ornery_chemist

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

cries in hypertension

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Good rule of thumb: if someone else hasn't solved the problem yet, it's more complicated than you're assuming. If the problem is worth solving, other people smarter than you have almost certainly attempted the easy "solutions" already, and they were inadequate to solve the problem. Heck, even if it's not worth solving, there's a non-zero chance that some pre-Reagan weirdos took a crack at it with bonus mercury and thallium compounds for the lulz and published it all in a vague 200-word comm in a now-defunct journal.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Isn't the squaring actually multiplication by the complex conjugate when working in the complex plane? i.e., √((1 - 0 i) (1 + 0 i) + (0 - i) (0 + i)) = √(1 + - i^2^) = √(1 + 1) = √2. I could be totally off base here and could be confusing with something else...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

I so badly want to be as smart and articulate as Feynman when ever I grow up.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

இல்லை, இது பேட்ரிக்.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

In fluent speech, the conjunction (the first "that") is unstressed, and as a result some speakers reduce the vowel a bit toward schwa. However, if you told those speakers to carefully pronounce each word, I bet they would pronounce the conjunction and the pronoun the exact same same. A more common example of this kind of reduction is the word "to", which is almost always reduced to /tə/ ([tə] ~ [tʊ] ~ [ɾə] depending on dialect and surrounding words) in everyday speech when unstressed.

Fun fact, you can reduce just about every unstressed vowel in English to schwa (if it's not already a schwa) and still be largely understood.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago

dass das das das dass da ersetzen kann ist falsch

translation: that "das" can replace "dass" there is wrong.

same shit different barbarians

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

This relation between temperature and resistivity can be shown to be exponential in certain temperature regimes by waving your hands and chanting "to first order."

for some reason this is the line that got me

[–] [email protected] 46 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

New strategy to prevent global warming: just freeze all of the CO2 out of the air!

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

That's not the gotcha OOP seems to think it is. If the world was magicked into existence by a supreme being 4000 years ago, there's no reason it couldn't have been magicked into existence with heavy elements having decayed by an arbitrary amount or with Pb by itself. 'Tis the problem with invoking appeals to magic. And anyway a quick look on wiki says that primordial Pb was mostly created by neutron capture of lighter elements, not radioactove decay of heavier ones, so the mere existence of Pb proves nothing wrt the timeline of U decay anyway... but at that point if you're bringing nucleosynthesis into it, you may as well point to anything higher than lithium or even atoms as a concept as "proof" rather than picking anything as exotic as uranium decay.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Alternatively for a full octet on every atom, oxiryne, which does not exist and does not have a wiki page. It's basically acetylene with its arms chopped off and the stumps dislocated, bent back, and stapled together with an oxygen atom.

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