kbin.pithyphrase.net

NuXCOM_90Percent , to Ask Science in Does a (phone|laptop) charger plugged in the socket but not connected to the device still consume electricity?

Depends on the charger but either effectively zero or considerably less.

People get pissy about it, but think of electricity like water. Having a longer pipe is a negligible amount of water if the faucet is still off. And the faucet can only turn on if your device completes the circuit by being plugged in (and doing the appropriate handshakes)

That said, some chargers will consume a negligible amount of electricity to actively listen for a device. Think of it like the water in your toilet. Every so often enough evaporates or leaks that you hear it run a bit to refill. But mostly it is nothing until you flush.

TallonMetroid ,
@TallonMetroid@lemmy.world avatar

Here’s an article on it, in case you wanted to know how to go about verifying it for yourself.

clockwork_octopus ,

As an electrician I approve this analogy

scytale ,

I use a short lightning cable to plug my phone to my car for carplay. I just leave it plugged into the usb port (without the phone) when I’m not in the car. Do you think it’s slowly draining some energy from the car battery?

Patches ,

The cables themselves do not use power. It is the brick.

Your radio being off would not push any power through a cable. Also your cigarette lighter being off would not push any power. Which is why plugging it in won’t do anything.

To continue the metaphor - your water is turned off. You can’t use up water that isn’t there.

The reason the brick uses power is because it is available 24/7 for you to plug something in - and when you do - it can ask that device how much power it wants - does it have fast charging? Etcetera.

scytale , (edited )

Thanks. About the cigarette lighter - my dashcam plugs into it but I always unplug it before I turn the car off so never noticed if the camera turns off along with the car. If it does, does that mean I can just keep the dashcam plugged in and it won’t draw power even though the camera is connected on the other end? Or does closing the circuit mean it will start drawing power?

Patches ,

If the camera turns off when you turn the car off then you’re safe to keep it plugged in.

Kethal ,

The water analogy is perfectly fine for many situations, but the reason these don’t draw a lot of power when nothing is plugged in isn’t because a “valve is off”. There’s a transformer, so this is like two separate water lines. If the charger is plugged in, there’s always a closed circuit on the mains side of the transformer, even if there’s an open circuit on the DC side. See the first diagram here: circuitdigest.com/…/ac-to-dc-converter-circuit-di….

The reason new chargers don’t use as much power with no device attached is because of better design. If you checked an old charger or some crappy power supply, they’ll use a fair bit of power even with nothing on the DC side. It’s not enough that one would matter, but it is enough that there was an industry wide initiative to reduce phantom load resulting in new chargers that use almost nothing when nothing is on the DC.

amio , to Ask Science in This is probably a dumb question, but if we eliminate the hydrophobia caused by rabies, would it increase the survival rate of active rabies?

No. Rabies is destroying neurons, causing the symptoms. The hydrophobia is not literal fear of water (like phobias so often aren't) but a result of your brain being fried to the point where you have issues swallowing. If it were an issue of hydration, just IV fluids would be a given, and you would probably want IV access anyway.

Not a doctor or anything, though.

criitz , to Work Reform in Is it just me or are 9-5 hours naturally the most stifling?

We should be working less, like maybe a few hours a day. Most of an 8 hour workday is unproductive time anyway. We’ve got decades of automation improvements, they should be serving to free us from constant labor instead of lining the pockets of the rich. But alas.

AtariDump ,

Amen!

AtariDump ,

Amen!

SinningStromgald ,

Very true. A majority of days I create work for myself so I’m not caught idle by the time lunch comes around.

OscarRobin ,

I work from home an average of 4ish hours per day, with plenty of breaks whenever I feel like it, and I’m one of the most productive people at my company of 50 employees - many of whom go into the office regularly.

williams_482 , to Star Trek in Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x07 "Those Old Scientists"
@williams_482@startrek.website avatar

Poor Christine Chapel! Now she knows what the audience has always known: her relationship with Spock is ultimately doomed. Plus a delightful mix of guilt and fear that she could unwittingly cause Spock to never measure up to the vague but crucial future that Boimler mentioned to her in the turbolift, simply by trying to make the two of them happy.

