I'm tempted but also I don't think I can go back to plastic cannulas.
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@t1chemist
I'm tempted but also I don't think I can go back to plastic cannulas.
when I was very young my mother told me “they’re going to try and teach you that we came from monkeys but that’s not true and you shouldn’t listen to them because we were made from god” and she was my mom and I was like 7, so I pretty much just went “okay, noted, anyway”
anyway like 2 years later evolution comes up in class and one of my classmates goes “is this the we evolved from monkeys thing?”
and I’m on Red Alert. this is what my mom told me about!
the teacher replies, “well, we share a common ancestor, but we didn’t evolve directly from apes. if you go back way before apes or people existed, you’ll find a different third thing we both came from. we know this because of things like fossils”
and I was like whoo! dodged a bullet there, good thing my 4th grade science class isn’t trying to teach us we came from monkeys and instead figured stuff out using fossils and taught us that instead :)
Instructions Unclear, Ended Up Believing In Evolution Anyway
God the prices of tvs have changed so much let me get my graph
wow thats crazy... tvs used to be so expensive!!
it's always a good day to complain about English speakers
Important addition: Maria Skłodowska-Curie was born during partitions, which means Poland didn’t exist, which means her insistence that she was Polish was a significant act of defiance against the occupation, which means that you should respect that instead of arguing that ‘well she had French citizenship’. She couldn’t have Polish citizenship despite being Polish, that’s kinda the point she was making by keeping her maiden name and naming a chemical element she discovered ‘Polonium’ .
HOW TO PRONOUNCE: Skłodowska
L with a dash through it (ł) makes a “W” sound. and W makes a “V” sound.
skwo-DOV-ska
thank you for the pronunciation guide!
I'm tempted but also I don't think I can go back to plastic cannulas.
We really really need to destigmatize diabetes btw.
It's like no one actually talks about it except diabetics. And when a non diabetics does mention diabetes it's to make an uneducated and cruel joke.
Type 1 diabetics will be bombarded with bad advice, condescending comments and others having an inability to sympathize with them and their life altering disability.
Type 2 diabetics will be shamed, ridiculed and blamed for their health issues, which will lead to them internalising ableism and fatphobia.
Some of y'all don't even know the difference between type 1 and 2.
I need you guys to listen so bad, but I’m at least glad people on Twitter are starting to talk about this. The government of Canada is expanding Medically Assisted Death to cull the poor and disabled, and now suicidal and mentally ill (these are usually interchangeable of course here). It is EUGENICS and every single disabled rights organization is against it.
Disability payments are $1,200 a month. The average one bedroom apartment rent in the Greater Toronto Area (greatest pop. area by far here) is $2,000 a month. People with mental illnesses are on months long waitlists to get even a single publicly funded session. Weeks to get privately funded care which costs at least $200 a session. There is no housing here for disabled people. We are in one of the worst housing crises in the world right now.
Doctors are now offering MAiD unprompted to young suicidal people. This woman is 21, a health practitioner literally suggested she kill herself.
This is one of the worst Disability Rights Violations we’ve ever seen in Canada. The government is killing us because it is cheaper than funding healthcare, cheaper than giving people housing and food and basic human rights.
TIL Nuclear power is actually better environmentally than coal.
via ift.tt
Atomophobia is a big oil plot tbh
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Newer designs are even better. For example, a molten salt reactor can be designed so that it physically can’t go into core meltdown. Because the radioactive fuel is dissolved in a molten salt compound, an overheating reactor can simply melt through a barrier, pour into a shielded chamber, and solidify back into a solid form.
The best example uses liquid fluoride salt and radioactive thorium, which is cheaper, more plentiful, and less suited to weapons than uranium.
Have ANY of you played fallout?? No thanks
What an absolute galaxy brain take
“I know this is a nuclear power plant that can’t go into meltdown, but have you not played the game about nuclear weapons destroying the world?”
afhfdssfgds the plot of fallout is that a fossil fuel shortage LED to nuclear war so this is even more of a galaxy brain take.
