Ask Lemmy

I'm a planetary scientist so technically this is a field, you can also be into meteorites as a hobby.

Chondrule formation. These are spherical balls of formerly molten rock that solidified and clumped together to form chondrites, some of the oldest rocks in the Solar System that predate planet formation. Essentially these are nebular dust grains that formed when the Solar System was still an accretionary disk.

Except, do chondrules predate planet formation? What causes them to melt while they're floating around? How do they overcome the kinetic barriers to agglomeration? Are the terrestrial planets, whose bulk composition is thought to be chondritic, actually composed of chondrites?

If you want to see one of the most simultaneously esoteric and bitter scientific debates, attend a chondrule formation session at a meteorite or planetary science conference. MetSoc is a great one in August, and officially I go to present my work but actually I just love the fireworks. As an achondrite person, I don't touch this topic with a ten foot pole, but I love to watch when someone introduces a new wacky idea (space lightning? Shine from a molten Io? Extrasolar?) and you see 15 eminent greybeards rush the mic to yell their objections.

-Guitar picks/strings -Warhammer editions (Or competitive vs narrative play) -using linux and the many reasons why

Some would argue it misses the topic, but I'll offer the Unix text editor wars. Vi vs. Emacs is pretty much the epitome of a pointless religious war in people's favourite activity, though for some that's obviously their job.

Why do I mention it? Because most would just look at it and say: obviously none of the above, what are you even talking about? But those in the know have been heatedly debating the topic since at least the 80s.. (I'm team vi for what it's worth)

D&D vs PF2 really brings out the uhh, loudest of each community

There's this guy on https://2004.lostcity.rs/ who is always buying and selling items for >15% the trade values, and the forums have hundreds of posts complaining that he should be banned from using the markets. Which is impressive, considering the entire community is like 200 people

Here's another one: Is there a "blind community?" This may sound odd since the very fact the question exists implies there is, since blind people have to get together and discuss it. So in some ways yes of course there is, but I'm inclined to say no, at least not in the sense that a lot of people define "community".

Blindness does not respect class, creed, or culture, so you have blind people from all over the map ideologically speaking who all approach their blindness in different ways. That's not getting into the difference between low- vs no-vision, or born blind vs blinded later in life, or blind people who are independent vs those that lack access to proper training. I've run into blind people who don't like hanging out with other blind people IRL because the spectrum ranges from "can't even pick yourself up when you trip without help" to "flies around the country alone with no problem."

I think the question exists because we look at deaf people who unambiguously have cultures and languages unique to them when we don't really have that.

In the world of Game Collecting, the guy with potentially the largest single collection on the planet is getting rid of his collection.

The ideal plan was for it to all go to a singular museum, which was in the works and then unfortunately fell through. Problem is the next two backups also fell through. So plan D involves the collection being split up and some of it going to the Embrace Group, and some into private collections, which was seemingly both never the plan. People who donated items, thinking that they would eventually be publicly displayed, are rightfully upset. And then the rest of his fans, such as myself, are somewhat bewildered that this is how it will end after decades of amassing a collection, and then years of saying it'll all be going to a museum.