That suuuuuucks.

hmantegazzi ,
@hmantegazzi@startrek.website avatar

I really didn’t expected the emotional moments, but they were all done so well

concrete_baby ,

So Boimler inadvertently causes Nurse Chapel to end her relationship with Spock and encourage him to go back to T’Pring?

Jestersage ,

Predestination paradox. In fact the entire thing is likely a predestinaiton paradox. “Activated 120 years ago”, which is caused by the imager at “now”; the reason why the two can go back home is because Tendi told them about the version according to Orion and mentioned her great-grandma being the discoverer, which is what let the past Orion to recognize the truth and probably themselves assigned it to Tendi’s great-grandma?

samus12345 ,
@samus12345@lemmy.world avatar

Tendi just said her great-grandmother was on the ship that discovered it, not that she was the discoverer.

polymorphist_neuroid ,

…this little bit of cooperation between the Federation and the Orions probably improves their relationship a bit, which will eventually lead to Orions joining the Federation, which is how Tendi is friends with Boimler in the first place, which is how Boimler knows that not all Orions are pirates which is why Pike tones down his hostile response which gets them to a deal with the Orions which leads to…

polymorphist_neuroid ,

OMG! They managed to make that scene just so hilarious and poignant at the same time. Watching her facial expressions as she realizes what Boimler is telling her made me want to just scream at him to shut the fuck up and slap the shit out of him…but he’s just being dear sweet clueless Boimey. :(

Theme-wise, I think they’re setting up a comparison between Pike knowing his doom and Christine/Spock knowing their relationship is doomed. Knowing that, what do you do in the meantime?

TropicalDingdong , to Ask Science in If life never emerged on Earth, would the continents still be more or less the same today? In other words, does life affect the formation and movement of continents significantly?

So a few things that are missing from the current answers. I'm not a geologist, but I have had graduate level paleobotany training, and quite a bit geology coursework. I also worked in paleobotany lab. I do currently do research in biogeochemical cycling, so while I can't speak to the nature of continent or mountain building, but I can speak to how our planet has changed chemically, and that in many ways, life on earth has already fundamentally altered major components of the biogeochemical processes that result in geologic formations. This is not quite what you asked, but I think a geologist with the right training could weigh in on the back to further the conversation.

So the two processes I would speak to are the formation of bituminous coal , and the formation of limestone, both of which are biological in origin.

Coal as a type of sedimentary rock involves the conversion of dead vegetation in wetlands, when vegetation dies and is submerged in an anoxygenic environment. The basic process is that vegetation grows, dies, and is buried in a low oxygen environment, and eventually turns into coal, which has retained most of the C-C bonds that were originally present in the plant tissue (cellulose). So how important is evolution and life to the formation of coal? Well consider that 90% of coal beds were deposited during the Carboniferous and Permian periods, representing only a brief fractions of earths geological history. Why would this be the case? Well, it was during the Carboniferous that plants evolved lignin, a plant molecule that is not only very resilient to decomposition, but is a structural tissue that allows for the building of large, indeterminate plant parts. This resulted in the first "trees", which is to say, tall woody plants that could extend a significant distance above the ground because they now had a strong reinforcement polymer they could integrate with cellulose. So all of a sudden, plant life was like "Fuck yeah, trees upgrade unlocked"!

HOWEVER fungi and bacteria had not yet evolved to degrade lignin. Which meant, for around 160 million years, trees were going gangbusters, but no organism had yet evolved to significantly decompose lignin; this resulted in the wood just kind of piling up, and where you had wetland conditions suitable for coal formation, you got coal. So for around 2% of earths history, we had trees, but we didn't have wood-decomposing fungi. There are other factors at play here like the high oxygen levels from all the plants, and extremely high CO2 levels from ongoing volcanism (I believe the Kamchatka volcanics?), but if not for the evolution of lignin, we would not have coal, and if not for the evolution of wood-decomposing fungus, the formation of coal would not have been curtailed significantly.

