RoabeArt [he/him]

  • 2 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: October 13th, 2020

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  • RoabeArt [he/him]@hexbear.nettoScience Memes@mander.xyzWormholes
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    9 hours ago

    I still remember the way my science teacher explained a hypothetical warp drive (like how it is in Star Trek). He took a black towel, representing space, and laid it flat on a table. He set down a miniature model of the Enterprise on one end of the towel, then accordion-folded the towel up so that the other end was close to the ship. He moved the Enterprise over to that end of the towel, and unfolded it so that it was flat again. The Enterprise was now on the other end of the table.

    An overly simplified visualization, but it really illustrated the idea to my ten year old brain how space-time could hypothetically be bent to make fast interstellar travel a possibility. Also it made me realize that warp speed on the Enterprise wasn’t just a super powerful rocket or something.



  • Before Louis Pasteur’s disproving of spontaneous generation, most people believed that bacteria and putrefactive organisms like maggots etc. spontaneously poofed into existence, like a video game character spawning. Pasteur suggested that maggots came from flies laying their eggs on rotting meat etc, and that bacteria were everywhere and will multiply quickly under the right conditions. A lot of people at the time thought these were crackpot ideas.





  • I wouldn’t say “completely fucked”, but for a few years I noticed YouTube on Firefox has this occasional quirk where videos will quit playing and infinitely buffer at the exact same timestamp. Like there’s no way around it except skipping about 30 seconds ahead with the seek bar, or doing a Ctrl-F5 (hard refresh) and starting the whole video over. Opera GX doesn’t seem to have this problem at all.

    But it’s still not a big enough deal to make me give up Firefox completely.



  • RoabeArt [he/him]@hexbear.nettoComics@lemmy.mlIt is that easy /j
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    2 months ago

    While I wouldn’t argue it saves the planet, sequestering garbage in far off, centralized, contained locations is a little better for public health than simply tossing it in the streets like we used to do. Cholera outbreaks happened on the regular before organized waste collection became a thing.







  • RoabeArt [he/him]@hexbear.nettoCommunism@lemmygrad.mlbut the inflation!
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    5 months ago

    The other day I was trying to explain this “made with 100% whatever” concept to a coworker.

    A HFCS fruit drink might say “made with 100% real juice”, but that real juice could be like 2% of the total recipe when the rest is HFCS, dyes and flavorings. It’s one of those technically true things and it’s enough to skirt FDA labeling requirements, and a lot of people are dumb enough to be taken in by it and believe they’re drinking a real product.



  • Are we talking first computer in your household, or first computer you ever bought yourself?

    Our first family PC was a hand me down from my uncle that we got when I was 12 or 13. 486DX2 66MHz processor, a couple MBs of RAM, 700-ish megabyte hard drive, Windows 3.1 and DOS. AOL install disks didn’t work on it because they needed at least Windows 95, and I was still clueless on how to set up a modem connection in 3.1. So it was entirely for games installed via disc only. We ended up getting a Windows 98 machine a year or two down the line.

    First PC I bought for myself was a custom built machine from a computer shop that has long since gone out of business. I think I paid around $200 for it, so it was a fairly basic PC for 2004. Athlon 1.5 GHz CPU (with a loud as fuck cooler fan), 512 MB RAM, a video card that I forgot the make and model of, Windows XP. Lasted me about 3 years until I built one myself.





  • RoabeArt [he/him]@hexbear.nettoLefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comfair share?
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    9 months ago

    I always use seconds as an allegory to dollars when I explain to people the difference between thousand, million and billion (I did the number crunching in my head and rushed it, so if I made any errors lemme know).

    1000 seconds = 17 minutes

    100,000 seconds = 27 hours

    1 million seconds = 11 days

    1 billion seconds = 31.70 years

    148 billion seconds (Bezos’ net worth) = 4693 years