NielsBohron

Profession can absolutely affect volume. Even without any hearing damage, any job that regularly requires that you project can become a habit.

I’m a chemistry professor at a community college, fairly well educated, and I flatter myself to say reasonably intelligent, but I still slip into what my wife calls my “teaching voice” in some social settings or even occasionally at home.

Me too. I was really wondering what sort of interview this was.

Not, you’re thinking of Deadshot. A deadlock is a Scottish body of water that has been polluted to the point that no life exists in the lake.

po-tay-to, po-tah-to

Depends. The cheap houses, yeah, there’s as fair bit of noise, but you can’t hear everything. From downstairs, you can hear when someone walks across the room above you, but not when they’re walking in other upstairs rooms. And from rooms on the same level, you can hear if someone is talking loudly in the room next door, but not enough to make out what they’re saying unless they’re yelling.

Well-built houses or buildings made for occupancy by multiple families usually have better sound insulation between the rooms/floors/units, so it’s not always an issue.

Edit: the plus side to that is I know all the noises my house makes at night, so as a light sleeper, I know when something is wrong in the middle of the night, and I only need one decent sound system for the whole house, which is great for listening to records while doing housework.

So, one observer will see those oscillations happen faster than the other?

Not quite. In each observer’s frame of reference, time appears to pass the same; it’s only when you try to reconcile the between two objects that are not at rest with respect to each other does relativity show up.

Basically, when you bring someone back to Earth, the observers will find that their watches don’t match up even though both observers experience time passing the same way as normal (because the oberserver is by definition at rest with respect to their own frame of reference).

TL; DR: Relativity is a pain in the ass and makes no sense in everyday terms.

edit: disclaimer - I am not a physicist and have not taken physics classes in a decade plus, but I do teach science at a college. I’m going mostly on half-remembered lectures and some random one-off discussions I’ve had with my buddy in the physics department over the past few years.

I mean, this is the real answer here, but you can’t just put them on UTC because of the relativity like we were discussing elsewhere, so it would still have to be a separate time zone for programming and timekeeping purposes, even if humans won’t be able to tell the difference

It’s been a long time since I took modern physics, so I’m not positive, but I think you’re right that the moon would have time moving slower, and if your 50ms/day is right (edit: I based this on the moon traveling faster than the earth, but I don’t know anything about gravitational relativity, so that’s probably wrong) then you’d need to do something like skip a second every 20th day on the moon to keep pace with Earth. We could call it an “anti-leap-second”

Programmers, that seems pretty simple; what’s the big deal? ^/s

No, the moon’s rotation isn’t on a 24-hour cycle. I’m not an astronomer, but I pretty sure since it’s tidally locked to earth and on a 28-day cycle around the earth, a lunar day is actually 28 Earth days, but I’m not actually sure how that would factor into the number of time zones (I’m pretty sure it would be more complicated than just 24 time zones to match 24 time zones on earth, though).

Plus, I think the speed of the moon relative to the sun is different enough from Earth that you need to take relativity into effect, which is the real headache here.

The idea that humans need the diverse micro ecology of earth in order to not become ill over the course of generations is pretty interesting.

Really pretty well-supported by current science, too. I teach chemistry at a community college, so maybe I’m an outlier, but I read a ton of current research about the importance of diversity in “gut biomes” and the damaging effects of monoculture on global ecology, etc.

It seems pretty clear that even if engineers could solve the physical and chemical issues with a generation ship, the limiting constraints are almost certainly going to be biological and ecological, and KS Robinson’s estimates for the upper limits seem pretty reasonable based on current knowledge

Someone what mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars trilogy, and that is really good, but his book Aurora is almost exactly what you are describing.

Highly recommend.

And the classic, “hold my beer”

This is the correct answer.

Not a programmer, but I run Neutral Good + Lawful Neutral at the office, because my work issued a docking station with two symmetrical monitors, but they also issued me a laptop instead of a desktop, so what am going to do, not use the third monitor?

So, it’s ugly, but it works since I either put baseball on one of the big monitors or Spotify on the laptop, and work on the other two.

RAAAAAHHH!

This is the correct answer.

Naw, I think this is better. I’ve seen the “… and worked” version of this question lots of times, but I want the actual bottom of the barrel this time.

Don’t get me wrong; “… and worked” still yields funny answers every time, but this is more interesting to me.

My guess is that they either flip the painted bricks over or sand the existing paint off and then either way they can just repaint

I actually quite like the way that looks, but I get that since the lines have an actual purpose, it should probably have been put back the proper way.

Correct. However, there are many ways to get glucose into the brain that are not dependent on eating glucose directly. For example, starch and cellulose are both big long chains of glucose molecules linked together, although no multicellular organisms have the necessary enzymes to break down cellulose into glucose (at least none of which I’m aware, anyway).

For the most part, getting your glucose by breaking down starch is healthier than eating it directly, because it slows down the introduction of starch into the bloodstream which keeps your blood sugar levels more stable, since the enzymes that break down starch (α and β amylase, IIRC) don’t do it instantly. Plus, other simple sugars can easily be converted by the buddy into glucose by a variety of enzymes find naturally in the body.

But even without eating any carbohydrates, the human body had the ability to create its own glucose via a process called gluconeogenesis, which occurs mainly in the liver. So, it’s not generally advisable to eat too much sugar directly, as there are plenty of other avenues through which the body can get its glucose, and eating the glucose directly leads to a much higher chance of developing diabetes later in life, even if you remain at a healthy weight.

Source: I’m a chemist who teaches college-level biochemistry and nutrition. If you want a source with more details, LMK your educational background and I’d be happy to provide some reading material.

Depends on what you mean by “basic groceries.” Produce and generally anything that is not processed or prepackaged is ok, but most anything ready to eat, including any baked goods is likely to be pretty high in sugar.

And just FYI, since glucose, fructose, and sucrose are all naturally occurring, they (and HFCS) are considered organic legally