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merc

@ merc @sh.itjust.works

Posts
4
Comments
1674
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • time travel

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  • Is building a lightbulb really trivial? Glass has been around for millennia, but transparent glass wasn't. If you didn't have transparent glass, would you know how to make it?

    When you say "embed it in glass" do you mean just wrap glass around a wire so the two are in contact? I don't know what the advantage of that would be. You can get a wire to glow without glass, just pass enough current that it heats up to over 1000C. It would even be visible at about 600C in a completely dark room. If you have the wire in contact with glass you need to keep the temperature below the melting point of glass, which is between about 1400C to 1600C. That probably wouldn't be better than a candle. Also, that "bulb" wouldn't last long because of the difference in thermal expansion between metal and glass.

    A typical light bulb has two things: space between the glass and the filament, and either a vacuum or something other than oxygen inside. There are 2 reasons for that. One is to allow the filament to get to a temperature that would melt glass. If there's a space between the two, the filament can get white hot while the glass stays below its melting point. The reason for the argon or vacuum interior is that if you had an oxygen atmosphere the filament would corrode and/or erode quickly. There wouldn't really be any point in building the "bulb" part of the light bulb without also changing the atmosphere inside the bulb. You probably couldn't get argon gas in antiquity. You could probably get a partial vacuum, however.

    IMO, the "white hot glowing wire" wouldn't be too difficult if you could build a big enough battery. The "light bulb" would be significantly more challenging.

  • time travel

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  • Would you know where to find the relatively pure zinc and copper that you'd need for a voltaic pile?

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  • I'm short, so I don't like that trend. It also seems like the more stuff you're "rolling over" the smaller your contact patch will be, so the less traction you'll have.

    Anyhow, probably doesn't matter to me since those aren't the kinds of bikes I buy.

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  • Or 26 inches, ye olde mountain bike standard. Are they putting 32 inch wheels on road bikes now?

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  • Really? What's the new wheel size? Get me in on this controversy!

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  • That's the problem. Believing in a flat earth isn't just some weird quirk, like believing that gluten is bad for you or the number 4 is bad luck because in Chinese it sounds like the word for death. You can have beliefs like that and still maintain friendships with people who don't share them. It's such an illogical belief that people who express it are always mocked, and it's also such a big "conspiracy" that believers have trouble not talking about it. That means believers tend to form a community to support each-other and defend against these insults. It's basically an especially stupid religious community or a cult.

    Giving up on your belief that the earth is flat means losing your whole community. There's no real way to be a sphere-earther in the flat earther community. Some of the people "lose faith" but don't admit it to the others in the community because they don't want to be ostracized.

    I would guess that the people who manage to leave the community are the ones who have friends and family that are willing to forgive and forget and welcome them back after they leave the cult. That also means that the ones who have lost their friends and family due to their wacky beliefs are never going to drop those beliefs because they'll have nothing left.

  • AI data centers face increasing complaints about inaudible but 'felt' infrasound — citizens complain high- and low-frequency sounds do not register on decibel meters but cause adverse health effects

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  • You can literally hear the power going through the lines.

    Which is the problem. People get scared of them, even though there's no danger, but they convince themselves there is, and they get a Nocebo Effect.

    This has been widely tested. Some people claim that WiFi makes them ill, so they did tests. The tests showed no difference in people's reported symptoms when they were next to a real WiFi router that was emitting WiFi signals vs. a sham WiFi router that was designed to look real but didn't have any active radio components.

    They've also done studies that show that exposure can result in symptoms. Exposure to media claiming WiFi is dangerous, that is.

  • AI data centers face increasing complaints about inaudible but 'felt' infrasound — citizens complain high- and low-frequency sounds do not register on decibel meters but cause adverse health effects

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  • He experienced a visual disturbance in his periphery manifesting as the false perception of a person

    Which can't be explained by an unfocused eye. They do a lot of speculating to come up with a reason why he could possibly see something out of the corner of his eye. But, that's only the physical part of it. It doesn't explain why he might think that whatever he was seeing was "a figure" and moved like a person.

    That's like saying that ghosts can be explained by wearing glasses with dirty lenses, then going into detail about how dirty lenses can cause someone to see something that isn't there, while ignoring the elephant ghost in the room. Except it's even worse because a smudge on your glasses causing you to "see something that isn't there" is really easy to test and barely needs an experiment to confirm it's true. But, low frequency waves causing someone to see something that isn't there isn't something that has been tested. It's pure speculation.

    So, pure speculation that low frequency waves can cause someone's eyes to blur in such a way that the corner of their glasses is mistaken as something that isn't there. No proof that has happened or can happen, just speculation.

    Then ignoring the elephant in the room that just because someone might not see clearly if their eye is vibrating, that is somehow magically interpreted as a figure moving like a person, which they interpret as a ghost.

    There's a humongous jump there from "a certain frequency might cause the eyes to wiggle" to "and therefore that's why he saw a ghost".

  • AI data centers face increasing complaints about inaudible but 'felt' infrasound — citizens complain high- and low-frequency sounds do not register on decibel meters but cause adverse health effects

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  • Ok, that's a paper that attempts to explain the feeling that a building might be haunted. There's nothing in there about causing people to hallucinate. They talk about the supposed "resonant frequency of the eye", but then they say:

    The resonant frequency is the natural frequency of an object, the one at which it needs the minimum input of energy to vibrate. As you can see from above, any frequency above 8 Hz will have an effect and some sources quote 40Hz

    If the values are that vague, then there is no resonant frequency. There may be frequencies that transmit vibrations to the eye, but with a big enough speaker you can cause anything to vibrate.

