Are long exposures bad as well? Almost every picture of the northern lights looks better in a camera than how they look to the naked eye, because cameras can perform better in low light with the right settings.

I used to be quite puritanical about not editing the pictures I take, but over time I realized that there’s no way to capture perfectly realistic photos, because there is no perfect baseline for that. Every sensation of sight is already subjective, because the brain is doing a lot of image processing and each brain and eyes are a bit different. Colours don’t exist outside the brain. Dark scenes aren’t actually desaturated, our retinas just suck at colour vision in low light.

Photography tries to emulate a very subjective impression of a scene. If the photographer makes tweaks to some settings of the RAW in order to make the final image closer to the impression they were trying to capture, then that’s quite fine in my opinion. Just the same as changing the settings of the camera beforehand. If they want to include multiple exposures with different settings, then that’s fine by me as well, because your eyes change aperture and focus each time they flick to a different part of the scene.

Rock and stone are also stardust. Checkmate liberal.

Not yet

Sure, that’s what they want you to think.

Yeah then we can use that to go back in time and save Harambe, and then we won’t need another planet!

Yeah that too. Could work for the niche applications mentioned, like low power satellites…

The waste heat generated by a person is one of the main concerns with designing space suits. If the tech can be scaled to accommodate that, it could change things. Unfortunately it’s less useful down here.

Your grandchild full of PFAS

Your great grandchild full of PFAS

Your great great grandchild…

Oh definitely. I just don’t like it when conclusions are drawn that as such, all germans are nazi sympathisers due to their blood (something intrinsic that can’t be changed), rather than just most of them and due to the societal circumstances that actually caused the widespread fervor. The former stance reeks of essentialism.

Yes, and 138 days is far from the shortest. Take Radon-220 for example. It can be found in nature in trace amounts, while having a half life of only 55.6 seconds, while Radon-222 has the longest half-life of all Radon isotopes at 3.8 days.

Polonium-210 produces alpha radiation, which can’t penetrate the skin. It will kill you with cancer if even one microgram of the stuff gets in your body, but otherwise it’s relatively harmless. [Edit 1: That being said, a small cereal toy like that is, uhh, ironic. Edit 2: Oh and apparently it dissolves in water :DDD]

Also with a half life of 138 days it’s hardly “one of the most radioactive substances on Earth”.

Are you joking now? Because you seem to be contradicting yourself. You say that you feel for the germans who stood up, but then you say that you have a hard time having that sympathy for germans (including the ones in the previous sentence?).

The reason I took issue with this is that I’m scared. Fascism is capitalism in decay. A systemic symptom of a flawed and unsustainable system eating itself. That leaves only people and their capacity for good to have hope in. That hope is in short supply. Things will continue to get a lot worse before they get better again.

As bampop said in a different branch of this convo, a country is more than its government. To declare an entire country nazis discounts the existence and in some cases the life’s work of a lot of good people. I can appreciate a joke, but right now I really want to focus on the fact that anti-fascism is also everywhere, and that as history repeats itself, the good parts can also be repeated. If not, then all is lost.

My flatmate is german. He’s a marxist academic writing a thesis comparing the far right parties of Spain, Germany and Finland. The AfD is getting more and more votes, but the vast majority hate their guts.

Sure, but to say thay Italy [as a whole] has always been like that discounts the efforts of a lot people, including former governments.

Sorry if I’m nitpicking. I just want to stay conscious of the fact that the forces opposing fascism never went away, and that as history repeats itself, the good parts can also be repeated.

Would you make the same joke about all germans always, based on their history and the recent resurgence of the far-right?

I’ll remind you that it was italian partisans who killed Mussolini and italians were the ones to beat the body up and hung it up on that square.

That seems like quite a generalization to make. Care to elaborate?

Ok so another definition: Metaphysics (at least as I use the word) is simply the branch of philosophy which deals with questions about the underlying structure of the world and nature of reality. The edges are a bit fuzzy and there is at times overlap with other branches like epistemology or philosophy of mind. Materialism is a metaphysical framework just as idealism is.

1+1=2 is in the realm of logic.

Yet it demonstrates that certainty does exists, at least in the realm of rational proofs. It’s something we can know without using our sensory organs, just thought alone. The Cogito argument is significant in that it’s the only such proof that can be made about the universe, and thus the only thing we can say with certainty about the universe.

Nice chat. It’s getting late and I should go to sleep. But before I go, do you have any recommendations to read up on the basics of dialectical materialism? It’s a subject I’ve been meaning to delve into for a while.

You seem to mistake epistemology and metaphysics. The Cogito argument is an epistemological claim about what can be known to be true. I do not believe that I am a Boltzmann brain or that we would be in the matrix. I only brought these ideas up as alternatives which can not be debunked with absolute certainty in the epistemological sense of the word. In case you’re unfamiliar, that’s the branch of philosophy which deals with the nature of knowledge and information. I already told you what I believe in terms of metaphysics: Materialism all the way.

We’re in !philosophy@lemmy.ml, entertaining ideas is what philosophy is all about. “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it” and so on…

And about on the subject of certainty: Are you not certain that 1+1=2?

I’m sorry but did you even read my comment?

Edit: Or the one before it. I already said that I believe in the existence of an objective and purely material world.

The Cogito argument by itself doesn’t take sides on what’s real. It only talks about what can be known with certainty to be true. It’s an epistemological claim, not a metaphysical one! Well, apart from stating the obvious that one does indeed exist.

Thinking doesn’t make me exist. I am perfectly capable of existing without thinking. But the fact that I can ponder the question “what is real?” means that something (me) must be real to present the question. It’s a rational proof about reality, the only one that can be made. Everything else relies on empiricism.

Descartes himself was a dualist. He believed in the material and objective reality, just with some souls and stuff sprinkled in, ghosts in the machine and so on. (This is why the original, now out of fashion version of the argument also claimed to prove at least a god"