🎓 Doc Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@qoto.org

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From : https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/12/28/sign-me-up-please/

RT @fermatslibrary

Here's why the circle has 360 degrees: around 2400 B.C., the ancient Sumerians noticed the Sun's annual path across the sky was ~ 360 days. In order to track the Sun's motion, they decided to divide the circle in 360 degrees. https://t.co/IIy8uoCC16

Recent discussions reminded me of this experience, so I wanted to share it.

When I was a good Catholic child I remember 1-2 years of constantly hearing a message from any church-related official I encountered. It wasn't every time or every lesson, or every sermon, but it appeared consistently enough that it was a theme for those couple of years. The message was lamenting over the state of society, in which people looked for meaning in buying and owning things, constantly acquiring more useless stuff. Everyone agreed this was bad and sad and crazy that people actually did that. This message was also topical, since it happened in a country that was just starting to reap benefits from the move to a freer market, so it referred to an actual phenomenon.

Oh, and obviously because it was about people finding meaning in material things, this was called "materialism".

Imagine my surprize many years later when I learned what "materialism" actually meant. This seems to me like an act of relatively subtle propaganda, make a huge swath of people associate the word for a philosophical position you don't like with something obviously stupid. I'm not completely sure this was intentional, but the coordination and consistent choice of words makes me very suspicious.

This is why it's sometimes necessary to squabble over meanings of words. In particular when they are being used to distort reality, introduce false equivalences or "taint" words with meanings that shouldn't be associated with them. It's good to always keep discussions closer to being about reality, but for humans perception of reality is very much filtered through words, so they cannot be ignored.

@Wetrix You mean QOTO? Just a place for STEM interested individuals or professionals to hang out. We dont have any topic requirements though or enforce a feed much beyond showing respect for others.

We basically want to get away from the childishness and mutual attacks and deal with people arguing our disagreements as STEM professionals do, respectfully and using evidence and no personal attacks. Presuming there is a disagreement at all, most of the time we just post nerdy videos we all enjoy.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=BOhUrUtNHmY #MooTube #Science @freemo Can life exist in 2D? The physics of a 2D Universe 12:24 Arvin Ash

Some screenshots of my first linux rice.

power-law nonlinearity with maximally uniform distribution criterion for improved neural network training in automatic speech recognition. (arXiv:1912.11041v1 [eess.AS]) http://arxiv.org/abs/1912.11041

@users Two important / note worthy things on this post :

- QOTO just got over the 6,000 user accounts in total. 😄 Wasn;t long ago we were waiting for the 5,000 mark to be reached!

- And anyone notice a sharp spike in the graphs - near the center? No, it is not a glitch. What would have happened?

A new study from Princeton physicists successfully uses boron powder to control nuclear reactions in plasma.

https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/physicists-discover-how-to-safely-create-star-power-on-earth.amp.html