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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • I have some better quality kitchen knives I like keeping sharp.

    I use a two-sided whetstone 400/2000 grit for basic shaping (400 is akin to those rolling sharpeners, to be used only when you fucked up real bad), a leather strop with green sharpening paste (~6000-8000 grit) glued to a piece of wood, a plain leather strop, and a honing steel.

    Green sharpening paste is most of what I ever use, a couple of strokes weekly (more realistically about 20 once a month), and maybe polish it up with the plain leather strop. Keeps the knives wicked sharp, and then I just hone them after each use.

    Sometimes I do stupid things and get burrs in my edge (like cleaving frozen bone), that’s where the 2000 grit saves me.

    400 I guess is for when the apocalypse comes or your kids decided to practice chef’s knife throwing into scrap metal. It’s nice to know I can remake a whole edge, but rarely used.




  • My list is quite different than the ones currently in the thread.

    The boring ones:

    Creating a vaccine or other cloaking to make humans invisible to ticks & mosquitoes. A separate project would be to do the same for parasites.

    Enacting strict pollution/carbon limits and mandatory circular economy everywhere in the world.

    Researching, trialing and Enacting a sustainable post-capitalist system everywhere in the world.

    Developing solar energy until covering global energy demands, including a power network that can transport energy from the sunny side and/or orbit everywhere.

    The slightly more ambitious:

    Establish self-sustainable colonies living on off-earth resources, most probably also situated off-earth.

    Create a Dyson swarm with enough energy output for in-system exploration, mining, colonisation, and terraforming.

    Perfect matter replicators.

    I have some other ideas as well, but those would be a start.



  • Heat is electromagnetic radiation - photons, sound is mechanical displacement - phonons.

    They mostly propagate the same due to being waves, in most other respects they are very different.

    Heat convection is an entirely separate process where heat radiation is aided by the movement of the surrounding medium. Where it would otherwise heat up it’s environment, convection keeps the environment from heating up. Compare coffee in a thermos (very little convection) to a cup you’re blowing on (significant convection); more air movement - more cooling.

    Also, destructive interference does not at all work like that.

    Maybe a more useful analogy could be that waves have like walking animations, where in part of the animation they go up, and in another part they go down. Destructive interference happens when a wave in its’ “up” phase crosses a wave in it’s “down”, meaning the resulting movement looks like nothing. The waves don’t however interact in any way, and will continue on their way and on their own animation cycles.

    The shifting and heating parts are technically true but require very specific circumstances, enough so that I’m more prone to believe it’s another misunderstanding of the physics behind this. But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.










  • There are a lot more changes influencing your perception of reality than just sensory development.

    I’d agree, but those are enough to clearly demonstrate a mechanism for changed perception in the proposed time span. The underlying question is question begging and whataboutism, so I think I’ve provided an overly generous answer to a dishonest question.

    That’s dependent on your consciousness being limited to your physical body. Who’s to say that your consciousness wasn’t limited so a pantheistic deity could interact with itself. Both theories are equally unscientific as you can’t disprove what happens before or after life

    As we can reliably affect consciousness though manipulating the body, it’s well established that it’s contingent on the body.

    And as we can map consciousness happening in the body down to individual neurons firing, where would a non-corporeal consciousness interact with a body?

    You calling these reliably reproducible facts unscientific belies a fundamental misunderstanding of science.

    Though naturalism might not be the only way to investigate the universe, we have yet to encounter any reliable other paradigms. And even if we would discover them, naturalism would still be part of science, we’d just add the other paradigms to the areas they’re useful, like we’ve done with psychology, sociology, and even quantum physics.

    A difficult question for unfalsifiable hypotheses is that if they’re unfalsifiable, they are also undetectable, and as such no different from figments of imagination. Why should I believe your imagination when my imaginary friend says not to?