UmbralRaptor changed the topic of #kspacademia to: https://gist.github.com/pdn4kd/164b9b85435d87afbec0c3a7e69d3e6d | Dogs are cats. Spiders are cat interferometers. | Космизм сегодня! | Document well, for tomorrow you may get mauled by a ネコバス. | <UmbralRaptor> … one of the other grad students just compared me to nomal O_o | <ferram4> I shall beat my problems to death with an engineer.
<soundnfury>
UmbralRaptor: itym "fsckin' _plants_, how do they work"
<bofh>
I love how ginormous plant genomes are.
<bofh>
Granted, some of this is b/c a lot of genes are spun-up on demand to external stressors, given that plants can't move this is somewhat of a necessity.
<APlayer>
Okay, I am off for today. See you guys!
<bofh>
(Actually I think the weirdest thing about plants is how they react to aneuploidy. Animals generally get severe diseases or are outright unviable given an increased number of copies of a chromosome. Plants generally are fine, just become like, larger and bigger)
<bofh>
(The canonical example for this (for me at least) being Fragaria (strawberries), Земляника (Fragaria Vesca iirc, no clue what the English name is) is diploid and fairly tiny w/small fruit, whereas North American strawberries are hexaploid and considerably bigger)
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<egg|anbo|egg>
!wpn bofh
* Qboid
gives bofh a dye ?
<egg|anbo|egg>
!wpn UmbralRaptor
* Qboid
gives UmbralRaptor a voulge
<egg|anbo|egg>
!wpn Fiora
* Qboid
gives Fiora a rho paraboloid
<UmbralRaptor>
stabbity!
<UmbralRaptor>
!wpn anbocat
* Qboid
gives anbocat a baked pommel
<bofh>
Ahh, so a voulge is a type of polearm.
<bofh>
TIL.
<UmbralRaptor>
bofh: things I learned playing Diablo 2.
<Ellied>
"Blacklight lamps which have this filter have a lighting industry designation that includes the letters "BLB".[3][5] This stands for "blacklight blue", which is a contradiction in that they are the type that does not look blue."
<Ellied>
"what does this label mean?" "blacklight blue." "huh? how can it be black AND blue? which is it really?" "neither." "..."
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<bofh>
Ellied: reminds me of how UV LEDs exhibit blue fluorescence for w/e reason in the plastic.
<Ellied>
bofh: I think that's actually intentional, for some reason. No other LED with a clear package I have fluoresces when brought in front of a UV LED.
<Ellied>
must be for "safety" so you can more easily see when it's on?
<bofh>
Probably.
<bofh>
(Tho I've found I can weakly see 390nm light myself, faintly but it's not out of my visual range. Which makes sense as it's blocked by the iris, the blue cone's peak is actually something like 415nm and it's a Gaussian).
<Ellied>
blocked by the lens, right? not iris, that just adjusts the amount of ~all wavelengths
<bofh>
er.
<bofh>
I meant lens and typed iris, wtf.
<bofh>
Yes, blocked by lens crystallins.
<Ellied>
I can see the light that comes out of UV LEDs just fine. It's not *bright* but the LEDs are more lumminously effective for me than the shitty red ones we have in the old drawer
<Ellied>
presumably the LEDs are very bright indeed and my lenses hate me.
<kmath>
<dataandpolitics> ?️??️??️??️??️??️? Are you an LGBT scholar? Do you study LGBT topics? Please help me run @LGBTscholars, wh… https://t.co/HvQxWdi9Ld
<Ellied>
I think my terminal got unicode'd by that
<UmbralRaptor>
D:
<Ellied>
silly emoji support
<bofh>
Ellied: well the old janky red GaAsP LEDs aren't exactly very bright.
<Ellied>
no, it's true
<Ellied>
20 mA and you can just baaarely see them glowing if you look straight down them in normal room light. What fun!
<Ellied>
contrast to the white ones I got in shenzhen where you give them 1 mA and everyone goes AGH MY EYES
<UmbralRaptor>
GaAsP is pronounced "gasp" right?
<Ellied>
yes
<Ellied>
unless GaSP comes into frequent use, in which case GaAsP might end up being "gay asp"
<Ellied>
none of the physicists I've been around have a name for GaAs ("gas" being already taken by GaS) so they usually call it "geeay ayess" or just "gallium arsenide"
<Ellied>
geeay ayess is technically fewer syllables but much harder to actually say
<Ellied>
presumably "gay ass" has been considered by each of them independently in private and quietly dismissed
<bofh>
I'unno, "gay ass" seems reasonable. :P
<Ellied>
beamline scientists are much too reserved for that sort of thing
<Ellied>
at least the ones at the APS are
<soundnfury>
can you compel someone with germanium arsenide?
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<bofh>
*snicker*
<soundnfury>
is bofh running a marathon?
<soundnfury>
(ok, that one might be a bit obscure)
<e_14159>
Iskierka: That headline sounds more like "Explanet hunters, thinking that it sounds much cooler, rethink searching for alien life instead"
<Iskierka>
it *does* sound much cooler
<UmbralRaptor>
Giant Space Telescopes are expensive, and will be grossly oversubscribed, so we want to use them efficiently. Though yes, it does sound cooler.
