So, in the fine tradition of using bananas for scale…
Bananas are slightly more radioactive than the background, due to potassium-40 content. So an informal unit of radiation measure in educational settings is the ‘banana-equivalent-dose’, which is about 0.1 microsieverts.
My particle spectrometer saw first light today, and I figure that I could use a banana to calibrate it. Then I noticed that K-40 undergoes a rare (0.001%) decay to 40Ar, emitting a positron. So not only is a banana a decent around-the-house radioisotope source, it’s also an antimatter source.
Truly a remarkable and versatile fruit.
This is some seriously dangerous information to be feeding me bro.
Now… to find magnets able to contain the antimatter…
Bananas are not typically very high on the danger scale except in exotic (and universally embarrassing) circumstances.
In fact, that’s another thing we could use bananas for scale with. Probably driving to work is equivalent to several kilobananas worth of danger daily :)
Anyway, I think the positron should be about 44keV if that helps you calibrate your magnets. The typical banana should produce something on the order of a positron every 10 seconds (although I used much rounding for the sake of brevity). Most commercial positron sources e.g. used in hospital PET scanners, are many times stronger than that!
A couple of weeks ago my wife and I got jiggy for the first time in five years. After our third kid she just went completely off it and we’ve been in a dead bedroom situation ever since, she told me how she felt and despite my frustration I understood and respected her wishes. A couple of weeks ago I just opened up about how I was feeling unloved and then blam! It happened out of nowhere. I was in a daze and couldn’t believe it. Now I’m scared it’s going to be five years before it happens again.
I learned recently how the James Webb Space Telescope is not orbiting around Earth but literally orbiting around an empty point in space. I don’t think I even quite understand it, but it’s really cool
For everyone who immediately thinks ‘it’s most likely orbiting a point within the earth,’ here’s a diagram to help:
Have no idea how this works… there is no gravitational pull at the L2 point, it’s just an empty point in space 🤨.
There is gravitational pull, from both the Earth and the Sun. The JWST is orbiting the “earth-sun system” if you will.
Yeah but it’s not at the L2 point, it’s spinning in a circle around L2.
Yes, my point exactly. There is no mass at the L2 point, so how can it spin around it.
Others explained it though, it makes sense now 👍.
PS: What are enbies 🤨?
A Lagrange point or whatever?
Now I got that ZZ Top intro ear-worm…
Maybe not nobody but most…
The freedom and control and depth and enjoyment in using Linux. I know, I know, shut up I’m answering the question.
There was a question here recently about partitioning, and that got me thinking about inodes and really wanting to understand how data storage works. I went on a deep dive and learnt so much. I feel like I have a real deep understanding of how my system works now.
People don’t understand how wonderful it is to have mastery over things. Most people are just consumers of a thing. I do my own motorbike and car maintenance, and I know where my limits are in terms of skill and equipment. It’s so satisfying, it brings a sense of joy and accomplishment to my life.
I’m baffled that people just… don’t do this kind of thing. Don’t learn about metabolic pathways or companion planting or do careful research and just impulse buy… Like… Life must suck for them. It must be so dam boring to live life like that.
So yeah, I don’t think many people understand that.
Yeah. My appreciation for Linux has recently grown a lot. It just seems like the Web and tech companies really are going to shit.
I’m old enough that being free from ads and spying is far more important to me then anything windows can offer.
People don’t understand how wonderful it is to have mastery over things.
I have so many areas of my life that I think in terms of a skill, one of which is Linux, which I’m using now. Another is coffee/espresso, cycling, writing, etc.
Basically all hobbies. But the point is that I can develop mastery at my own pace in so many different areas. Sometimes, it’s slow and methodical, like coffee: I’ll try something new maybe every weeks. And sometimes it’s breakneck speed, like Linux…just do a deep dive and come out knowing a bunch of new stuff.
I fucking love being alive.
For me, it’s homebrewing. I think this can keep my interest long enough to get through winter depression. That’s good enough.
Eh, time and effort is limited depending on what the matter at hand is. Sometimes, you are required to just impulse buy or not live at all.
… And yet, I know exactly what you mean. There’s a class of people who just live with a phone for nearly everything they do 14 hours of their daily life, day in day out, 12 months a year. No rest whatsoever. And yet, the moment they find any resistance anywhere in their life, not even on something related to the phone, they just. dont. google. They literally refuse to help themselves and will just do what they know and refuse to do or even concern themselves with better.
