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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 27th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • 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.




  • 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.



  • 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.



  • 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.