I aim to be more human. I aim to be less apathetic as a human. Apathy grows, like a tree, and I aim to prune my own.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • A new apartment building is going up in the middle of my small town. It’s “luxury” apartments.

    Big black “stylish” (see also: identical to every other luxury apartment building in the last 5 years) building on top of a hill in the middle of a low-cost and simple rural community. It’s so ridiculous. It stands out horribly, and looks terrible. And it’s right next to a gas station… so it looks even more ridiculous. I doubt they will get a lot of renters for it.

    About a decade back there was a push to build luxury apartments in the town over. They built them all (few hundred units) right next to the landfill. I’ve driven past said landfill in summer and nearly throw up. I can’t imagine living next to that, and calling my place luxury…





  • Apathy Tree@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoScience Memes@mander.xyzHoney
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    2 months ago

    Have you ever tasted flower nectar?

    I grow gladiolus sometimes, and they produce a lot of nectar, but there aren’t any pollinators for those flowers around me, so I remove the nectar myself with a syringe. There isn’t a lot in each flower, but it’s nice in a cup of tea.

    It doesn’t really taste like honey, even dilute honey. It doesn’t taste like just sugar water, either, though. I’m sure each flowering plant produces a subtly different flavor, like fruit.

    And indeed, honey apparently tastes different depending what the bees are feeding on. But I’d say it’s probably a mix of something bee-specific and the nectar itself.




  • I know I’m not trans and thus considerably less of a target overall… but this shit scares me so much.

    I have been accused of being a man on multiple occasions due largely to having a deep gravely voice and no willingness to hide my true personality… I wrestled, was in the military, and have mostly non-stereotypically-feminine interests… so despite being a whopping 5’2, 120lb, feminine-presenting afab, people (actually it’s been 100% men doing it) misgender me quite a bit more than one would expect…

    And coming from a conservative area, that is frightening every time it happens. Most of the men who do this are 2-3x my size and would probably kill me.



  • I think Mozilla has something like this as well (also a subscription).

    I’m of the opinion that, at this point, one of the best infosec things a company could do is include a subscription like this (assuming they are safe and work as intended) for all employees as part of their compensation package, much the way they sometimes provide financial consulting services or gym memberships. Maybe one of the providers will start offering enterprise packages.

    If we could purge large quantities of data on employees, it would be that much harder to use social engineering for hacking. As a bonus, if enough people got themselves purged, it would entirely disrupt the data harvesting and selling models, potentially making them worthless. That would be a huge win.

    But I don’t think many people are going to pay for it themselves. They just won’t care that much. So as a work perk, it incentivizes them to use it by being free.

    I’m not in IT or anything, but my close friend is in security, so it’s something I consider quite a bit.

    Edit to add: obviously I’d rather see it illegal to collect data and sell it and all but that’s not going to happen any time soon, and this could be a lot faster. And if it becomes a business expense, businesses might just push for legislation…



  • So I’m not a biologist either but I’m going to speculate on the temp thing. (Somewhat educated speculation - science of all varieties is my jam)

    Basically my hypothesis is that between insulation and size, they aren’t capable of losing heat fast enough to fall below their baseline temp, but any old temp would probably have worked fine, as long as their fats stay liquid (and for all I know that’s 36C, but that seems highly unlikely - you’d want to be several degrees warmer in case of emergency, else you’d get stiff and die for sure).

    They have a nice layer of fat for insulation and that’s all well and good, but they are massively huge and a lot more spherical than most animals. So, they have a small surface area to volume ratio, and lose heat slower as a result. And because they are huge, and muscle twitch is heat generating (to say nothing of leaky heat-producing brown fat, idk if they have this, but most mammals seem to for thermoregulation), they likely produce a gob of heat internally just existing. Much like we believe the larger dinosaurs were endothermic due to sheer size (and some evidence from their bone structure).

    Side note - Imagine how many calories it would take to maintain basal metabolic rate when you are losing that heat to 4C water at literally all times. It takes us about 1500-2000 calories for this function and we only lose heat to air that’s relatively close to our body temp.

    I did a super quick scan of melting points of various fats, and while without knowing exact compositions of whale blubber idk the melting point, a surprising amount of the animal fats we use for cooking melt around 25-40C, with most large terrestrial animals (cow, pig, deer, etc.) falling between 32-40C (goose fat was the 25C).

    If their composition hadn’t worked, though, they could have evolved a polyunsaturated fat (like fish oil) with a lower melting point.

    Anyway, thanks for coming to my ted talk ;)


  • Plus side for squick thoughts, probably not that warm. The ocean is quite cold and things lose heat 25 times faster in water than air, so it would likely cool down considerably between being…… extruded…? And consumed.

    Then again, I don’t know a whales body temp to start with, so there might be a lot of heat to lose. Idk if that’s better or worse…


  • Speaking from experience, it functionally ruined them, at least the early macs -exact os/model unknown- we had (school computers well behind the curve and all). They’d need to be reformatted after. It would delete, then iirc just crash and you’d reboot into errors (my memory of this is spotty, it was a very long time ago)

    I used to do that in the computer lab when I was supposed to be doing typing practice. Fucking hate typing “properly”.

    Note: I am not a verifiable source, this is anecdata.


  • Apathy Tree@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlWhen a real user uses the app
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    7 months ago

    Eclipses happen every year like clockwork (it basically is clockwork, but on a huge scale). Eclipse seasons are spring and fall, around the equinoxes. You could very easily fly to see a total eclipse every few years if you want to, because we know when they are going to happen and where will have totality - it’s very routine stuff. There’s literally nothing special at all about the one that just happened, except that a lot of people haven’t seen one before because it hasn’t happened -at that location- in a time.

    So no, absolutely not something you’ll never get a chance to see again, tho you won’t be able if you go blind like a fucking moron.