alpine_jim

joined 2 weeks ago
[–] alpine_jim@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago

the "Inglorious Treksperts" podcast just reviewed this episode last week.

one of them recited the whole "these words" monologue from memory - it is the highlight of a patchy episode.

[–] alpine_jim@piefed.social 3 points 2 days ago

that's reasonable.

bonus fun fact - the etymology is connected - "axle" comes from older words for "shoulder", or "armpit", which survives in some regional Englishes as "oxter" - the connection is apparently that you'd carry a person by putting their arms up and linking at the shoulders, much like an axle is how wheels carry a cart.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/axle

[–] alpine_jim@piefed.social 3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

No, that's what I meant by not an axle.

But, come to think of it, we can swing our arms round and round, more than 360°.

[–] alpine_jim@piefed.social 7 points 2 days ago (4 children)

How about this insect with a pair toothed gears? Not an axle, but still amazing!

"The juvenile Issus - a plant-hopping insect found in gardens across Europe - has hind-leg joints with curved cog-like strips of opposing ‘teeth’ that intermesh, rotating like mechanical gears to synchronise the animal’s legs when it launches into a jump."

[–] alpine_jim@piefed.social 7 points 2 days ago

right, even trains don't need diffs, the conic-slice wheels take care of turns fine without.

[–] alpine_jim@piefed.social 9 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (6 children)

What's the point, if downvotes are no longer a factor in the YT backend?

[–] alpine_jim@piefed.social 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

extensive use of the "Don't recommend this video > Tell us why > I don't like this video" function, plus removing bad videos from my watch history after I stop watching, has got me a well-trained slop-free recommendations page with interesting new smallish channels.

[–] alpine_jim@piefed.social 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I hadn't heard of that method.

can you show some examples of such images?

[–] alpine_jim@piefed.social 3 points 5 days ago

i believe there was some early speculation that the unprecedented temperature of the Trinity test might ignite the atmosphere, somehow making the nitrogen burn, but that would be a chemical reaction, not a nuclear reaction.

[–] alpine_jim@piefed.social 12 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Alpha and beta decay are types of fission.

further, if you only want to look at fissions with similarly-sized daughter products, there are several micrograms of fissile atoms in each of us, so random fissions are indeed constantly happening.

[–] alpine_jim@piefed.social 24 points 5 days ago (3 children)

no, there are lots of atoms splitting inside your body every second.

a single U-235 atom's fission, releasing ~200MeV, (~30 picojoules), in ideal circumstances could maybe nudge a very small fine grain of sand (~ micrograms) enough to see movement (small fraction of a millimetre) under a microscope .

It takes months of refining to make nuclear fuel that's suitable for sustaining a chain reaction.

it's an interesting question, I'm glad I did the research checking that the orders of magnitude match!

view more: next ›