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BonHair posted:This is definitely a stupid question: of we imagine that every human on earth disappeared overnight, what would happen to the economy? I know that the question would be meaningless mostly, but in terms of "number go up", what would actually happen? Presumably, a lot of purchases are automated, so a lot of stuff would just continue, including interest on debt. On the other hand no one would consume anything, and no innovation would happen. I guess my question is how much of the economy would just continue through inertia, and how much would be actually stopped by people not doing work. the computers would keep running until they lost power. even with backup generators, that isn't going to take more than a few days to a week or so without humans running the power generating equipment.
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Nov 12, 2020 16:44
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Mr. Nice! posted:windows
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Nov 12, 2020 16:50
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Mr. Nice! posted:the computers would keep running until they lost power. even with backup generators, that isn't going to take more than a few days to a week or so without humans running the power generating equipment. That was my first thought too. Even if the power system didn't drop off immediately, any storm that came through would knock out power and there would be no restoration. Eventually the system would trip out on instability.
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Nov 12, 2020 17:00
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Boba Pearl posted:How do people find new music? I've tried spotify radio and pandora, but I don't really get a lot of new things, I find maybe one or two songs I like each week. Pandora was terrible when I used it. Their limited library led to constant repetition of music. I left about 4 years ago, not sure if it changed. Spotify has been amazing, though. I have an "all music" category with over 8 days of music saved. Then I have things broken down into various categories (main three ones being a gradient from Lounging to Chill to Crushing It). My lists are heavily curated. I never add a full album, I'll add exactly the songs I want. I feel like this has helped because each week Spotify makes a "Discover Weekly" where they suggest music based on your listening habits and 60-80% of it really matches my tastes and is new to me. So, in short: curation on my end and Spotify's recommendations have really worked out for me. Youtube's algorithm is a miss 95% of the time but sometimes tosses me new music based on my habits. What type of new music are you looking for?
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Nov 12, 2020 17:04
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BonHair posted:This is definitely a stupid question: of we imagine that every human on earth disappeared overnight, what would happen to the economy? I know that the question would be meaningless mostly, but in terms of "number go up", what would actually happen? Presumably, a lot of purchases are automated, so a lot of stuff would just continue, including interest on debt. On the other hand no one would consume anything, and no innovation would happen. I guess my question is how much of the economy would just continue through inertia, and how much would be actually stopped by people not doing work. As others have said, electricity would be down in a matter of hours or a day, backup power might last a day at some places, and everything else would follow with it. There is a very good book about this curious question called The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, one of my favorite non-fiction authors. He uses your premise of "What if humans disappeared all at once" to look at things like system resilience, decomposition of all sorts of manmade stuff, what it looks like when nature takes over a manmade space, etc. It's a neat book. For example IIRC the NYC subway tunnels would be flooded in 1-2 weeks - did you know they are constantly pumped out?
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Nov 12, 2020 17:41
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El_Elegante posted:Here’s some more “sexy bug lady “ inspo: I wish I hadn't taken an edible before seeing this.
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Nov 12, 2020 22:36
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Anyone in the Northern Virginia area know of a good sushi restaurant that’s doing dine in?
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Nov 13, 2020 00:40
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If a piece of firewood does not disintegrate into ash, does this mean the wood was not seasoned properly? I had a fairly sizable piece of firewood, but instead of burning into nothing, they turned into these big charcoalish pieces that don't burn too well. I can get them going again with a gas lighter, but I thought seasoned firewood was supposed to burn down without that much trouble. What gives?
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Nov 13, 2020 01:22
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credburn posted:I wish I hadn't taken an edible before seeing this. I’m so sorry, I would not have recommended that course of action either.
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Nov 13, 2020 01:27
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Thirteen Orphans posted:Anyone in the Northern Virginia area know of a good sushi restaurant that’s doing dine in? Is there a Northern VA thread in LAN you can ask?
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Nov 13, 2020 02:22
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My home inspector in Texas grew up in Georgia, and told me that on Georgia, you don't need a license to be an inspector. Is that true? How would I go about finding that out?
