For example in a tree, the water is lifted from the high concentration in the soil to the low concentration higher up in the tree. But at the end of that process the water has been elevated, which should take energy (=mgh), but it seems like it kind of gets lifted for free without spending any energy?

Similarly, dipping a paper towel into a bowl of water, the water "climbs" the towel (by capillary action?) and absorbs upwards, meaning the water was lifted upwards (so gained potential energy) seemingly for free?

I have a website setup and am trying to get ad revenue (wordpress.com site). Issue is that I need a Paypal account, for which I need a phone number and bank account from the same country. I have Canadian bank stuff, but no Canadian phone number. I've checked out skype, viber, textnow, openphone, and a few other services but none work (because I'm in Lebanon and they require a phone number to sign up). Any ideas? A VPN won't work since most services are requiring that I sign in using my phone number, which is Lebanese.

Please be a little specific in your plan, not just "travel". Where do you want to travel ?

Fact or fiction. From one-liners to long-form.

Mastodon, being popular, has a feature with filter blocking for the user level. But no such feature for the mods them selves to help them moderate their communities. I think even Lemmy could benefit from potential ease of moderation

Is/should their be an option where moderators can auto block potentially offensive words used in uses posts, on their local timeline or beyond?

I've heard that the reason Puerto Ricans can't vote is because Puerto Rico isn't a state and it is states that choose the president, not voters. But what about expats living abroad? Do they just get to pick which state gets their vote? If so, couldn't Puerto Ricans do that too?And what about people in DC? Where do their electoral college votes come from?

I'm sure I'm missing something here, I'm just not sure what.

I'm a first-year university student. Right now, we're going over completely uninteresting topics that I’ve either already covered (or skipped) back in school. I have no motivation to complete the assignments because these subjects don’t interest me at all. I know that in the future there will be subjects I’ll enjoy, but for now, I’m stuck with all of this – and without any motivation.

As a result, I end up doing nothing all day, finding ways to distract myself just to avoid working on my university assignments. I don't like this at all because I’m not doing what I actually want to do. I "wait" until late at night, realizing I can’t procrastinate any longer, or I end up sacrificing sleep. It feels like a waste of time because I’m neither doing what I have to do nor what I want to do.

All the mess around the US elections make me think : What are weird stuff you've seen occurring during election days no matter whether it's incident, crazy voters/questions or even straight-up fraud ?

Also thanks to all of you who volunteer to run/observe an election, you're keeping your country democracy alive.

No Intel ME or AMD PSP please

I've always thought that mold is the fungus, and to mould is to shape. When talking about it with my colleagues yesterday, I was surprised that this isn't common. Most people use one of the two spellings to refer to both.

Doing a quick search on duckduckgo also confirms that:

• mould is the British spelling referring both meanings.
• mold is the american spelling referring to both meanings.

In my quest to prove them wrong, I was surprised at how wrong I was... until I discovered a few people on the internet who said the same thing:

• https://english.stackexchange.com/a/169920
• https://english.stackexchange.com/a/172089
• https://english.stackexchange.com/a/139605
• https://old.reddit.com/r/confidentlyincorrect/comments/18sx2l0/mold_vs_mould_doubled_down/kfaa6nj/
• https://old.reddit.com/r/confidentlyincorrect/comments/18sx2l0/mold_vs_mould_doubled_down/kfcio12/
• https://old.reddit.com/r/confidentlyincorrect/comments/18sx2l0/mold_vs_mould_doubled_down/kfet3jz/

I'm not looking for what's correct or incorrect anymore, I just find it very fascinating that there are some people who use the words similarly to me, but the vast majority of others who use it in a different way.

So: what's the difference between mould and mold according to you?

Just chilling and sharing a stream of thought..

So how would a credibility system work and be implemented. What I envision is something similar to the up votes..

You have a credibility score, it starts a 0 neutral. You post something People don’t vote on if they like, the votes are for “good faith”

Good faith is You posted according to rules and started a discussion You argued in good faith and can separate with opposing opinions You clarified a topic for someone If someone has a polar opinion to yours and is being down voted because people don’t understand the system Etc.

It is tied to the user not the post

Good, bad, indifferent…?

Perfect the system

As I was reading about the Valley of the Kings again, I wonder why that was actually legal.

I go to work to work because I need a paycheck, not to make friends.

Where I am there is a new coworker that to me acts needy (think of Slow Horses's Struan Loy), tries befriending me, but he invariably asks if everything's ok. I don't care about this person's life.

The first 2 times I didn't think anything of it, but he asks that every day and it's becoming tiring.

I feel mobbed and stalked, mobbed because he keeps insinuating there is something wrong with me just because I don't ask him about his private life and do my job, and stalked, because he is so fixated on me.

going to HR over this seems ridiculous, but I'm starting to hate his voice.

I'll start off with one, Being upset about a breakup that happened hundreds of years ago.

Edit 1:

• Heath death of the universe, Death of the sun, etc, does not count. I feel like focusing on this is an overused point.

Edit 2:

• Loneliness does not count. I feel like we all know immortality means you'll miss people and lose them.

I can't get a good answer for this as Google is thinking I'm talking just solely on the driver. I'm including passengers who don't. I've seen PSAs that tell you the dangers you pose for others as well when you don't wear a seatbelt. So if you don't wear a seatbelt and that results in someone being killed could you not wearing a seatbelt mean you get a manslaughter charge?

These things appeared in friends flat. What are they?

It's been a day and my parrot still has food in his bowl. Do I just replace it? Do I wait until he finishes it? How do I deal with replacing bird food?

Some people have rings that are so tightly stuck that even soap does not help, but dental floss works for them. Meanwhile, others find dental floss painful even with a mildly stuck ring, yet soap works well for very tight rings. Why is some skin more sensitive to dental floss? And what makes some people’s skin respond better to either soap or dental floss?

Have a name ? Scientific name ?

Location: Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam.

This is a spider found indoor.

I know of preplexity, Bing chat, web search on Poe, kagi. Not sure if Gemini 1.5 Pro uses search?

I am seriously thinking of commissioning a simple tungsten cube emblazoned with cuneiform style figures, set up on a stainless steel platform. For the legacy. For someone millions of years from now.

Wanna make my own blurays, idk what software people use. I used to use dvdfab for dvds but my files are bluray mkvs so I imagine dvdfab would reduce the quality. Would like ones I make to work on real players. The printing side of it I already have figured out

I only just learned today that, when someone from one instance gets banned from another instance, that person not only is no longer able to interact with the second instance, but people from the second instance actually can't see anything the person said from the moment they got banned even though they're still there. I'm disappointed to learn all my friends who got banned from my instance are still saying stuff and nobody told me, making it more akin to an instance forcing everyone to block them (because individuals blocking each other the same way work like this). And this is coming from the person who has fantasized about universalization of federation.

What's something about the fediverse that was most recently unobscured but that you know now?