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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Pazuzu@midwest.socialtoScience Memes@mander.xyzEat lead
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    11 days ago

    The original post only gave half the explanation. It’s not that lead exists in general, it’s that lead exists within zircon crystals.

    Under normal circumstances that would be impossible, zircon crystals strongly reject lead atoms as they form. There’s no way to stuff lead into the crystal lattice in the quantity we find them there. But uranium and zircon go together just fine, we just have to wait for it to decay into lead. The trouble is it takes ~4.5 billion years for just half of those uranium atoms to turn into lead. So any zircon crystal we find with half as much lead as uranium must be roughly that old













  • I thought this had to be hyperbole, so I did the math myself. I’m assuming human history is 200,000 years as google says, and we want to narrow this down to the second the bike disappeared. also that the bike instantly vanished so there’s no partially existing bike.

    each operation divides the time left in half, so to get from 200k years (6.311×10^12 seconds) to 1 would take ~42.58 divisions, call it 43. even if we take a minute on average to seek and decide whether the bike is there or not it would still be less than an hour of manual sorting

    hell, at 60fps it would only take another 6 divisions to narrow it down to a single frame, still under an hour

    edit: to use the entire hour we’d need a couple more universes worth of video time to sort through, 36.5 billion years worth to be exact. or a measly 609 million years if we need to find that single frame at 60fps








  • AMdroid is similar, bunch of different task and puzzle options you can set for your future self to solve before you can turn the alarm off. I usually do math problems, just difficult enough that I need to be at least 90% conscious to actually solve them.

    come morning time I hate the app with a passion, but it’s just the kick in the ass I need sometimes