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Nov 13, 2020 02:28
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Slimy Hog posted:Is there a Northern VA thread in LAN you can ask? Thanks, forgot about LAN.
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Nov 13, 2020 02:29
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Bioshuffle posted:If a piece of firewood does not disintegrate into ash, does this mean the wood was not seasoned properly? I had a fairly sizable piece of firewood, but instead of burning into nothing, they turned into these big charcoalish pieces that don't burn too well. I can get them going again with a gas lighter, but I thought seasoned firewood was supposed to burn down without that much trouble. What gives? it means you built a lovely fire man, try watchin some youtubes or something i'd show you if we were irl
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Nov 13, 2020 03:57
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Yeah making charcoal happens when a fire is burning cool or hypoxic. Often happens to the wood at the tail end of even a good fire
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Nov 13, 2020 06:06
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alnilam posted:As others have said, electricity would be down in a matter of hours or a day, backup power might last a day at some places, and everything else would follow with it. That reminds me of reading somewhere that the only truly lasting impact humanity will have after we're gone, on geological timescales, will be the concentration of not naturally occuring glass in the ground in areas where big cities with skyscrapers once stood. Everything else will decay and just fade away given enough time, but some alien species could so a soil analysis and figure out that a billion years ago some species created huge amounts of glass and collected it in certain places, even after all other evidence of our being here is gone.
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Nov 13, 2020 13:11
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Gold reserves will be a tell as well. Any alien species that has spacefaring technology will know that gold never ever ever exists on a planetary surface in multiple-ton deposits of near-pure gold and wonder about the mechanism that got it there. And gold reserves are generally situated in geologically stable areas, so what you'll get is wind-blown sediments and then "woops, all gold".
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Nov 13, 2020 13:31
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We noticed that uranium coming out of Oklo in Gabon was deficient in uranium-235. This turned out to be due to natural nuclear reactions that had taken place there a couple billion years ago. We’re going to leave all sorts of isotopic irregularities like that around. The Moon is geologically dead and the artefacts we left there will last an extremely long time. I’ve heard it said that we’ll leave a thin layer of plastic across the planet, but I don’t know about the geochemistry of that.
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Nov 13, 2020 13:38
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Is there still tons of lead everywhere from leaded gasoline? Does that need to be remediated or does it somehow get taken care of by regular use of the soil?
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Nov 13, 2020 16:12
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The alarm on lead was actually raised by a geologist, Clair Cameron Patterson. He ought to be as well‐known as Rachel Carson.quote:Patterson had first encountered lead contamination in the late 1940s as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. His work on this subject led to a total re-evaluation of the growth in industrial lead concentrations in the atmosphere and the human body, and his subsequent campaigning was seminal in the banning of tetraethyllead in gasoline and lead solder in food cans. It hangs around basically forever and can only be diluted or carried to places we’re less apt to take it in, and it’s not very mobile. If you manage a Superfund site, here’s your guide. Platystemon fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 16:26
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Cross posting from the CC questions thread:dog nougat posted:I've had an idea/sort of obsession with altarpieces for a while, and want to make one. Ideally I'd make it out of wood or vacuum formed plastic, but I don't have access to a wood shop or the money to make that happen. Paper mache is basically my best option. I'd like to make it archival if at all possible, but that seems difficult without using acid-free fibers to make the whole thing ($$$). I have a stack of old newspapers, which I'm sure are not acid/lignin free. I'm curious about the longevity of using those fibers, but encasing them an acrylic medium or PVA. I suspect the acids would still eventually eat through fibers and possibly react with the encasement material and the whole thing would eventually collapse or lose it's structure.
