No Stupid Questions

I'm wondering if it's pseudo religious with humans being created in God's image (Ancient Aliens stuff), the human-centric idea that intelligent life must resemble us, it being easy to make costumes for movies and TV when all you need to do is paint someone's skin, or if SciFi writers were going for the uncanny valley effect for example.

I know not all praying religions have their adherents join their hands, but I think it's the case for most. Many cultures even use clasped hands in day-to-day life as a sign of deference or pleading (which I guess makes them "social prayers").

My only 'armchair anthropologist' theory is that hands that are gripped together are unable to present a threat to you, so it is a signal of voluntary vulnerability. But that doesn't make sense in a religious context (although it does in the social context), because how would you ever be a threat to any god in the first place? 🤔 If anything, you're displaying arrogance by saying to god "yeah I COULD fuck you up, but just for this conversation, I'm gonna decommission my arms, arms which I have to register as deadly weapons by the way".

A secondary question on this topic is what is the function of praying hands in the praying process? If you say a prayer without joining your hands, does it not reach god? Or does he hear it but he's like "uhhh, excuse me?? Forgetting something? No childhood leukaemia cure for you, I guess!" like an overly-pedantic lawyer?

Third question: Do any holy books actually describe or prescribe 'praying hands'? If so, what do they have to say about it?

Cheers! 🙏

I’ve only used Lemmy amongst the panoply of ActivityPub compatible social networks; am I seeing and interacting with posts from Mastodon, Friendica, et al. and just not aware of it?

I’m in this predicament with my soon-to-be 15-year-old son.

people do not quit jobs, they quit managers and I personally would like to quit some coworkers.

Basically the manager says in public that I'm good and passionate about the job but privately she writes the opposite. She never talked to me about what I need to improve, if anything. And then has the gall to tell me to trust her if I want to open up to her. Two faced, not to trust.

I only found out when another manager read to me what she wrote about me.

I was never good at playing office politics. FWIW I don't like the job, I do it because I need money and I'm good at it.

I’d say an average sized zucchini slathered in olive oil.

It shows fever is a symptom. Even if I ask the question of what is the most common symptoms it still shows fever. Did Covid mutate again and now fever is one of the most common symptoms?

Lamp's function is going to provide light to the sheet music, that's it.

All I've found online is cheap. I just want something durable and reliable (meaning for the next 40 years), something I can attach an E26 or E12 to, nothing fancy, but durable.

Can one still claim that the USA is a liberal democracy? Where do you draw the line?

I live near a major airport and see commercial planes with huge front headlights shining in the night sky. What could they be good for way up in the sky, though? I get that when they are taking off/landing headlights are necessary. Why not give them lights like a boat, with a green in front and a red in back?

I'd expect the shortest day of the year to also be the coldest, with the coldest season of the year spreading out equally on both sides of it.

If so, do cell phone networks still get stressed?

How does it work that we eat few times a day, but usually we poop only once?

Is the colon somehow programmed to buffer the waste until the time is up and then dumps it all further?

Got this thought when observing my dog who eats twice a day (morning and evening) and more or less poops twice a day (morning and evening).

So I was looking at google maps while working because of course I was. I'm not even kidding when I say that I was wondering if there's some nice place far enough south to experience 18+ hours of sunlight and nice weather in the southern summer as we do here in the northern summer in Estonia. But when I took a look, the closest thing would be the southernmost tip of Chile, which apparently is pretty cold in the (southern hemisphere) summer. And just a few more degrees south, we have Antarctica. Here, you go a few more degrees north and you just get Finland.

I was wondering what the reasoning is - is it something inherent to the Earth's orbit around the sun, or is it due to the shapes of the continents, the ocean currents, etc?

Edit: Many great answers here. Thank you!

I was looking at a car on a local dealership’s website last night and saw that there was a mention of “2 days” or “250 miles” and you could return a car that you bought from them. I came back to the website this morning and I’m not seeing that anymore. I’m not 100% positive where I saw it, but I know the general area and not seeing it there anymore. It seemed to be under the car’s description for each car they had in their inventory.

I used site:dealershipdomain.com in Google to search for “2 days” and “250” and it finds results but not finding this wording specifically on the pages listed in the search results.

Is there another way to search for this on a specific site? Am I doing that incorrectly?

Edit: thanks for the tips, everyone! Sorry, should have mentioned I was using CTRL + F to search when on the page.

I found one mention of it on another site linking here, and now it makes me wonder if that’s where I saw it.

But either way, kind of found what I was looking for. Thanks for the help, everyone!

Like the Raspberry π SoC is based on a television tuner box. The vast majority of the die is related to the TV tuner functions that are completely undocumented. What techniques exist to explore undocumented physical hardware? Are we limited to reverse engineering code to find when and how these undocumented areas are used, or are there other fuzzing type techniques to find relationships between memory, flags, and potential byte instructions?

This is an abstract thought and generalization that potentially patches a hole in my understanding. There is no broader purpose in asking.

Can anyone succinctly explain communism? Everything I've read in the past said that the state owns the means of production and in practice (in real life) that seems to be the reality. However I encountered a random idiot on the Internet that claimed in communism, there is no state and it is a stateless society. I immediately rejected this idea because it was counter to what I knew about communism irl. In searching using these keywords, I came across the ideas that in communism, it does strive to be a stateless society. So which one is it? If it's supposed to be a stateless society, why are all real-life forms of communism authoritarian in nature?

Was out on a walk earlier today and wanted to do something sort of Christmas related and try and help people pass on virtual presents in the form of community suggestions.

What is a community you think more people should be subscribed to and why?

My answer is https://lemmy.world/c/superbowl ( Superb Owl, not Superbowl. It's a community about birds, not americal football) and there is frequently high quality images of owls posted which I find cute and I wish I could take shots like that. P.s. I know birds aren't everyone's thing, but I wanted to use it as an example.

And I the community is NSFW but the name isn't obvious, flag it as NSFW.

so this happened to me yesterday, i was hanging out with a few of my relatives and we were doing a lot of stuff and we were having fun but i realized that when my relatives talk to each other they talk like proper adults because well, they are, like, they can swear and stuff, but when i talk to them they are like "yea buddy sure!!" or talk to me like as if i was some sort of young person, and even my friends do that same thing, all of them!!!! it feels like i'm not part of anyone's conversation which sucks but well it's fine!!!

Diarrhea is usually caused by the body dumping water into your intestines so I was wondering if holding it in would help with dehydration?

I currently have food poisoning so that's why I thought of this.

As previously mentioned, we now have a PS5 in the household. My handicap is that I have no experience with modern consoles, so I therefore have a few questions. Basically, we have multiple users, each with their own controller and PS account, and I haven't entirely figured out how games, saves, and purchases work.

If offspring A buys a game, can offspring B play it? (Are the games/purchases tied to the console or the user?)
If offspring B plays a game, will his progress/savegame only be for his user?