I know much less about the formation of limestone, except that there a shit ton more of it than there is coal, but I can speak to it enough to make a few points. Limestone forms mostly in shallow marine environments. Limestone is made from coral and forminfera, basically shell bearing microorganisms. Anything with a shell that lives and then eventually dies in a marine environment can lead to the formation of limestone. Limestone makes up around 25% of the sedimentary rocks on planet earth, which is a shit ton of shells. Its been forming for a very long time.

So a few more considerations. Consider that sedimentary rocks like coal or limestone are much lighter than igneous rocks. Continental crust is like rafts of light rock floating in a sea of heavier oceanic crust. So there is a kind of geological selection process for these lighter rocks to accumulate as continental crust rather than be subducted and then stay subducted. I'm going to stop there because that's too deep into the geology for me to speculate further on. I can speak to the biogeochemical aspects, but I'm not a geologist.

So from a chemical perspective, the contents of the minerals that make up continental crust have ABSOLUTELY been altered by the trajectory of evolution on planet earth. Now if that would fundamentally alter the outlines of the continents or their movements? That's beyond what I know about earth history. What I can say is that evolution has had a direct impact on the chemical composition of the atmosphere, and the makeup of major rock and mineral formations that represent a significant portion of the earths crust.

dumples ,
@dumples@kbin.social avatar

I just want to add all of the organic material that makes soil different from sand. Erosion will turn rocks into small rocks which we call sand. It's plants, fungus and animals that make that into soil. They all work together to digest and excrete what makes up soil. Not to mention that it's fungi that dissolve minerals to make them bioavailable to everything else. So there's lots of ways life changed the surface but I don't know about the base continents

cymbal_king ,

Adding all of that coal and limestone trapped a lot of carbon underground. If that carbon was CO2 instead, the Earth would be much hotter. Perhaps hotter than the boiling point of water and thus there would be no ocean between the continents, like Venus.

classic ,

A note of appreciation for such a quality response

deweydecibel , to Star Trek in Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x07 "Those Old Scientists"

Sooooo many people that never watched Lower Decks are going to be asking why there was a koala in the opening and I’m delighted by that.

ummthatguy ,
@ummthatguy@lemmy.world avatar

“Why is he smiling? What does he know?”

teolan ,
@teolan@lemmy.world avatar

I watched lower decks and I’m also confused

AuroraBorealis ,
@AuroraBorealis@pawb.social avatar

I think it’s s1e4 of lower decks

teolan ,
@teolan@lemmy.world avatar

Thanks

Taleya ,

The universe is balanced on the back of a giant cosmic koala! WHY IS HE SMILING? WHAT DOES HE KNOW??

linux2647 ,

I missed the koala! When does it show up in the intro?

Edit: found it at 6:46

athos77 , (edited ) to RedditMigration in Does anyone regret deleting their Reddit account?

14 years, 17 accounts, ~2000000 karma. Nuked everything: deleted comments and submissions, de-modded myself, unsubbed from everything, gilded various protest content using the coins I'd been given over the years, bought a cool Apollo app t-shirt, walked out and walked away. Nope, don't miss it; I'm exploring kbin and tildes, and getting my meme content from imgur. Which is ironic in a way, because the sole reason imgur was created was because reddit refused to allow native images.

Are you having regrets? It's okay to have regrets.

Lemmyfunbun ,

What is kbin and tildes?

TelKaivokalma ,
@TelKaivokalma@kbin.social avatar

Always weird to read comments like this while on Kbin. Kbin is another "threadiverse" instance. Like Lemmy or whatever.

LegendofDragoon ,
@LegendofDragoon@kbin.social avatar

Yeah, it becomes so second nature that I'm on kbin that it's a weird kind of dissonance, like someone asking what's Reddit on Reddit.

