it's not labeled but the orange things are mitochondria and the green things are chloroplasts

Depicted are a plant cell and an animal cell. The plant cell contains both mitochondria and chloroplasts, while the animal cell only contains mitochondria.

anyways there's a cute story about two fish in a pond that fits this image well

according to legend, according to myth, when religion was first invented, it was invented by two siblings who sat by a pond and watched what they saw in the water. the first sibling who was very energetic saw a fish in the lake, and upon seeing that beauty, they declared "aaaah, such a beautiful creature. we must make a religion out of it". that is why the symbol of christianity is a fish.

the other sibling who was more calm also watched the pond, but as they were more calm, they didn't immediately jump up when they saw the fish, instead they remained seated and continued to watch the pond. after a while, they recognized a second fish in the water. they recognized that one fish represented yang, the other who was darker and therefore more difficult to see represented yin, and together they represented opposites, but only together were they whole. from that insight, came the southeast-asian religions.

that's why in the western world there is a lot of hot-headed idiots who make a lot of noise about everything while the chinese are more calm and contemplate.

and in biology, the interpretation is that the bright, first fish is the mitochondria but the second, calmer fish is the chloroplasts, representing the consuming and nourishing elements of living beings, as they consume/produce sugar and therefore biological mass and life.

It is widely regarded that the early modern age was caused mostly by three factors: the invention of the printing press, the discovery and settlement of america by europeans, and general population growth to have larger workforce.

The thing is, the chinese invented the printing press (with movable letter) 400 years before the europeans did. In europe, the invention is famously attributed to Johannes Gutenberg around 1440 (source), while in China, around 1040 the commoner Bi Sheng already performed printing with movable letters. He created movable type from porcelain. (source). But because the chinese script was so complicated, picking the right letters each time was a chore and so the invention didn't have much impact. Had they used the latin alphabet, picking the right letters would have been significantly easier and they would probably have started the printing revolution instead of the europeans.

This article is a bit longer so it's divided in 3 parts:

• rant about current status
• historical overview
• new ideas from me

What do the terms "politically left" and "politically right" even mean? To many, they're a way of group-think; To give a name to people who see the world differently than oneself and to create a target of hate and opposition.

Politicians have tried to turn these terms into an "empty signified" (link), i.e. a word without inherent meaning. Such "empty signified"s are ways of talking without actually saying anything. Politicians and also managers of companies like to use it all the time, because these speeches often look good to a passer-by without having to come up with an actual policy decision or meaningful arguments. They avoid headaches for the listeners and are at the same time something that people can get behind emotionally, i.e. to many people, identifying as "politically left" is an emotionally important term, even in the absence of any meaningful definition.

In many cases, "politically left" is defined as "anybody who opposes the political right" and the political right, in turn, is defined as "anybody who wants to kill people based on their color of skin". According to my own field research, people who fit this definition of "politically right" are about as rare as six-legged unicorns on a rainy day in the desert. In other words, they practically don't exist, and even when they do, they're engineered examples that are artificially constructed to make attractive newspaper headlines to keep the people at each other's throats.

In this article, i want to forget everything about these stupid definitions and come up with new, natural, meaningful definitions.

I will first clarify the historical origins of the term "right" and later "left".

The term "(politically) right" seems to go back to the Romans who already had the word "dextera" to refer both to the right hand of the body and also to a "just, righteous" way of life. (Link)

It is noteworthy that the often-heard explanation that these terms go back to the french revolution is just false. According to that myth, it was about who sat on the left-hand or right-hand side of the president of the assembly hall. Surely these terms were used there, but they were not the origin, merely their modern re-interpretation. The terms themselves are much much older than that.

The term "(politically) left" goes back to Latin as well, as the word "sinister" could refer to both the left hand of the body but also to a wicked, sinful character. (Link)

Now, what might a meaningful, natural interpretation of these words mean?

Let's use biology to start from something natural:

As you can see, the liver is on the right-hand side (of the human; you look at that human from the front so everything's mirrored). The liver is one of the hardest-working metabolic organs of the body, which means it does a lot of processes and transformations to convert input substances into output substances.

I think it is meaningful to compare that to labor in human society. Notice the similarity of words. This is evident when you speak the two words "liver" and "labor" out aloud often enough; It's even more evident in german where the liver is called "Leber".

