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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • Rhaedas@fedia.iotoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldYou are not Racist
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    2 days ago

    That doesn’t seem to be a reclaiming of a word (since it wasn’t previously used in a good way), but a reuse of a historically insulting term. I can respect the effort, but I still cringe when hearing it used as an amiable word. I don’t know if that makes me racist because I have trouble moving past it being a slur and distasteful. Maybe it’s still too new and it’s going to take a few generations to become more normalized.






  • The flaw of the question is assuming there is a clear dividing line between species. Evolutionary change is a continuous process. We only have dividing lines where we see differences in long dead ones in the fossil record, or we see enough differences in living ones. The question has no answer, only a long explanation of how that isn’t how any of this works.


  • A reminder that this is still how they think.

    Here’s a fact check OF a fact check about Project 2025, something that has been stated recently will gut the National Hurricane Center.

    USA Today’s fact check of that claim

    Now when I first ran across this link, I thought, hmmm…are liberal Youtubers making up stuff to sell their position as a hurricane approaches? Maybe so. Then I read the article and actual text from Project 2025.

    Project 2025 “does not call for the elimination of” the National Hurricane Center, Heritage Foundation spokesperson Ellen Keenan told USA TODAY.

    Not in the text, this part of the fact check is correct. The text calls for review of it as well as other agencies and downsize or move resources around as needed. But then I see:

    Data collected by the department should be presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.

    Well, that set off some alarm bells in my head. They aren’t actively proposing to shut it down, but there does seem to be an agenda here.

    Project 2025 accuses NOAA of “climate alarmism” and calls for it to be "broken up and downsized.” “That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions,” the playbook says of the agency.

    I read all this as exactly how MAGA Republicans in power have been treating anything tied to climate change. They aren’t completely cutting things out, only the parts that are inconvenient to their agenda. Which of course is terrible science, and will absolutely affect the ability to learn and respond to future threats.

    USA Today is a tool for them if they are marking such claims as completely false.






  • Correct, the differences make the analogy good enough to visualize the concept. It does however suffer from the same problem as the balloon one, in which someone can get the impression the expansion has a center. The wiki for the expansion of the universe goes through the various analogies and where they break down.

    I would suggest Dr Becky’s Youtube channel for a number of excellent videos on the expansion as well as the current problem of getting an accurate measurement of the correct Hubble expansion rate. The James Webb telescope was hoped to solve that dilemma, but we still aren’t sure.



  • At the cluster level it will depend on the velocities and distances. For example, using very rough numbers the current expansion rate means that space between us and the Andromeda galaxy is expanding at 55 km/s. Seems fast until you realize the distance needed to see the effect build to this level. For perspective I found someone’s calculation to reduce it to solar system level to end up with ~10 meters/AU/year. But of course at this distance gravity dominates so we can’t measure that directly and it may not even be large enough to consider.

    A larger and slower moving galactic cluster would be more affected than a tighter one. I don’t know what our Local Group would be considered to be, but there are a hundred or so galaxies around us that appear blue shifted, so they are moving towards us even with the expansion.