I’ve seen a 20-year-old who, when asked to give in their homework on Moodle, like normal people do, instead… wrote everything on a Mac’s Notes app, took a photo and then pestered people for the teacher’s phone number so they could send the shitty photo of their homework on a very popular chat application. When told that this was not going to count, they just shrugged and stopped caring. Again, they used technology daily. That was objectively the stupidest and laziest “functional” person I’ve ever met, a true sheep, and I fear ever becoming like them during onset of dementia.
I’m the kinda guy who’s aware of how cool Linux and system mastery can be, but also the kinda guy who’s too lazy to care enough about maintaining a dual boot Linux/Windows system so every other year I’ll install a new Linux distro I haven’t used before only to do nothing with it and delete that partition of my hard drive within a month.
Last week I installed Ubuntu!
There’s a part of me that really wants something to take over my body or replace myself with an entirely different person who does all of the things I struggle with. Even if it wasn’t a person, if it did work and made my family and friends proud then I could stop struggling.
Oof.
I feel this all to well.
I highly recommend reading https://www.strugglecare.com/book .
It’s not self-help. It’s not going to “fix” you.
But reading it was some of the best therapy I’ve ever received. If you’re at all like me, maybe it will help you too. I am happier, as are the people I love and who love me, in large part because of K.C. Davis’ philosophy. (The people I love and who love me are also very empathetic and understanding, which I know is definitely not true for most people unfortunately).
It’s less than $20.
It’s short.
Buy it. If you can’t afford it, I might even be willing to buy it for you / venmo you $20 to get it.
Also available in your library / Libby.
Also available as an audiobook.
if it did work and made my family and friends proud then I could stop struggling.
Why can’t they be proud that you are happy? Why do you need them to be proud of you? It sounds like they are projecting their desires/dreams on to you. You could be honest with them and tell them you aren’t happy trying to make them proud the way they want. You want them to be proud of you for being you. Or you could ghost your family and friends who sound like they want you to be someone you don’t want to be.
How it feels to never have had anyone in my life that I could just randomly call up and talk about happy and sad things with.
If you’re really set out on doing this I’d gladly make the call
Converting a high resolution photo scanner into a large format digital camera
There’s a lot that goes into it and I’m still fairly early in the process but it is possible and has been done before
I already have some lenses that will cover the whole scanner bed, it’s mostly a question of power at this point
only thing i don’t understand about it is why are you dong this
Perhaps a huge sensor like that is good for night/astrophotography
Not so much really, it would be more capable for like landscapes and architecture due to the time frame it’d take pictures in
so you’re really trading long exposure time + large size for extremely high resolution, that’s pretty cool actually
Please do update us on your progress! This is really fascinating
Once I finish it I’ll be sharing information about it and pictures it takes on multiple photography groups across Lemmy
Will that not just result in a terrible camera…? O.o
Surprisingly no
Such scanners can scan at incredibly high resolution
Hundreds of Megapixels in fact
The main thing the time it takes to scan the image is quite high, like 30 seconds or do
Edit: Here’s an example photo from someone who did what I’m talking about.
My mental health
Cybersecurity, as a profession, is a fool’s errand.
Dedicated security staff exist solely to teach real engineers how to do their job, and the fact that such personnel exist is a catastrophic failure in computer science curriculum
It often seems cyber sec staff write reports on what should be done with no understanding of why and this leads to them fretting over things that are not actual vulnerabilities.
200 vulnerabilities, 2-3 that might actually be exploitable, and no prioritization. But look at these metrics!
My PhD thesis
This is actually something that people are intended to understand by design.
Something I’ve been thinking about is… I often mention that I’ve been trying to look for more friends for a while, because I don’t have any that my mind would qualify as any that I have access to, and I often get two questions, 1) how do I define a friend, and 2) how do I know friends would make me happy.
The first question is a rabbit hole in disguise. Most people, when asked, would list a bunch of benefits, right? Things like “someone I can trust” and “someone who puts me first”. But that’s the thing. Take the first question for example. Do you not have any enemies you might consider at least honest people? And do you not have friends whom might inspire some skepticism? They’re not absolute. So that begs the question, what do I answer to the question of what a friend is? I do in fact have an answer, but it’s goes deeper than words, the same words used to answer the question. It defeats itself in ways that swell the question rather than remedy it.
