tal

tal , 1 year ago to askscience in Why do we associate nuclear radiation with a green glow?

In 2023, yeah, but remember that it isn't in 2023 that the association was made.

Tritium watches used to be a much bigger deal some decades back, as you could actually use the thing in the dark. Subsequent to that, battery-powered digital watches with a light became common, and then a lot of people just moved to using a cell phone to know the time.

As the linked WP article details, uranium glass also used to be more-common prior to the government locking up a lot of supplies of uranium. I've only seen uranium glass in person in museums, and in general, plastic has displaced a lot of glassware today.

tal , 1 year ago to Linux in Every Linux Geek Needs to Know Sed and Awk. Here’s Why… - The Tech Edvocate

Python isn't really a fantastic drop-in replacement for them, IMHO, though there is some overlap.

There are a bunch of Unix tools that let one concisely put a lot of logic into a single command line. They lower the bar to throwing a lot of logic into that single line.

Python's whitespace-sensitive and requires newlines. I guess theoretically you could use a HEREDOC or something, but realistically, if you use Python, you're going to go author a throwaway script and then execute it, which raises the bar to just including it in your command lines.

I think that Perl is probably closer to a middle ground between "application-oriented programming languages" and "single command line use". I think that it'd be reasonable to simply use perl -pie as an alternative to awk especially, though having sed's conciseness is still nice.

tal , 1 year ago to askscience in Why do we associate nuclear radiation with a green glow?

Some possible factors, from reading similar discussions:

• Tritium paint is radioactive and produces a pale green fluorescence on watches.
• The Simpsons had a glowing green fuel rod in the opening. The rod would not have glowed green in reality.
• Uranium glass fluoresces green under UV light

tal , 1 year ago to Fediverse in I created a site that helps people search the fediverse

In all seriousness, Google needs to get on providing an easier way to specify that a search should hit the Fediverse. site:reddit.com works for Reddit, but there is presently no analogous operator on Google's search for a distributed system that spans many domains.

I mean, it's great that you've made this, don't get me wrong, but they really should do that as well.