Muroid

Muroid t1_jegfxuj wrote

You’re the one who said there was a geographic reason for it.

There’s no geographic reason for poles to be oriented vertically.

You’ve essentially just said “There’s a reason that we orient our maps so that North is up. It’s because that’s where the North Pole is and we orient our maps vertically based on the poles.”

Ok great, except that that doesn’t actually answer the question, because if you then ask “why do we orient our maps based on the poles” which is kind of implicit in the initial question, the answer is “No particularly good reason except that that’s how we do it.”

Edit: Sure, there are always reasons why an arbitrary choice went one way or the other. But you didn’t actually give the reason in this case. You’ve just asserted that there was one.

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Muroid t1_jegef9x wrote

Yeah, but the orientation is still arbitrary. There’s nothing natural about associating the poles with up and down or the precession of the sun through the sky as side to side motion.

It’s purely an arbitrary convention that could easily be reversed with no impact on how any of it is observed now or in the past.

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Muroid t1_jefw3tl wrote

You’re already assuming an “axis = vertical” model in that justification.

There’s no particular reason to think that the sun moving East-West means that East-West has to be side to side.

Maybe the sun is falling from “up” to “down” and the poles are the sides of the Earth.

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Muroid t1_je50suh wrote

Also, the white stone looks gorgeous. The way things were painted in bright colors in antiquity was gaudy as hell.

A lot of the classic Greek and Roman architecture and statuary would look kind of stupid to modern eyes that are used to seeing it with the color stripped away.

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Muroid t1_j7zxb6s wrote

>unfortunately, i live with my 80 year old

The line ended here and wrapped around to a new line to continue the sentence. Combined with the headline, I’ll admit my heart skipped a beat before my eyes caught up to the rest of what you wrote.

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Muroid t1_j6ojls0 wrote

Endowment effect: People overestimate the value of things they already own.

You say an arm or a hand isn’t worth a million dollars, but let me ask you this: if you had a million dollars and someone offered you a severed arm for a million dollars, would you take it? No? Then clearly a million dollars is worth more than an arm.

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Muroid t1_j5w24kc wrote

You have correctly identified the fact that kinetic energy is frame dependent and not conserved between frames of reference.

You aren’t really missing anything other than that you should do all comparisons from within the same frame of reference, but what frame you choose can be arbitrary and the math will ultimately all work out.

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Muroid t1_iy6yibk wrote

Mold and bacteria thrive in moist, humid environments. It’s less that humidifiers have been engineered to need excessive cleaning and more that their intended function encourages this growth as a natural consequence.

Preventing it would require doing things to the water that you probably don’t want to do to something you’re intending to aerosolize and inhale, or else treating the device itself in ways that are likely to require cleaning and/or maintenance anyway.

So at that point it’s cheaper and safer just to tell people they need to clean their humidifiers because the thing that makes humidifiers good for you also makes it good for stuff you don’t want building up in the humidifier.

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Muroid t1_iu01r1h wrote

The speed of light almost always refers to c. It would technically be correct to refer to any speed that light travels at as “the speed of light” but given the common name of c, that is almost never what people mean or understand by the phrase “speed of light” unless it’s been very clearly specified.

The speed of light through air is very, very close to c. The speed of light through fiber optics isn’t. Still a high percentage of c so very fast, but not a value that you’d ever mistake for c. With air it’s practically a rounding error away.

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Muroid t1_itvf738 wrote

“Renewables” aren’t really reusing energy so much as the source of the energy can or will be replenished rather than running out on human timescales.

For instance, we can burn oil and we can burn trees. There is currently a finite amount of oil on the Earth and a finite number of trees.

But we can grow more trees. We can’t make more oil. So trees are renewable. Oil is not.

The overwhelming majority of “renewable” energy sources that will not run out are actually just capturing energy put out by the sun.

If we want to be very technical, that energy is also finite and will run out, but the sun will expand and destroy the Earth long before that happens, so worrying about running out of that source of energy doesn’t seem particularly worthwhile.

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Muroid t1_iqrsyp5 wrote

In addition to the already mentioned pheromone trails, ants are also very good at exactly retracing their steps.

Experiments testing this exact question found that if they added stilts to ant legs on their return trip found that they overshot their nest by the corresponding amount that their stride was lengthened by the stilts, implying that they are effectively counting steps as they retrace their path.

If these normal methods fail and they get lost, they’ll then enter a spiral search pattern until they find the nest or a trail.

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