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Nov 13, 2020 17:00
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I would think you could buffer the paper slurry to neutral with calcium carbonate fairly easily, but that wouldn’t address the lignin question. In ordinary times, I would say to go to secondhand stores and buy old books printed on cotton rag paper and use that. Edit to add: if you do decide to go ahead with using the newspapers, you should think about bleaching out the ink, which is also very reactive to light and air. Another option is to make your own cotton paper with rags, but that also requires more time browsing tattered textiles in secondhand stores that might be advisable right now. Old sheets are great for making rag paper with! AlbieQuirky fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 17:52
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Taeke posted:That reminds me of reading somewhere that the only truly lasting impact humanity will have after we're gone, on geological timescales, will be the concentration of not naturally occuring glass in the ground in areas where big cities with skyscrapers once stood. I think the premise of this question is one of the questions in the debate of whether we should call the age of humanity the anthropocene epoch, or just a continuation of the holocene. In geological terms, iirc epochs are periods marked by a significant enough geological change that you can find evidence of it anywhere on earth in the geological record. So the question is, would the age of humanity be apparent to an astute geologist a hundred million years from now? iirc a lot of geologists have settled on the answer being yes, because of some of the materials we have made that will remain, the materials we have unearthed and moved around and accumulated in concentrations that would be surprising to be natural, and of course, the impact of the burning of fossil fuels will be measurable in the geological record. Disclaimer I'm not a geologist but I casually read about it sometimes 
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Nov 13, 2020 18:01
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I swear I read somewhere that thinking about accomplishing something releases almost as much dopamine as actually doing it, and this plays into procrastination because your brain is getting almost the same hit for zero work as it is for work. Has anyone else heard of this theory? Is there any validity to it?
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Nov 13, 2020 18:30
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AlbieQuirky posted:I would think you could buffer the paper slurry to neutral with calcium carbonate fairly easily, but that wouldn’t address the lignin question. Yeah, looking into removing lignins from pulp is a bit on the complicated side for me, involving making it water soluble with acids and cooking it down essentially. Calcium Carbonate is cheap as hell and worth looking into at least and would probably at least make the paper mache last a bit longer. This article gives some interesting insight into calcium carbonate as a buffer for lignins in paper. I doubt I'd have any way to determine the lignin content of the newsprint though. I'm not super worried about the inks in the paper unless they'd be reactive with the paper pulp. I plan on sealing the whole thing in a medium of some sort (likely acrylic), gessoing, and painting it anyway. I have some amount of old clothing to make a rag from as well. I have a rough concept in my head about how large I'd like to make this thing. I should probably do some rough sketches and layouts to figure this whole thing out and determine if it's actually feasible for me to even make.
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Nov 13, 2020 18:30
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What would be the best online source or course for learning stock investing? There are a plethora of these online and I'm not sure what to choose (free or paid, etc).
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Nov 13, 2020 19:32
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Grouchio posted:What would be the best online source or course for learning stock investing? There are a plethora of these online and I'm not sure what to choose (free or paid, etc). https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2892928 No really, in stock trading there is an incredible amount of bullshit and snake oil out there from people who want your money. As with most topics, SA is a surprisingly good place to find mostly level headed people who can at least point you to the most sane resources. The OP of that BFC Long-term Investing thread is pretty good. If instead you want to like, actively trade stocks (also known as gambling), BFC also has a stock trading thread. e: this is also a really good, short, level-headed read on investing for retirement, imo http://www.etf.com/docs/IfYouCan.pdf
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Nov 13, 2020 19:38
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Grouchio posted:What would be the best online source or course for learning stock investing? There are a plethora of these online and I'm not sure what to choose (free or paid, etc). 
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Nov 13, 2020 19:42
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alnilam posted:I think the premise of this question is one of the questions in the debate of whether we should call the age of humanity the anthropocene epoch, or just a continuation of the holocene. In geological terms, iirc epochs are periods marked by a significant enough geological change that you can find evidence of it anywhere on earth in the geological record. So the question is, would the age of humanity be apparent to an astute geologist a hundred million years from now? iirc a lot of geologists have settled on the answer being yes, because of some of the materials we have made that will remain, the materials we have unearthed and moved around and accumulated in concentrations that would be surprising to be natural, and of course, the impact of the burning of fossil fuels will be measurable in the geological record. I am a geologist, and I fall firmly into the camp of Anthropocene. It's the only epoch that you can trace to an exact starting point, to the second. 05:29:21 UTC-6, July 16th, 1945.
