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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • NielsBohron@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldAbe babe.
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    16 days ago

    Well, it was completed in 1941 while the US was still strongly isolationist. We didn’t enter WW2 until after the attack on Pearl Harbor, which was December 7th.

    So yeah, there was a world war going on, but the statue was planned and completed while it was largely “business as usual” in the US.



  • Type O Negative had two albums in the 2000’s, and they were only OK (especially compared to their 90’s albums), but I’d say they still count as “pulling off something remotely ‘goth’”

    Plus, Nine Inch Nails has some good stuff in the aughts, and Trent Reznor’s brand of industrial rock is definitely “goth-adjacent,” as are My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade (2006, I think) and AFI’s Sing the Sorrow (2003), which are both great albums.

    And in more recent music, the band Creeper is really killing it. Their rock opera Sex, Death, and the Infinite Void is very goth and it’s amazingly good (especially as someone who turned his nose up at pop-punk as a kid).

    In non-music media, there have been some really good comics with goth aesthetics in the last 20 years, and I can give some good recs if anyone is interested.




  • NielsBohron@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlTears
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    5 months ago

    It’s more like a mutual friend. There’s a connection to both reactants (aka “binding affinity”), but not as strong as the bond that is formed between the two substrates (if the reaction is forming a covalent bond between the two substrates, anyway)

    Edit: I’m actually saving this meme to show my coworkers that teach biochem, because it’s a pretty decent analogy. You can even extend it to other reaction classes, like a phosphorylase being like a friend who connects your buddy who is selling a guitar with your other buddy who wants to buy a guitar, or a isomerase being that friend who gives you a make-over so that another friend can set you up on a date.


  • NielsBohron@lemmy.worldtoMemes@sopuli.xyzA bad influence
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    5 months ago

    It’s useful for me to keep track chat conversations with coworkers, but it doesn’t really do anything that Discord can’t. It just has the benefit of being pre-installed on our work computers and it already has everyone’s contact info (plus then I don’t need to juggle multiple Discord accounts or teach my Boomer coworkers about Discord). Especially since I work in a building and location that has little to no cell service inside the building, it’s nice to be able to get ahold of people in a faster and less formal way than email.

    But for any of the other advertised functions, it’s trash.


  • So, one observer will see those oscillations happen faster than the other?

    Not quite. In each observer’s frame of reference, time appears to pass the same; it’s only when you try to reconcile the between two objects that are not at rest with respect to each other does relativity show up.

    Basically, when you bring someone back to Earth, the observers will find that their watches don’t match up even though both observers experience time passing the same way as normal (because the oberserver is by definition at rest with respect to their own frame of reference).

    TL; DR: Relativity is a pain in the ass and makes no sense in everyday terms.

    edit: disclaimer - I am not a physicist and have not taken physics classes in a decade plus, but I do teach science at a college. I’m going mostly on half-remembered lectures and some random one-off discussions I’ve had with my buddy in the physics department over the past few years.



  • It’s been a long time since I took modern physics, so I’m not positive, but I think you’re right that the moon would have time moving slower, and if your 50ms/day is right (edit: I based this on the moon traveling faster than the earth, but I don’t know anything about gravitational relativity, so that’s probably wrong) then you’d need to do something like skip a second every 20th day on the moon to keep pace with Earth. We could call it an “anti-leap-second”

    Programmers, that seems pretty simple; what’s the big deal? /s


  • No, the moon’s rotation isn’t on a 24-hour cycle. I’m not an astronomer, but I pretty sure since it’s tidally locked to earth and on a 28-day cycle around the earth, a lunar day is actually 28 Earth days, but I’m not actually sure how that would factor into the number of time zones (I’m pretty sure it would be more complicated than just 24 time zones to match 24 time zones on earth, though).

    Plus, I think the speed of the moon relative to the sun is different enough from Earth that you need to take relativity into effect, which is the real headache here.



  • Even though weed is legal in Canada the legal stuff is the worst and most expensive.

