• 6 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Except a lot of the taste comes from receptors in the nose. They get the most info with the food on the top. The tongue has only very basic information about the food and is there to determine if we should spit it out because it is poison or get as much as we can because it is high caloric stuff.

    Fun fact, the way the tongue works is very different from how many people think. Each little taste bud can detect one or two aspects depending on its specialization. They can detect sweet, savoriness (umami) , bitter and sour. Salt is detected in a different way. Sweet and umami are detected by the same bud, where bitter and sour each have their own specialized buds. Most of the little pink buds on the tongue aren’t taste buds, but there are still a lot of taste buds all over the tongue.

    With the taste buds the brain takes a “picture” of the food. It receives a signal from each taste bud in regards to the level of taste they receive. The brain learns to interpret these pictures in what the food tastes like, supplemented by the nose and the salt levels. Since each tongue is different and each brain is different, tastes are very personal and can be different for different people. Tastes evolve over time, so it can even differ for the same person as they get older.

    When first drinking something like coffee or beer, the brain gets very confused. These are complex tastes and the brain has a hard time of figuring out what it’s tasting. Since it can be very bitter with coffee for example, the brain thinks it might be poisonous, so revulsion is often a first response. However when sticking with it the brain learns to make sense of the jumble and might like the complexity. These are so called acquired tastes.




  • Yeah this is the biggest issue.

    The way most housing gets built where I live it works like this: A company handles the project management, buying the land, getting the permits, hiring the builders, doing the marketing/sales etc. This costs a HUGE amount of money, which they don’t have. So these projects get designed on paper and then sold to investors. These put in a big amount of money, with the expectation of the project making money in the sales of the housing in the end. This means they can often double their entry in a couple of years, which is really good in terms of investments. As the investors want to make as much money as possible, the company designing the housing have incentives to not only make the houses as dense as possible, but also as expensive as possible. Their margins in percent are about the same no matter the house, so a more expensive house makes them more money. This leads to really big expensive homes crammed together in either high rises or plots. It’s really dumb as well since detached homes are worth more, they build homes with like 2 meter between them. The biggest issue is, only rich people can afford these homes. Even though more homes are built, the majority of people looking to buy a home can’t afford these. Homes also get sold to investors again, to rent out as the house itself appreciates in value. These expensive homes also have the effect of driving up property prices in the area, which leads to more expensive houses and higher taxes.

    In the end, it’s only the rich that profit. They get the good investment projects, making them even more rich. They get to buy the expensive new homes to live in. They get to buy the homes to rent out and use as an investment vehicle.

    Some places have made them build cheaper homes as well, if they want to get the permit. But it’s not enough. We need to be building practical affordable homes, but we don’t cause the people putting up the money to build stuff don’t want to.


  • Disagree, if you need a custom big machine made, there are some really good people on AliExpress.

    I have had a couple of customized CNC machines custom built for a fraction of the price it would have cost to have it done over here. Even with the shipping costs it came out cheaper. And the people were really helpful, they use machines like mine all the time so they know their stuff. They offered really good advice and were excited to work with me. It’s a bit butt clenching to fork over a lot of cash and hope a big ass pallet shows up 4 months later, but they’ve come through for me every time. YMMV.

    Temu on the other hand can fuck off. It’s just a scam site like Wish.





  • Besides the first all electric train bit, which is nonsense, it also touts the capacity of the train. It has 120 seats, which may be mind blowing to car heads, but for a train is rather on the low side. Regular passenger trains often have over 200 seats and many have more seats for the same length. For busy pieces of track 600 seats per train aren’t unusual.

    It really is like the author has never heard of trains before and has his mind blown by the concept.

    Personally I think putting in batteries is kinda dumb, trains need so much infrastructure already and it’s fixed in location. Adding a power delivery system (like overhead power lines like most electric trains have) is really easy. That way a lot of weight is saved, thus making the whole thing more efficient. You also don’t need any special materials to make it, compared with huge batteries. And the wear components are a lot less expensive to replace.



  • Thorry84@feddit.nltoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldOof ouch owie
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    15 days ago

    People call 911 because they are having a medical issue, cops show up and shoot them and their dog, plus the neighbors dog for good measure. Shitheads actually attempt a coup, try to hang congress people, invade government offices, somehow only one of them gets shot. It makes 0 sense.


  • That’s within a solar system, where distance, time lines and energy is relatively low.

    Any event with enough energy for something to leave the solar system, destroys all life, even microscopic. And even if somehow it does survive and leave the solar system, space is pretty much empty so it will probably never hit anything. But if it does hit something, 99% of what’s out there is stars. So it would end up in a star. And if it does hit a planet, coming in at intergalactic speeds absolutely destroys any life. None of that matters though, because the distance involved is so freaking huge, nothing living can survive that long. Travel times are so long, only fossils would arrive, that’s how long we are talking.


  • If aliens were to visit us it’s a miracle not only in space but also in time.

    Space is huge, for some aliens to randomly arrive here would mean they are just about everywhere. We would surely see signs of them in other solar systems, even if they haven’t visited here. There are so many solar systems out there, you don’t just randomly stumble upon ours. And the space in between systems is also so big our brains literally can’t fathom it.

    But time is huge as well. Humans as a civilization with electricity and technology has only existed for 200-300 years (being generous). Some say aliens have only been interested in us since the atom bomb, which is not even 100 years. However humans as a species has existed for over 100,000 years. And intelligent tool users have been around for about 1,000,000 years. If aliens visited anywhere in that time they would have laughed at the silly monkeys and have been on their way. For them to have randomly stumbled upon us just as we are enjoying our few hundred years of modern civilization is one hell of a coincidence.

    Space is mind bogglingly huge, time as well, for both to line up perfectly for aliens to happen upon us is impossible. Even if life is abundant in our galaxy, the separation of time and space pretty much excludes any chance for contact.


  • I’d go one step further. Not only does our current understanding of the universe not include any possibility for FTL, as far as we understand FTL would completely break reality. Science actively excludes FTL as a thing that can exist.

    Wormholes might be an idea, but they aren’t even at the theory level yet. More of a conjecture that fell out of some math, but can’t exist in the real world.


  • Really I’m gonna need a source for that old timey radio claim. Because that sounds like it’s made up and even if it’s not, correlation does not mean causation.

    There is no known mechanism for non ionizing radiation to have ANY effect on the human body or individual cells besides from a warming effect. And even the warming effect is quite small, there are normally a lot of other factors that have a way bigger effect on the temperature. See the Mythbusters episode where they tried to warm a chicken on a radar emitter. The turning of the radar cooled it down more than any warming from the radar did.

    If there is any truth to claims that non ionizing radiation harms humans, physicists would be all over that. That would mean new physics in an area where there hasn’t been any new stuff for a long time now.

    But it turns out we understand it pretty well and see no mechanism for any harm to occur. In that context all of the studies that find no relation are meaningful. If there seems to be no relation and there isn’t a mechanism to do anything, why would anybody think there is anything to find? Turns out it always comes down to FUD, to further some kind of an agenda.