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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • I expect it’ll probably be relatively boring. Trump likely has been coached to hell and back not to say unhinged shit. Of course, he can’t control himself so he’s going to say some unhinged shit, but it’s definitely not going to be to the same frequency and magnitude that he normally is.

    Meanwhile, Biden is going to play the “Trump is unhinged, so Republicans please vote for me” strategy, which is going to be unexciting to both Republicans and Democrats.

    I think the debate itself is going to be dull, and what will really sway the population is what the media and social media run with afterward. ie, it’ll be determined entirely by who has the more embarrassing slip-up. God this country is fucked





  • If you want a real answer, it’s like living with a roommate 100% of the time, with all the positives and negatives that come with having a roommate 100% of the time.

    Don’t believe in all the lovey-dovey stuff that you see in media. That’s just attraction, not love. In some ways it’s similar to war - media always glamorize the emotional aspect of war, while completely skipping over the fact that wars are won through robust logistics networks. Love is similar in that in real life, any physical attraction takes a backstage to the fundamental requirement that everyone needs to be on the same page about basically everything.

    In that respect, it is a lot of communication, and oftentimes it requires a bit too much communication than you are willing to provide. It definitely takes a lot of effort to establish and maintain robust communication with your significant other, especially if you are not used to doing so. But as long as you continue to do so, you basically get a close friend who is always there to help with what you might need




  • Former child in a bilingual household. The time that your child spends outside of your home has by far the biggest influence on language fluency. You can have your child speak a language at home, and they would be able to understand it and speak it, but it would be limited - likely conversationally fluent, but not natively fluent.

    If you can find a community for that language and culture that you visit every once a week, it will help reinforce that language. There might be language schools run by people from that culture - it’ll be an easy way to get in touch with other people from that same culture





  • My field of expertise is bacterial pathogenesis with a particular interest in pneumococcal pneumonia.

    And it’s true, immunology is ridiculously complex that no one person can ever hope to fully understand it. Immune cells are helpful or detrimental depending on the context, and sometimes even both. And we don’t really fully know why. The problem is that pathogens and humans have been in an evolutionary arms race for billions of years, and unraveling all of that evolutionary technical debt is Fun

    To give an example, Toll-like receptors are one of the most important pathogen-detection mechanisms, and they were discovered just about 25 years ago and people only really figured out their importance about 20 years ago. There are researchers who have spent the majority of their careers before the discovery of one of the most crucial immune pathways.

    We really don’t know what’s going on with immunology and to say otherwise is, as I’ve said, an outright lie. People seem to overestimate how much we know about the immune system, not knowing that we are still very much in the “baby phase” of immune research. The fact that we are able to do so much already is really kind of a testament to human ingenuity than anything

    My personal experience is that people who claim to know completely about how the immune system works is more likely to be a science denier (or more likely, naive)




  • The screen size matters significantly. More specifically, what humans care about is pixel density. A 24 inch 1080p screen does not look the same as a 27 inch 1080p, which does not look the same as a 32 inch 1080p.

    A 24 inch 1080p screen is perfectly fine. A 27 inch 1080p, you can start to see the pixels more clearly. A 32 inch 1080p IMO is unacceptably bad.

    I would say the standard should be 1080p for 24 inch or under, 1440p for 24-27 inch, 4K for 27 inch or above

    I personally run a 24 inch 1440p screen because I’m pretty picky with pixel density, and the monitor was relatively good deal.


  • I address this in the last sentence of my previous post.

    To reiterate, your argument does not matter because if you keep asking why, you are no longer answering the question that is being asked, but an entirely different question altogether. You can answer why there are so many metals. We might not figure out why the laws of physics are the way they are, but if you’ve gotten to that point where you’re trying to answer that question, then you’ve deviated so far from the original question that you weren’t even trying to respond to it to begin with.


  • That’s blatantly incorrect. The properties of metals is an emergent property that arises from how atoms interact with each other.

    Dense network of bonds with a lot of electrons -> higher chance of absorbing incoming light of a particular wavelength -> electron gets excited to the precise energy level of the incoming light due to the dense network of molecular orbitals -> electrons releases the exact amount of energy absorbed when it falls back to ground level -> a photon with equal wavelength to the light that was absorbed is emitted -> we observe that as something being shiny.

    There’s nothing fundamental about why metals are metallic - inorganic chemists don’t just spend their entire day looking at elements and categorizing them as metals or not. Their entire job is figuring out why metals are the way they are. If you want to debate about why quantum mechanics (which is what ultimately causes atoms to interact in a particular way) is the way it is, then sure, we don’t know that yet. But then you’d be talking about an entirely different topic than the one that was asked


  • I’ll try my best. I’m not an inorganic chemist, but I did take a class on it once, and I’ll try to remember as much from it as I can.

    Metals are metallic mainly because they’re able to form these vast networks of bonds between many atoms. All the properties that we associate with metals - shiny, conducts electricity and heat, such as that - arise because of how this network of bonds interacts with the environment. For instance, having a network means electrons can go from one side of the network to the other which we observe as being electrically conductive.

    In other words, the metallicity of an object is an emergent property that’s dependent on how large this network of bonds is and what types of bonds make up the network. As a side note, because we know that the network is the basis of metallicity, we can kind of cheat the system by making networks out of otherwise non-metallic objects, and if we make these networks act similarly to the networks found in metals, we get a non-metal that looks and acts like a metal (what we would then call a semiconductor)

    It turns out, the higher energy orbitals that you find on heavier atoms have the tendency to form networks. I don’t fully remember why, but I think it has something to do with the fact that when you get so heavy, you have so many orbitals that you can just form a ton of bonds at once (I was surprised to learn that metal atoms can form more than 3 bonds with another metal atom)

    So basically the lighter elements tend to be non-metals because they don’t have the number of orbitals to form a cohesive network (outside of select cases) and the heavier elements tend to be metals because they have so many orbitals that they kind of have to form networks.