While labor transforms some input products into output products in some capitalist factory, the liver does the same in the human body. So there is a natural analogy there.

I propose to define the political "right" as a group or movement that dictates that people should work, in other words that we should be a work-based society. Typical proponents of that group are capitalist stakeholders who want to see their stock valuations go up; As companies are typically listed higher when they produce more output, a company will have a natural incentive to make the people in it work harder. That could mean doing more work per hour or working longer hours.

On the other hand, i propose to define the political "left" as work-less, in other terms, as people who think that our lifes shouldn't be dictated by constant laboring, and that we should be able to live even when we're not being productive elements of society. In other words, people who think that it's not the point of living to be constantly hustling, but who enjoy their leisure, their time off. And who think that working hours should be reduced, and that work should be paced at a more relaxed, comfortable rhythm.

So, i want to tell you about a dream that i have had many times in a row now.

It is called "Der Flug der Schwalbe" (the flight of a bird)

It discusses why space settlement is not just a pointless human endeavor but much more profound than that.

Imagine you are standing in a forest and next to you is some really old tree that speaks to you: "Oh, i can throw my seeds but no matter how far i throw them, there's no point because all the land is taken and we've reached our potential [Note: carrying capacity]. Just like a wolf would eat my fruit and shit it out somewhere very far away^1,2^, just like a bird can carry it through the air to remote islands^3^, it is the destiny of humans to carry seed to remote worlds^4^." In fact plants pay us to do so, in the form of incentive in the form of food. Plants pay us to carry their seed to remote places, that is literally the evolutionary reason why plants produce (edible) fruit in the first place. We are workers that fulfill the role of transporting seeds through space, for which we get rewarded from plants with calories. That is the evolutionary role of animals.^5^

[1]: Note: This is a fascinating concept. An animal's shit contains many minerals (phosphorous, sulfur, ...) that plants need to grow properly. So many plants make fruit that is eaten by animals sothat the seeds inside the fruit are swallowed as well and pass through the digestive tract, often without being digested themselves, to end up in a pile of shit, which makes them grow better than if they fall on dirt.

[2]: Note also that (most) animals can move through space (which is an important property they have). Which implies a plant can move its seeds through space inside the digestive tract of an animal by incentivizing the animal to eat the seed. For example by adding sugar and other delicious stuff around the seed. As is done in fruit.

[3]: Note: The implicit assumption here is that remote islands are sparsely populated, so if a seed falls on them, it is more likely to grow as it has less competition from other vegetation. At least that's the assumption; I don't guarantee its veracity.

[4}: Planets.

[5]: Exceptions apply. For example, cows eat grass, which is not a fruit. They do so with the help of symbiotic bacteria which are able to transform cellulose into calorie-rich protein.

Hello everyone! I hope you are having a good day, anyways your day is going to get even better because you have the honor to learn about the Wheat Seed Problem today.

It is a mathematical riddle from stochastics (statistics) which asks the question "what is the likelyhood of a wheat population to ever go extinct?"

Let me introduce the basics: You are a farmer and start out with a single wheat seed. When you plant a seed into the ground, it grows into a wheat plant, which you can harvest. Harvest gives you anything from 0 to 3 (inclusive) new wheat seeds, which you can then plant again next year.

Let me show you an illustration:

(Icons from Mineclonia, https://codeberg.org/mineclonia/mineclonia)

Obviously, when you run out of seeds, you have nothing to replant the next year; The population goes extinct and the game is over.

The question is: What is the likelyhood of that never happening? In other words, what is the likelyhood that you can continue to plant seeds year after year, until infinity?

The probability for each plant (when harvested) are: 25% that it gives you 0, 1, 2, or 3 seeds each. That means that on average, you get 1.5 new seeds per plant, so you get more than you invested. This means that the average size of your population goes up with time.

However, whenever the population reaches 0 seeds in total at any one year, then the game is lost.

What is the chance that you can continue to plant new plants each year indefinitely?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/35051103

Most trees grow up to their mature size and then stay that size, or at least greatly reduce their rate of growth so as to only compensate for damaged parts that need replacing; like (most?) animals, they don't continue to grow larger and larger until they die.

But what if mangosteen is different?