Has anyone of you heard about Nuclear wastes? They take centuries to degrade. Sure, USA and Russia don’t have to think about it, they can just dump them into siberia or the Nevada desert, but countries like France, UK, Germany, etc.. we have no space for nuclear waste to properly store it for the amount of centuries that it takes for it to become less harmful and who knows if the barrels that store them are not leaking? Nuclear energy is a short term solution to coal. Heck, central and east europe got hit by the nuclear disaster that was fucking chernobyl. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_decay
France already gets 80% of their electricity from nuclear power. I think they store the waste in a very deep mine, in rural Finland, far away from people.
Nuclear waste only takes a long time to degrade if it comes from uranium. It’s very inefficient, and 90% of a “spent” fuel rod is still enriched uranium.
Uranium was only used because the government wanted a “dual use” technology that could also be used for nuclear weapons. Thorium is very bad for building bombs, but it’s very efficient in reactors.
Almost all of the thorium is consumed, leaving a small amount of weakly radioactive waste which is easy to contain. It only lasts for 200-300 years.
Some thorium reactors are designed as “waste burners”, which can consume uranium waste and transmute it into weaker elements that last for centuries, not millennia.
We’re also figuring out how to turn uranium waste into electric diamond batteries. So you know, there’s that.
requested by @raven-harlot and @pokegeek151
As there is a lot of conflicting information in this post, with varying levels of reliability, I will not be giving this an overall rating.
Nuclear power is considered more environmentally friendly than coal and other fossil fuels.
Source: ‘Nuclear power has a lot going for it. Its carbon footprint is equivalent to wind, less than solar, and orders of magnitude less than coal. Nuclear power plants take up far less space on the landscape than solar or wind farms, and they produce power even at night or on calm days.’
Source: ‘The paper demonstrates that without nuclear power, it will be even harder to mitigate human-caused climate change and air pollution. This is fundamentally because historical energy production data reveal that if nuclear power never existed, the energy it supplied almost certainly would have been supplied by fossil fuels instead (overwhelmingly coal), which cause much higher air pollution-related mortality and GHG emissions per unit energy produced (ref. 2).’
Newer nuclear power designs may be safer.
Source: ‘Nuclear proponents are now banking on next-generation designs, like small, modular versions of conventional light-water reactors, or advanced reactors designed to be safer, cheaper, and more flexible.’
Source: ‘Molten salt reactors have numerous operational and safety advantages over solid fuel designs. […] Fluid nature of the fuel means meltdown is an irrelevant term and allows the fuel salt to be automatically drained to passively cooled, critically safe dump tanks.’
(Fallout is indeed set in a world where oil depletion resulted in international turmoil, eventually leading to a nuclear exchange between the US and China. I don’t think this needs further exploration, so I’m just going to link to the Wikipedia page and leave it at that.)
Nuclear waste disposable is a factor to consider, as it does pose some risks, but this risk is generally lower than the public perceives it to be.
Source: ‘In the absence of reprocessing, spent fuel is considered to be waste and must be prepared for permanent disposal in a separate facility. In addition, the waste stream from spent-fuel reprocessing must also be disposed of. Many nuclear countries, from the United States to China to Finland, have researched the technologies and geologic locations for disposal sites, but no permanent disposal site is in use anywhere in the world. Pending approval and construction of disposal sites, all spent fuel and processed waste are being kept either in cooling pools or in aboveground storage casks.’
When a holistic view is taken of the nuclear waste-disposal process, the risks seem extremely small, yet among the general public, these risks are one of the most-feared aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle.’
France gets around 70% of its electricity from nuclear power, not 80%. They have been storing their waste in France, not Finland, and they are currently building their first permanent underground facility. (Finland was the first to begin building an underground repository, which may be where the confusion came from.)
Source: ‘Since France’s first nuclear power plant opened in 1956, the country has housed its high-level toxic waste in four short-term national surface facilities at La Hague in Normandy, Marcoule and Cadarache in the south and Valduc, north of Dijon.’
Source: ‘The world’s first geological tomb for nuclear waste is rapidly taking shape more than 400 metres below the forests of Finland.’