EnglishMobster ,
@EnglishMobster@kbin.social avatar

I love everyone always saying "Lemmy, what's XYZ?" or whatever not realizing there's a good chunk of people not on Lemmy.

It does get annoying when I see Lemmy-specific questions in my feed, though.

Very_Bad_Janet ,

Kbin is a part of the Fediverse and is similar to Lemmy. I have a kbin.social account and am replying to you from kbin. (I subscribe to a lot of Lemmy communities via kbin).

Tildes is not a part of the Fediverse. It is a text-driven private forum basically created and run by one person. You need an invite from a Tildes account holder to join. It's its own little island. am on Tildes a lot and really like it.

Openminded-skeptic ,

Isn't the founder of Tildes a former Reddit admin with a pretty well-known account? Or am I remembering that wrong?

Amongog ,
@Amongog@kbin.social avatar

Kbin is a different software than Lemmy, although similar.
It has only been around a few months (unlike lemmy that has years in development).

It offers what seems to me a more centralized view of the fediverse, with federation to lemmy servers and mastodon servers as well.

It has access to the microblogging feature, that is like sending a toot from mastodon.

I've found it to be a more familiar experience to Reddit, and honestly, I prefer it over lemmy.

Due to it being so new, it has many missing features lemmy might have, like mobile apps (the API is still not public, and it's being worked on).

HOWEVER, Kbin has a great community backing it up.
I'm currently posting this from the amazing Artemis beta app for Kbin, the first of its kind.
This is due to the incredible job @Hariette has done!!

rustyfish ,
@rustyfish@lemmy.world avatar

imgur

I forgot about that…been a while old friend.

Edit: HOLY FUCKNUGGETS BATMAN! It’s still alive and well?!

originalfrozenbanana , to Work Reform in I this a firm and polite way to tell an opinionated coworker to stop pushing his agenda I don't care about?

I’d like to keep work about work. This conversation is not appropriate for work.

d00phy ,

I think this is the best answer. Think of it in terms of what would the boss (a good boss, that is) say? I can actually hear my managers say this. Many of the options here could be taken by the other person as you thinking you’re “better than” them. This is a fair and accurate response that doesn’t get personal.

originalfrozenbanana ,

Yeah it is important to set boundaries. It’s critical, actually. But it need not be judgmental or cruel. Work is a place where I go to give my time and labor for money. It’s nothing else. I have friends, family, and a therapist. OP’s coworker may not, and that is sad. But their behavior is hurting OP, which means it’s time to set a boundary.

OpenPassageways ,

This was my initial thought, but it's not clear from the post whether this is a work-related rant or not. It certainly could be a rant about issues that do affect work.

howrar , to Ask Science in Is zero divisible by zero?

It does not. If you enforce 0/0=1, then you end up in a situation where you can prove any two numbers are equal to each other and you end up with a useless system, so we do not allow for that.

e.g. 0=0*2 -> 0/0 = (0/0)2 -> 1=12 -> 1=2

If you get into calculus though, you’ll have ways to deal with this to some extent using limits.

amio ,

Quick tip, Markdown treats * specially so you need to escape it like so: *

howrar ,

Thanks. I already fixed it, but it seems Lemmy is just slow to propagate edits.

Spzi ,

I see you replace two “0” with a “0/0”, but why that? Since you assume it equals 1, why do you replace it for 0?

howrar ,

I’m dividing both sides by 0.

Spzi ,

Ah, yes. Normally not allowed because undefined, but here you define it as 1. Alright, thanks.

Corgana , to Star Trek in Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x07 "Those Old Scientists"
@Corgana@startrek.website avatar

Loved having a Sunday morning cartoon 🖖

This episode was way better than it needed to be. I was genuinely moved seeing Una’s reaction to the knowledge of her being the “poster girl”, as well as the reaction of the Orion captain at the end.

