Neat to see a 6-7 solar mass black hole spotted. First one without a companion star to give it away! As we get better at finding black holes of this size, will be interesting to see if they end up explaining part of the “dark matter” problem.

Apparently she started out saying AI, then switched to A1 mid-statement. Might have been corrected privately before, but it only partially took.

Elsewhere in the thread, someone said non-primate mammals (like mice) are dichromic (can’t see orange), but birds are quadchromic (see even more colors than trichromics like primates). Is your cat only a good mouse-hunter, and comparatively a bad bird-hunter?

Apparently pink works as well, if a hunter wants a second color vest

I guess people eating a basket of shrimp are balanced out by people sharing one cow with several hundred others.

Well, changing it dramatically. It’s going to stay within historical ranges where ocean life flourished, but without any exoskeleton-heavy animals like corals in the mix.

Maybe more with less is possible, but we are currently doing less variety of skill with way, way more energy. From https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en/follow-hbp/news/2023/09/04/learning-brain-make-ai-more-energy-efficient/

It is estimated that a human brain uses roughly 20 Watts to work – that is equivalent to the energy consumption of your computer monitor alone, in sleep mode. On this shoe-string budget, 80–100 billion neurons are capable of performing trillions of operations that would require the power of a small hydroelectric plant if they were done artificially.

I have gotten a lot of social connections and philosophy learning through my congregation, consumed a variety of exercise safety and effectiveness tips, enjoyed discovering recipes that fit with my lifestyle and dietary preferences (many of which contribute healthy variety to my food intake), and get positive feelings finding spaces that share experiences and tips around specific health conditions I have. It’s sad to see all of those experiences cast as me being a victim of grifting.

The in-your-face topics of “society and culture” and “comedy” are close to evenly split.

The shows the right is dominating in are things like sports and wellness and spirituality with political sprinkles. The left didn’t even have one show in the article’s survey of those topics.

The “society and culture” and “comedy” topics are only slightly right-skewed, which seems representative of the US voting behavior with Republicans winning more elections but not by much.

The non-political topics with political sprinkles are interesting, and where the right overwhelms the left. People don’t listen to these shows because of the politics - they are there for the sports talk, or the discussion on getting and staying healthy, or for some inspiration and spiritual reflection - but the political sprinkles aren’t enough to drive them away. Does anyone see a path to a left-leaning host attracting significant audiences for mainly sports or wellness or spirituality, with occasional progressive sprinkles?

The politics aspect is much more driven by identity and social group than by sunk cost or refusal to have buyer’s remorse. A singular respected leader can turn the ship - churches and pastors were critical in the US civil rights movement, for example - but groups can be more nebulous without a particular leadership structure, like how difficult it is for people to leave Twitter: even though most users agree the experience has significantly degraded, there is no critical mass agreed on a replacement.

The more nebulous groups can break up - Twitter’s engagement is declining - it’s just slow. Maybe years or decades slow to get to the point it’s no longer one of the dominant social media. So I guess keeping the social connections open (giving someone who wants to make a major change an option to still have a friend or family member who will talk to them after), and patience.

There is a surprising amount of empty space between atoms, and even inside atoms between the electron orbitals and the nucleus. Small black holes are so dense they mostly fall through this empty between-atom space and don’t actually hit anything. Even in a matter-rich environment like inside the Earth, you’d need a black hole with more than half the mass of the moon to be large enough to eat matter faster than it loses matter to Hawking radiation.

It’s wild that there is so much space between atoms (and inside them, between the elctron orbitals and the nucleus), and black holes are so incredibly dense, that a small black hole can fall all the way through the Earth and not hit enough matter to gain appreciable mass.

The 3:2 resonance Klear references is considered a type of tidal locking.

There was a time people thought Mercury would have some “twilight” acreage that was always at habitable temperatures. Then we learned that, while yes it is tidally locked with the Sun, it is locked in a 3:2 resonance so it does rotate with respect to the sun, and everywhere gets both scorched and frozen to uninhabitability.

It’s not just the uptake, it’s whether it stays at the surface, ultimately releasing the carbon back into the atmosphere via decomposition gases, or sinks to the ocean floor, thus locking up the carbon in oceanic rock.

We have a good handle on understanding the uptake. It’s the float vs sink part that has the critical uncertainty.

To work as a carbon capture mechanic, iron fertilization-driven algae blooms would have to die and sink to the bottom of the ocean, thus locking up their carbon in oceanic rock.

The concern is they would die and float, releasing all that carbon back into the atmosphere via decomposition gases. Then we would have all the effort of the fertilization, all the ecosystem disruption of the algae bloom, and maybe negative benefit as far as carbon since the ecosystem disruption could mess up carbon sinks that were actually working.

Also cultivate plants caterpillars feed on! We won’t have any butterflies if the only food available is only edible by adults.

Estrus in bats - some bloody discharge while in the fertile part of their cycle. Only great apes have menstrual cycles (shedding unused uterine lining at the end of a cycle, NOT fertile when discharging blood).

Physical trauma makes sense for large animals. If you have 50 lab rats that you need to euthanize, a gassing setup can make more sense than individually whacking them.