In other news today...
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
Or maybe his invisibility is limited to a certain wavelength.
I'm invisible in certain wavelengths.
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
@DogsB said in In other news today...:
it occurred to me that the invisible man must be blind
And rather cold. Or hot. Or just cold-blooded; if he neither receives IR nor emits it... he must be a lizard of some kind. And really, who'd know, since you can't really see him.
Or maybe his invisibility is limited to a certain wavelength.
But all this speculation is meaningless, since the invisibility trick is magical and thus topical. If it wasn't, imagine the profits he'd make selling invisible dandruff to a lens coatings manufacturer.
The idea that the invisible man is blind is well-documented (light that passes through the retinas unobstructed will be undetected by those retinas). This usually comes up right after the question of how his clothes might or might not disappear with him, followed by the matter of how long after he swallows food the stuff inside him remains visible (and presumably disgusting to see).
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@da-Doctah said in In other news today...:
how long after he swallows food the stuff inside him remains visible
This depends on thoroughness of chewing, if you're wondering.
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How to Grow a Perfect Copper Acetate Crystal
To grow copper acetate crystals, first prepare a saturated solution by reacting 10 g of scrap copper with 400 mL of white vinegar.
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@Dragoon said in In other news today...:
How to Grow a Perfect Copper Acetate Crystal
To grow copper acetate crystals, first prepare a saturated solution by reacting 10 g of scrap copper with 400 mL of white vinegar.
From the article:
To speed it up, you can get cleaning vinegar, which has a concentration of above 30%. This vinegar is much stronger, so be careful while using it.
That's a bit of an understatement. High-concentration acetic acid can be pretty scary stuff. At very low concentrations it's harmless, and quite delicious as a food ingredient, but be really careful with the strong version!
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@Mason_Wheeler said in In other news today...:
High-concentration acetic acid can be pretty scary stuff.
While some of the SDS somehow both fall way too far on the "better safe than sorry" side of the spectrum and understate some of the dangers of the really dangerous substances, with high-concentration acetic acid, caution is in order.
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@aitap I remember dealing with glacial acetic acid many years ago. "Interesting" stuff, and happily not an experience I've had cause to repeat...
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@Mason_Wheeler said in In other news today...:
That's a bit of an understatement. High-concentration acetic acid can be pretty scary stuff. At very low concentrations it's harmless, and quite delicious as a food ingredient, but be really careful with the strong version!
True, however 30% acetic acid is not any more dangerous than a number of other household chemicals (bleach, ammonia, etc...). Don't be an idiot and take the normal safety precautions (gloves, goggles, ventilation) that you should use for all of these and you will be prefectly fine.
As you get closer to 100% though, it gets plenty nasty, so I would stick with the 30%.
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I fully support this, the more people reading the better.
Brooklyn Public Library is offering free digital library cards to young adults in the US
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The BPL is fighting back against book removals.
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Are You The Asshole? New AI Mimics Infamous Advice Subreddit
Two artists are illustrating bias in machine learning with data from one of the most opinionated sites on the internet: the r/AmITheAsshole subreddit.
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making toast
Ambivalent
being an asshole
Unsurprisingly ambivalent.
serving as the muscular orifice closing the lower rectum?
Rather biased against this still, even the Neutral adds
"Also, it’s not your muscular orifice to decide when to open."
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
@aitap I remember dealing with glacial acetic acid many years ago. "Interesting" stuff, and happily not an experience I've had cause to repeat...
I recall having to dilute gallons of glacial acetic acid to prepare working solutions when I worked in the chem lab at college. Not quite as
as diluting concentrated sulfuric acid. Highly exothermic, as in boiling and spattering hot acid all over if you don't do it carefully enough.Sheesh, that was at least 41 years ago, because that's when I transferred to university, and I didn't work in the chem lab there.
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@Dragoon We all know the answer to that question on this site. Betteridge's Law does not apply.
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@Dragoon "Free digital library cards"? Did they cost money before?
I don't think I've ever paid for my card so now I'm wondering...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
@Dragoon "Free digital library cards"? Did they cost money before?
I don't think I've ever paid for my card so now I'm wondering...
I am assuming that the online ebooks had a nominal fee to appease the publishers who several years ago objected to libraries allowing unlimited check-outs of their ebooks at no cost.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
@Dragoon "Free digital library cards"? Did they cost money before?
I don't think I've ever paid for my card so now I'm wondering...
