futurebird

futurebird, 1 day ago to random

Square cube law? Square shumb law!

Arthropods can get humongous. The main reason they don't is they are far too tempting targets for warm-blooded vertebrates.

But about that? Why couldn't an arthropod also be warm-blooded? Maybe some were.

And that thing you heard about "giant insects needed higher O2 levels" also questionable. Arthroplura was still around after the levels crashed... something else ended the golden age.

futurebird, 3 days ago (edited 1 day ago) to random

… and the stupid wind took my hat. I didn’t even have it on I was holding it worried about the wind — pulled it right out of my hand. How did people live wearing hats all the time!?

Maybe the MTA people have some kind of grabber??

futurebird, 3 days ago to random

“During Jim Crow, the Black family was together,” Donalds explained to the crowd.

Not worthy of freedom; he cannot handle it. Donalds believes this about himself. Without a boot on his neck he would be feral. I will take his word on that. But, he should not presume to speak for all black people.

In our history Black institutions, Black organizations were dismantled & burned. Churches burned. Neighborhoods burned. The less perceptive among us, like Donalds, roped in to cheer it on.

futurebird, 3 days ago to random

Via toothedgoose on tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/futurebird/752672809471377408/image-description-two-pie-charts-divided-into?source=share

futurebird, 3 days ago to random

Taught my CS how to program a mandelbrot set generator from scratch today.

Still don't have the colors doing exactly the right thing. This is in python, but we'll sort it out in the next class.

The most annoying thing is making the magnitudes of the terms in the series into a number between 0 and 256 without knowing exactly how big they will get.

I need to find my old James Gleick book.

gregeganSF, 5 days ago (edited 1 day ago) to random

Every solid object, such as the rods in the image below, has an inertia tensor. We can write the inertia tensor for the black rod, which keeps changing its orientation, as a sum of various multiples of the inertia tensors for the 6 fixed rods. The plot at the bottom shows how these 6 components change as the black rod points in different directions.

But why do we need 6 components? In 3D space, shouldn’t 3 be enough?

To see why we really need 6, let’s look at the inertia tensor. This is a matrix, I, that we use to multiply the angular velocity vector of an object, ω, to get the angular momentum, L.

The velocity of a point mass whose angular velocity is ω is given by:

v = ω × r

where r=(x,y,z) gives the coordinates of the point mass.

The linear momentum is:

p = m v = m ω × r

and the angular momentum is:

L = r × p = m r × (ω × r)

To get the same thing using matrices, note that we can write the cross product of r with any vector like ω as:

r × ω = C(r) ω

where C(r) is the matrix:

0 –z y
z 0 –x
–y x 0

This lets us write:

L = m r × (ω × r)
= –m r × (r × ω)
= –m C(r)^2 ω

Minus the square of the matrix C(r) is:

y^2+z^2 –xy –xz
–xy x^2+z^2 –yz
–xz –yz x^2+y^2

So the inertia tensor for a point mass is:

I = –m C(r)^2

This is the matrix above, multiplied by m.

In general, we add up (or integrate) over all the point masses in the body, to get the inertia tensor for the whole thing.

The inertia tensor we obtain this way will always be a symmetric matrix, so it can be specified with 6 numbers: 3 on the diagonal, and 3 above. So the inertia tensors belong to a 6-dimensional space.

Strandjunker, 5 days ago to random

If Fani Willis had a conflict of interest because a man might have paid for a meal, imagine how serious it would be if Supreme Court justices heard cases related to an election their wives had tried to overturn.

ElleGray, 6 days ago to random

morale in hospitals is currently very low and this is one of the reasons

futurebird, 5 days ago (edited 1 day ago) to random

An overactive imagination is seen as a good thing, a fun thing but it can be a little annoying and overwhelming to have a breathless 5 year old telling a wild story about everything in your mind who never stops. Everything is like six other things— and part of a story that never slows down or stops. I have to spend a lot of energy thinking about what’s normal enough to talk about. Increasingly? I’ve just been giving up. Let the chips fall where they may. LMAO

futurebird, 5 days ago to random

Hey @john these are the kind of gothic clouds I meant. "The Flying Islands of the Night"
1913 art by Franklin Booth

Franklin Booth is the deco huge clouds man-- also really cool redwoods.

futurebird, 5 days ago to random

How did ants become farmers of fungi? I want to suggest that the behaviors found in nearly every species of ant centered around nest building, and maintaining gradients of temperature and humidity within their nest to raise their young were transferable to fungi farming.

Ants that practice "higher agriculture*" keep their brood and eggs inside of the fungal sponge. It's not just food, it's a nursery, the fungi and larvae enjoy the same humidity levels.

1/

ai6yr, 5 days ago to random

Well, another beekeeper totally screwed up a swarm capture at our local elementary school. The vacuumed up the bees instead of boxing them up and waiting until evening. Thus leaving half the swarm wondering where the queen went, and not solving the problem at all. I was called by one of the teachers... nothing I could do. Although most of the bees crawled into my bag of bee gear and I took them home. #beekeeping #failure

stux, 6 days ago to random

Time to clean the world!

Roomba leaves the house and go further cleaning outside

paul, 6 days ago to random

The other day, there was a stock market software glitch that made it appear that the sky was falling

Phone alerts were blasted, and even local news had financial experts on for a bit at some point.

Later, it was revealed to be a software glitch

I accidently came across 1 news item that reported there was a glitch in the software.

How many regular people are still thinking there was a bad dip in the stock market the other day?

If they blast breaking news, then it's an oops, blast the oops.

cmdr_nova, 6 days ago to random

Article headline: Venomous spiders are invading the north eastern US

The actual information: They're harmless, pose no threat to humans, or their pets. But we had to use arachnophobia as a weapon for clickbait

futurebird, 7 days ago to random

Why is it that the worst tasks: the ones I want to do the least are things that take like 17min tops to complete— but I think about how I haven’t done them — oh no no just can’t bear to do them for 30min a day for two weeks?

For me, at least, a task is odious if it may cause me to find out bad news that produces more tasks, if it involves forms, if it involves talking to people on the phone, especially someone I don’t know (what if they are mean to me? 😫)

It’s not THAT bad. Is it?

jjimenezshaw, 27 days ago to programming

"If the authors of computer programming books wrote arithmetic textbooks..."

A colleague used this image to describe the documentation of a library. Meaning that the documentation was the example with the rabbits, but they have to use the library as the second part of the image.
#programming