Wow! That took me a moment to spot 😁

I agree!

That's really cool, I will use it

There is a bit of humor and a bit of truth. I don't have a garden and so when I was looking into whether it was possible to grow a pumpkin in a pot, most of what I found stated that the pumpkins need a lot of ground to have a strong and healthy root system, and a lot of sun, and so it is not recommended to grow them indoors. I thought that the plant would begin to grow but at some point the pot would not be able to sustain the root system and the plant would die. This has happened to me with many trees that I try to grow indoors - most recently my tamarind trees. They look perfectly healthy and then drop dead. Well, I am not certain of why the trees die but I suspect their roots rot.

But the humor is that I still don't think it is a good idea to grow this plant indoors. It has taken over a lot of space! My original plan was to prune it and keep it small, but I noticed that even the farthest leaves are able to pull moisture from the pot with no problem, and so I am letting the plant grow to see what happens.

The sensors are from AZDelivery, these ones. They are connected to an arduino nano which reads the capacitance values and sends them over to a raspberry pi 5. The raspberry pi 5 is connected to a few other sensors (CO2, particle counter, air humidity and temperature all from Sensirion), and there is a 7-inch raspberry pi display that the pi writes images to. I was making a home air quality station but I decided to place everything around the pumpkin instead for now, to see if I could get something interesting out of that. But, so far most of them have not been practically useful.

Awesome, thanks!! :D I will deactivate the other bot.

I am also running a modified version of the bot on /c/houseplants, but that one responds only if specific keywords are found in the title. I will continue testing that one.

Thanks! I can imagine preserving a feather for 65 millions of years is no easy feat.

Basically, dehydrated salamanders don’t run away from a poke in the butt as fast but they do move faster when searching for water. Is that it?

Yes, exactly, that's it!

When you poke the salamanders, the hydrated salamanders move faster than the dehydrated salamanders.

The dehydrated salamanders are more motivated to find water. They find the water faster because they actively try to seek water.

From the article:

we consider that the difference between these two results may be attributed to the fact that dehydrated salamanders could be more motivated to search for a water source than those hydrated. On the contrary, in the locomotor performance test, as all salamanders were stimulated or forced to move, it is probable that hydrated animals were able to perform a higher speed than those dehydrated due to their better physiological condition.

I have the Tianje MF903 (https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/32719535459.html), which I bought early 2022.

But just now I have done a search and I see many more pocket wifi routers now. Unfortunately I can't tell you if they work well, or if it is also possible to change their IMEI easily. The one I have is functional, but it doesn't have a very long battery life.

Thank you for that reference! Very interesting

OTOH my understanding of the speed of light in a medium is that it’s the result of photons being absorbed and re-emitted, and the speed of any individual photon is always exactly c.

I am an experimentalist and so if a theoretician reads this they will probably tell you that I am wrong...

I think that the description of a photon being "absorbed" and "re-emitted" could be used to describe the picture from the point of view of quantum field theory (which I don't claim understand), because within this theory the photon/electron and even electron/electron interactions are mediated by photons that are created and annihilated during those interactions. Whenever the "photon" exists it will travel with speed c. As light travels through a material it is traveling as a wave of electrons influencing each other, similar to how water waves travel through water, and since these interactions of the electrons pushing each other are formally described by the photons popping into and out of existence I think one could correctly use the language of "absorbed" and "re-emitted".

But personally I think that it can be a bit confusing, because the absorption and emission of light by materials is often used to mean something very different... Absorption more commonly refers to a resonant interaction in which a photon is destroyed and a molecule (or atom, or crystal, etc...) comes into an excited state. The molecule that becomes excited can remain excited for quite a long time (usually picoseconds - microseconds), and the re-emission of the light often comes in a completely different direction and even a different wavelength than the original photon. So using the language of "absorption" and "emission" in this context can also generate confusion,.

Personally when I imagine the propagation of light through a material I think about it in terms of the polarizability of the medium. When the light propagates through a medium, you don't need a "photon". The wave is being carried by the electrons oscillating (these are very small oscillations - unless you are using powerful lasers, then you reach the beautiful world of non-linear optics). The speed of propagation of this wave through the medium depends on how far the wave can travel through the material with every oscillation. There is a nice description of this semi-classical process in the Feyman Lectures: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_31.html

gravity moves at the speed of light in a vacuum

Hmmm... Always? Maybe some funky things happen as the wave passes by a black hole.

I think you left this line behind by accident:

l = Lemmy(INSTANCE_URL)