Seeing Boimler and Mariner in this context really drives home how much Lower Decks is essentially “what if Trekkies could serve in Star Fleet” and it worked so well!

Hogger85b ,

Especially the poster girl part being how she (and her lawyer) presented her self in the trial in ep2

Corgana ,
@Corgana@startrek.website avatar

Yes exactly! To Boimler it was a major and inspiring story out of history, but to Una it was a personal moment that happened only recently. Imagine being told something you did that you thought was relatively minor (and over) would inspire generations of people in the years to come. Her reaction was perfect.

simple , to LinkedinLunatics in Belching
@simple@lemm.ee avatar

I can already imagine a 40-something year old manager coming into work wearing this

DagonPie , to Sysadmin in fuck Adobe and fuck their licensing
@DagonPie@kbin.social avatar

As someone that had to deal with adobe for 5 years for an 800 person studio. Fuck Adobe. For the rest of forever.

notabot , to Ask Science in How could SI units be derived from scratch without the use of modern technology?

Once you can get a good reference for one unit ypu can start to use it to determine the others. None of these are going to be perfectly accurate, but they should be good enough for day-to-day use.

I’d start with time. We’re going to make a sundial. To do this you need to make a drawing compass and some flat ground with plenty of sun. Find a v-shaped stick, or lash a couple together so you can scribe circles in the ground. Start by making one circle around a well marked centre point, then using the same compass, draw another circle centred on the edge of the first. Draw two more circles where the second crosses the first, and two more where those cross it. You should now have a central circle with the perimeter divided into six segments (this is the same technique for drawing a hexagon inside a circle). Put another stick upright in the centre and you have a sundial with 2 hour segments. You can bisect the lines between each of the points to get 1 hour segments, and if it’s big enough, busect again to get 30 minute segments. We’ll get shorter time measurements later.

The next unit to find is the meter. A one meter pendulum completes a swing from one side to the other every second. In order to minimise the effect of air resistance, find a heavy, but not too large rock and tie it to the end of a rope. Measure out approximately out meter of rope (measured from the centre of the rock) and tie it to a solid branch. Next is the tedious bit. Set it swinging as the sundial hits one of it’s marks and count the number of swings until the sundial hits the next mark. You should get 3600 per hour. If you get too many, lengthen the rope and try again, if you get too few, shorten it. Once you have the right number you have both your meter measure and your one second.

You can get a metric tonne, and thereafter a kilogram, by building a balance weigh beam, and a cube shaped container that is exactly one metre on a side. Attach the container to obe side of the beam, and a second container exactly the same distance away from the pivot on the other side. Add rocks to the second container until it balances with the empty first containor. Now fill the first with cold water. Add more weight to the second until it balances again. The additional weight should be exactly one metric tonne. By careful geometry you could reduce tge size of your first container to make this easier, but keeping it big and then dividing the result minimises measurement errors.

Temperature is harder to measure, but you can build a thermometer with any liquid that changes density with temperature. Even water works, although adding alcohol helps I believe. So, while you’re finding the meter, get some fruit and let it ferment. Use the resulting liquid in your thermometer. If you don’t have a glass tube, and can’t make one, use an opaque one, and float a light reed or similar on the liquid, with the end sticking out of the top. Calibrate it with boiling water for 100c, and, assuming a reasonable climate, wrap it against your body for a goid long while to get 37c. If you have accesd to ice, letting it just melt gives you 0c. Dividing the marks you get like this would involve some careful geometric construction, but should yield a usable thermometer. Converting that to Kelvin, as the SI unit, involves adding 273.16.

The ampere and candela are probably of less use in this situation, and are going to be tricky to measure. By assuming gravity is 9.81m/s^2 and using the kilogram you can derive the Newton. From that you have the Joule, and one Joule per second is one Watt. Assuming you build a generator, you can derive the Ampere from it’s older definition relating to the force, in Newtons, between two parallel wires. From there the volt can be derived.

Beyond that, I think you should just hope for rescue!

