I hadn’t heard about bulldog ants before and was incredulous about your statement, but damn, yeah, bulldog ants are wild

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrmecia_(ant)#interaction with humans

I’m reminded of a clip that I’ve seen that originates on Tik Tok about a guy who says something similar to what you’re saying here, including a clip where the guy went and shouted at a neo-nazi to basically say “you’re not welcome here, fuck off”.

I found it interesting because he explained that this isn’t usually something he would do because he’s very much a voice against toxic masculinity and this means that generally he doesn’t want or need to take the role of the angry, scary man. In this instance though, of the many members of his community who were uncomfortable with a neo-Nazi spewing hate, this guy was best situated to challenge this. I found it especially interesting because there’s a particular kind of aggressiveness to it — like, obviously going up to someone and shouting at them is aggressive, but it was clear that this guy wasn’t going for a fight

I respect your approach. I bet you’re the kind of parent who apologises to their kids when you make mistakes

I always find it tricky to understand how tools all relate to each other in an ecosystem and this is a great example of why: the fact that Ansible can do this task, but Teraform would be better suggests that they are tools that have different purposes, but some overlap. What would you say is Ansible’s strong suit?

That sounds beautiful. You really captured the moment

Thanks for this recommendation. Diverse perspectives are important in underscoring that the Israeli people are not a monolith, and that they are distinct from the state of Israel.

I often see people online speaking about Israelis as though all of them are in favour of the ongoing genocide, when this is simply not the case. That’s not to say that Netanyahu’s control of the media hasn’t led to a depressingly high proportion of Israelis to see themselves as righteous victims — years of state propaganda has unfortunately had an impact. However, there are journalists and activists (Jewish or otherwise) who are working to challenge this rhetoric.

I like the way one of my university textbooks frames the particle wave duality thing: “A single pure wave has a perfectly defined wavelength, and thus an exact energy, but has no position. […] [Whereas a classical particle] would have a perfectly defined position but no definable wavelength and thus an undefined energy” ^([1][2])

I am currently in my bed. I have a lot to do today, but I’m not sure how much I will get done because I don’t know how much energy have. Thus I conclude you are right and that I am clearly a particle.

^([1]: Principles and Problems in Physical Chemistry for Biochemists, Price, Dwek, Radcliffe & Wormald, p282)

^([2]: I’m practicing being more diligent with citations, in hope that good habits will make it easier when referencing is actually important)

A big part of quantum mechanics is the fact that matter can show wave-like behaviour, which sort of breaks a bunch of “rules” that we have from classical physics. This only is relevant if we’re looking at stuff at a teensy tiny scale.

Someone else has already mentioned that electrons are a fair bit smaller than protons and neutrons (around 1840 times smaller) and this means they tend to have a smaller momentum than protons or neutrons, which means they have a larger wavelength, which was easier to measure experimentally. That’s likely why electrons were a part of this theory, because they’re small enough that they’re sort of a perfect way to study the idea of things that are both particle and wave, but also neither. In 1940, quantum mechanics and particle physics were super rapidly moving fields, where our knowledge hadn’t congealed much yet. What was clear was that electrons get up to some absolute nonsense behaviour that broke our understanding of how the world worked.

I like the results of some of the worked examples here: https://www.chemteam.info/Electrons/deBroglie-Equation.html , especially the one where they work out what the wavelength of a baseball would be (because that too, could theoretically act like a wave, it would just have an impossibly small wavelength)

TL;DR: electrons are smaller than protons/neutrons Smaller = larger wavelength Larger wavelength = easier to make experiments to see wave-like behaviour from the particle Therefore electrons were useful in figuring out how the heck a particle can have a wavelength and act like a wave

This is more of a “how to survive under oppressive policies while we work to change them” kind of tip, but self-care, and community support networks.

For example, too many of my friends have found themselves feeling obligated to challenge transphobic rhetoric online. They frequently put themselves on the front line of things and persisted out of a sense of duty, even when their mental health was degrading. Sometimes self care is about moderation, in the case of my friend who actually enjoys arguing with assholes online. In some cases, it means picking a different front to fight on (such as in the case of a different friend who got back into activism after a break by starting a trans clothes swap).

