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Cake day: July 27th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • good question.

    Because even trivial things like Fourier transforms (to people like me) are very difficult to understand to those that don’t know them. They took me years to understand. Non scientific software engineers do not understand those. It’s just a different course of education.

    You’re also right about old code base as well. Algorithms like these belong in c++ (or C or fortran), and it’s extremely difficult to explain why to people who have no understanding of numerical computing.

    It’s just different education.