• 0 Posts
  • 13 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 16th, 2023

help-circle


  • scratchee@feddit.uktoScience Memes@mander.xyzT. rex
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    2 months ago

    I don’t think that’s what the meme is claiming.

    I think instead it’s just claiming that all fossils have the same implied increase in maximum size implied by the paper, not just T rex.

    I’m guessing the illiterate paleo fans were excited that maybe T rex was king of the dinosaurs again, but the logic fails if all the dinosaurs get bigger max sizes…



  • scratchee@feddit.uktoScience Memes@mander.xyzLinguistics
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    2 months ago

    “Divorced from the context that brought them about” Ahh, so you’re complaining about all the Germanic words in English, or the Latin words? The whole point of their diatribe is that the “brain rot” words you hate are little different from most words. It’s just that for some words the “in group” is Latin speakers, and for some words it’s some group nerding out about their own topic that spread their word to the rest of us… actually, I’m still talking about Latin speakers.





  • Same could have been said about electricity not that long ago. Now that renewables are building steam the switch to electricity is revealed as perfectly logical, why not the same for hydrogen?

    Hydrogen is a harder sell, thanks to the poorer density, cost of storage, and the poor efficiency of production. But given the variable production of renewables all but guarantees we’ll end up with vast amounts of excess power we can’t store, we will need a fuel we can make from electricity that we can use, and hydrogen is one of the contenders for that task. Whether it’ll be the winner is more doubtful, but something will be, we certainly will never build enough batteries to avoid giving away cheap power for things like this, and there are still things that benefit from higher density fuels that aren’t going away (planes). Accusing people of being “worse than deniers” just because they’re looking a little into the future and betting on something that might turn out to be Betamax is a little presumptuous.

    Hydrogen today is a fossil fuel. But hydrogen has a very obvious method of green production, the only problem is cost of power to produce it (thus why it’s all fossil fuels right now) but the inevitability of variable power sources like solar and wind in the future guarantees excesses of cheap power, so cost of power today is not going to be the same barrier tomorrow that it is today.

    As for the fossil fuel industries plan to use hydrogen to maintain business as usual in a post fossil fuels era, I really don’t care if they manage to use their machines as long as they stop using fossil fuels, so that’s fine with me.

    Edit: to be clear, I’m not supporting a hydrogen based economy, since that makes no sense, hydrogen is a storage medium for energy, not a production source. There have been people pushing it as a magical solution to all things, that is stupid. As a small piece of the puzzle it could fit, if we don’t find a better chemistry for high density storage of energy with simple conversion from electricity, which is as yet an unsolved problem.



  • scratchee@feddit.uktoScience Memes@mander.xyzJAPANESE KNOTWEED
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    35
    ·
    11 months ago

    Try doing that in Iceland. They’re both very aware and conflicted about invasive species up there. Lupin is invasive and covering the country and also building soil from nothing, Pine trees are invasive and the quickest way to get treecover that is desperately needed.

    Makes for weird discussions, I guess Iceland is such and extreme case that nobody really knows if they should be saving the ecosystem it had managed to scratch together before we turned up or if they should be trying to rush a healthier ecosystem with imports (Iceland was pretty thin and fragile even before humans and we wrecked what little there was)