If you read the article (INB4
) you'll see that they started the initiative mostly to offer digital books across state lines, for free. From their webpage:Brooklyn Public Library is adding our voice to those fighting for the rights of teens nationwide to read what they like, discover themselves, and form their own opinions. Inspired by the American Library Association's Freedom to Read Statement, BPL's Books Unbanned initiative is a response to an increasingly coordinated and effective effort to remove books tackling a wide range of topics from library shelves.
The American Library Association reported 729 challenges to library, school and university materials and services in 2021, resulting in more than 1,597 individual book challenges or removals. Most targeted books were for a teen audience and were by or about Black or LGBTQIA+ persons. This represents the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling these lists 20 years ago.
National Teen BPL eCard
For a limited time, individuals ages 13-21 can apply for a free BPL eCard, providing access to our full eBook collection as well as our learning databases. To apply, email [email protected].
BPL’s eCard is always free to teenagers in New York State.
If anybody wants to discuss whether kids are getting "the right stuff to read" then they can go to the
.Point is that it's trying to circumvent barriers for those who are seeking out information on some topic, and that by itself should be encouraged. It might inspire others to share knowledge which some party wants to ban, because at least it admits that it wants to let individuals make up their own mind.
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@JBert said in In other news today...:
If anybody wants to discuss whether kids are getting "the right stuff to read" then they can go to the .
Oh I certainly didn't get the right stuff to read...
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@JBert said in In other news today...:
you'll see that they started the initiative mostly to offer digital books across state lines,
Yeah, that was my assumption. Generally libraries only give out cards to people who live in their jurisdiction.
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@boomzilla Yeah, the city I live in now is like Swiss cheese, and I live in one of the holes, so I can't get a library card, because I don't live within the actual city limits. Some libraries give cards to people who live outside their strict jurisdiction, but for a fee that isn't charged to residents who pay taxes to support the library.
OTOH, when I lived in CA, our family went on vacation to another city in CA, and the library there said, sure, as long as you live anywhere in CA, we'll give you a card.
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@Dragoon said in In other news today...:
unlimited check-outs
My library has always had a limited number of ebooks available. I remember being 30th in line one time...
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@dcon said in In other news today...:
@Dragoon said in In other news today...:
unlimited check-outs
My library has always had a limited number of ebooks available. I remember being 30th in line one time...
Oh, yeah. Here's my current hold:
Most aren't that bad. This one even had 65 copies. When I put that on hold back in January and I was in the 600s.
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@dcon said in In other news today...:
@Dragoon said in In other news today...:
unlimited check-outs
My library has always had a limited number of ebooks available. I remember being 30th in line one time...
Oh, yeah. Here's my current hold:
Most aren't that bad. This one even had 65 copies. When I put that on hold back in January and I was in the 600s.
Oh damn. I gotta get in line! I really like Andy.
edit: Oh wait. (looks in calibre) Oh, I already read it... (goes off to release hold)
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@dcon said in In other news today...:
@Dragoon said in In other news today...:
unlimited check-outs
My library has always had a limited number of ebooks available. I remember being 30th in line one time...
I think most libraries did, but there were certainly a few that toughted unlimited check-outs and publishers being upset about it. Not sure how big of a problem it really was, book publishers are just as bad as the RIAA in terms of wanting control of everything.
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Take care of hot honey bees: they may roast you (at least when you are a hornet).
https://www.pnas.org/post/journal-club/key-genes-enable-japanese-honey-bees-roast-hornets
By the way, that's in
, not 
!
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does that image embedding not worky anymore?
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@dkf said in In other news today...:
@aitap I remember dealing with glacial acetic acid many years ago. "Interesting" stuff, and happily not an experience I've had cause to repeat...
I recall having to dilute gallons of glacial acetic acid to prepare working solutions when I worked in the chem lab at college. Not quite as
as diluting concentrated sulfuric acid. Highly exothermic, as in boiling and spattering hot acid all over if you don't do it carefully enough.Add the acid to the water. The reaction is a lot less lively that way.
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@Dragoon said in In other news today...:
@dcon said in In other news today...:
@Dragoon said in In other news today...:
unlimited check-outs
My library has always had a limited number of ebooks available. I remember being 30th in line one time...
I think most libraries did, but there were certainly a few that toughted unlimited check-outs and publishers being upset about it. Not sure how big of a problem it really was, book publishers are just as bad as the RIAA in terms of wanting control of everything.
They never saw a dollar they didn't want to have a piece of.
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@BernieTheBernie said in In other news today...:
does that image embedding not worky anymore?Sure it does!
But iframely is having another one of its "moments".
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@dkf oh, html injection, then...
