jacobolus

8 ms·

91.
by jacobolus 7mo ago
Yeah, I imagine it's considerably slower at ambient ocean temperature. Don't throw your PLA bags in the ocean or a river. Here's a different paper: > For example, PLA is not biodegradable in freshwater and seawater at low
92.
by jacobolus 7mo ago
My understanding is that cellophane generally does biodegrade in most settings. Polylactic acid (those cornstarch-derived bags) mostly biodegrades in hot enough compost or (after several years) in ambient-temperature soil, but not very well
93.
by jacobolus 8mo ago
BART is full of white-collar people who use it to commute and to travel around the area (alongside all sorts of other kinds of people, as you would expect for a broadly used service). Ridership collapsed in 2020 because of the pandemic, for
94.
by jacobolus 8mo ago
The speed of spoken Spanish varies significantly from one place to another.
95.
by jacobolus 8mo ago
"To reduce human errors in his experiments, Wu opted to use a scoring machine to accurately fold the origami patterns."
96.
by jacobolus 8mo ago
For a bit of context, the Phaenomena was a book by Eudoxus (c. 400 BC) explaining the then-current knowledge of astronomy; unfortunately there are no extant copies. A poem (also called Phaenomena ) by Aratus (c. 300 BC) made the content
97.
by jacobolus 9mo ago
The only way anything ever changes in a volunteer project is if someone feels motivated and makes the effort. Please contribute changes to German Wikipedia articles (or English ones) when you notice possible improvements. If you are not per
98.
by jacobolus 9mo ago
> the challenge is all the gatekeeping I'd say there's significantly less gatekeeping on Wikipedia than most parts in academia. YMMV. But: there are a bunch of random clueless people trying to promote their obscure papers to
99.
by jacobolus 9mo ago
Sanger was originally hired to edit Nupedia, a web encyclopedia project with a strict peer review process, and only worked for Wales for about a year. Wikipedia was started as a side project (with Sanger contributing to the concept and some
100.
by jacobolus 9mo ago
The articles about Fourier series and Fourier transform currently begin with: > A Fourier series is a series expansion of a periodic function into a sum of trigonometric functions. The Fourier series is an example of a trigonometric ser
101.
by jacobolus 9mo ago
It's extremely difficult to write math articles for a general audience which are both accessible and accurate, and the number of excellent writers working on Wikipedia math articles is tiny. Please get involved if you want to see impro
102.
by jacobolus 10mo ago
There are some flowers which produce tiny amounts of caffeine in their nectar, apparently to give the pollinators a buzz.
103.
by jacobolus 10mo ago
> What is this [Greek notation] about? The Greeks "notation" was a diagram full of points labeled by letters (Α, Β, Γ, ...) with various lines connecting them and a list of steps to do with an unmarked ruler and a compass, so
104.
by jacobolus 11mo ago
> foreign government maintain 40 colonies within your boundaries with ~200,000 of their colonists? Instead of speaking in riddles, can you be more explicit? Which foreign government are we talking about, and who are "their colonis
105.
by jacobolus 11mo ago
How many do you think were killed then, over those centuries of conflict? Several hundred thousand? What if we include deaths due to famine? How many were forced to migrate? Also several hundred thousand? As I said, I'm not an expert;
106.
by jacobolus 11mo ago
If Europeans hadn't made it to North America, it's likely that nobody would have invented vaccines or the internet by now. European history would have been unrecognizably different.
107.
by jacobolus 11mo ago
The Inquisition was mostly about mopping up the last few practicing Jews and Muslims in the Iberian peninsula, terrorizing them into conversion and conformity. Millions of people (on all sides) were killed in the Reconquista, over a few cen
108.
by jacobolus 11mo ago
I'm lost. Can you be more explicit about which "unhinged and narcissistic people" you mean? If not the Jews, was that supposed to refer to the German ruling party? German business elites? Other Europeans? NATO? Foreign immigr
109.
by jacobolus 11mo ago
Now imagine that happening once per generation for 3 or 4 generations in a row, followed by / contemporary with getting invaded by an alien army with significantly superior weapons and ships whose goal was total domination and enslavem
110.
by jacobolus 11mo ago
Probably not, but this counterfactual depends on the circumstances, and depends on your values. For example: people might argue about the relative harms of various kinds of slavery vs. cultural genocide vs. land dispossession and forced dis
111.
by jacobolus 11mo ago
Just to be explicit, you are now calling Jewish people "the most unhinged and narcissistic people" who have "perpetrated that endless abuse [of denouncing the Holocaust and Naziism] upon the German [..] people"?
112.
by jacobolus 11mo ago
The Spanish crown also repeatedly sent new waves of political allies to take over political control in the Americas, to counter the consolidation of power of the descendants of previous generations of Spanish rulers. There was a fair amount
113.
by jacobolus 11mo ago
It's pretty fair to blame the entire social and political system of 16th century Spain, which at that time was centered on religious persecution, mass murder, large-scale theft and exploitation, and quasi-slavery, leading to centuries
114.
by jacobolus 11mo ago
They hunted down all of the libraries, collected all of the books inside, and burned them in massive bonfires, accidentally saving a total of like 3 books which had already been shipped back to Europe as trophies. I think there are also som
115.
by jacobolus 11mo ago
They could have an exhibit like that, perhaps describing how they were trying to make amends, donating money to projects promoting pluralism and diversity, opposing authoritarianism around the world, helping the descendants of those they
116.
by jacobolus 1y ago
We use a variant of Steve Stephenson's counting board, which we call "button arithmetic" as an activity. Stephenson (since deceased) was a retired engineer turned high school teacher who got very interested in counting boards
117.
by jacobolus 1y ago
The use of various kinds of mathematical manipulatives and concrete materials is great (including base ten blocks, cuisenaire rods, ten frames, number lines, dice, balance scales with weights, geoboards, pattern blocks, multi-link cubes, et
118.
by jacobolus 1y ago
A sliding-bead suanpan or soroban is a practical and very portable tool for doing basic sums and differences, but after working with my own kids I don't think it's as good as a teaching tool as a counting board is, and I expect it
119.
by jacobolus 1y ago
One fun one is that people used counting boards for all of their complicated calculations (literally "calculi" = "pebbles", i.e. counters) for many thousands of years, starting we don't know precisely when but maybe
120.
by jacobolus 1y ago
That would be great. I was looking at https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

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