You ever think about how torturing someone is fundamentally an act of empathy, that you have to be able to model and understand what the victim is experiencing – the sensation, the emotion, the despair – for there to be any point in going to the bother of evoking it?
This post isn’t about BDSM it’s about war crimes, but that too.
gold, silver, copper, tin, lead, iron, and mercury
no aluminum. I assume large scale aluminum use is a post-electricity thing? Cause you get it from the ore with electrochemistry somehow? Reducing aluminum oxide id guess
Aluminum used to be a precious metal. Like, Napoleon had an aluminum silverware set and the Washington Monument is capped with aluminum. You’re absolutely right about refining bauxite into aluminum being a post-electricity thing. I’m not too keen on the process, but I think it involves melting ore with giant electrical arcs in an oxygen poor atmosphere
hmm you do have to melt it but it is electrochemistry, if you just heated it all you’d get is molten aluminum oxide i guess, an electric potential is driving transfer of electrons from oxygen to aluminum atoms
You can heat it enough to melt it into aluminum, but it’s like a thousand degrees more. More even than when you don’t have the catalyst. Doable, but not in antiquity when they couldn’t even melt iron.
By “melt it into aluminum” do you mean… I don’t know, this is a chemical reaction, it’s not melting.
I guess, at some temperature, it goes from liquid alumina to liquid aluminum with evolution of oxygen? This should happen at some temperature for entropic reasons, but I can’t find any information about such a process (such as what temperature is required, or that there’s a catalyst).
Best I can find is here, if you use carbon to take away the oxygen in the bauxite, but at around 2000C
Also important to point out that it was not Napoleon who had the aluminum cutlery, but his nephew, Napoleon III. Aluminum wasn’t isolated until 1834.
yeah, that’s hot. I think the electrolytic process is at like a thousand degrees celsius, so this is like a thousand hotter, as you originally recalled.
Aluminum refining takes so much electricity it’s used as a way to export the value of renewable electricity generation with no nearby uses; bulk cargo ships haul bauxite ore to Iceland to use their geothermal power or to Siberia to use refineries powered off hydroelectric dams in the middle of nowhere.
Trees outside my sitting window have pinnate leaves, so I don’t have a good sense of how big they’re gonna be fully come in to project how complete the canopy’s gonna be this season after felling all those branches last year
This is the standard winged nightjar and it has one singular stupidly big feather on each wing… if you even care.
Love this guy
That’s standard as in “pennant” or “banner”, not standard as in “normal”.
But it’s not a pennant-winged nightjar. THIS is a pennant-winged nightjar… if you even care.
can’t forget the Lyre-tailed Nightjar! there’s actually a number of these ridiculous guys, and they’re partly why caprimulgiforms are some of my favorite birds
also the Sickle-winged Nightjar, which is. come on, that’s just a weird moth
Basically at any time you are in Japan, you are at the coast (the plains count), in the mountains, in the foothills, on Hokkaido, on a minor outlying island, or at Lake Biwa.
suddenly viscerally remembered when I was in first grade and decided that “I got a boo boo” was too childish of a way to communicate to my mom that I’d gotten hurt.
I was a bookish kid though, so instead I switched to “mommy, I’ve been wounded” which in retrospect must’ve been a little odd to hear from a six-year-old.
Me, earnestly speaking to a deeply uncomfortable econ professor at a party: “Hallmark won’t publish my ‘I would like to fornicate with your spouse, but am willing to collectively forget this incident if it’s too awkward for you’ cards, despite demand for them, which proves we live in an inefficient market,”
Vavilovian mimicry is a good illustration of unintentional selection by humans. Although the human selective agents might be conscious of their impact on the local weed gene pool,
such effects go against the goals of those growing crops. Weeders do
not want to select for weeds that are increasingly similar to the
cultivated plant, yet the only other option is to let the weeds grow and
compete with crops for sunlight and nutrients. Similar situations include antibiotic resistance and, also in agricultural crops, herbicide resistance.
Having acquired many desirable qualities by being subjected to similar
selective pressures, Vavilovian mimics may eventually be domesticated
themselves. Vavilov called these weeds-become-crops secondary crops.
…
Another example is rye (Secale cereale), a grass which is derived from wild rye (Secale montanum), a widely distributed Mediterranean species. Rye was originally just a weed growing with wheat and barley,
but came under similar selective pressures to the crops. Like wheat, it
came to have larger seeds and more rigid spindles to which the seeds
are attached. However, wheat is an annual plant, while wild rye is a perennial.
At the end of each growing season wheat produces seeds, while wild rye
does not and is thus destroyed as the post-harvest soil is tilled. However, there are occasional mutants that do set seed. These have been protected from destruction, and rye has thus evolved to become an annual plant.[5]
Rye is a hardier plant than wheat, surviving in harsher conditions. Having become preadapted
as a crop through wheat mimicry, rye was then positioned to become a
cultivated plant in areas where soil and climatic conditions favored its
production, such as mountainous terrain.[4]
This fate is shared by oats (Avena sativa and Avena byzantina), which also tolerate poorer conditions, and like rye, grow as a weed alongside wheat and barley. Derived from a wild species (Avena sterilis),
it has thus come to be a crop in its own right. Once again paralleling
wheat, rye and other cereals, oats have developed tough spindles which
prevent seeds from easily dropping off, and other characteristics which
also help in natural dispersal have become vestigial, including the awns which allow them to self bury.[4]
Huh, I never considered that. Evolution wins yet again
This is what the porn bots are currently in the process of doing
