• 11 Posts
  • 2.68K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 6th, 2023

help-circle

  • I was a new grad student at a gathering organized to introduce us to the department, and I was drinking a hard lemonade. The department head walked up to me and said, with a strong German accent:

    In Germany, zat would be illegal.

    I thought she was just giving me a hard time about drinking the lemonade rather than a real beer, but then I looked it up and the lemonade would in fact have been illegal in Germany. (Or rather it would have been illegal when she was growing up there. It was legalized since then.)










  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.workstomemes@lemmy.worldThe circle of life
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    14 hours ago

    An interesting thing about atoms is that all atoms of the same isotope are fundamentally identical. In other words, they’re not just the same as far as we can tell. They are absolutely the same. This challenges human intuition about identity, because while an atom can be said to have a specific history, there is literally no trace of that history in the atom itself. If God swapped two atoms of the same sort, only he could ever know.

    Consider software. You downloaded your copy of My Little Pony: The Movie from a particular source, but if that source turned out to be disgusting you wouldn’t have any urge to delete your copy and then download a new copy from someone else. Atoms ought to be considered like software in this way.

    (This is relevant because “eating” involves breaking food down into individual molecules.)



  • That happened to me once in my life, but waking up from a dreamless sleep with a new idea is fairly normal for me (to the point where I consider sleeping a part of my problem-solving strategy).

    When my subconscious is working on a problem, I have this pleasant lazy feeling similar to the feeling I get after finishing productive physical labor. It makes me want to relax and daydream. Do you get something like that?


  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.worksto196@lemmy.worldru >:l e
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    82
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    22 hours ago

    This is August Landmesser. He had been engaged to a Jewish woman, Irma Eckler, but the Nazi Nuremberg Laws of 1935 prevented him from marrying her; nonetheless they went on to have two daughters. Tragically, Irma later died in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Landmesser was also imprisoned, charged with ‘dishonouring the race’, sent to a concentration camp and, after his release and forced conscription, died on the Eastern Front.

    Source.