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The country claiming to have the most “freedom” of any country has the highest incarceration rate of any country.
you are loved and deserve happiness
Fuck Lemmy is unexpectedly wholesome
Bullshit and lies.
No one loves me, and i deserve nothing, for I am trash.
♥️
perfect answer, everyone needs to be reminded this sometimes
I love this!
Awwww <3 that’s something that should be taught at school AND home
Oxford University is older than the Aztec empire.
Oxford University founded in 1326, Aztec empire ~1428-1521
Lighters were invented before matches! 1823 vs 1826
Oh, I have two good ones:
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Nuclear power causes less deaths (per energy unit produced) than wind (source)
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You get less radiation when living near a nuclear power plant, than if that nuclear plant hadn’t been there.
To explain the second: A major misconception is, that nuclear power plants are dangerous due to their radiation. No they aren’t. The effect of radiation from the rocks in the ground and the surroundings is on average 50x more than what you get from the nuclear power plant and it’s fuel cells. (source). Our body is very well capable of dealing with the constant background radiation all the time (e.g. DNA repairs). Near a power plant, the massive amounts of isolation and concrete will inhibit any background radiation coming from rocks from that direction to you. This means, that you’ll actually get slightly less radiation, because the nuclear plant is there.
Regarding the dangers of nuclear disasters. To this day, it’s been very hard to find out, if at all any people have even died to Fukushima radiation (ans not other sources such as tsunami/earthquake/etc.) Nuclear radiation causes much more problems by being an emotionally triggering viral meme spreading between people and hindering it’s productive use and by distracting from the ironic fact, that the coal burned in coal power plants spew much more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear power plants themselves. (source)
To this day, it’s been very hard to find out, if at all any people have even died to Fukushima radiation (ans not other sources such as tsunami/earthquake/etc.)
Truly no offense, but this is sort of burying the lede on Nuclear Power risks. Mathmatically coal releases more radiation - no question. It’s also hard to pin down how many died due to Fukushima for ver good reasons: Correlation might be easy, but determining cause is ultra tough and no right-minded scientist would say it without overwhelming evidence (like they had something “hot” that fell on their roof and didn’t know it for a long time). Also? They aren’t dead yet. So we look to statistical life span models crossing multiple factors (proximity, time of exposure, contaminated environments and try to pin down cancer clusters attributable, and people can live for decades, etc…
The problem is that people rightly are concerned that in both Fukushima and Chernobyl (and 3 Mile for that matter) unforseen circumstances could have been catastrophically worse. You blow up a coal plant? You expose a region locally to it and it’s probably “meh”. You blow up a nuclear plant, and you get melt down corium hitting ground water or sea water with direct exposure to fissioning material and all the sudden you have entire nations at risk for subsequent spewing of hot material that will contaminate food supplies, water resevoirs, and linger on surfaces and be pulled into our lungs once it’s in the dirt. Radioactive matieral is FAR more dangerous inside the body when you eat plants and animals that are exposed and pull it from the ground. Even cleaning down every surface, eventually you’ll get some of it airborn to be breathed into our lungs again with wind storms, flooding and other natural erosion. The consequences are exponentially higher with Nuclear accidents and ignoring that is whitewashing. And that’s not even getting into contamination from fuel enrichment, cooling ponds/pools leaking water, or the fact that it will take 30-40 years to clean up Fukushima (and they aren’t sure how exactly that will happen and there could be another tsunami). Probably hundreds to try to clean up and contain Chernobyl - and given the current state of affairs we may find out even worse.
BTW, I’m pro-nuclear. Thorium salts seem a good way to go and we probably would already have these if not for the nuclear arms race making nations hungry for plutonium. Please don’t short sell everyone’s intelligence because you can claim “only” a handful of people died due to Fukushima. Direct death is only one facet. Lives were disrupted (and displaced) and for a while there, the impacts spread to the US across the Pacific and there were discussions of evacuating like 1/3 of Japan’s population outside an exclusion zone. You can be pro nuclear while still acknowledging that some fears are real and well founded, and unfortunately the industry has proven gaps in safety that make it harder and harder to argue when we have Solar and Wind and rapidly ramping power storage. Nuclear is likely to simply be outcompeted over time (just like Coal and NG).
Iv read about Thorium the last 3-4 years and it seems so promising. Im really disapointed that the push is not greater as it would make everything a lot more safe.
