Centrist, progressive, radical optimist. Geophysicist, R&D, Planetary Scientist and general nerd in Winnipeg, Canada.

troyunrau.ca (personal)

lithogen.ca (business)

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • New Testament: Given that the bible, as we know it today, wasn’t assembled into its current form until hundreds of years AD…

    While being written, it wasn’t being used as anything other than a record of events. Given that most of the events recorded in the Gospels happened decades before they were written down, they were effectively turning oral tradition to written tradition. The later books in the new testament, excluding Revelations, are largely letters traded between early churches.

    Revelations is where shit gets weird. A bible without this would be far superior, harder to weaponize, and probably would be considered a living corpus rather than a fixed thing. If there was intent when writing anything in the bible, it was here. And here is where we can start arguing nefarious intent, turning the religion into a death cult.



  • Personal anecdote. I run a small business with a business partner (co-owner) and we have no employees. We need an employee. I’m personally a huge fan of employee-owned companies.

    But from a hiring perspective, it is mind bogglingly risky for us to hire someone and just automatically stake them. Like, what if it’s the wrong person? How do we claw back control? Do we risk dilution sending the company in another direction?

    It’s just so much easier just to pay someone and not have to deal with the complexity. And therein lies the rub.






  • Unpopular opinion (largely discredited in anthropology circles): cold weather encourages resourceful behaviour and improves human cooperation. In climates where you can survive winter outdoors, homelessness is not as detrimental to continued existence. Three walls and no roof is fine in a slum in Florida, but harder to pull off in Minneapolis.

    This societal coordination which is required to survive winter leads to more orderly and more socialist civilizations. Because hairless apes have no business being in that climate. So it is human ingenuity that is selected for – and that includes development of systems of cooperation.

    If I extrapolate, our space faring descendants will face much bigger hurdles, but ideally will develop even better systems to deal with it.

    Bonus picture. Me doing arctic exploration.









  • Kind of. My own business will probably needs to hire a tech sometime in the next six months. Ideally someone technically inclined with a steady hand (who can be trained to solder connectors onto cables, etc.)

    Oh, the arctic exploration stuff? My old employer is Aurora Geoscience – they have a careers page. There are others like them, depending on your citizenship and location. Many of these companies will hire labourers and semi-skilled technicians who want the lifestyle. You won’t get paid a lot – but it’s kind of like the military experience without the guns and you come out knowing how to do a lot of shit. A good life experience. :)



  • At the time, arctic mineral exploration. However I blew out my knee and started a business with lower personal risk (equipment targeting the same market) ;)

    Free photo – me doing science in the arctic in winter (February, so the sun is up) with curious caribou checking it out



  • Counterpoint: Sometimes you can kickstart a community that you want to see just by consistently posting content. !science_memes@mander.xyz is my favourite example – it was essentially one person who created that entire community (and it’s since been diversifying somewhat – at least there’s traction in the comments).

    But to reinforce your point: I did !spacemusic@lemmy.ca and tried to do the same thing, but it sort of petered out. But it’s way way more niche.

    Rome wasn’t built in a day. Just engage with the content you like and build some places for content you’d like to see.


  • Excerpt from Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood:

    “This is the latest,” said Crake.

    What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.

    “What the hell is it?” said Jimmy.

    “Those are chickens,” said Crake. "Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They’ve got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit.

    “But there aren’t any heads…”

    “That’s the head in the middle,” said the woman. “There’s a mouth opening at the top, they dump nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don’t need those.”