Today I Learned

A man ahead of his time. source

I only knew him from The Whitest Kids You Know. This is the first I watched and it's hilarious.

RIP Gloria.

May your empowering movement and stance against gender-based segregation in the workplace be a historical impact for the ages!

WTF

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg1ex3w91no

TIL that generative AI is changing how teachers assess student work.

Instead of looking only at the final assignment, some educators are paying more attention to drafts, revision history, research notes and oral explanations. The goal is to determine whether students actually understand the work they submit.

AI detectors can also make mistakes, so a detection score alone may not be enough to establish academic misconduct.

I found it interesting that education is increasingly shifting from simply asking “Who wrote this?” to asking “Does the student understand this?”

What do you think is the fairest way to assess students in the age of AI?

The ritual is done at least 20 times, with months or years between each session, taking 10 to 30 minutes. The ones that pass through it all are accepted as warriors and future leaders

https://pib.socioambiental.org/en/Povo:Sater%C3%A9_Maw%C3%A9

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maw%C3%A9_people

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraponera_clavata (bullet ant)

The team examined over 600 sculls from South America from 400 BCE to the mid-1500s CE. The earliest had survival rate of 40%, then it jumped to 53%, during the Inca period it was 75% to 83%, and the latest period survival rates was at 91%.

According to Civil War medical records which was from 1861 to1865 , some 46% to 56% of cranial surgery patients died.

More on this: South America's Inca civilization was better at skull surgery than Civil War doctors | Archive link

Edit: This post's title was "South America's Inca civilization was better at skull surgery than US Civil War doctors, some 400 years later". After taking into consideration the comment section, I changed it to the current one

The Mesozoic marine revolution (MMR) refers to the increase in shell-crushing (durophagous) and boring predation in shallow-sea (neritic) and some deep-sea marine organisms throughout the Mesozoic era (251 Mya to 66 Mya), along with bulldozing and sediment remodelling in benthic marine habitats

It coincided with the rise of large secondarily adapted marine reptiles... proliferation of shell-destroying mesopredators... a trend toward benthos infaunalization,[2] and extinction/habitat restriction of sessile organisms incapable of reattachment once dislodged

The MMR is an important evolutionary transition from the Paleozoic fauna to the more modern-looking fauna

It is thought that the break-up of Pangaea and the formation of new oceans throughout the Mesozoic brought together previously isolated marine communities, forcing them to compete and adapt

We don't know how pterosaurs evolved powered flight. The most primitive, probable, ancestor of pterosaurs had a bodyplan closer to that of a kangaroo. And the earliest pterosaurs like Preondactylus or Eudimorphodon were already fully capable of flight.

Hong Xiuquan was a Chinese religious leader who believed he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. He led the Taiping Rebellion, which established the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

Death count during the rebellion? 20-30 million people...

(sketch is self-made)

So, many solid materials have a so-called "Young modulus E" which describes the mechanical stress that develops inside a material when it is deformed. Basically, when a material is deformed by a deformation ε, then the stress σ is σ = E · ε.

ε is measured as Δx/x, i.e. when you take 1m of steel and deform (stretch) it by 1mm, then ε = 1mm / 1m = 10^-3. The value of E is set for any material, i.e. E(steel) = 200 GPa, or 200 kN/mm². So if you stretch it by a deformation of ε = 10^-3, you get a stress σ = 10⁻³ · 200 GPa = 200 MPa.

A practical application of this would be if you have an elastic wire (a wire made from steel, in this case), and you want to calculate how much force you need to stretch it.

This means that if the steel bar has a cross-section area of A = 1mm², and a length of 1 m, and you stretch it by an additional 1mm, then ε = 10^-3 and to calculate the force F, you multiply σ by A and get F = σ · A = 200 MPa · 1 mm² = 200 N/mm² · 1 mm² = 200 N. This is the force that you have to exert to stretch the wire to this length.

In a follow-up article i intend to show how you calculate how much energy you need to stretch the wire to this length, which is surprisingly simple to do if you know some calculus and the basic rule that dW = F · dx. To sum it up, the result would be W = ∫ F · dx = ½ · F · Δx. For the above example this would be W = ½ · F · Δx = ½ · 200 N · 1 mm = 0.1 J. Which is surprisingly little energy, in my opinion.

Did i calculate this correctly? Can somebody check please?