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Nov 13, 2020 22:55
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Memento posted:I am a geologist, and I fall firmly into the camp of Anthropocene. It's the only epoch that you can trace to an exact starting point, to the second. Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
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Nov 13, 2020 23:59
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Memento posted:I am a geologist, and I fall firmly into the camp of Anthropocene. It's the only epoch that you can trace to an exact starting point, to the second. For real? Or are you being poetic? I mean, was there an accompanying geological shift with the bomb? (Apologies for being stupid if I’m being stupid)
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Nov 14, 2020 01:39
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devilmonk posted:For real? Or are you being poetic? I mean, was there an accompanying geological shift with the bomb? (Apologies for being stupid if I’m being stupid) In order to define a new epoch, it needs to be a global and permanent change in the rock record. The detonation of nuclear weapons across the planet since 1945 has left permanent markers in the rock record that plastics, carbon, glass, all that other stuff, can't really compete with. For one thing, the trinitite and kharitonchik created by the early ground-based blasts cannot have occurred any other way than a nuclear explosion, and will last in their position for a very long time. It's definitely a personal preference of mine, but I feel it meets the criteria. Volcanic glass with that amount of heavy metals in it is impossible for nature to reproduce, due to how metals fractionate out of magma before it reaches the surface, which is where volcanic glass is created (very fast cooldown to form the cryptocrystalline matrix of glasses like obsidian only occurs when lava interacts suddenly with water or air). Memento fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Nov 14, 2020 |
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Nov 14, 2020 01:58
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devilmonk posted:For real? Or are you being poetic? I mean, was there an accompanying geological shift with the bomb? (Apologies for being stupid if I’m being stupid) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_pulse Nuclear weapons testing messed up the ratios of radioactive carbon isotopes too, which is a big deal.
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Nov 14, 2020 02:05
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That makes sense and is pretty fascinating too.
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Nov 14, 2020 03:52
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Memento posted:I am a geologist, and I fall firmly into the camp of Anthropocene. It's the only epoch that you can trace to an exact starting point, to the second. UTC is undefined before 1972. Just use GMT.
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Nov 14, 2020 04:01
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Is there a thread anywhere commemorating banned user number 25,000?
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Nov 14, 2020 04:27
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McCracAttack posted:Is there a thread anywhere commemorating banned user number 25,000? If you sort the Leper's Colony by "all bans", there's 32,535 total bans. So it kinda looks like that ship has sailed. Here's a hint though: it was Seraph84, Yug, star war beta max or monkeu.
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Nov 14, 2020 04:35
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Memento posted:If you sort the Leper's Colony by "all bans", there's 32,535 total bans. So it kinda looks like that ship has sailed. Ah well...
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Nov 14, 2020 04:37
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There are more bans than there are banned users because accounts can be banned, restored with  , and banned again.But considering the state of the forums codebase, the counting could just be bad.
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Nov 14, 2020 04:47
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Google Play Music no longer exists. I used the app to listen to music from their streaming service, which I subscribe to, and listen to podcasts that I downloaded from Patreon or wherever. Youtube Music now has all my streaming library and playlists etc, that's fine, but there doesn't seem to be a way to listen to downloaded podcasts on it. Is that correct? Android 11.whatever on a Pixel 3a phone. Guess I'll go back to whatever music app I used before Google Play Music. I can listen to the audio file straight from the downloads window, but it doesn't save where I'm up to, and now that I don't have a commute, I generally can't listen to a whole podcast in a single sitting. The firstest of the first world problems, I know, but still.
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Nov 14, 2020 06:35
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Methanar posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_pulse A related bit of trivia that I think is neat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel For a few applications, like high-sensitivity radiation detectors, you can't use steel that was made after 1945, since it's all ever-so-slightly radioactive. (Steel production involves a lot of air being blown through it, and as mentioned, that air now has various radionuclides in it, which will end up in the metal.) So to build your super-sensitive detector, you need a source of high-quality steel that was made before the first atomic bomb went off. The main source of this? Sunken warships from the First World War.
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Nov 14, 2020 07:12
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