Thanks for a thought provoking question.

janus2 OP ,
@janus2@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I hadn’t even thought about getting HH:MM from a sundial, that’s brilliant! Then getting seconds and the meter from a pendulum is just straight up elegant.

By careful geometry you could reduce tge size of your first container to make this easier, but keeping it big and then dividing the result minimises measurement errors.

I thought this was worth a callout for being a really important consideration in this thought experiment. Understanding that larger scale measurements generally reduce error, and perhaps also repetition with averaging of results, would be incredibly useful in fast tracking the redevelopment of precision.

If you have accesd to ice, letting it just melt gives you 0c.

This one I wondered about more because of the effect of atmospheric pressure(?) on melting point, such that I wondered if it would be worth using Fahrenheit’s Weird Brine ice slurry to get ~ -17.778 ° C instead. But that’s ofc also subject to air pressure influencing melting point so I’m unsure if it’d be worthwhile.

Relatively constant 9.81 m/s² gravity is also useful for deriving force as you mention, though it reminds me of learning, to my abject horror, in undergrad physics that gravity does vary quite a bit by geolocation :'D 9.81m/s² is a better starting point than nothing though

notabot ,

This one I wondered about more because of the effect of atmospheric pressure(?) on melting point, such that I wondered if it would be worth using Fahrenheit’s Weird Brine ice slurry to get ~ -17.778 ° C instead. But that’s ofc also subject to air pressure influencing melting point so I’m unsure if it’d be worthwhile.

Varying air pressure is certainly a concern, but repeating the experiment, as you said, would help to reduce the error, as would being as close to sea level as possible. Interestingly, if you have your meter measure you could use that to measure atmospheric pressure by seeing how far you could raise water in a column by suction. At standard atmospheric pressure you should be able to lift fresh water 10.3m.

Relatively constant 9.81 m/s² gravity is also useful for deriving force as you mention, though it reminds me of learning, to my abject horror, in undergrad physics that gravity does vary quite a bit by geolocation :'D 9.81m/s² is a better starting point than nothing though

Gravity is altogether too unreliable and should be abolished. Failing that, You could measure the local gravity by measuring how far a rock falls in a fixed time, say one second, and calculating back from that. If the rock is heavy enough we can ignore air resistance as the effect will be smaller than our measurement error.

janus2 OP ,
@janus2@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Interestingly, if you have your meter measure you could use that to measure atmospheric pressure by seeing how far you could raise water in a column by suction. At standard atmospheric pressure you should be able to lift fresh water 10.3m.

Oh yeah! I should have remembered that actually, since I was just rewatching an episode of Connections 2 that mentions this height limit in the context of vacuum pump history (I think it’s detailed more in season 1 but I forget which episode). So 10.3 m is another key measurement that you want at least one human to have memorized :]

Gravity is altogether too unreliable and should be abolished.

This reads like a Douglas Adams quote and I love it.

sylver_dragon , to Ask Science in Is the heat produced by fossil and nuclear fuel negligible?

Let me borrow an image to put some numbers around it:

https://explainingscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/image.png

So, in one hour, the Earth receives more energy from the sun than us humans generate in an entire year. If we took all of the energy we generated over a year (and not just the waste heat) and converted it into heat, we wouldn't even be adding half of one percent to the system. Our direct contributions to the system are minuscule. The problem is we're pumping out green house gasses like there's no tomorrow. And those directly increase the amount of solar energy the Earth retains. And when we start keeping 1 or 2 more percent of that insane amount of solar energy, it adds up really, really fast.

Tinidril ,

Not that it changes things much, but pretty much that entire 163,000 TWh ends up as heat, not just the waste. Pretty much the only energy that doesn't is light and other transmissions that get radiated into space.

Ephera OP ,
magnetosphere , to Work Reform in Got laid off today.
@magnetosphere@kbin.social avatar

I might consider relocating someplace nice, but an overhyped, overpriced city in one of the reddest red states? Kindly fuck off.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • random
  • All magazines