By “community support networks”, I mean a community where you don’t have to worry about changing hearts and minds, where you can sometimes say “fucking hell, this is depressing” sometimes. And also people with whom you can feel safe with and seize whatever joy you can. It might mean having a friend who knows a lot about DIY HRT, who can forward the info onto whoever needs it, or sharing prescribed HRT with someone whose prescription is late. It can mean a lot of things, and it can be online or in real life, but the short of it is that we can’t do this alone, whether “this” is “surviving” or “changing the world”

Speaking as someone who has grappled with addition to hard drugs like Factorio, make sure to take care of yourself OP. Hydration is the big one, but sleep, food and giving your eyes a break is important too.

No it won’t. Eco-fascist rhetoric like this is unproductive because it ignores the fact that the people who are most shielded from the harms of climate change are the ones most responsible for it.

Billionaires and others who are profiting most from pillaging the planet’s resources are not the ones at risk here.

(N.b. I am not calling you an eco-fascist, just that this framing is commonly used by eco-fascists. Part of why I highlight this is because your use of this rhetoric may not be intentional)

It’s frustrating how common IQ based things are still. For example, I’m autistic, and getting any kind of support as an autistic adult has been a nightmare. In my particular area, some of the services I’ve been referred to will immediately bounce my referral because they’re services for people with “Learning Disabilities”, and they often have an IQ limit of 70, i.e. if your IQ is greater than 70, they won’t help you.

My problem here isn’t that there exists specific services for people with Learning disabilities, because I recognise that someone with Down syndrome is going to have pretty different support needs to me. What does ick me out is the way that IQ is used as a boundary condition as if it hasn’t been thoroughly debunked for years now.

I recently read “The Tyranny of Metrics” and whilst I don’t recall of it specifically delves into IQ, it’s definitely the same shape problem: people like to pin things down and quantify them, especially complex variables like intelligence. Then we are so desperate to quantify things that we succumb to Goodhart’s law (whenever a metric is used as a target, it will cease to be a good metric), condemning what was already an imperfect metric to become utterly useless and divorced from the system it was originally attempting to model or measure. When IQ was created, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it was. It has been made worse by years of bigots seeking validation, because it turns out that science is far from objective and is fairly easy to commandeer to do the work of bigots (and I say this as a scientist.)

I’m super dubious because Starmer has done very little to earn my trust, but I would be very keen to be surprised, or even proven wrong

This post has a title I can hear

What the fuck do we have hate crime laws for it not this guy? What the hell?

It’s one reason why I like Lemmy so much — conversations around here are so small scale that I can be confident I’m talking to a human.

I saw an article recently that looked at the rates of suicide in Israeli soldiers. One guy, who featured heavily in the article, had killed himself after being an IDF bulldozer driver. The article tried to dial up sympathy for him, but additional coverage (in response to this article) highlighted that this guy had posted some pretty horrifying stuff on social media — stuff like videos and photos of him in Gaza, being pretty jovial as he drove through bodies and buildings. I wonder whether the PTSD he experienced afterwards was a sort of moral immune system, and that once he was away from the kind of military camaraderie that normalises atrocities, if he began to reflect on his part in this genocide. At least for him, we’ll never know.

A Jewish, anti-Zionist friend who lived in Israel for a while said that it was disturbing to see how much the Holocaust was leveraged to make people feel scared and insecure. I imagine many members of the IDF do genuinely believe that most, if not all Palestinians hate all Jews and want them to die. That way, they can enthusiastically participate, believing that they are on the side of justice.

I once punched a Nazi at a gig, and I did enjoy it, because it feels good to be righteous and angry. Enough so that it makes me anxious about how easy it would be to lean into anger if it feels righteous.

That’s an extreme case, but the point still stands. For example, right now, I’m pretty fat, because I haven’t shifted the weight I gained over COVID. Even though I’m visibly way larger than I was, I’m not much heavier than I was pre-covid, because I’ve lost a heckton of muscle. It’s insane to me that BMI will look at me pre-covid, and look at me now, and say “that’s the same picture”. Especially because I personally found that the best and safest way for me to lose weight was to focus on getting strong and fit first.

Who is David Kinne and what did he do?

I think being aware of the ongoing maintenance (and one’s ability to do it) still feels productive in a prepping sense. It’s sort of like meta-prepping? Like, I’d expect that in a disaster, your knowledge would be helpful in organising within your community. Certainly you’d fare better than me, as someone who has been fortunate enough to never have to consider emergency supplies.