From what I can tell, uranium does have a particularly long half life compared to other components of nuclear fuel. 95% of the energy in fuel rods is still present in nuclear waste.
Source: ‘The majority of the material in spent nuclear fuel is a relatively stable form of uranium called uranium 238 (U-238). It has a half life of over four billion years, so it will be around for a long time. The next largest fraction of material is unspent uranium 235 (U-235) and plutonium fuel with half lives of 700 million years and 24 thousand years respectively.’
Source: ‘as much as 95 percent of the energy in fissile uranium remains in the waste’
It does not seem that uranium was chosen over other materials specifically for dual usage in bombs. Its advantages were that it was one of few fissile materials, and the only one that occurs in usable amounts in nature.
Source: ‘All heavy nuclides have the ability to fission when in an excited state, but only a few fission readily and consistently when struck by slow (low-energy) neutrons. Such species of atoms are called fissile. The most prominently utilized fissile nuclides in the nuclear industry are uranium-233 (233U), uranium-235 (235U), plutonium-239 (239Pu), and plutonium-241 (241Pu). Of these, only uranium-235 occurs in a usable amount in nature—though its presence in natural uranium is only some 0.7204 percent by weight, necessitating a lengthy and expensive enrichment process to generate a usable reactor fuel’
Thorium waste may be more difficult to refine into bombs, although this is disputed somewhat.
Source: ‘When thorium is used, the nuclear reactions are altered so that the reactor produces much less plutonium, and the radioactive waste it does create is more difficult to refine for use in bombs.’
Source: ‘Contrary to that which many proponents of thorium claim, U-233 should be regarded as posing a definite proliferation risk. For a thorium fuel cycle which falls short of a breeding cycle, uranium fuel would always be needed to supplement the fissile material and there will always be significant (though reduced) plutonium production.’
Thorium would produce less waste, and this waste would likely be dangerous for shorter periods of time.
Source: ‘The thorium fuel cycle generates much less waste, of far less long-term toxicity, which has to be stored for just three centuries or so.’
Source: ‘Claims that thorium fuels give a reduction in radiotoxicity are justified. However, caution is required because many such claims cite studies based on a self-sustaining thorium cycle in equilibrium. More realistic studies which take account of the effect of U-235 or Pu-239 seed fuels required to breed the U-233 suggest the benefits are more modest.’
In 2016, researchers did find a way to convert nuclear waste into a diamond battery.
Source: ‘New technology has been developed that uses nuclear waste to generate electricity in a nuclear-powered battery. A team of physicists and chemists from the University of Bristol have grown a man-made diamond that, when placed in a radioactive field, is able to generate a small electrical current.’
Okay something that bothers me is the fact physics is seen as the more prestigious of the three main sciences, with biology at the bottom and chemistry in the middle. Like. I doubt most people could name a famous biologist, but they could name 5 famous physicists. Why are Albert Einstein and Stephen hawking household names but Norman Borlaug and Jonas Salk aren't?
Not to dismiss the accomplishments of Einstein or Hawking, or their genius, but their actual tangible contributions to society have been miniscule compared to that of Borlaug or Salk who have each saved LITERALLY hundreds of millions, if not billions, of lives each. Half the food on your plate was probably grown thanks to Borlaug and Salk is the reason half your siblings didn't die of polio as a kid.
Sure Einsteins theory of relatively is important for modern satellite communications but really though how can it compare?
This is coming from someone who studied physics. I love physics, and years ago when i was at uni I looked down at biology and so did everyone else studying physics. And I know others did too. Retroactively of course I know this was so very wrong.
If society as a whole started treating biology with more respect then maybe more students would go into that field. If we had rockstars of medicine and agricultural science that were household names rather than just physicists? think of how many more lives could be saved, how many more lives could be improved.
I'm not saying physics isn't important, and more scientists of any kind is always good, but proportionally I think societies priorities are a little skewd.
Relevant xkcd
the answer to elitism is not anti-intellectualism. it is to stop defining art and literature the way white colonial supremacy does. like. ?
