Forest fires are so weird. On what other planet do you just suddenly have such a violent chemical reaction? Idk probably none cause on what other planet do you have a bunch of carbon-carbon bonds sitting immersed in a bunch of oxygen? It’s not a stable situation, and after the fire has to be restored with solar power
Venus!
Fun Venus fact: it has fewer craters on its surface than you’d expect, and they all look suspiciously young. As far as we can tell, the whole surface of Venus is not that much more than a half billion years old. So what makes this so?
It is Earth-sized, which is theoretically enough to sustain tectonic activity. But we don’t see traditional plates there. Remember that Earth’s tectonic plates come in two flavors: continental plates, which are long-lived and low density, floating high in the mantle, and oceanic plates, which are heavier, younger, and are continually refreshed, spreading out from the center of the oceans and being subducted back in to the mantle where they collide with the continents.
As an incidental consequence, this means that a lot of ocean water gets sucked up in to the mantle during the subduction process. Water is very much unstable at tectonic pressures and temperatures, so it usually finds its way back out to the surface as a volcanic gas or something, but in the meantime there’s enough of it down there to lubricate the movement of the plates. Basically on the same principle that makes wastewater injection cause small earthquakes during the fracking process.
Now, Venus is likely to have had liquid water oceans at some point, but the runaway greenhouse effect has long since boiled them off. This means that a)the weight of the oceans doesn’t land disproportionately on a subsets of the plates, and b)there’s no water being pulled down there to keep the plates well-greased. So nowadays on Venus, subduction just… doesn’t happen. The plates are too rigid and dry, too homogeneous. So they stay locked in place relative to one another.
That means Venus has volcanoes but not really earthquakes. The energy that would be released in the motion of plates just builds, and builds, and builds. Until it doesn’t any more. Every [n] hundred million years or so, Venus has its one earthquake, which carries all the accumulated energy of all the earthquakes that ever happened on Earth between now and the Cambrian era, all at once.
This is enough to melt the entire surface and then some. The whole crust, all the mountains and valley networks and continents and basins and everything that floats on the fluid mantle, is subducted all at once, falling back in the planet’s interior. Then, with the whole planet molten, the surface can cool enough to form a new crust.
Anyway, that’s why global warming is bad.
Holy fuck
The whole crust
Melts
All at once????
#amazing
alarming for my Venusian real estate portfolio if true
one of my favorite things is how badgers and coyotes will hunt cooperatively. as in not just like happening to go after the same thing at the same time but actually combining efforts to bring down prey; coyotes are faster and can chase down prey species, while badgers are adept at digging them out of their burrows
This is my first coding assignment for my software engineering class that started today. It’s going to be a really good semester.
UPDATE: I got my grade back and
“100″
Since this post has gotten some attention, I feel like it’s worth mentioning that this was just the first half of the assignment.
The second half, which we weren’t made aware of until the day we were meant to turn this one in, was to trade USB drives with the person sitting next to us and MODIFY their “unreadable” code without getting any help from them.
This was to teach us two things:
1) In this field, you’ll spend more time working with code written by other people than you will writing original code from a blank slate. The people who wrote the original code will probably not be around to help you. Learning to read code is IMPORTANT, even if it seems unreadable.
2) There is a strong brotherhood/sisterhood among programmers and software engineers. Respect that bond when you’re writing code and documentation. In my professor’s words: “When you write code, pretend that the person who will have to maintain it after you’re gone is a homicidal maniac who knows where you live.”
This class and professor are incredible.
AHHHHHH I need this in my life.
If anyone wants to send me obfuscated code to fix I would be fucking delighted.
@the-real-seebs this looks like a job for the Obfuscated C Contest
i am a deaf iranian muslim womxn and i have NEVER seen art that is even CLOSE to resembling me.
today, my pal tagged me in this photo, and i fucking cried. i have NEVER seen art even close to my identity and so seeing art that describes me to a T made me cry so hard.
this is why we need representation of different identities. so people like me know we arent alone
-mod tabby
God that’s beautiful art, too. Like, how expressive her face is – and I LOVE the way the artist drew the sign (with the arrow) so that you read it in movement. I love this. I want to see this character in something.
evidence that ancient paleolithic venus statues were made by women who were examining their own bodies and sculpting them from their own point of view, not, as previously assumed, exaggerated features from an outside perspective
there’s a website where you put in two musicians/artists and it makes a playlist that slowly transitions from one musician’s style of music to the other’s
i just found out merriam webster has a time traveler feature that tells you some of the words that were “born” the same year as you. it’s pretty neat yall should do this
I’m the same age as glass ceiling and horndog.
vietnamese pot-bellied pig, crack house, and elephant in the room
I’m the same age as ‘cyberpunk’, ‘nuclear winter’, ‘cell phone’, ‘designer drug’ and a whooole lot of now-common computer terms. i’m old.
I GOT VARROA MITE
ah yes, 1995. the year of “partial-birth abortion,” “date rape drug,” and “complex regional pain syndrome”
just moving along like everyone else 