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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • Some fungi found to be thriving in Chernobyl, and seemingly growing towards radiation sources, are hypothesized to be able to capture and use the radiation energy to support biological processes. If it turns out that some fungi can synthesize compounds that convert ionizing radiation into chemical bonds that can be metabolized by biological organisms, one could theoretically imagine some kind of symbiotic relationship between organisms that comes out of that.


  • As this thread shows, back pain isn’t caused by just one thing, so each specific person’s back pain won’t be cured by the same one size fits all approach.

    If your back pain is caused by poor posture exacerbated by a weak posterior chain, lifting weights at the gym or doing other strengthening exercises/physical therapy can be helpful. As plenty in this thread can attest, gym time to offset laptop time can go a long way.

    If your back pain is caused by repetitive stress from physical labor, adhering to proper form/technique and rest/recovery cycles to the best of your ability can help.

    If your back pain is exacerbated by the weight you carry, losing weight (or in certain circumstances, breast reduction surgery) can help.

    We’re all just trying to get through life. Sometimes other people’s tips can help, so it’s worth sharing, but we also shouldn’t get too tied to a particular solution that worked for us, as a the solution for everyone else.








  • It’s because we’re also very used to seeing photographs of a subject in shade while the background is in full sunlight. If you take a picture of a white and gold dress in the shadow of a patio, with the background all fully lit by bright sunlight, the actual pixels representing white objects in the shade would be that bluish gray tint.

    The problem here is that the dress isn’t in the shade but those of us who see white and gold simply assume that it is in shade, while black/blue viewers (correctly) assume that it is under the same lighting conditions of the overexposed background.


  • Since we have no context, the dress is white and gold objectively.

    The actual physical object photographed is black and blue.

    White and gold appear when the brain makes the assumption that the dress falls within a shadow (effectively applying a filter that shifts the white balance towards bluer colors and brightness down significantly compared to direct sunlight). Only in real life, the photographed dress did not fall within a shadow, and instead was affected by a yellowish lens flare, so the subconscious color correction that leads a viewer to assume white and gold was erroneously applied.

    I see white and gold. But to claim that it’s “objectively” white and gold ignores how the human brain perceives color and ignores that the actual photograph was a blue and black dress.








  • Everybody’s punching up.

    The diversity in preferences makes “up” impossible to define and order consistently between people. If you take a survey of a population for an ordered ranking, in desire ability as potential spouses, of a particular sample set, you might get wildly different rankings.

    And then those same people might rank things differently depending on who they would most want to have a one night stand with.

    Even laying out specific physical characteristics and asking about attractiveness will get those isolated features ranked differently. Heterosexual men will disagree on whether it is attractive, unattractive or neutral for a woman to be:

    • Being very tall
    • Being very short
    • Having an athletic build
    • Having pale skin
    • Having curly hair
    • Having tattoos
    • Having a Ph.D.
    • Speaking multiple languages
    • Being Christian
    • Being vegetarian

    We’re all just looking for compatibility. What that means will vary from person to person, and what is very attractive to one person might be a huge turn off to another.

    I’m generally of the view that you want to be with someone whose unique traits are positive to you, and who sees your unique traits as positives, too. That way both can fall within that stable equilibrium of both believing that they’ve married “up.”