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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • logicbomb@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzBurrito
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    28 days ago

    The primary reason an MRI is expensive to run is that it has this magnetic field that must be maintained. This is a cost that is irrespective of whether they are running a scan.

    So if you have an MRI for small animals and it’s not being used, you might use it for a hamster.



  • This idea is a complete non-starter from a practical standpoint. Parents would complain about it either way. Either they wouldn’t want girls in school early or they’d want boys in school early, too.

    It’s just much easier to treat children all the same.

    Also, I personally think this plan would backfire. Girls graduating wouldn’t want to have to be adults earlier than boys, so they’d stay in school longer. And from what I’ve heard, the most reliable way to reduce birth rates is to educate women more.

    I think everyone also knows how to ethically increase the birth rate. Make having children easy and affordable. Lots of government assistance. Make sure everybody has access to cheap or free childcare.

    And there’s also the generational problems. Young adults can see the problems that the previous generations caused. You can’t go back in time to fix those. It will be expensive to change this sort of thing.

    But quick fixes aren’t going to change the underlying problems.




  • The Vatican said Pope Francis had approved the document, which also reaffirms its condemnation of surrogacy, saying the practice represents “a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child”.

    “A child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract,” the document says. “Every human life, beginning with that of the unborn child in its mother’s womb, cannot be suppressed, nor become an object of commodity.”

    The ethical problems with surrogacy are real, but they’re not about the child. They’re about income inequality and putting adult women through a physically traumatic, dangerous, and possibly life-changing experience for money. If we were able to use artificial wombs for “surrogacy” (I know, it’s technically not the same thing), I think people would see it as nothing but a new type of fertility medicine.




  • The stupidest part is that both Republicans (in Utah at least) and Democrats have seen, first hand, that Housing First initiatives are actually less expensive for the government than just ignoring, then displacing inconvenient homeless populations.

    Research in Seattle, Washington, found that providing housing and support services for homeless alcoholics costs taxpayers less than leaving them on the street, where taxpayer money goes towards police and emergency health care.

    Both morality and fiscal responsibility agree on certain issues, and this is one of them.

    I’m not saying that housing first is the ultimate best remedy, because I don’t know all of the alternatives. Just that clearing homeless camps is proven to be expensive and ineffective.


  • They give a bit more context in this video. (from 2017)

    By the way, I got that link from an article in The Guardian, and I can’t find anything in either of those two articles that really adds on top of what was known in 2017. It could just be hard for a layperson to understand, and so was oversimplified?

    TLDW is that researchers have known for decades that this tablet showed the Babylonians knew the Pythagorean Theorem for 1000 years before Pythagoras was born. So, that part isn’t new.

    They seem to be saying that what’s new is that they understand each line of this tablet describes a different right triangle, and that due to the Babylonians counting in base 60, they can describe many more right triangles for a unit length than we can in base 10.

    They feel like this can have many uses in things like surveying, computing, and in understanding trigonometry.

    My take is that this was a very interesting discovery, but that they probably felt pressure to figure out a way to describe it as useful in the modern world. But we’ve known about the useful parts of this discovery for forever. Our clocks are all base 60. And our computers are binary, not base 10, just to start with.

    We overvalue trying to make every advance in knowledge immediately useful. Knowledge can be good for its own sake.