Mangosteen trees are slow. Notoriously slow. They are also extremely delicate. Yet I've heard of a 200-year-old tree in the Philippines that was at least 20 metres wide. Could it be that mangosteen trees simply never stop growing, as most of them don't survive long enough for it to become an issue? Or is it that people who plant mangosteen trees never see them reach maturity (due to either the tree or the grower dying before then)? If the latter is the case, then it makes sense what they say: You don't plant a mangosteen tree for yourself; you plant it for your grandchildren.

Just a train of thought that I had recently.

We are so damn diverse with hidden strengths -- even neurotypicals -- like life in a forest, with the potential to empower each other. Life came from the damn stars, and evolved into all these weird things, and we are here part of it for maximum of a bit over 100 years like this. Yet ~11,100 generations of "us" have existed before us and more will most certainly come, and if not as humans, life will probably continue anyway.

What's really mind-blowing for me is what I learned on my quest to understand why people do the most horrendous things. And we see that a big part is Dark Traits, which is documented to be very prevalent among the most powerful people.

Psychopathy, for example, can be genetic and according to recent studies even exists in cats.
It's an evolutionary thing to survive (of course can be developed during life as well). And as it became less useful of a set of traits for cats to survive, it receded in prevalence.

So, 1. If I was a primary psychopath and didn't really feel any emotional empathy, shame, or guilt, it would be a lot harder not to serious harm other living things over the course of my life, than if I had strong emotions here.

Which means, 2. it can be rooted-out over time, by shaping the world to make compassion more desirable/effective for anyone's self-interest of survival and essential needs. And if humans are more compassionate such a massive part of the suffering and injustice would go away.

And this, I think, is beautiful.

Even with this, I feel it's important to say, to still be wary of some people. Even if you see a good side or core in them, they might not be able to connect to it, or stay connected, but put on a mask to act as though you moved them, to later exploit you.

I made this drawing:

The brown things (labeled R and L) are bones. They're hard and protect the vital organs in the tummy (labeled F) which are soft and would break easily.

That's kinda how human society (through its architecture and infrastructure) is supposed to keep us squishy humans safe

Let’s see if I got the gist of this community right.

(And yes I did eat at All’antico Vinaio and wanted it again.)

The bread they use is schiacciata. It’s like focaccia but not - different hydration and made with something called a “poolish”, where you take a certain amount of yeast/flour/water and let it ferment for an extended period of time (multiple hours/overnight) then add more water/flour and let it it proof again. Because the hydration is so high, it is sticky as hell, so be careful when working with it.

The cheeses, obviously, are not just regular sliced cheese. What they frequently use is stracciatella, which is mozzarella mixed with cream and cooked. It’s the center for burrata. But there’s also a “cheese cream” like “pecorino cream” which seems to be a mornay sauce (aka grated/shredded cheese + bechamel (roux + milk)). Looks to be a way to make sure cheese doesn’t go to waste, makes it go further, and is spreadable. (And hecking delicious)

Finally there are other creams like pistachio cream, which is finely chopped pistachios mixed with Parmesan or Pecorino Romano and Olive oil (and maybe some lemon). It’s delicious and entirely different from what I as an American use as sandwich condiments.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/32957140

I thought of this after reading the first example in the comm sidebar.

In elementary Microwave Math (the subset most people learn during the normal operation of a consumer microwave), there are two places, the seconds place and the minutes place. The seconds place is constrained to [00 - 99] inclusive for one hundred total possible values in that place. The minutes place can be constrained to the same set of symbols, in which case Microwave Math is simply a base one hundred numeral system operating in a base sixty place value system, leading to the mildly humorous situation of having two ways to represent the same numerical value, e.g. 01:20 = 00:80. Some microwaves may have an hours place, or different constraints on the possible values of the minutes place, for which we'll need...

Advanced Microwave Math! This introduces the concept of nested place value systems. Most of us are so used to place value numbering systems that we hardly notice how often we use them, but most numbering systems follow an implicit rule that the number of symbols is the same as the value of moving up a "place". This makes sense for counting because you don't need to move up a place until you run out of symbols, so you may as well make the value of the next place the next number you need to represent. Numeral systems don't have to follow this rule, and Advanced Microwave Math breaks it.