    The closest the get to hallucinations is to say that "the eyeball would be vibrating which would cause a serious "smearing"of vision. It would not seem unreasonable to see dark shadowy forms caused by something as innocent as the corner of V.T.’s spectacles." So, no hallucinations, just some blurry vision that might vaguely count as an excuse for seeing a ghost if your eye is vibrating significantly. Notice that that's all just speculation, saying "this seems like it could be possible" rather than actually testing for that hypothesis.

  • AI data centers face increasing complaints about inaudible but 'felt' infrasound — citizens complain high- and low-frequency sounds do not register on decibel meters but cause adverse health effects

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  • It's pretty clear it's a BS condition. Jimmy even tests him. It doesn't mean that Chuck is lying, it's also pretty clear from the show that it's some kind of Nocebo Effect. He doesn't want to believe he's a bad person, so his body effectively comes up with this "solution" to the problem.

  • AI data centers face increasing complaints about inaudible but 'felt' infrasound — citizens complain high- and low-frequency sounds do not register on decibel meters but cause adverse health effects

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  • The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI), a non-profit organization, said that high- and low-frequency sounds emitted by these industrial sites can be heard and felt for hundreds of feet in surrounding areas, with noise levels reaching as high as 96dB for 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

    It says "these industrial sites" so it's making a generalization, it says "as high as" so that's presumably the maximum they measured at one of those many sites. They also talk about high and low frequency sound, so it may not be the infrasound that is "loud" but the high frequency sound, which doesn't as easily travel through the ground, etc.

    Because sound tends to follow an inverse square law, if they measured that 96 dB at 100m from the sound's source, it could be just 2% of that level at 800m away.

    So, that "96 dB" figure needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The figure as actually measured in some person's home might be a tiny fraction of that amount.

    Again, it doesn't mean there's no problem, just that it needs some further investigation.

  • AI data centers face increasing complaints about inaudible but 'felt' infrasound — citizens complain high- and low-frequency sounds do not register on decibel meters but cause adverse health effects

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  • Anxiety, nausea and sleep problems can be caused by many things. One of those things is believing that a nearby datacenter is making you ill.

    Sure, investigate it and see if it is actually happening. But, do a proper double-blind study.

    I take this personally because my mother is a conspiracy nut who thinks that everything is making her ill: wifi, chemtrails, street lights, electricity, gluten... if she heard about infrasound she'd add it to the list of things that are hurting her health.

  • AI data centers face increasing complaints about inaudible but 'felt' infrasound — citizens complain high- and low-frequency sounds do not register on decibel meters but cause adverse health effects

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  • That's right. Even if the person won the lawsuit it doesn't mean the science is true. It's one really frustrating thing about the legal system, sometimes people win lawsuits based on absolutely terrible BS science. A persuasive lawyer has to convince a jury that something is true, not convince a scientist who knows about that field.

  • AI data centers face increasing complaints about inaudible but 'felt' infrasound — citizens complain high- and low-frequency sounds do not register on decibel meters but cause adverse health effects

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  • Exposure to this level of infrasound

    What level is that?

  • AI data centers face increasing complaints about inaudible but 'felt' infrasound — citizens complain high- and low-frequency sounds do not register on decibel meters but cause adverse health effects

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  • [citation needed]

    I fully believe that at times infrasound can result in anxiety, nausea, etc. But, in 2026 so can reading the news. So can thinking that your health is being affected by a datacenter, resulting in you worrying and losing sleep.

    This whole thing about the "resonant frequency of the eye" and that causing someone to hallucinate... that smells like utter BS. A much more likely explanation in a basement is carbon monoxide.

  • States Rush to Gerrymander Away Black Electoral Power Following Supreme Court Decision

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  • What's interesting is that the Voting Rights Act has been used to gerrymander states to elect more GOP members.

    The way you gerrymander is by creating one area that overwhelmingly goes for one party, and a bunch of other areas that very slightly go the other way. It's often hard to come up with a legal pretext to do that (back when that sort of thing mattered). The voting rights act said that not only was it legal to create districts that would give black voters a majority, it was necessary. How do you do that? You group all the black voters together into one district, thereby creating a strong democratic-voting district. What side effect does that have? It creates a bunch of other districts that are not democratic-leaning so the overall state goes Republican.

    If other laws still mattered, Republicans might have been fighting to save the VRA because it was their best tool to legally gerrymander in their favour. But, with the modern "laws don't matter lol" supreme court, it's different.

  • Number bOne

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  • Riker plays a complex instrument with no fixed resonant settings where your arm extension and lip tightness determines the note and your breath drives the volume. It is an instrument you play with your entire body.

    Data plays an instrument with no fixed positions that requires careful control. It's an instrument capable of playing multiple notes at once, but requires neither lips nor lungs, perhaps indicating his slight lack of humanity.

    Picard plays a recorder using someone else's hands:

  • Best use I've seen of this template

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  • There are many other kinds of salmon though, and some of them are native to parts of Japan, like Hokkaido. It just wasn't traditionally part of Sushi. Even tuna wasn't considered sushi-worthy for a long time. It used to be food for poor people.

  • Best use I've seen of this template

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