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in In other news today...:
@dcon said in In other news today...:
Oh, I already read it
That's why I use Calibre to track the status of the books in it! I created a custom field and have things like "library requested", "library unread", "library" (which implies read), "amazon", "coming", etcetc...
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Kellogg's goes to court over milk on your Cornflakes
Food giant challenging the Government over rules to tackle child obesity
I haven't looked at the nutritional value of a Kelloggs' product in years but do they still have an * and tiny writing on them somewhere that says nutritional values include full-fat milk. I do love that there now exists a legal document where Kelloggs admits that their products contain no nutritional value.
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
Chris Silcock, Kellogg's UK managing director, said: “We believe the formula being used by the Government to measure the nutritional value of breakfast cereals is wrong and not implemented legally. It measures cereals dry, when they are almost always eaten with milk.
“All of this matters because, unless you take account of the nutritional elements added when cereal is eaten with milk, the full nutritional value of the meal is not measured.”
What a bunch of
. If you measured the nutritional value of the hypothetically added milk, then anyone actually looking at the values and adding up the cereal and the milk they eat will double count the milk.We have kind of the same problem here where the last corrupt government has been fully into the Nestle lobbying and when they implemented a simple "nutritional score" system that had been demanded for some time, they fucked it up completely.
Salmon versus chocolate flakes:
Stupid Bitch.
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@dkf said in In other news today...:
@aitap I remember dealing with glacial acetic acid many years ago. "Interesting" stuff, and happily not an experience I've had cause to repeat...
I recall having to dilute gallons of glacial acetic acid to prepare working solutions when I worked in the chem lab at college. Not quite as
as diluting concentrated sulfuric acid. Highly exothermic, as in boiling and spattering hot acid all over if you don't do it carefully enough.Add the acid to the water. The reaction is a lot less lively that way.
Yes, of course. But with the sulfuric acid, at least (and maybe dissolving NaOH; I don't remember) it goes beyond that. Add the acid to the water slowly, a little at a time, while stirring constantly, and with the beaker in which you're mixing it sitting in an ice water bath. (Add more ice as needed.)
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
simple "nutritional score" system […] fucked it up completely
It is approximately, to within a few percent, impossible to create anything like that, so fucking it up is expected. Just recall how many times the recommendations of ‘nutrition “experts”’ have changed over last 30 years. And there is plenty of reasons to think the newer ones are more likely worse than better.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
@DogsB said in In other news today...:
Chris Silcock, Kellogg's UK managing director, said: “We believe the formula being used by the Government to measure the nutritional value of breakfast cereals is wrong and not implemented legally. It measures cereals dry, when they are almost always eaten with milk.
“All of this matters because, unless you take account of the nutritional elements added when cereal is eaten with milk, the full nutritional value of the meal is not measured.”
What a bunch of
. If you measured the nutritional value of the hypothetically added milk, then anyone actually looking at the values and adding up the cereal and the milk they eat will double count the milk.We have kind of the same problem here where the last corrupt government has been fully into the Nestle lobbying and when they implemented a simple "nutritional score" system that had been demanded for some time, they fucked it up completely.
Salmon versus chocolate flakes:
Stupid Bitch.
I have the strong impression that all
governmentnutrition advice beyond "don't eat too much of any one thing, where you'll have to figure out how much is too much" and "arsenic isn't healthy" is bunk.Sure, there are general rules of thumb and high-levels-of-generality advice that sorta works. For most people. But "eat a varied diet" and "don't eat too much" and "drink enough but not too much water" about sums it up. Beyond that? Junk
foodscience
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
and maybe dissolving NaOH; I don't remember
Dissolving NaOH is exothermic, but nowhere near as much.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in In other news today...:
But "eat a varied diet" and "don't eat too much" and "drink enough but not too much water" about sums it up. Beyond that? Junk
foodscience… even the “but not too much” part with water is fairly recent addition. It was “drink plenty of water” until a few years ago.
We also had that very interesting article linked somewhere around here describing how much of the obesitology stuff is bogus and how a lot of energy in fats isn't actually a problem if it isn't combined with a lot of sugar.
Which I suppose is exactly the reason smoked salmon gets a D (it's rather fatty) while in practice you'll gain more weight eating the cornflakes that get B (despite containing plenty of sugar and starch).
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@Bulb said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
simple "nutritional score" system […] fucked it up completely
It is approximately, to within a few percent, impossible to create anything like that, so fucking it up is expected. Just recall how many times the recommendations of ‘nutrition “experts”’ have changed over last 30 years. And there is plenty of reasons to think the newer ones are more likely worse than better.
