman, and she effectively denied that it was happening or could happen.
I told her I don’t even want people not to think these things, everybody who is in their own place of trauma has to get their shit off their chest.
All I wanted was a place where men didn’t have to hear this crap.
And that’s being incredibly neutral in my opinion because there are a lot of opportunities for men to talk about just how insane and shitty women can be. But I don’t want to talk about those things, I just want them to stop shit talking men especially their own clientele.
Exactly. You can see this on various aspects of life. Racism, sexism, etc. Many use them as excuse to throw out the baby with the bath water.
Just watched a Tibees video about the possibility of a force like gravity potentially traveling through folded 4D space and affecting something before the light can reach it.
I realize this sort of thing has been thoroughly tested and debunked, but I can’t get it out of my head. What if it’s some force other than gravity? What if Earth just happens to be folded against some empty bit of space - and what if that were to change?
Like, I’ve thought about folded spacetime before, but always in the context of traveling between points (like the classic ant-on-paper thought experiment). I never really considered that something could in theory radiate a force (like gravity) in 4+ dimensions.
Maybe you’ve seen this already, but if you haven’t, here’s a wonderfully terrifying thought:
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/universe-fundamentally-unstable/
(and (lisp programming) (libre software))
What are you using lisp for?
What is the mechanism by which gravity “pulls”? Puzzling me for almost 10 years. I think I’ve almost got it.
Hehe guess what… Nobody exactly knows how gravity works.
So let’s start with Newton. According to his equations, gravity is a force. Why? Well, according to the first law of motion, an object stays in motion in its original direction till a force is applied on it. Newton said, “Gravity is clearly actively changing the direction of an object. Hence, gravity is a force”. As Newton establishes that gravity is a force, we say that it “pulls” objects. However, he couldn’t explain the mechanism behind this pulling force.
Then came Einstein. According to general relativity, gravity is not a force. How’s that possible? Doesn’t gravity change the motion of a given object? Nope! Wait, whaaaaa?! Okay, so according to special relativity, all things in the universe are on a “spacetime”. What’s a spacetime? Well, it’s a four dimensional fabric like thingey that all objects are present on. The four dimensions are time and the three spatial dimensions that we experience. Mathematically, there is no difference between time and the spatial dimensions. However, all objects move only in one direction through spacetime at c, ie., lightspeed through spacetime. If an object moves at c through space, it moves at 0 m/s through time and vice versa. This is how you get the time dilation magic. Cool. Now what if we bent this said spacetime at certain points? The object traveling on this spacetime would be traveling in a straight line always. Hence, no force. Hence, no pulling. Hence, no pulling mechanism.
Cool! So we solved gravity, right? Sike! GR doesn’t work at the quantum level… Aaaaand most of the best models that we have for quantum gravity use a particle called the “graviton”, which has a field that results in an attractive force. How does this force work? The answer is “go fk urself”.
Hence, in conclusion, noone knows whether gravity even “pulls” in the first place, let alone HOW it pulls. Aaaaand we’ve been trying to answer this question for almost 100 years… Cool…
tee hee hee - guess what. I didn’t ask for quantification and prior art.