It's also to stop writing everything at a literacy level that most people don't have. Also Elitism and anti intellectualism are problems outside of humanities, you find them in every scientific fields, so communicating information in a clear and simple way is crucial.
0/10 missed the point of the op and brought up a non sequitur that is frankly patronising to ‘most people’
to the person above op, let's try to go over these concepts again. pretty much every field and every different human activity will spawn language that signifies an in-group & out-group.
the average baseball commentator and spectator share specific lingo about the game. knitters at large are not being exclusionary gatekeepers when you don't know what a "dropped stitch" is.
especially wrt to science it is important for people in the field to say exactly what they mean. to do so requires specific context & jargon.
the average scientist in a lab is not writing papers for the average person, it's for their colleagues in the field. some of those colleague work as public educators who spread this information to non-experts at different levels of competence. an undergraduate engineering student won't receive the exact information in the exact same language that second-grade students will, on the exact same topic. and guess what? that's just appropriate to either group's level of competence with the material!
the same applies to the humanities! you will not teach eight-grade students about hermeneutics, you will go over the structure & elements of a short story. why? not because hermeneutics is a frivolous field of intellectual elites showing off to each other, but because at their level of competence, eight-grade students don't need to interpret at the level of those scholars.
is it now so hard to see that you can build your way up towards different levels of expertise? is it stupid to ignore the fact that now more than ever you can work up to this through the vast amount of free resources on the internet? you tell me
it's not the job of writers & artists performing at a high level to write "at a literacy level most people don't have" because they are writing for the people who are their intellectual colleagues. and with some effort you too can reach that level. it's fine if you don't want to, but it doesn't mean that their work is snooty or frivolous, just because you cannot appreciate it as a layman. it's fine if you don't want to put in the effort! but there's no need to cry elitism when you are frankly choosing intellectual laziness in the face of higher competency than yours
thank you for the addition!
since we’re here, i would like to make it clear that, within the arts & humanities, i do think more tangible efforts need to be put in, on an institutional level, to make such context-specific research & knowledge if not conceptually accessible (not easy! accessible), then at least available to non-experts. there are definitely academics - usually white bourgeois scholars in the imperial core - who write for the purposes of gatekeeping colonial knowledges and imperial ideologies. this IS rooted in an exclusion of marginalised people (usually the poor, racialised and disabled).
however, this is less the case now than it was a few decades ago, generally speaking. Black artists, scholars and activists in the us especially, along with postcolonial writers and critics around the world, have worked - often tacitly - to ‘unlock the gates,’ so to speak, of academia and critical theory, and this gained momentum particularly in the 60s and onwards. the rise of fields like gender studies, critical race theory, q/ueer theory, women’s studies, etc., are a byproduct of this process and have also helped reclaim some of academia’s ‘elitism,’ which, again, is rooted in colonialism & white supremacy.
the rest of it is, as @soupgirl777 mentioned, a matter of specialist study, which is a function of disciplinary learning and not inherently elitist. you don’t expect scientists to dumb down their research and conceptual investigations for the public (i hope), and your regard for them is none the worse for it, so why would you expect that of writers and literary critics? people are entitled to accurate, useful and, ideally, digestible information where it is expected, but there’s a difference between gatekeeping and simply not being privy to something you’ve never had the need or desire to understand in the first place.
I'm sure I've said this before but it's like so weird to me how people tend to think of scientific interest as antithetical to sentiment like noo.. What do you think drives people to study something so intently. Do you really think there's no passion behind it. Have you ever heard a scientist talk
People will be so captivated by a certain subject they devote their lives to it & then the general public is like "numbers are the opposite of feelings though"
general relativity for babies
babies? Hell, I’m an adult this is the clearest and most understandable explaination I’ve ever seen. This book is for anyone
Going to the Endocrinologists like: will I be praised for being the best diabetic to ever exist OR be shamed for being the worst diabetic to ever exist!! Cannot wait to find out!!!
mutuals. c'mere. this is a checkpoint. i am checking in. i am wrapping you in a blanket and giving you a nice warm drink. also some pretty flowers. it will be ok.