Additional fun fact. There has been a lot of research and activity dedicated to potentially switch coal power plants to nuclear. Currently, they cannot do it, because the coal plants and all the equipment associated produces far more radiation than regulations allow a nuclear plant to emit.
Therefore, unless they could find a practical way to decontaminate the radiation away from existing coal equipment, or regulations change for transformed plants, they can’t do it.
Did you know, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s only mandate is to ensure the safety of nuclear power, not to promote its implementation. Many regulatory bodies have a dual mandate to stop them from just shutting down what they’re supposed to regulate.
Can’t be unsafe if it doesn’t exist lol
What are you trying to say by linking this article?
I mean, it even says that it was a mechanical issue - and the radiation danger was low. And even then, it’s just a single person. Looking at the bigger picture, the numbers game favors nuclear+wind+solar over fossile.
Just found it coincidental that today someone died from radiation at a nuclear power plant. It does not happen that often.
Not just that, but you might get less radiation swimming in the pool where spent nuclear fuel rods are stored than outdoors.
Haha, that’s a nice explanation
Nuclear power is actually the cleanest way to produce energy. The waste from replacing solar panels and windmills (which have a service life only three to five years) is actually more of a problem than the waste from spent fuel rods. Plus environmental impacts from fuel rod production are less than solar panel and windmill production. The problem with nuclear energy happens when things go wrong. It would have to be absolutely accident free. It never has been and never will be.
Though they’re on the right track with nuclear power. Fusion would be ideal, runs on seawater (fuses deuterium/tritium) and if there’s a problem you simply shut off the fuel. Problem is insurmountable engineering issues, we just don’t have tech for it yet (need anti-gravity). They’ve been working on it for many decades and progress has been painfully slow.
Windmills last much longer than five years. They generally last 20-25. Wherever you heard that bullshit number from, ignore all the other info you got from them.
Not only windmills, but also every for of alternative energy production.
Wind turbines do not have a service life of 3 to 5 years. Where did you hear that?
Even when things go wrong, it’s not as bad as with the other classic fossile energy sources. Exactly this calculation is included in the world in data source on deaths per kWh which I linked.
When we have car accidents normalised, massive climate change, air pollution from fossile fuels, then even the occasional nuclear accident isn’t really a problem.
The problem is, that these accidents get much more attention than they deserve given how many deaths are caused by fossile fuels. When calibrating for deaths, fossile fuels should get around 100x the attention
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There are people still alive who remember a world before “splinter-free” toilet paper.
The manufacturing of this product had a long period of refinement, considering that as late as the 1930s, a selling point of the Northern Tissue company was that their toilet paper was “splinter free”.
The closest planet to Earth is Mercury.
On average that is. Mercury is actually the closest planet to every other planet in average. Because when it’s on the other side of the Sun, it’s still pretty close.
Wow, you’re absolutely correct!
The average distance from Earth to Mercury is about 1.04 astronomical units (au), which is the average distance between Earth and the Sun.
In comparison, the average distance between Earth and Venus is approximately 1.14 au, while the average distance between Earth and Mars is around 1.7 au.
You can check that in Wolfram Alpha.
How can that be? I mean if that is true than at some point Earth Venus and Mercury will align in such a way that Mercury occupies the 2nd position not the 1st right?
@ChatGPT@lemmings.world Hello there! What is the closest planet to Earth, Venus or Mercury, and why? Provide detailed, analytical, step-by-step output. Thank you
Hello!
The answer to your question may actually surprise you. The closest planet to Earth is not always the same because all of the planets in our solar system are constantly in motion, orbiting the sun at different speeds and distances.
However, average distance over time is a key aspect to address here. Based on such a perspective, Mercury, not Venus, is the planet that spends more time being the closest to Earth.
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Orbital Paths: Understanding the orbit paths is the first step. The way planets orbit the sun is basically elliptical and not perfectly circular. For the Earth, Venus and Mercury, they all have different elliptical paths which cause their distances to each other and the Sun to constantly vary.
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Distance and Speed: Second step, each planet orbits the sun at a different distance and speed. Venus’s average distance from the sun is about 67 million miles (108 million kilometers), while Mercury’s average distance is roughly 36 million miles (58 million kilometers). Therefore, Mercury is closer to the Sun.
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Mathematical Simulations: This is the third and most crucial step. In 2019, a mathematical simulation was run by physicist Tom Stockman, showing that when the principle of comparing average distances over time is applied, it turned out that Mercury spends the most time as the closest planet to Earth.