<Iskierka>
and it seems "efficient" is going to mean "it's gotta be as close to us as possible. Factors like water aren't enough on their own because they can drown the planet"
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<UmbralRaptor>
Somewhat, yes. They'll all be within ~50 pc.
<UmbralRaptor>
SPIDERS?
<Qboid>
UmbralRaptor: [SPIDERS] => SPectroscopic IDentification of eROSITA Sources
<Iskierka>
... SPIDROSITAS?
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<UmbralRaptor>
Recursion?
<UmbralRaptor>
!acr -add:Recursion See: Recursion
<Qboid>
UmbralRaptor: I added the explanation for this acronym.
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<APlayer>
How come do they look for life but keep assuming its chemical composition to be exactly the same as life on Earth? I agree water is a rather common and handy compound to create life of any sort, but why do they assume it also needs phosphorus and stuff? Even water could be replaced by some other liquid to create some sort of alien life, not mentioning things like phosphorus for earthly cell membranes.
<APlayer>
In fact, I am convinced if we ever find anything, it will most definitely not look or work the way we know life. It's just like assuming all exoplanets look like the earth, which is simply false.
<APlayer>
</rant> I am off for now. Be back soon.
<UmbralRaptor>
At least for some chemistries (Si), they're a lot less promising than they looked several decades ago.
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<Iskierka>
Si was based on a naive assumption that all you needed was the four bonds. It's less promising now because people asked "wait ... can these four bonds actually DO anything interesting?"
<Iskierka>
turns out: not especially. Si makes ... rocks. And doesn't form long chains
<Iskierka>
there's only a very finite number of elements to select from and that actually does end up meaning similar chemistry is very likely
<bofh>
I once heard a very good explanation for why Si doesn't bond in a similar manner to C from an organometallic prof, but I sadly completely forgot it. Should email him again and ask.
<Iskierka>
if anything water is one of the less significant parts as it's not infeasible that could be replaced by something like methane that also has a triple point, as far as I believe we currently know. Titan's still potentially viable. But the biological chemistry has to be centred around C, as far as we know
<Iskierka>
it's still entirely possible for life to look very different. Maybe it'll develop complexity using only RNA, or some crazy new chemical that acts similar to DNA/RNA. But it'll be Carbon-based for certain, and may just have swapped chirality for shared amino acids
<UmbralRaptor>
Yeah. I'm sort of hesitant about titan in that I get the impression that the cold has greatly reduced reaction rates.
<Iskierka>
it does, but does that actually indicate life would struggle? Surely would just mean life is slow
<Iskierka>
(it presumably also slows down reactions that would *decay* life-forms)
<kmath>
<AnalysisFact> "Real analysts cannot do without Fourier, complex analysts cannot do without Laurant, and numerical analysts cannot… https://t.co/YFLAb82zQN
<UmbralRaptor>
Slow to the point that life might not have had time to evolve (!)
<bofh>
UmbralRaptor: kinetics are actually less important than making sure that things are catalytically above activation energy barriers.
<UmbralRaptor>
ah
<bofh>
like complex life, sure. but things like self-replicating RNA-esque strands? certainly within the realm of possibility.
<Iskierka>
I recall people talking about silicon for cold worlds and that seems like it would be a big issue there
<Iskierka>
plus, surely if silicon can do anything interesting, it can only do it at high temperature, what with it being so good at being solid?
<kmath>
<GuardianUS> If you tax the rich, they won't leave: US data contradicts millionaires' threats https://t.co/fiVsUHc08R
<egg|fokker_100|egg>
UmbralRaptor: uuh
<UmbralRaptor>
Dr.I, 100, close enough.
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<SnoopJeDi>
holy crap I learned something from a formula in a QCD talk
* SnoopJeDi
checks if the stars are just right
<Ellied>
damn
<SnoopJeDi>
nothing incredible, but the evolution from the Boltzmann equation to the distributions of actual concern to experimentalists was a lot clearer than it's ever been for me.
<SnoopJeDi>
UmbralRaptor, 538 published a "think" piece about the doneness of meat and had some stupid line about the BTU differential between rare and well-done ?
<SnoopJeDi>
nevermind all that water and energy up the supply chain, let's fuss about the cooking heat as though it were very relevant
<Ellied>
BTU, drink!
<SnoopJeDi>
Ellied, imperial units drinking game?
<Ellied>
I was thinking just BTU, because I hear that most often from people who are trying to sound smart but don't understand thermodynamics
<bofh>
Still think my fav is "International British Thermal Units" (yes, they're a thing).
<Ellied>
wat
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<SnoopJeDi>
British Thermal Unitte
<SnoopJeDi>
bofh, the best part of this class is the prof (emeritus, very much non-STEM) asking questions after each talk.
<SnoopJeDi>
Someone presented their talk which is just their draft of a yearly review talk upcoming. Talked about Euclidean correlation functions or some-such, and she asked afterward what any of it had to do with Euclid because she didn't "recall any of this from Euclid"
<egg>
!wpn bofh
* Qboid
gives bofh a numeric expression
<egg>
!wpn UmbralRaptor
* Qboid
gives UmbralRaptor a mesolect/torus hybrid
<egg>
!wpn Ellied
* Qboid
gives Ellied a praesiodymium charm µa741-like pommel
* Ellied
looks up the physical spec for pommel-mount IC packages