Riding Giant Mechanical Tricycles, 1896

Vine-Glo was a grape concentrate brick product sold in the United States during Prohibition by Fruit Industries Ltd, a front for the California Vineyardist Association (CVA), from 1929.

The product was advertised with tips for preventing alcoholic fermentation, with one salesperson giving customers a very specific warning: "Do not place the liquid in this jug and put it away in the cupboard for twenty-one days, because then it would turn into wine."

On August 25, 1958, Momofuku Ando created the first instant noodles, Chikin Ramen (Chicken Ramen). The inventor and businessman created them to help address the food shortage crisis in post-World War II Japan. Ramen itself has its roots in China, but after Japan ended its isolationist policies in the mid-1800s, the quintessentially Japanese version of the dish was created from the resulting cultural fusion. More specifically, modern Japanese ramen was first created in 1926 by a chef named Wang Wen-chai at a Chinese restaurant in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan. His dish was designed to appeal to both Chinese and Japanese students studying in the area and combined Chinese wheat-based noodles with traditional Japanese flavors. The food quickly became a staple, and during the postwar period in Japan, black-market food vendors began selling ramen. After noticing the long lines forming at these stalls, Momofuku Ando became determined to help alleviate the plight of food shortages and set out to create noodles that could be “quickly prepared and eaten at home with only hot water.” He spent a year working on the recipe in his garden shed and then had an epiphany while watching his wife make tempura, which made him realize that the process of dehydration through frying could preserve the noodles, allowing them to be stored for a long period of time. He then created the first instant ramen, which was sold by Nissin Foods under the name Chikin Ramen. The product was originally sold as a luxury item, costing far more than fresh noodles, and was originally met with skepticism, but eventually morphed into a staple. Then in 1971, Momofuku Ando introduced Cup Noodles, creating a global trend that is still going strong today. Over time, different flavors and brands of instant noodles have been introduced, but the original Chikin Ramen version is still widely available. In fact, instant noodles remain extremely popular today overall and more than 100 billion servings are consumed each year.

It's like a very quiet Digg or (old) Reddit. Niche content covered by passionate individuals. The way the web was meant to be. While I wasn't able to log in with my piefed account, I was able to use my mastodon one, which is pretty cool.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/51078361

Here, using high-resolution satellite-retrieved data and interpretable machine learning techniques, this study quantified the impact of NEVs on atmospheric pollution, specifically particulate matter particles with an aerodynamic diameter of 2.5 μm or less (PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and particles with an aerodynamic diameter of 10 μm or less, and evaluates the corresponding health benefits. By 2023, NEVs led to reductions of 23.80% in particles with a diameter of 2.5 μm or less (8.97 µg m−3) and 30.67% in carbon monoxide (0.26 mg m−3), resulting in the prevention of approximately 262,000 non-accidental deaths and 75,000 all-cause deaths, respectively.

So I saw this show with a bit of a different title but completely the superfriends animation with cyborg and firestorm and im like what is this? Went on a bit of a rabbit hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Friends but it seems like they were slowly inter speeding so many reruns and not putting in much new content when I was watching it and then it was gone for awhile but apparently it came back but they had relegated it to early sat timeslots. Kinda funny because I was getting into comics about then and I had never seen firestorm or cyborg at the time unitl I saw them in comics but apperently they were on some early time on saturdays.

For the most part the predicted market peaks and troughs are pretty accurate. This is more of a statistical analysis (using past numbers to predict future behavior) than a Nostradamus getting high and pulling predictions out of his ass.

But still, there's a degree of confirmation bias influencing the believers (and conversely instinctive skepticism affecting doubters) that come into okay.

Either way, I think it's an interesting tidbit from the past.

Window guidance - essentially, the central bank increases or limits credit for certain sectors in order to incentivize their growth.

Learned from watching this documentary - The Princes of Yen | The Hidden Power of Central Banks (yt link) - , so if anyone knows if any information is wrong or misleading, please tell me so :)

Other stuff the doc mentions is that the late 1980s Japanese economic crisis was caused on purpose by the Ministry of Finance, through the Bank of Japan, by enforcing all banks to reach minimal loan quotas; all of that in order to force structural changes to the finance system, as without a crisis, there is "no reason to change the structure"

• Genus name: Rattus
• Species name: rattus
• Subspecies name: rattus

You'd actually say it as R. rattus rattus or Rattus r. rattus.