For the uninitiated

TIL fascists are boggarts from Harry Potter

Beehaw had been around for a few years before lemmy.world launched. They have a specific sort of space they want to create, so good for them for being able to maintain it.

The yield is small enough that it isn’t a threat to the soldiers launching it. Still, I wouldn’t want to be the one tasked with firing it.

Red delicious is an abomination that should be cleansed from the earth with fire. That variety’s sole purpose is to be used as a projectile to hurl at people who try to sell you red delicious apples.

Sugarbee apples are my current favorite.

As annoying as it is to lug a bag around and find room for it, I much prefer this to checking it. There’s the small but nonzero chance your bag doesn’t make it to your destination, plus the added time waiting at baggage return.

God forbid they elect Mark Robinson as governor, then you have state level oppression again.

At an event in Greenville, Robinson said people who “are confused” about their gender should “find a corner outside somewhere to go” to the bathroom.

I lived in Chapel Hill during the 2016 election. The one silver lining to that Election Day was voting Pat McCrory out of office after his own bathroom bill nonsense.

It still is a blurry orange ball, where the orange is the location of radio wave emission. The team did a new image where they measured the polarization of the light, which is the result of strong magnetic fields where the light was emitted. The lines are drawn over the image to depict the polarization orientation of the light as a function of location.

I want to be clear that this is an incredible feat, both the fact that they can produce an image of a black hole from the center of our galaxy AND determine the polarization of the light. But they don’t have a super crisp image of matter swirling into a black hole.

These are strange times for the Berry Club. Strange times…

I’m guessing they signed up for HP Instant Ink, a monthly subscription service that monitors the ink levels in the printer and automatically mails you refills.

If you buy an HP printer, they HEAVILY promote this and offer discounts/free trials. I declined, because fuck that, but I could see someone agreeing and forgetting about it.

I will run this thing until it dies.

Good luck with that. My 2011 MacBook Pro still works. I’m pretty sure it’ll outlive me.

Where did you hear that? CFCs can linger in the atmosphere for 50-100 years, so recovery is a slow process. It took more than a decade after the Montreal Protocol went into effect before the hole in the ozone layer stopped growing. Additionally, different parts of the ozone layer will recover at different rates:

If current policies remain in place, the ozone layer is expected to recover to 1980 values (before the appearance of the ozone hole) by around 2066 over the Antarctic, by 2045 over the Arctic and by 2040 for the rest of the world. Variations in the size of the Antarctic ozone hole, particularly between 2019 and 2021, were driven largely by meteorological conditions. Nevertheless, the Antarctic ozone hole has been slowly improving in area and depth since the year 2000.

Lots of doom and gloom in the comments here. As the article describes, the hole in the ozone layer varies in size over time. It is slowly recovering, but the annual variability means it sometimes is larger than before.

The variability of the size of the ozone hole is largely determined by the strength of a strong wind band that flows around the Antarctic area. This strong wind band is a direct consequence of Earth’s rotation and the strong temperature differences between polar and moderate latitudes.

If the band of wind is strong, it acts like a barrier: air masses between polar and temperate latitudes can no longer be exchanged. The air masses then remain isolated over the polar latitudes and cool down during the winter.

Although it may be too early to discuss the reasons behind the current ozone concentrations, some researchers speculate that this year’s unusual ozone patterns could be associated with the eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai in January 2022.

And

Claus concludes, “Based on the Montreal Protocol and the decrease of anthropogenic ozone-depleting substances, scientists currently predict that the global ozone layer will reach its normal state again by around 2050.”

Seek by iNaturalist

The app uses AI to identify the species of plants, animals, insects and fungi. In video mode you scan around something you want to ID as the AI narrows it down to the species. Then you can take a pic. The app keeps track of each unique species you’ve found (along with your photo of it). There’s also badges and achievements for identifying different numbers of species, if you want to gamify your nature sightseeing.

It’s basically real life Pokémon. Oh and it’s completely free.

With betavoltaics it’s more a matter of physics than lack of engineering refinement. Even assuming 100% efficiency, you would need something like 250 gallons (1000 liters) of tritium gas at atmospheric pressure to power a 100 Watt lightbulb.

