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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Pazuzu@midwest.socialtoScience Memes@mander.xyzEat lead
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    9 months ago

    The original post only gave half the explanation. It’s not that lead exists in general, it’s that lead exists within zircon crystals.

    Under normal circumstances that would be impossible, zircon crystals strongly reject lead atoms as they form. There’s no way to stuff lead into the crystal lattice in the quantity we find them there. But uranium and zircon go together just fine, we just have to wait for it to decay into lead. The trouble is it takes ~4.5 billion years for just half of those uranium atoms to turn into lead. So any zircon crystal we find with half as much lead as uranium must be roughly that old







  • Funny enough I got shocked by a USB port once because it was “grounded”. I have my PC plugged into a fairly beefy power strip, and after getting zapped I figured out that the outlet the power strip plugged into was not grounded. So the power strip acted as a mediocre transformer, putting about 70v through the ground wire my PC was plugged into, then the grounded metal of the USB port.

    Surprisingly didn’t fry anything in my PC, even that USB port still works just fine. Went through and checked all my outlets were properly grounded after that, thankfully it was just the one I needed to fix.


  • I thought this had to be hyperbole, so I did the math myself. I’m assuming human history is 200,000 years as google says, and we want to narrow this down to the second the bike disappeared. also that the bike instantly vanished so there’s no partially existing bike.

    each operation divides the time left in half, so to get from 200k years (6.311×10^12 seconds) to 1 would take ~42.58 divisions, call it 43. even if we take a minute on average to seek and decide whether the bike is there or not it would still be less than an hour of manual sorting

    hell, at 60fps it would only take another 6 divisions to narrow it down to a single frame, still under an hour

    edit: to use the entire hour we’d need a couple more universes worth of video time to sort through, 36.5 billion years worth to be exact. or a measly 609 million years if we need to find that single frame at 60fps