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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I’m not depressed, at least I don’t think I am. I don’t really feel sad.

    Society equating depression with sadness is a great disservice to the condition. It’s quite common for it to present as just … nothing. An emotional void where you might expect emotions to be. Things that would be expected to make you happy just don’t. Things that would make you sad, the same. Your feelings are depressed in the sense that their impact is just muted across the board.

    A lack of motivation is also a very common indicator. You’re just missing the drive to do something because the emotional rewards that you expect to happen when you accomplish your goals just aren’t there.



  • I’m with you. This shift over the last decade or so to everything being in video essay format is infuriating. Especially when I’m trying to look up instructions for something that could just be a five item bulleted list or a single image but instead is stretched out into a ten minute video.

    There have actually been a few times I’ve given up on finding some piece of information or instructions I wanted because I could only find video sources.


  • Yes, that’s my point. They know they have a dominant hand, and which hand that is. They are also likely to remember whether they are right or left handed. Even if they don’t know intrinsically what “right” is it can simply be memorized in the same way that people know their blood type.

    Combining those two pieces of information should let a person figure out which side is which.






  • vithigar@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyzOxygen
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    2 months ago

    The short version is that life needs something that’s at least a little unstable in order to extract chemical energy from things.

    The post is correct when viewed in a particular light, on a technicality, if you squint. By that same technicality iron rusting is also burning very slowly. They’re ignoring the rapidity which is implied by “burning”. But yes, oxygen is unstable, oxygen helps burn things, and oxygen is toxic if you get too much at once. Though you’d need to be breathing pure oxygen pressurized to about 1.4 atmospheres, or regular air pressurized to about 7 atmospheres, for that last one to happen. It’s a legitimate concern for deep SCUBA divers.

    But why does life need instability? Chemical instability is, in basic terms, just stored chemical energy, and that energy wants to be released. The more reactive something is the easier it is to get energy from reactions involving it. There’s a balancing act here where more reactive means easier energy, but also more dangerous. Oxygen is in a kind of sweet spot where it’s stable enough that it’s not generally going to explode or catch fire on its own, but can be coaxed into doing those things in controlled ways with other chemicals to extract energy when needed.








  • Yes, if you consider just a human-mass equivalent portion of the Sun then it’s not doing much, but that’s not really a useful comparison. We’re talking about total net entropy here, not entropy per unit mass.

    But yes, if it makes you feel any better, I’ll concede that if you had octillions of people our total metabolic energy output would, in fact, be significantly higher than that of the Sun.