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The Reason: So, why is Mercury closer on an average even though Venus gets closer to Earth than Mercury at their closest approach? The main reason is the orbital speed. Mercury orbits the sun more quickly than Venus or Earth, therefore, it crosses our field of view more often and is more frequently the closest planet to us.
In fact, Mercury is not just the planet that spends the most time closest to Earth, but it spends the most time closest to all the other planets in the solar system due to its location and speedy orbit.
So, while Venus is the second planet from the sun and appears closer to Earth based on that logic, Mercury actually spends more time as our nearest neighbor due to its speed and unique orbit.
I hope this has provided you with a comprehensive understanding.
@ChatGPT
So if on average the closest planet to the Earth is Mercury, based on Average. That would mean that the closest planet to Neptune on average, is Mercury too, not Uranus. Is this correct?
Provide detailed, analytical, step-by-step output.@ChatGPT@lemmings.world
So if on average the closest planet to the Earth is Mercury, based on Average. That would mean that the closest planet to Neptune on average, is Mercury too, not Uranus. Is this correct? Provide detailed, analytical, step-by-step output.
Yes, you are correct according to a technical analysis by Greg Laughlin, an astronomer at Yale University.
The analysis considers the relative motion of planets in their orbits instead of just the simple measure of the average distance between planets.
Here is a step-by-step breakdown of this concept:
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Most of the time we think of two planets’ proximity as them sharing the same longitude in the sky, or them being at a point in their orbits where they align.
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Yet, if you’ve got three bodies and by definition two of them have to be closest to each other, then it’s the one that’s left out in the way we think of planet distances.
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This average-distance calculation involves working out every single possible configuration of, say, Earth, Mercury and Venus — every possible location they could be in their orbits — and then calculating which two are closest.
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Based on Laughlin’s model, Mercury sits on average 1.04 astronomical units (AU) away from Earth — closer than Venus, our nearest neighbor, which sits an average of 1.14 AU away. (1 AU is the average Earth-Sun distance — about 149 million km.)
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Extending that complex model to the outer planets, the closest planet to Neptune on average, turns out to be Mercury too, not Uranus!
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Because Mercury is the planet that orbits the closest to the Sun, it is often closer to other planets despite the large overall distance. Mercury’s faster orbit brings it regularly back close to other planets, including Neptune.
So, counter to simple intuitions about the structure of our Solar System, by considering the whole of planetary orbits and using this complex method of calculation, the nearest planet to any chosen planet often turns out to be Mercury.
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That’s a great usage of the bot! :0)))
CGPGrey made a video about this 3 years ago.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/SumDHcnCRuU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
It depends on what do you mean by “2nd position”. I mean, imagine the Venus on the opposite side of the orbit, and Mercury on the same side of the orbit as Earth. In that case, the distance from Earth to Mercury would be only 0.6 au, while distance from Earth to Venus would be 1.7 au.
Yeah, I did intense brain work and I got it now. This is a very interesting way of making people think about averages, space, geometry, etc. Noticed some steam coming out of my ears. Think I’m done for the day! X’D
I learned this from QI recently. Great piece of trivia!
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You’re still right, though - talking about closest planet on average isn’t very useful, because it’s always going to be the closest planet to the sun. Asking “what planet can get closest to some [Planet]” is more interesting and enlightening.
A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus.
If you start to think about how these lengths of time are defined it becomes clearer.
1 day = time to rotate on it’s axis once 1 year = time to complete a full rotation around the sun
For Earth, it takes us ~24hrs to rotate on our axis and 365.25 days to orbit the sun.
However, because Venus’ axial rotation is so slow (and another interesting fact, it rotates in the opposite direction to other planets) it actually completes a full orbit of the sun before 1 axial rotation.
Hence, a year is shorter than a day
For those interested:
1 Venus day = 243 earth days 1 Venus year = 225 earth days
Colloquially, most people use “day” to mean how long it takes the sun to get to the same place in the sky. Solar day vs sidereal day, the difference is only about 4 minutes on Earth, but can be much greater elsewhere. Venus’ solar day is about 117 Earth days, so you would see a couple sunrises/sunsets each Venusian year.
This is the most interesting one I’ve read so far.
Really interesting.
Wow! That’s another thing I learned from QI recently. Great fact though, and nice to see it mentioned here 🙂
A broken clock is right twice a day, but a clock running backwards is right four times a day.
Cleopatra was born closer to the invention of cellphones than the building of the pyramids
We live closer in time to the T-Rex than the T-Rex to the stegosaurus. Which makes the land before time a fictional story not based on true events.
