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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 23rd, 2022

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  • Is there any scientific evidence Esperantano is more efficient, has significantly superior user experience/usability? What about that in the context of using it for software engineering? People seem to have developed it in the 1800s; so outdated. Also many issues https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Criticism like bias and the gender non-neutrality; I would discard it. I would suggest to come up with a better language for the 21st century. This one seems better https://www.globasa.net/eng

    Also, isn’t this an XY problem? The problem is that many people do not know the current dominant language that people use in science, technology, so on. So you propose Esperanto. Well, now you gatekeep it to people who know Esperanto, which is a way less demography than English. But since learning languages that are more close to one’s native language is easier, that would allow people from Latin/Roamance/Germanic-based languages to possibly learn it faster? That would not be true to Asiatic languages, …

    Why another language is the correct solution? Why not improve current education systems? Why not machine translation? Why not improve translations? If the US switches its official language to Esperanto, wouldn’t it be imperialist as well? Language dominance is linked to socioeconomic development. You need countries like US to actually adopt it; otherwise it would be just another language to learn besides English. You are just making it harder.









  • in short there is no evidence whatsoever for the beginning of the universe. people confuse universe expansion (which there is evidence for) with the beginning of the universe (no evidence).

    Big Bang #1 the beginning of the universe […] is what we find in the mathematics of Einstein’s general relativity if we extrapolate the current expansion of the universe back in time. The equations say that matter and energy in the universe becomes denser and hotter until, eventually, about 13.7 billion years in the past, both density and temperature become infinite. We cannot extrapolate any further back in time, so it’s fair to say that this event, if it happened, would be the beginning of the universe.

    Einstein’s theory breaks down about 10-43 seconds before the mathematical singularity, a unit also known as the Planck time. Since physicists don’t believe the singularity is real, the phrase “Big Bang” has come to refer to whatever event might replace the singularity in the to-be-found theory of quantum gravity in this Planck time. Let’s call it just that—the Big Bang Event.

    We have no evidence the Big Bang Event happened. We cannot look back in time anywhere near that long ago. The earliest direct observation we have is the formation of the cosmic microwave background, which was formed about 400,000 years after the hypothetical Big Bang Event. Be careful: If you Google for the time at which the microwave background was formed, you will get the answer that it was formed 13.7 billion years ago and that might look like it was formed at the Big Bang Event. But that’s because the figure is rounded.

    The James Webb Space Telescope doesn’t tell us anything about the Big Bang Event.

    We understand quite well how matter behaves at energy densities somewhat above those at which the microwave background must have formed, so we trust that our extrapolations back in time are correct until we reach an energy density that roughly corresponds to that which the Large Hadron Collider probes, which brings us to about 10-12 seconds before the hypothetical Big Bang Event. We know nothing about what matter does at higher energy density—even the density in neutron stars is lower than that.

    Now, 10^-12 seconds isn’t much in human terms, but to get from there to the Big Bang Event, we’d still have to extrapolate over more than 50 orders of magnitude in energy density. That’s 50 orders of magnitude for which we have only speculation. This means the Big Bang Event might happen in our mathematics, but we have no observations that can tell us it happened in reality. Indeed, I think we will never have any observations that confirm the Big Bang Event. Some of my colleagues in astrophysics may disagree. But be that as it may, at least for now we just don’t know how the universe began.

    That we have no evidence for (or against) the Big Bang Event is the reason why physicists have a large number of different hypotheses for the beginning of our universe. Besides the Big Bang Event, our universe could have been born out of a black hole; or it could have come about in a collision of higher-dimensional membranes; or it could have started as a big network in a non-geometric phase; or our universe could cycle through eons, as Roger Penrose has proposed. The most popular idea now is that our universe was born out of a fluctuation in a quantum field. All these alternative ideas to the Big Bang Event are possible because we cannot look back in time far enough to tell them apart.

    The James Webb Space Telescope is an amazing instrument. It looks at young stars and galaxies that were formed long after the cosmic microwave background, at about 200 million years. That’s impressive, but it doesn’t tell us anything about the Big Bang Event, or its alternatives.

    The problem has long been that the term Big Bang is used to refer to the expansion of the universe in general, and not to the event of the creation of the universe in particular. These are, however, two separate scientific hypotheses. We have overwhelmingly strong evidence that the universe expands (call it Big Bang #2), and we are confident about its history back to about the time of the electroweak phase transition, which is what the Large Hadron Collider probes. We have to date zero evidence for the beginning of the universe, whether it was a Big Bang Event or something else.

    Historically, the first evidence for the expansion of the universe was Edwin Hubble’s observation that the light from other galaxies is systematically shifted to the red, indicating that they all recede from us. While this may have been the first evidence, the decisive evidence for the expansion of the universe was the discovery of the cosmic microwave background that ruled out the competing hypothesis, the “steady state” universe.




  • health systems that integrate mental and physical health care, especially at the primary care level. Mental and physical well-being are inextricably linked—physical illness and pain can cause depression and anxiety, and conversely can mask underlying medical conditions, especially when doctors interpret these experiences solely through the lens of a psychiatric diagnosis.

    Any treatment has to start with a focus on the whole person. We need appropriate community-based care and holistic solutions that take social, economic, and cultural factors into account. We also need to broaden our understanding of recovery to mean a person’s ability to live a good life on their own terms, rather than defining it as the absence of certain symptoms.

    Finally, we have to start treating mental health as a social justice and human rights issue. That’s why Mental Health Europe advocates for a psychosocial model that acknowledges the profound impact of lived experience and social environment in shaping mental health. We know that poverty, racism, and violence put people at higher risk of developing mental health problems—so that means we need population-level interventions which can focus on fighting the root causes of this public health crisis.





    • i always liked soundcloud better because it is where the underground has been; youtube also has many underground gems
    • mixes/podcasts and the like
    • through music communities
    • i explored many of those essential charts in the past
    • exploring genres
    • sometimes i would pick a region, greenland, iceland, africa, … and listen to some of their music
    • there are some interesting youtube channels making documentaries on underground music
    • algorithm