cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 147 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • I am curious, what do you think Zionism is actually?

    I don’t think I can continue contributing when there’s literally a rule condoning ethnic discrimination

    The rule against Zionism is literally the opposite of “a rule condoning ethnic discrimination”. This community’s second rule is actually redundant with its first one, but it’s worth stating separately due to the prevalence of misunderstandings about it.

    FYI, aside from being predicated on the forced displacement and/or murder of the Palestinian people, Herzl’s Zionism (to which the state of Israel explicitly credits its existence) has also always been rooted in antisemitism.










  • Wikipedia says:

    The mitochondrion is popularly nicknamed the “powerhouse of the cell”, a phrase popularized by Philip Siekevitz in a 1957 Scientific American article of the same name.[4]

    But know your meme attributes its meme status to this tumblr post from 2013:

    screenshot of text: "what i learned from school 1. im a fucking piece of shit 2. everybody else is also a fucking piece of shit 3. mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell"

    Contrary to comments in many places like this reddit thread from 2018, I suspect the phrase wasn’t actually used in many textbooks or very commonly known prior to that tumblr post.

    (If you search on Google Books you can find numerous textbooks using the phrase. Range-based search on Google Books appears to be broken so I’m not sure, but all the ones I checked were published well after 2013.)






























  • Upload bandwidth doesn’t magically turn into download bandwidth

    Actually, it does. Various Cable and DSL standards involve splitting up a big (eg, measured in MHz) band of the spectrum into many small (eg, around 4 or 8 kHz wide) channels which are each used unidirectionally. By allocating more of these channels to one direction, it is possible to (literally) devote more band width - both the kinds measured in kilohertz and megabits - to one of the directions than is possible in a symmetric configuration.

    Of course, since the combined up and down maximum throughput configured to be allowed for most plans is nowhere near the limit of what is physically available, the cynical answer that it is actually just capitalism doing value-based pricing to maximize revenue is also a correct explanation.