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Cake day: 2023年6月10日

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  • Pazuzu@midwest.socialtoScience Memes@mander.xyzEat lead
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    1 年前

    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








  • the pills feel about as solid as any others, it’s just the foil backing on the blister pack they’re meant to pierce through is damn near bulletproof.

    oof, I forgot about cutting pills. those cheap pill cutters are absolutely useless. one trick I found for the pills too small to break by hand is to press them over a small wire, something like a small paperclip straightened out. then set the notch of the pill on there and press down on either side with each thumb. finnicky getting them lined up right, but far cleaner breaks than anything else I’ve ever found. worked better to do them in batches for future use than every time I needed one


  • 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