Thank you for sharing; I watched it and found it so silly that I went and found an even longer one https://youtu.be/NBH3UvlZo90 It’s so silly. I was trying to ponder what sound effect would best match, but there’s so many, it’d be impossible to choose.

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 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?

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

Thanks for the recommendation, I’m always glad to discover new resources. I’m also forever cursing the fact that science degrees don’t put more emphasis on writing and speaking well.

My dude, I’m agreeing with you

Edit: effectively I was saying that I agree with you that there seems to be a particular kind of person who is overly contrarian, very loud and impossible to have productive discussions with.

I felt like the wheelchair example you picked was a great example of how this happens “in the wild”. I wanted to build on your comment by using that example to elaborate on how these contrarian types cause harm, even if they might seem to be concerned and well-intentioned. I found the wheelchair example to be a good one because it is actually something that I’ve seen happen multiple times.

I feel that your reply is an unfair characterisation of my comment. Given how the internet’s communication norms can prime us to read and respond to things in an overly adversarial manner (especially as it’s clear from your original comment that you’ve got way too much experience with silly argumentative types, so I sympathise), I am hoping that your response was based on a misinterpretation of my comment and/or me being insufficiently clear in what I originally wrote (apologies if so).

I’ll keep an eye out for one, but in the meantime, I’ll be more specific about what I mean about ignoring how science actually is.

One of the things I find most beautiful about science is how it thrives in uncertainty — great science is more likely to arise from a “huh, that’s strange…” than a big “Eureka” moment, not least of all because most breakthroughs involve large collaborations of researchers.

“Scientism” is the term usually used for the kind of thing that irks me. I’m realising now that I feel unequipped to properly explain that, so I’m going to point to a video I like on this matter by a cardiologist and science communicator I like: https://youtu.be/CVPy25wQ07k

I find “cis” useful, personally. I’m bisexual, so certainly “straight” isn’t applicable. In a lot of contexts I’d use “cis” to refer to myself, I suppose “not trans” would also work, but it’d be clunkier.

Plus, there are times when the thing I want to centre in my communication is the cisgender perspective that I have. For example, I was recently discussing with a friend that seeing trans friend’s gender euphoria improved my own relationship to my gender because it made me ask myself whether cis people could experience gender euphoria and if so, why couldn’t I recall any instances of experiencing it?

I feel like the term “cisgender” implicitly acknowledges that voices and experiences like mine are important in building a shared understanding of gender — i.e. trans people aren’t the only ones who have a gender. Like, obviously I can’t speak directly about trans experiences, but that doesn’t mean that I’m expected to shut up and contribute nothing to the wider conversation.

“teachers who interact with middle schoolers; our frontline troops facing the bleeding edge of internet memespeak.”

Reason number 201 why teachers are underpaid

Perchance is a great word though. I think I’d probably use it if I knew how to do so appropriately in a sentence (though I imagine only a fraction of people who do use that word use it properly. That tends to be the case with formal or archaic words used in informal contexts)

I do this too much. My defence is that I am a bad writer who’s working to be better.

I am someone who really likes the term for myself, because it can encompass a whole bunch of complex identities across gender and sexuality. It feels like it simplifies things for me, and has helped me to properly understand the necessity of LGBTQ solidarity. There have been times when I have been told it’s inappropriate for me to personally identify as queer because some people find the term offensive, which I find absurd because such a large and heterogeneous community will never be unanimous on what terms or labels to use.

However, much more frequently than that, I have seen people being insensitive to the reality that there are a ton of people who have pretty legitimate beef with the term and who don’t want it applied to them. I’m talking about situations like “queer folk like us <gestures at the entire room>” or “the queer community”. It’s a pretty reasonable request if someone says “hey, if you’re referring to a group that involves me, I’d prefer you not use queer as a blanket term”. The appropriate response to that is “I’m sorry, my bad”, but I have seen way too many people start arguments that actually the (usually but certainly not always) older gay men are obstacles to Progress.

I like the way that a friend of mine framed it when he said that he’s actively jazzed to see a word that did such harm being reclaimed by a new generation who are finding great power and solidarity in it. But that’s never going to erase the sting he still feels when remembering being victimised for years by people who’d shout that word. “You can’t reclaim a slur if you ignore all its history and disown the members of your community who experienced it as a slur”.

It boggles my mind that there are people who are heavy advocates of the power of self determination of one’s identity, but who don’t see the issue in forcing the label of “queer” onto individuals who have expressly rejected it.

The wheelchair one (whilst obvious hyperbole) is a great example of why this rhetoric isn’t useful.

Often people who say we should plan walkable cities don’t consider what that would mean for wheelchair users and other disabled people, because they don’t have the lived experience to think along those lines. So it would actually be super useful if someone could say “okay, but what about wheelchair users?” in a constructive way, because there are additional considerations re: pedestrianisation and public transport. Disabled people are way too often treated like an inconvenience or obstacles to progress, and that’s fucking exhausting, so it’s useful to have allies who ask “hey, what about disabled people tho”

The people your comment is about don’t do this. As you highlight, they make things about themselves, and if anything, this makes it harder to have productive conversations about what a ‘walkable city’ for everyone would look like. I suspect that for many of these people, it’s based on a nugget of good intentions inside a blob of insecurity and dread at the state of the world; they feel like they’re not doing enough so they resort to very loudly virtue signalling in the most bizarre ways.

I’m also sick of it, but I also sort of like how it’s gone viral. I had a very non-techy friend mention it to me the other day. I feel like most of the people who I see talking about it are jazzed because it makes them feel seen. My friend, for example, said to me that before she learned of “enshittification”, she felt like she was going mad because of how things don’t seem to work like they used to, especially in tech; she said that for the longest time, she had assumed it must be something that she was doing wrong.

Being all like “I fucking love science” whilst perpetuating ignorance of what science actually is like

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

Same.

I used to really hate pink because boo, pink is girly. I’m really enjoying having grown out of that and now being in my pink-appreciating era

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.