#the power of science #I sure am having emotions about this video but they’re mostly not the intended emotions #let me see if I can convey the emotions in words: #the world that was big enough to contain science museums was an illusion #built atop the sand in an hourglass #I was one of those cheering kids once (not this exact group‚ not this exact demo‚ but the general area of concept-space) #and then I grew up and realised just how much had been stolen from my future to build that happy present #in the end‚ there are only two kinds of people: those who are independently wealthy‚ and those who are not #my parents failed to treat their dependency on my father’s career as the emergency it was #(they even failed to treat the *absence* of my father’s career as the emergency it most certainly was) #they could have been *fine* #*we could all have been fine* #if they’d *prioritised* correctly #but they didn’t‚ and now I’m going to spend the rest of my life cleaning up after their mistakes #Mom had the fucking gall recently to say ”I’m glad things didn’t get bad until you guys were old enough to understand” #what the fuck do you even say to someone who has missed the point that completely #the only good thing to be said about it is that I know‚ firsthand‚ the better world that might one day come to be #it has never yet existed‚ not truly #but it might‚ someday #tag rambles #venting cw #adventures in human capitalism #my childhood
Europa & Io passing over Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, shot from space probe Cassini.
for everyone asking if this is real footage: yeah!
It is an extremely accelerated timelapse made by Kevin Gill, the movement here is more a matter of Cassini whipping past Jupiter at astounding speeds than the motion of the moons, which is why there’s such a large parallax shift, but it’s actual images taken during the Cassini flyby. They did another one of Titan orbiting Saturn, you can see that at the end of this video. [Flickr link]
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#space #the power of science #proud citizen of The Future
see we need to get back to our roots of shooting something so hard you change its genetics
We literally just learned this in my class about phytoremediation yesterday and it made me laugh so hard because the professor was like “downfalls include tissue damage and sometimes killing the organism”
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#genetics #biology #the power of science #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #death tw?
A fun curse you get when you spend long enough looking at consumer electronics is automatically figuring out roughly how much power something uses. This is useful sometimes: if you know your laptop sucks down about 8 watts while browsing the web, and you have a 40 watt hour battery, you know you have about 5 hours of battery life. If you know that you only have 50 kilowatt hours left in your prepaid electricity meter, you can estimate whether you need to buy more now or if you can let it slide until tomorrow, by tallying up everything that’s running.
It also makes you develop strange opinions and heuristics. This electric heater pulls 2000W which means it costs about ZAR 2 per hour to run. All the stuff plugged into my desk runs an estimated 150-200W depending on how much computing I’m doing, so that’s ten times less than that. My lights are 4×5W or 20W so that’s ten times less than that. If I decide that, to account for my convenience, I should turn off my lights if I’m leaving the room for more than 10 minutes, I should sleep my computer if I’m leaving the room for more than 1 minute. This is of course, nonsense, the convenience factor here is not fixed, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think about it every time I turn off my lights but leave my PC on.
If you happen to know that the rated power for a single wall plug (in South Africa) is about 3700W, then you also start to see danger where most people do not. Most people learn that the dangerous thing about power strips is that you can plug in too many items and that’s mysteriously dangerous somehow, but the REAL danger with power strips is that they put the full load of everything plugged into them onto a single wall plug. Daisy-chained power strips with 40 cellphone chargers plugged in is relatively safe. A power strip with two electric heaters plugged in is a recipe for disaster, and will pull excessive current in basically any house on earth. That’s how you get house fires.
(Note: in the USA your plugs are rated at only 1875W per plug (or maybe 2500W, depends on the plug), so many appliances such as hair-dryers, heaters and other high-power devices are only safe to use if they are the ONLY item on a wall plug. Multiple-slot extension cords have a much higher risk of exceeding minimum safe levels in this situation compared to countries with higher voltage wall power.)
If you ever find yourself wandering aimlessly through the appliances aisle of your home goods store, muttering about rated versus nominal current and trying to estimate how long per day you actually /run/ a blender and really how many days a year do you use it anyways, is it worth springing for the more efficient one? I’m sorry to say there’s nothing we can do to help you.
Technology Connections at it again with informative videos about my debilitating obsessions.
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#are you telling me other people *don’t* wander around hardware stores muttering about whether to spring for the more efficient appliance? #adventures in human capitalism #the more you know #the power of science #domesticity #fun with loopholes
you’d think they would have been able to get more than 50 undergraduates to do. it doesn’t take a long time and requires answering no surveys
Also, psych researchers have a reputation for lying their asses off to the subjects regarding [what a study is actually about] until after it’s over. I would seriously consider pressing the button once or twice just to see if they were telling the truth about it being a shock button.
(Not sure if I’d *do* it, but I’d seriously consider it, and I would definitely wonder if it was some sort of covert test that I was failing by not pressing it.)
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#the first draft of this post only had commentary in the form of the tags #”basically what shacklesburst said” #”I’m not comfortable with the gender-focused framing here but I’m reblogging for Electroshocks Georg” #but–while I’m still primarily reblogging for Electroshocks Georg–I realised I did in fact have something to say #reply via reblog #the power of science #sexism cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #Spiders Georg
Brinens and Things 