Are you saying that if I picked up a copy of that differential equations book I might actually learn wtf is going on? Because I only passed that class with the help of wolfram alpha and never looked back

This one got me good because Saddam Hussein was the last thing I noticed

You’ve enlightened me. I love dragonflies too now.

Some kids at my high school tried that on their phones, but it never worked because all the other kids in the room would cuss them out for basically inflicting the entire room with mosquito-in-ear noises.

In your previous artworks, I really enjoyed your themes of reusing/repurposing things from an earlier time. So the first thing that came to mind for me was an offshore platform (one of those shallow water ones that’s anchored to the seabed) repurposed as living space, research area, or a hub for an offshore wind farm.

I don’t know of the technology level in your setting could accommodate this, but I also thought about nuclear powered cargo ships. Lots of safety and environmental considerations, but the potential to vastly reduce emissions (since cargo ships switch to the cheapest, nastiest, most bottom-of-the-barrel bunker oil sludge they can get their hands on as soon as they’re in international waters).

We put some raw chicken in a wasp trap once and my god, I’ve never seen so many wasps in one place. The thing was almost a quarter full by the end of the day.

If it’s an alpha or beta emitter, sure, you’re probably fine standing near it. But if you find yourself next to a chunk of a gamma emitter, you should probably run away very quickly

So there’s four types of radiation: alpha, beta, gamma, and neutron. When you’re talking about radioactive materials, it’s almost exclusively the first three. In addition to the inherent danger of the object itself, there’s also the danger of radioactive contamination: not making other things radioactive, but shedding bits of themselves as dust and then that dust getting on other things, or getting ingested/inhaled by humans.

Active fission reactions, like what goes on in the core of a nuclear reactor (or perhaps messing around with some plutonium and a screwdriver), produce neutron radiation. Neutrons can make other things radioactive, via a process called “neutron activation”, whereby the neutrons bind to the material and change some of the atoms into radioactive isotopes.

I hope that helps, and feel free to ask me anything else about radiation. I have some education about it thanks to my job, and I’m always happy to help other people understand it more as well.

More or less. The difference is that, if they really wanted to, they could very thoroughly clean the notebook and take most of the contamination off. I’m guessing they won’t because a) It’s a historical artifact and they don’t want to risk damaging it, b) the contamination is so low-level that it’s not dangerous as long as you don’t lick it or something, and/or c) there’s a bit of a shock factor in watching a scientist’s notebook make a Geiger counter freak out.

taptaptaptaptap

DROP AND RUN

M o i s t u r i z e m e

Cheetahs are quite a bit more fragile since they’re optimized for speed. Any injury could hamper their ability to hunt, so as a result they’re more skittish and flighty than the other big cats. In zoos they often raise cheetahs alongside dogs, giving them a service animal of sorts so they are calmer around the weird hairless monkeys and don’t get stressed out as much.

This would have been a much better movie than whatever The Happening was about.

It’s probably for the smell. The plant is rafflesia arnoldii, which smells of rotting meat to attract flies as pollinators.

Yeah but I also get to play Skyrim on my toaster

Fun fact! During the Apollo flights to and from the Moon, the spacecraft would perform “Passive Thermal Control” or “barbecue roll” where it would rotate around its long axis about once per hour, to distribute the thermal load from the sun and keep one side from heating up too much

My favorite fact about the ISS is that it actually has an engine to do its own orbital boosts. Astronauts have taken videos where they slowly drift from one side of the cabin to the other during a burn

Wow, I had no idea the Calabi-Yau Manifold was a real thing. I thought it was just made up for Barotrauma, since that was the only place I heard of it. It sounded Lovecraftian enough so I never questioned it lol

VBA has made things so, so much easier since I started learning how to use it.