Salamander
- 60 Posts
- 172 Comments
5·3 days agoNo, not at all! As you grow older, it may not be as automatic as when you are in school. Many of the people that you interact with might be focused on their own stuff (work, partner, family, hobbies, finance) and not too motivated to expand or even have a “social life” in whatever free time they have (if they even do). But this is not everyone. There is still a lot of people at every age that do want a social life, you just need to put in a bit of effort to connect with them.
And, a tip, do not consider failed attempts at socializing as a “failure” on your side. Perceived rejection often boils down to people being very attached to their free time, and socializing not being on their list of priorities. If you keep this in mind then you do not need to feel discomfort from rejection, and you can be active in your search for like-minded people without worry.
Even though:
These data are associative and do not establish a causal role for such particles affecting health
I still don’t feel so nonchalant about the idea of microplastics lodging on my brain. While the effect on human brains is very difficult to directly measure, we do have a lot of data on mice that suggest that having plastic in the brain is bad for the brain.
When quickly looking into EU food regulations it seems like microplastic content is not regulated in food, and the logic appears to be along the lines that not enough data is available to assess the actual risk. This makes some sense in that measurement, control, and enforcing limits is likely to be difficult, expensive, and might create some economic challenges, and so regulators might not want to go this route unless proven absolutely necessary.
At the same time, data does exist showing that the plastic levels are increasing in our brains, and we have very good reasons to believe that this is not a good thing. It is not that we are completely in the dark - I am sure some smart people would be able to come up with reasonable limits and methods of control by now.
My not-very-informed suspicion is that there is pressure from wealthy and powerful lobbyists that would significantly suffer from microplastics regulations, because ‘plastic in the brain’ has seemed like an obvious thing to address for some years now.
I have never been educated about how to avoid ingesting / breathing microplastics. Do any of you know some habits or diets that reduce or increase exposure to microplastics?
There is a nice (even if by now already a bit outdated) analysis about the openness of different “open source” generative AI projects in the following article: Liesenfeld, Andreas, and Mark Dingemanse. “Rethinking open source generative AI: open washing and the EU AI Act.” The 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. 2024.
2·9 days agoI think that panspermia is the most likely hypothesis to be eventually proven correct.
According to this hypothesis, very simple “living” structures can be found throughout space, scattered around planets, meteorites, and perhaps even in space dust. This dust can be thought of as fungal spores. When they land in a planet with suitable conditions, these systems can evolve into more complex life forms.
The alternatives to panspermia generally imply that Earth is a super special planet in which certain special conditions conspired at a point in time to allow an extremely unlikely event to happen. Panspermia suggests that, instead of a being a statistical anomaly, life is probably rather common throughout the universe.
I don’t have any recommendations, unfortunately. But this is very interesting! I have gotten into software-defined radio recently and radio astronomy seems like a good direction to continue learning. Hopefully someone has some good advice.
Very interesting list! I am especially curious about Matt Brown’s videos. Thanks!
Fresh from the Farm Fungi - he is a mushroom farmer from Colorado. He has a ton of valuable information on growing mushrooms and running a business. He also has a few series of videos on very interesting experiments such as growing boletus, morelles, and cordyceps.
Microbehunter - he is a biology teacher that runs a microscope channel. His videos are very useful for learning the basics of microscopy.
Huygen Optics - I’m not sure about this guy’s background. He worked in R&D for Phillips in the 90s and he knows a lot about optics and chemistry, but I don’t know much more. He has built some equipment in has garage for sputtering metals on surfaces and has some pretty cool videos.
MissOrchidGirl - she is more popular than the others. She has great info about caring for orchids and a fantastic orchid collection.
Ben Felix - he is a portfolio manager with very solid financial advice. He supports his claims with research articles.
The “Slur filter” is a server setting. The filter makes use of a “regex” (a text matching algorithm) to automatically remove any text that matches those words. An admin needs to explicitly set the rules for that regex. The regex does not take language into account, it is a simple text matching algorithm.
The box is in the Admin settings page and looks like this:
I know that lemmy.ml makes use of a strict set of regex rules. The translation of the french word for “late” matches an ableist slur in English, and so it is removed by lemmy.ml.
I am not sure about whether you can check regex for each individual server, but I believe that most instances don’t filter that specific word out.EDIT: Ah, I found out how to check the regex. You can check an instance’s regex by going to the the URL https://{instance}.{TLD}/api/v3/site and looking for “slur_filter_regex”. For example, for lemmy.ml you would go to:
If you don’t mind sharing, please do!
I looked a bit more into it and discovered that some people do use UV lights for inducing stress responses on plants. Most of what I found is from cannabis growing communities that make use of the UV light to increase the potency of the plant. I don’t know how effective that is, but that did signal to me that some shops might sell UV lamps as grow lamps.
An example of a specific lamp I could find is the MIGRO UVB 310. If you follow that link and look through the images you will see that the bulb is clearly labeled with “UV BOOST”.
These lamps are meant to be used as supplemental inputs to stress the plant. It is not very likely that you ended up with such a lamp by mistake as it is still a niche type application. But it is good that you are making sure.
I don’t know how to set up a specific image captcha, but I like that idea! I have added that to the registration form 😛
Does the bulb have some model written on it? If you tell us the specific model we may be able to find the properties of that light.
There is a good chance that you do not have a “UV lamp” but instead a purple grow light that does not emit a lot of UV. The purple grow lights have an emission that is tuned to the regions of the spectrum for which green plants absorb the most light - so, the lamp emits mostly in the blue and red, which is why they look purple. There is no need to worry about that light, it is perfectly safe.
If you do have a UV lamp and are using that lamp for a plant: Then we really do need more information to estimate the level of risk. Chances are that, if that UV lamp is harmful to you, it is also harmful to the plant, and it is better to swap it for some other type of lamp.
It is not very likely that you are using a one of the more dangerous UV lights - like a mercury-vapor lamp with a quartz bulb - which will produce smelly ozone and can burn your eyes if you stare at them. Those lamps tend to be specialized items that you are unlikely to end up with by mistake. More common lamps would be the blacklights with common variants that produce 365 nm or 395 nm light. Continuous direct exposure of moderately intense 365 nm carries a low risk inducing skin cancer and is better to avoid. 395 nm is relatively safe but I would still not want to expose my skin continuously to it as it may still cause oxidative stress to the skin. These are used ornamentally for making things glow, but they are not the best choice for plants.
Certainly a fun fact 😄 Reminds me of the painful sandspurs that stick one’s feet while walking through the beach.
Careful. Big Taxa doesn’t mess around.
Thank you very much!
Hey, thanks a lot! I agree with your assessment.
I spent some time looking through pictures and these Verticillium photos were the best matches I could find:
http://ephytia.inra.fr/en/I/7133/Verticillium481
But that Acremonium certainly looks like an even better match. And you are completely right in pointing out that the arrangement seen in my image is irregular whereas the Verticillium images show a more regular symmetric relationship between the condiogenous cells (term of the day for me).
Awesome work! Upgraded. Thank you!! 😄
Hahahahaha
Thanks!
It wouldn’t be much fun if the bot was always right ;) It is here to give some quick suggestions.
I agree, it does look a lot like a Tillisandia. Could it be Tillandsia yucatana? It looks similar to photo (L):
From here: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/llustrations-of-12-of-the-14-epiphytic-bromeliad-species-found-in-the-precipitation_fig2_299420322