The simplest case is where the minutes place is bounded to the set of all non-negative integers. In this value system there are two places, each with their own rules governing which symbols are allowed and what values they can represent. the seconds place is constrained in value to 00 - 99 (decimal, or DEC), and has a place value of one. The minutes place might be constrained to [00 - 99DEC], [000 - 999DEC], or it might be that the minutes place can contain any non-negative integer.

After that, we come to the hours place, which functions more or less the same way as the minutes place, in that it can have various constraints on what values can be used, but it still has the same place value relationship to the minutes place of sixty that minutes has to seconds. This changes with the introduction of the days place, which has a value of 24DECxhours instead of 60DEC.

Expanding this system into weeks and months and years introduces the idea that, though the system is generally presented one with positional notation (the value of place n is some [usually fixed] multiple of the value of place n+1). This isn't necessary for Microwave Math, if each place can be defined by an arbitrary multiple of the of a base value e.g. the years place could be defined as 31557600DEC seconds (the "Julian Year"). The only requirement is that instead of position dictating the multiplier, each place must have a unique symbol denoting which multiplier is being used by that place. By convention they are arranged from largest multiplier to least, but 3 years, 6 months, and 12 seconds can just as unambiguously be written as 12 seconds, 3 years, and 6 months and refer to the same amount of microwave time (c.f. the American middle-endian date representation, a similar rule-breaking place value system that, if we insist upon using it, could really benefit from some non-positional place value indicator).

The value multiplier for a place doesn't have to be an integer either. The introduction of leaps (day and second) and other vagaries of calculating means that we might prefer to use a "mean" value where a year might be some non-integer multiple of seconds, depending on which period of earth's history one is in. There's no reason the multiplier has to be an integer, or non-negative, or real, or rational, or continuous or differentiable or have any particular reference to any other place. In addition, each place has its own rules about what values can be in it, and those rules may mean that each place can have infinitely many symbols representing infinitely many values.

The inner place value systems can themselves be a simple positional place value system like decimal, or they can themselves use Microwave Math, meaning that place value systems in Microwave Math can nest infinitely. I'm not sure what kind of number that is but Microwave Math has some crazy implications to it.

Technically, there's only two sources of energy in the universe: nuclear energy and the expansion of the cosmos.

Like, solar is fusion, ofc, the light coming from the sun. So is wind and water and bioenergy (indirectly). Geothermal is fission (heat comes from radioactive decay inside Earth).

But then there's another source of energy that nobody ever talks about: tidal power It works by converting the rise and fall of water with the tides into electrical energy. This energy ultimately comes from the moon orbiting around Earth, more precisely, its mechanical energy: The fact that the moon is distant from Earth is only because the universe expanded after the big bang. Had it not done this, the moon and earth would be located at the same location, and there would be no "orbiting" to extract energy out of :P

I wrote more about the subject of extracting (useful) energy out of cosmic expansion in this post here

In scientific literature there's generally two ways to cite someone:

• If you're writing a technical paper about something related to technology, you typically cite the paper in square brackets.[The Art of Citation; Johnson et al.; doi: 10.4208/jcm.1512-m2015-0242]
• If you're writing in sociology, you typically cite the author in round brackets. (Clarke 2013)

Nevermind the square/round brackets, my point is that in technology-related fields, typically the name of the paper is considered more important than the author. A paper can have many authors, and not always all are listed. Meanwhile in sociology, the author is considered more important than the name of the paper.

This reflects the main difference between Mastodon and Lemmy:

• Lemmy is content-centric, where you have communities (focused on a topic) as the central element of organization, and they can have posts.
• Mastodon is people-centric, where you have person/user as the central element of organization, and they can have posts.

This is why lemmy mostly appeals to people working in IT and tech, and that's why there's mostly nerds here.

Just to put things into proportion:

This is vienna. Vienna has an area of around 400 km².

And the blue area is the area that would have to be covered by solar panels to produce enough energy for the whole city:

Source: I did the maths myself. I assumed that per person around 30 MWh of energy/year are needed. Data for this: our world in data, energy usage per person. It's well known that 1 m² of solar panel produces around 200 Wp and that's 200 kWh/year. So you need about 150 m² of solar cells per person. Vienna has about a million inhabitants, so that makes 150 km² of solar panels approximately.