A more standard definition in my tenure in academia is that scientists solve problems because they want to know the answer. Engineers solve problems because they want the problem to be solved.

In any case, the difference is just, heh, academic.

I’m very much the latter.

Agreed.

I might also argue that those people are all still engineers.

Engineer just means “problem solver”. Everyone gets paid for solving problems.

The real question in my head is how far does this go?

Sometimes the problem is that these burgers need flipping. Protein disk translocation engineers? I’m cool with that.

I always thought about going to be a farmer. Then I watched some videos from farmers and realized they are also engineers.

A large faction of engineers, especially software-type engineers, have these types of hobbies.

I’m sitting here right beside the heirloom quality (compared to most furniture) coffee table I made in my garage with my nearly complete wood shop.

I make stuff in two ways in my day job. I design something and someone else makes it, or it’s just some idea as software.

Engineers are a type. We’re just wired differently from most other people.

Lemmy is so toxic. Why down vote this?

Bobcats and house cats are obligate carnivores. Even if people doubt that you actually ate bobcat, I pretty much guarantee that it would be gross.

Outside of fish, where there are additional trophic levels, there are two reasons that we don’t eat carnivores.

First, there are fewer carnivores. The common figure is that in nature if you want 1 pound of animal, you need 10 pounds of animal food (I’m simplifying). So 100 pounds of herbivore food makes 10 pounds of herbivore which makes 1 pound of carnivore. And if you want to farm an animal it can’t be competing with you for food. It needs to, in general, eat stuff you don’t want to eat. Like grass or table scraps or bugs. We can eat herbivore meat. We love it so much that whenever we showed up, we ate everything to extinction.

Cats are separate. They kinda domesticated themselves because when we started storing grain lots of rodents showed up. They just ate them, doing both of us a favor.

Second, they taste nasty. We’ve got poultry. They eat “bugs” those are more like the plankton type trophic level. When they can catch things like snakes or mice, they go absolutely nuts, but they do so more rarely than obligate carnivores.

Then, there’s pigs. They have a similar enough diet as poultry, but we do feed them meat scraps. I can guess about why this is, but I can’t be as confident as I am about my other statements.

Finally, humans are alleged to taste like pig. Maybe that’s it.

Ah. Yes. That’s the easy way to do it.

💯🐴🔋(umm, staple)

I disagree. This is fear mongering.

I’ve spilled a lot more than this on me and didn’t even report it. I’m pretty sure they would have laughed at me if I did.

My dad just got diagnosed with cancer. He had a pet scan, got about 600 MBq of tracer injected, then proceeded to sleep next to my mother and piss that radiation all over the place.

That is much worse than this, and it’s just not a problem.

Radiation units are difficult. Especially so because Sievert is used in SI for several different concepts (that really don’t belong in the SI, imo).

I can’t really explain this to you simply. There’s probably some YouTube videos that are good, but you really need a sophisticated understanding of modern physics and lots of engineering principles.

I’ll be brief, but I just can’t explain this stuff in a text post and I’m not used to not explaining it to people who don’t already have detailed knowledge.

Bq and Curie are units of activity. That’s how many times you measure a decay per second.

Roentgens is a unit of exposure. That’s about how much the radiation is charging up a unit of air. You recognize this from the Chernobyl series (which is extremely good and at least accurate in the physics).

Absorbed dose is the cumulative energy deposited. This is Gray in SI. That’s the unit of measure you use when you prescribe someone radiation therapy.

Then there’s equivalent and effective dose. Those depend on various ways about where the radiation goes and what kind of radiation it is. You can irradiate your hands a lot without problems. It’s different for your colon or brainstem.

That is completely out of scope to this.

Ionizing radiation is dangerous in large amounts, but this is not a large amount. I’m not even sure how they got their 4 Bq/cm2 number. You’re way more radioactive than that on your own.

The dosage makes the poison.

This is more like rubbing a banana on you.

Those incidences are people finding dangerous, improperly discarded sources and not knowing what they were.

The radiation levels in the two hospitalised men were at or above 4 becquerels per square centimetre, the threshold which is considered safe.

Honestly. This is journalistic malpractice.

A Becquerel (should be capitalized) is 1 decay per second. That isn’t really even detectable above background, and radiation is really, really easy to detect in minute quantities.

I have spilled vastly more than that on myself and didn’t even bother telling anyone.

A simple nuclear medicine scan uses something like 500 MBq.

This is at the level of rubbing yourself with a banana.

Can we just not turn this into world war 3?

Please?

What’s even the point? Just trade with your neighbors and don’t fight with them.

Oh yeah, and you know the justification for indigenous peoples being granted their land back because their ancestors used to live there, and they were removed?

That’s the exact same situation for Israel. The Jews used to live in Israel until they were kicked out.

Let that complicate your morality.

Also please remember that Europe purchased nearly the entirety of products produced by slaves in the Americas.

If there were no European market there would have been little incentive for American slavery.

I guess the slave free northern states also purchased their fair share, but nothing compared to Europe.

This is an extremely interesting and well written paper with a lot of complex points to unpack.

I’m really happy the bot shared it with me.

Part of the fact is that this is not necessarily a bad thing. These are life extending substances and ones that can greatly improve quality of life.

Once you are old enough to bear children and raise them to self sufficiency, evolution has very little incentive to keep you around. For long term human evolution, the 25 years number seems about right.

In any case, my depression, left untreated, is terminal. I’ve been on these pills since I was 15 or so. 25 years.

I’ll take them until I die because if I don’t, I will die.

A simple distro, like one for a raspberry pi, is also helpful.

Yup. That’s the one. Suggested earlier.

Very suicidal behavior, but a different way to die than, well, downing while clawing at the solid rock above you.

I know a lot about scuba, and that’s why I’m not going into caves again.

AI is not a meaningful term.

If you ask people if a piece of software that never loses at tic tac toe is AI, most will say yes. Everyone I’ve asked that didn’t already know why I was asking said yes.

I cannot separate that piece of software from any piece of software.

I’ve literally had this conversation with the marketing department. It’s marketing. Tell me what you want to say is AI, and I’ll give you a justification.

“Dave not coming back”. Those people are ridiculously suicidal. Watch it and contact me later. It’s absolutely insane if you understand what they were actually doing. They don’t do a good enough job explaining that.

“The last breath” that’s on Netflix. Not quite the same. Terrifying nonetheless.

I’ve actually been scuba diving in a cave (well, cavern according to the standard diving definition). Far enough, though, that I couldn’t get back to air without someone sharing theirs with me.

There’s also some good, terrifying documentaries that I can recommend.

But yeah, I’m not going in a cave ever again. I will go under water and even get a decompression obligation again, but nothing but the largest, safest carves ever again.

I’m too old for this shit.