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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • While I agree with your main gist, I actually think this overall creates less misunderstanding than more; at least, and probably solely, with respect to what organic means. Because people read that headline and think ‘z0mg life discovered on mars’ and then one of a few things may happen which leads them to realize that organic != organism. Though some of those ‘few things’ may include temporarily spreading their incorrect interpretation to others, I believe even a slightly intelligent person will realize that they may have wrong information when this finding doesn’t end up as front page news and ‘breaking news’ segments around the world.

    So at least in that respect, this kind of journalism constantly teaches and reminds people that organic doesn’t mean life. Though, ultimately, I still dislike it as much as the next guy.


  • Naturally, organic simply means carbon is present in the (non-metal) structure. Generally carbon-carbon, carbon-hydrogen, and a few other bond-types are considered organic. Many articles prey on people’s misunderstanding of this in order to craft a good headline, since “carbon-based material” doesn’t sound as exciting as “organic material”.

    And when they say it “be created by processes not related to life as we know it” they should also probably mention that it can be created in the absence of any life at all; since if that weren’t true then it would in fact be direct evidence of life.




  • Only very hot flames are a plasma and usually only within certain regions of the main body of the flame; most flames one encounters in their life will not be a plasma due to low or non-existent ionization. A candle flame is almost certainly not a plasma, rather it’s a combusting (oxidizing) gas which appears as a flame due to the emission of photons in the visible range from regions where the fuel is reacting with air. Furthermore, fire does not require mechanical or kinetic force to combine a fuel and an oxidizer, there is no need to ‘ram’ these particles together. Simple contact between a fuel and an oxidizer in states which would allow redox will cause burning and possibly visible flame (not all redox produces visible flame).




  • That’s a good point, and I’m sure that would certainly be a problem with PageRank and similar ranking algorithms, but I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if Google and other SEs have intelligently crafted a pre-processor that translates links like “kbin.social/m/lemmyworld@lemmy.world/t/34817/Is-Lemmy-Indexable” to the Original-Instance-Link (OIL, lurking Google devs feel free to steal this acronym) “https://lemmy.world/post/189226” so that relevant algorithms properly reflect the ‘true’ ranking of the information itself rather than the particular instance’s… instance of it.

    OStatus and Pump.io have been around for a while so SEs may (should) have already identified this problem and addressed it unless they’ve decided it’s not important, not in-line with how their rankings are intended to work, or simply not easily solvable in some cases like I previously assumed. As Bjarne Stroustrup would say, “If you think it’s simple, then you have misunderstood the problem.”


  • It’s certainly archivable; all one must do is look at the ‘robots.txt’ (a file that websites use to let nice search engines know which pages they shouldn’t index) associated with the domain to find out what it permits to be indexed. Lemmy.world’s robots.txt only disallows pages associated with instance/account creation, user settings, and administrator/authorized interaction.

    So everything relevant to how reddit appears on Google is possible for Lemmy, the only difference is that Lemmy’s associated PageRank (and other ranking scores) are considerable lower than reddit’s. This should change with time, especially when more niche and specialized communities take hold.