Also the T in T-shirt stands for tyrannosaurus because it has short arms, just like the T-Rex.
Modern birds are dinosaurs as far as I’m concerned.
Well that’s just plain science.
All Aves are Dinosauria.
Where did you get that the T stands for Tyrannosaurus? 😂
It looks like a T, that’s why it’s called T shirt, imo, no source either.
I always love this one, just it sounds so crazy
It is not even all that close either, something like 500 years.
I’ve always thought this was amazing
The world is running out of sand.
It’s one of the most used materials in the world for construction but islands are disappearing because of its limited supply.
Oh no. For some reason I thought we were manufacturing the sand used in construction and stuff. At what point do we stop stealing it and start making it? Is that actually any better?
Isn’t one of the issues that the sand in the deserts isn’t the right kind?
Yes, sand in the desert and beaches is “too old”, in other words, it’s too smooth and can’t hold material together. That’s why Dubai is importing huge amounts of sand while being literally a city in the desert.
Dubai needs to stop it.
So all we need to do to increase our supply is to rough up some sand?
Some companies came up with an alternative by grounding cement blocks into cement sand instead.
Got it. I’ll just make me some concrete… Alright I need
- Cement mix
- Pebbles
- Sand… oh shit.
But we can make sand so you don’t have to worry about that part
Nice one. lol
On a more serious note, they can find cement from smashed buildings. Destroying old rundown hotels to develop something else. Cool, some one wanna buy those debris and put them to some good use.
How do you make sand lol.
Put rocks through the “coarse” setting on your coffee grinder.
I just chew dried pasta.
of coarse
That made my teeth hurt.
Same way nature does, grind up bigger rocks
Why not just use the rocks themselves then
Because they’re not sand, silly!
They’re big sand
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By rubbing sandpaper…duh
Shells, coral, and a whole lot of time.
Good. I hate sand.
Ani?
I heard that in the high pitched voice of Jar Jar Binks
So Water world had it right apparently
Are you saying we should put dibs on Sahara property?
All the planets in the solar system can fit in the space between the Earth and the Moon
But putting them there is almost definitely a bad idea.
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this is actually a misconception! the gravity of the planets combined would cause them all to crash into each other!
This is a simple statement that the space between the earth and the moon can allow for the diameters of each planet to fit in between. Obviously it is not saying that such an arrangement would be stable for said astronomical bodies. Not at all “a misconception.”
further proof that /j is always necessary, no matter how obvious the joke
Wouldn’t that take even lesser space?
yes but we would all die (due to planet exploding)
“There’s nothing more we can do. I’m calling it. He’s gone. Time of death, 03:39. Cause of death: planet exploding.”
Or would they just stack up?
I just did a simulation with representative bodies that included spheroid objects of varying densities to approximate the makeup of the major solar bodies and all the fruit bounced everywhere and the lady behind the counter is really upset now.
Now you have me wondering if there’s any combination of paths that would have them all pass through that alignment and continue on their way after slingshotting around each other. And, if not, how many bodies could do that.
Your car keys have better range if you press them to your head, since your skull will act as an antenna. It sounds like some made up pseudoscience that would never work in practice or have a negligible effect, but it actually works.
The northern most part of Brazil is closer to Canada than it is to the southern most part of Brazil.
What is this sorcery?
Mercator Projection be like.
That Mercator bastard has been lying to us for centuries. Wake up sheeple!
Ain’t no way!
Shouldn’t be surprising when you consider a Brazilian people live there.
Bigger than the earth. That image surely must be right.
- Wombat feces are cube shaped.
- Bananas are berries and strawberries are not.
- Oxford university is older than the Aztec empire.
- Humans share 50% of our DNA with bananas.
I always knew we were related!
Tomatoes are also a fruit
To all those people who say they don’t like fruit on their pizza.
Also pineapple on pizza is fantastic … mi dispiace
Tomatoes are vegetables. If we’re speaking botanically, then squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, peppers, eggplants, corn kernels, and bean are also fruit. US supreme court ruled that they’re vegetables. EU declared tomatoes to be fruit for the purpose of making jam, though.
Wait wuh! Strawberries aren’t berries? What is this heresy?
Strawberries are nuts by definition. I guess the definition is nuts, too.
Well, the little “seeds” on the outside are nuts by def. The red fleshy part is an accessory fruit.
Wow. TIL. Thank you
and lady bugs are actually beetles, not “true bugs”
