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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • There’s no point retaliating once you’re dead unless the enemy knows it’s something you might do. You also can’t make a plain A-bomb arbitrarily big as you need the fuel to be small enough to be subcritical until it’s assembled, and simple enough to assemble that it spends so little time critical but not supercritical that a random decay doesn’t cause a chain reaction to start before the mass is fully compressed. If it starts too early, there’s enough energy to blow the bomb apart, which stops the reaction continuing. The more material you add, the more often random decays happen, and the likelier it becomes that the reaction starts prematurely. The theoretical limit is somewhere between 500kT and 1MT, which isn’t very much for a city buster, especially if you’ve buried it. You’d have to use more than one, but a pure fission bomb is very senstive to nearby nuclear detonations, so only the first one would be likely to work.




  • Modern nukes contain a subcritical mass of fissile material and require an injection of tritium to arm them, and also require tritium for their second stage to get most of their rated yield. Tritium doesn’t last very long, so needs regularly topping up. If you’ve secretly buried a nuke, you’ll have to dig it up pretty often, undermining the advantages of secret burial. There’s also not much point in having a better nuclear deterrent than your enemy knows about, as the goal is to make them know you can destroy them so they’re too scared to attack you rather than to actually destroy them.


  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldtoProgrammer Humor@programming.devTOML
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    15 days ago

    TOML’s design is based on the idea that INI was a good format. This was always going to cause problems, as INI was never good, and never a format. In reality, it was hundreds of different formats people decided to use the same file extension for, all with their own incompatible quirks and rarely any ability to identify which variant you were using and therefore which quirks would need to be worked around.

    The changes in the third panel were inevitable, as people have data with nested structure that they’re going to want to represent, and without significant whitespace, TOML was always going to need some kind of character to delimit nesting.


  • I reckon it depends on how warm someone’s home is and how good their circulation is. If I don’t have shoes on indoors, then for half the year it feels like my feet have been stabbed because they get so cold (slippers are not enough), but I don’t wear the same shoes indoors as outdoors. I suspect that if we set the heating higher and the house wasn’t constructed in a way that makes the floor always much colder than a few inches above the floor, this wouldn’t be a problem.










  • OED:

    1. totally or partially resistant to a particular infectious disease or pathogen.
    2. protected or exempt, especially from an obligation or the effects of something.

    Merriam Webster

    1. : not susceptible or responsive

      especially: having a high degree of resistance to a disease

    2. a: produced by, involved in, or concerned with immunity or an immune response

      b: having or producing antibodies or lymphocytes capable of reacting with a specific antigen

    3. a: marked by protection

      b: free, exempt

    So unless you pretend that MW’s 2b sense is the only valid one, the immunity is immunity.

    If you have a sample of HIV at 37°C in blood, but with all the immune cells removed, it’ll still all become inert after around a week simply due to chemical reactions with other components of blood etc… It’s pretty comparable to a population of animals - if you take away their ability to reproduce, they’ll die of old age when left for long enough even if you’re not actively killing them.

    Edit: fat-fingered the save button while previewing the formatting


    • this is a shitpost community, not a biotech publication, so immune here means the dictionary definition, not any domain-specific technical jargon, otherwise people can’t make shitposts about diplomatic immunity
    • lacking the receptor that HIV uses to hijack the regular immune response in order to reproduce means the regular immune response destroys it
    • even in a normal person, after exposure, a lot of HIV gets destroyed by other parts of the immune system, often enough to eliminate it before an infection gains a foothold. Once an infection takes hold, it outbreeds the immune response as it’s the part best equipped to deal with a large viral load that it interferes with.
    • if you’ve got the virus in your body, but due to the lack of the receptor, it can’t reproduce, then it doesn’t remain viable for very long as each viron accumulates damage over time, and ceases to function once it’s too badly damaged. People carrying a disease have enough viral reproduction going on to balance out the virus being destroyed.

  • Even if you ignore that there’s an entirely valid sense of the word immune that has nothing do do with biology (i.e. the one in phrases like diplomatic immunity), my original comment is entirely consistent with the dictionary definition of the biological sense of the word. There are probably sub-fields of biology where immunity is used as jargon for something much more specific than the dictionary definition, but this is lemmyshitpost, not a peer-reviewed domain-specific publication.


  • When a normal person is exposed to HIV, it reproduces inside of them, so can then go on to expose more people, and if there’s enough of it, infect them in turn (if there’s a smaller amount, their immune system will normally be able to clean it up before it gets enough of a foothold). If someone’s lacking the receptor, then no matter how much they were exposed to, their immune system will eventually manage to remove it all without becoming infected because it can’t reproduce. If they had a ludicrously large viral load, then there’s a possibility that it could be passed on before it was destroyed, but most of the ways people get exposed to HIV aren’t enough to infect someone who’s vulnerable, let alone infect someone else via secondary exposure if there’s not been time for the infection to grow.