Nuclear reactors, however, absolutely should be supplying a larger fraction of our electrical grid. Traditional, large reactor facilities have such a high cost and long timescale for permitting/construction that it’s difficult to get newer, more modern reactors built in the US. There are some exciting developments in small, modular reactors that would sidestep these issues. I believe a few designs are in the process of being built for full scale testing.

www.charitynavigator.org

If you’re interested in a particular charity organization, you can look them up on Charity Navigator. They pull information from the charity’s IRS filings as well as their website to rate various aspects. They give a breakdown of things like the fraction of funds spent on administrative costs, privacy policies, fundraising efficiency, etc.

They also provide the contact information and website for the charity. This way you know you’re donating to the actual charity and not a scammer impersonating them.

Betavoltaic devices are exactly what you’re describing. They convert beta radiation (energetic electrons) into electricity in the same way that photovoltaic cells (solar panels) convert photons into electricity. You can create a nuclear battery by putting some radioactive material that decays via beta emission in one of these.

The downside of these devices is that they generate very little power. It takes a dangerous amount of radioactive material to generate the power needed for say a phone or laptop. Commercial betavoltaic devices generate ~tens of microwatts. They’re useful if you need a low power battery somewhere that you don’t want to replace, like in a remote sensor.

Inertia, I guess?

I have another account on lemm.ee which is federated with both, but I’ve been using this as my main since I joined lemmy. I might have to check out how things are on the other side of the fence.

I actually cross-posted this post into Beehaw’s chat community, but thanks for the suggestion.

Ah, I guess I can’t see that from lemmy.world haha

Also, in an online forum at least, it is really hard to decipher intent so the actual content of the text matters a lot. so communicating criticisms without adding anything more than that just leads to the conversation not going anywhere.

That’s fair. I would hope that someone who has a genuine constructive criticism would be able to communicate it, but it might not hurt to have a rule reminding them to acknowledge and affirm the core concept before providing criticism. I can see how someone being a little curt and just voicing the criticism might come across as being anti- whatever the topic is.

PS: In a slightly unrelated question why did you decide to stay on lemmy.world since it seems like you might want to discuss with the Beehaw community as well?

When I joined lemmy I was looking for a general purpose instance - one where I could be a member in a variety of communities. At the time the largest communities actually tended to be on beehaw as they had been around much longer, but lemmy.world grew fast. By the time beehaw defederated with lemmy.world, it was clear that if I wanted to join a discussion on a recent news/politics/science article it would be best to choose a lemmy.world community as they were the most active.

No disrespect to the folks at beehaw, I may still make an alt account there. I appreciate what they’ve built, but it wasn’t the best fit for what I was looking to join. Ideally I’d be able to participate in their communities with this account, but I totally understand why they defederated with lemmy.world.

I agree with your general premise that safe spaces are necessary for allowing ideas to develop. I think they’re also necessary for giving people a place to simply exist without their existence being questioned or threatened.

However, I don’t know that I agree with your proposal to avoid echo chambers by encouraging “yes and”-style responses. The sort of person who accepts the core premise of these ideas and wants to improve them can probably already communicate their ideas/criticisms without violating the safe space.

A bad faith actor could always use “yes and” as a means to promote a slippery slope argument that seeks to invalidate the original idea. And there are certainly some ideas that would be dangerous to add on to.

A side note, if you’re interested in discussing how to create a supportive online space, you may want to check out beehaw.org if you haven’t already. They’re a lemmy instance that defederated with lemmy.world, but I believe they’re still federated with your instance. Before they defederated with us, I was able to read a series of lengthy posts by one of their admins describing their moderation philosophy- specifically how it evolved over the years as they tried to create a safe community in other sites and what they settled on for beehaw.org. It was really interesting, and their conclusion was that the only way to create a safe community was to proactively moderate, warning and banning users before they cross a line. Reactive moderation (removing/banning posts and users after they do something offensive) still allows for the negative post to impact the community before it’s removed. They also believe that having clearly defined rules doesn’t work since trolls just learn to work within them while still achieving their goals.

Their moderation style requires a lot of work to implement, but it definitely achieved the results they wanted. The beehaw communities were very friendly and users seemed more open with each other.