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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Artificial Intelligence Analysis:

    The chin is situated near the area where the tongue and jawbone interact during speech. It’s possible that the chin provides a surface for the tongue to move against, allowing for more complex sounds and articulations. The development of language is believed to have occurred around the same time as the emergence of Homo sapiens. While other primates have similar facial structures, they don’t possess a distinct chin. This suggests that the chin might be related to the unique demands of human language.

    Bingo – other animals don’t have a chin because they didn’t invent languages like humans did for communication, and thus the demands of speaking weren’t evenly distributed.

    Next time on interesting questions 104: Why did homo sapiens develop language when other animals such as Corvids did not?






  • Naz@sh.itjust.workstoScience Memes@mander.xyzAnt smell
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    1 month ago

    Weird. Marijuana has an iconic, skunk-like / rotten bologna smell to me. I can smell someone smoking up to maybe 500 feet away, sometimes from the inside of my car. It’s a deeply repugnant smell.

    The strange thing being, I’ve smelled the actual flowers and the plant up close, and it just smells like grass. It only smells like shit when it’s burning, oddly enough.

    No idea why. Everything about the “natural smell” up close screams “this is a plant and can’t harm you in any way shape or form”. That specific experience made me in favor of decriminalization.



  • Samuel Vimes is personally responsible for my pair of good boots and he isn’t even real.

    I went mountain climbing on Saturday and the good boots saved my life. Sometimes it isn’t about feeling the cobbles beneath your feet in the streets of Ankh-Morpor, but about the god damned sharp rocks climbing Mt. Erebus, and the fact that one slip means certain death.

    Oh, and speaking of death, he loves mountain climbers. He doesn’t even have to do his job.







  • It’s a really good business idea that I’ve had more than once – a self sustaining “green gym”.

    Members would leave their electronic devices in special hardened lockers, plug them in, and then go to work out, and the power from central battery bank would then charge everything that’s in the lockers.

    I also had an idea for credit system where the more power you generated the cheaper your monthly bill/subscription would be for the gym (only a few bucks here and there), or some kind of perks, like a free t-shirt once a year if you generated over 1 MWh (1000 kWh) or whatever.

    The power generated by such a place would probably be negligible but it would give people the same emotional high as other pro-social tasks.


  • TLDR: It’s a great concept but it’s about 100× more exhausting than you imagine.

    I absolutely love stuff like this, and I also love cycling.

    However, there is a big caveat here: I’ve been cycling for years and know my own power output:


    Output – Time Window – Heart Rate

    • 1400 W* | 60 seconds | 208 bpm
    • 385 W | 20 minutes | 162 bpm
    • 148 W | 6 hours | 110 bpm

    *(yes, I know. My thighs are larger than some people’s torsos and it scares me too)

    That means that on average, around 13 and ½ hours of pedalling to charge this thing. (2 KWh is also worth $0.68¢ where I live at standard residential rates).

    Humans are not great at converting their physical and thermal energy into kinetic or electrical (20-24% for most bodies).

    Pedal power is amazing for things like charging phones or powering small devices and computers though, or for something completely meta: Charging up a eBike or electric scooter (120W), to then use without pedalling later.

    Which then begs the question – if our “human/person power output” is like 150 watts constant … and the sun provides 1.4 kW/m² of energy – why not just lay down a 150W photovoltaic solar panel ($89) in the sun and sip on some unsweetened iced tea instead?