    Give it time. I’m far from a connoisseur, as these days I mostly just partake in edibles 1-2 times per week, but California has some pretty sweet weed prices, at least compared to my college/grad-school days. I saw an ad on a billboard just yesterday for 10 USD Eighths at a pretty reputable shop in my town, and I think I usually pay 35 USD for a pack of 10 2-dose THC:CBD gummies (compared to 40 USD for an eighth of mediocre bud in the early 2000’s).

    As people get less paranoid about enforcement and local governments ease up on restrictions, the price should come down and the quality should go up (although this probably depends a lot on local government, so who knows, really)


  • I wish this was true for me, but I only have one record shop within 45-minute drive of my house (and their prices and selection are far from competitive), so I wind up buying pretty much all my records online through Discogs. Frequently, the new represses are just flat-out cheaper than the vintage vinyl, especially for a lot of the more esoteric albums I buy. For instance, even though they’re not really hard to find, for Black Sabbath’s first four albums I paid just as much for mediocre, water-damaged copies of Sabbath and Volume 4 as I did for brand-new represses of Paranoid and Master of Reality. If you actually buy your vinyl to listen to, buying used online can be a pretty big gamble as far as quality, so for the same price, I frequently wind up consciously choosing the new vinyl over the used copy.

    Even though I do frequently manage to package one or two cheap used albums with each new album purchased to take advantage of that sweet “media mail” shipping, it’s not even close to a 10:1 used:new ratio.

    Edit: I suppose now that I think about it, I’m starting from a pretty decent used vinyl collection from my days in the early 2000’s as a hipster music snob before used vinyl got nearly so expensive, so my collection overall has much more used vinyl than my current buying habits would indicate (I probably have 200 albums, of which 30-40 were purchased new in the past 3-4 years)


  • Him being better than some contemporaries isn’t great.

    Yeah, especially since I went back to look at publication dates and his more serious works were published much later than I had thought. Arguing that Tolkien’s racist language was just “a product of his time” is a lot less valid given he was writing Fellowship of the Ring in the 1950’s, not the 30’s like I’d assumed. It seems like even for his time, Tolkien was pretty stodgy and conservative.

    I don’t have any particular issues with Tolkien besides that he wasn’t socially creative enough to see beyond what he knew, but that’s true for most people.

    Yeah, but then most people aren’t famous for creating entire fantasy worlds, so I’d like to think that it’s reasonable to hold authors to a higher standard here. His world-building is incredibly complex and innovative in many ways, while also being built around fairly derogatory and one-dimensional characterizations. And IMO, his writing, while entertaining, isn’t profound or even note-worthy in many respects compared to many of his contemporaries (I think I’m preaching to the choir, here, but look at the list of significant modernist writers and try to tell me with a straight face that the list should include Tolkien). Personally, as much as I love LOTR, people that argue that Tolkien is a literary genius and can do no wrong are just cringey.

    However, we should always be critical of any creator of any work. We should strive to solve issues and point out flaws in order to improve our world. It can’t change the past, but it can change the future.

    Well said.


  • I think it’s pretty obvious from the rest of the sentence that Tolkien is explicitly using "Mongol-type"as a racial descriptor; “sallow” is referring to skin color, “slanted eyes” speaks for itself, and the fact that he explicitly references European beauty standards are all providing contextual evidence that Tolkien is using Eastern Asians as the physical model for orcs


  • NielsBohron@lemmy.worldtoLord of the memes@midwest.socialSnacks and some pipe-weed
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    6 months ago

    I mean, I’m all for contextualizing Tolkien, and I’ll grant that many of his contemporaries were far more overtly racist (cough Lovecraft cough), but it’s still pretty hard to justify passages from his private letters that describe orcs as

    squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types

    Edit: here’s the Wikipedia source that describes the issue in fairly nuanced terms




  • Interesting, thanks for the info

    No problem! Obviously, I like talking about this stuff. And if you’re interested, I’d also recommend reading the whole book. It’s pretty fascinating, although in his reminiscing and pontificating, Asimov does get a little “get off my lawn” for my taste at times.

    great name! I found a first edition of his in a basement bookstore in Switzerland as a teen. Totally random, I know.

    Thanks! And it’s not too random, I’d say; we’re in a sci-fi forum talking about historical sci-fi writers, many of whom were also trained as scientists, after all.