As for the second question, that’s where it becomes like anhedonia embodied by words.
I thought about this stuff a lot for years. The thing that broke me out of it was choosing to focus on myself.
No one else can make you happy. Happiness comes from within. So focus on yourself. Develop new skills and hobbies, spend your time doing what you enjoy. If you find other people who enjoy the same things, that’s great, if not, also great because there’s nothing wrong with enjoying life on your own.
I’ve heard that many times before, that happiness comes from within. I think about it though, and it gives me a little doubt because, if I was my own source of happiness, why do anything? I could starve to death and be happy because it’s within me.
I swear some people legitimately could do that. Some people really are high on life. But most of us aren’t.
The happiness from within thing is just a cheesy way of saying you have to make yourself happy. If the phrase isn’t useful to you, you don’t have to use it. It would be a lot more realistic to say “Happiness comes from putting in the effort and work to make yourself happy, primarily through delayed gratification.”
You can definitely count on me to keep negotiating with the universe on achieving happiness, but don’t count on me succeeding. That much I learned by now.
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I’ve been dealing with this back pain under my right shoulder blade for like 6 years or so and I can’t seem to figure out what’s causing it or how to treat it. I think it’s called “rhomboid pain”. I’ve seen a doctor once and physical therapist twice and the best they can do is recommend I stretch and go get a massage. Yeah thanks guys. Totally haven’t tried any of that.
I’ve always had a bad posture but it’s been getting better yet the pain has gotten worse so I don’t think it’s that. I doubt it’s weight lifting either because I had been lifting for almost 10 years before the pain appeared and taking a break doesn’t make it better and lifting heavy doesn’t make it worse. I don’t think it’s mountain biking either because the pain started before I bought my bike. I also got a new bed, tried different pillows, tried sleeping on my back, pillow under my knees. Sleeping on both sides with a pillow between my legs. Nothing. Also it’s rarely bad in the mornings but rather on the evenings.
Well - it’s still early to say, but I have a new idea what might be causing it and I think this might actually be it. I think it’s because I switched from a desktop computer to laptop. It perfectly correlates with the time I started experiencing this pain. I now sit for hours and hours every day with my right hand extended to reach the trackpad. It has to be that. I now switched to mouse and a keyboard and let’s see if that makes a difference. Only been doing that for few days now but I have zero pain right now.
I have had chest discomfort for decades. I’m 46 and it started when I was about 25. Doctors never found anything. I’m lucky to have good benefits and have been going to masseuses for over 10 years.
A couple of years ago tried a new masseuse mentioned the tightness and she found a huge lump of scar tissue she massaged out. I’m still not perfect but I’m light-years better.
My point is, get a massage and never give up. You just need to find the right person to find it.
Do you keep your wallet in your back pocket when sitting?
Nope. Thanks though.
I hope the new keyboard and mouse do the trick! I also was experiencing wrist/arm/shoulder pain after I started working primarily on a laptop. I got a split keyboard that i can angle in a more ergonomic manner, and that single change cleared my pain up. Repetitive stress injuries suck. and I hope you find relief with your new work setup.
It probably doesn’t help that I’m also literally sitting in front of my dining table on a shitty chair, but it’s not like I had some super ergonomic computer station before either. I really hope this helps because otherwise I’m out of ideas.
I would definitely suggest getting a good chair. Being able to adjust the height and stuff is really important, especiallyfor shoulder pain. Take a look at used gaming chairs and/or keep an eye out for recently discontinued models at brick-and-mortar office supply stores (mine was super cheap because they only had the floor model left).
rhomboid pain
I had this from having my shoulders curled in while working as well as sleeping on my side. I was picking fruit which requires lots of reaching. Try to be aware of keeping your shoulders square and get a friend to jam their elbow in there and grind it out.
Yeah I’m a side sleeper aswell and my bad posture includes shoulders curled in. I’ve been meaning to get one of those elastic things that’s supposed to pull my shoulders back. It’s interesting when sitting against a backrest or using a foam roller my shoulder blades don’t feel symmetrical. Like the right one is sticking out more.
I want to be able to offer exclusively vegan dishes at Bancho Sushi, but dishes that involve the rape and murder of sentient shrimp are bigger money makers.