That is well true, but I very much doubt it applies to this level of fuckery. "Don't eat salmon, but those chocolate flakes are nutritious" isn't something that I believe any "nutrition expert" would have agreed on, ever.
You can't create a simple, perfect system. But you can create something not as horrible as this.
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@Benjamin-Hall The counter argument is that since Kellogg's is opposing it, it clearly is a good idea. Replace "Kellogg's" with Nestle et al. as needed.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
If you measured the nutritional value of the hypothetically added milk, then anyone actually looking at the values and adding up the cereal and the milk they eat will double count the milk.
The cereal boxes I currently have in my pantry have nutrition labels with columns for dry and with 1/2 cup (118 ml) of
(low-fat?)skim milk. Oddly, however, the with-milk columns don't actually include the nutrition content of the milk. Some of the RDV percentages are slightly different, but the column doesn't contain any actual content, no grams of fat, grams of sugar, grams of total carbs, etc., just percentages. And for carbs, at least, the % values are exactly the same in both columns, despite the fact that (for one of them at least) adding 118 ml of milk triples the sugar content. One serving of the cereal has 3 g of sugar (presumably sucrose), and 118 ml of milk contains 6 g of sugar (presumably all or mostly lactose).
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@Benjamin-Hall said in In other news today...:
I have the strong impression that all government nutrition advice beyond "don't eat too much of any one thing, where you'll have to figure out how much is too much" and "arsenic isn't healthy" is bunk.
Only if there's not enough chocolate cornflakes in your arsenic.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
@Bulb said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
simple "nutritional score" system […] fucked it up completely
It is approximately, to within a few percent, impossible to create anything like that, so fucking it up is expected. Just recall how many times the recommendations of ‘nutrition “experts”’ have changed over last 30 years. And there is plenty of reasons to think the newer ones are more likely worse than better.
That is well true, but I very much doubt it applies to this level of fuckery. "Don't eat salmon, but those chocolate flakes are nutritious" isn't something that I believe any "nutrition expert" would have agreed on, ever.
You can't create a simple, perfect system. But you can create something not as horrible as this.True. But here's the thing--these simple "test cases" (where the correct answer is obvious) are canaries. But the underlying methodology is what's throwing up the garbage. And changing that to something that doesn't just throw up garbage on different canaries is...non-trivial. And all (ok, "the ultra-vast, dominant majority") of nutritional research (like educational research) is bad. Not because the studies themselves are inherently flawed. Except when they are. But because they assume generality.
It seems like in education, nutrition (beyond the very basic level) has a wide range of optima. And what works really well for one person may be exactly the wrong thing for someone else. Assuming there is a "right" answer globally is, in my opinion, hubris.
Shorter: what's sauce for the goose may not, nutritionally, be sauce for the gander.
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@Benjamin-Hall Also, in the US, the official serving size is often ridiculous. For some foods, at least, maybe all, the serving size is broken down by age — into two groups: 0–3, and 4–adult. I'm sorry, but the nutritional requirements and amount eaten a 4yo, a teen in a growth spurt, and a healthy adult are vastly different, and trying to average them all into a single, one-size-fits-none "serving" is ridiculous.
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@Benjamin-Hall Also, in the US, the official serving size is often ridiculous. For some foods, at least, maybe all, the serving size is broken down by age — into two groups: 0–3, and 4–adult. I'm sorry, but the nutritional requirements and amount eaten a 4yo, a teen in a growth spurt, and a healthy adult are vastly different, and trying to average them all into a single, one-size-fits-none "serving" is ridiculous.
Ah, but we're (
) now back into the amount eaten by a 4yo phase! (as can be proven by my waist size)
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@Benjamin-Hall Also, in the US, the official serving size is often ridiculous. For some foods, at least, maybe all, the serving size is broken down by age — into two groups: 0–3, and 4–adult. I'm sorry, but the nutritional requirements and amount eaten a 4yo, a teen in a growth spurt, and a healthy adult are vastly different, and trying to average them all into a single, one-size-fits-none "serving" is ridiculous.
Yeah. And that "2000 Calorie" thing? Total joke. Sure, we can measure the combustion energy of food (bomb calorimetry, which isn't nearly as exciting as the name sounds). But the actual bio-available energy? It's some number smaller than that. How much?
Depends on the individual, the phases of the moon, even stuff like mood and what else you are eating. Or ate recently. And how much sleep you've gotten, etc.There's a reason I stuck with physics--it's so much simpler than things like biochemistry and biology.
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
Add the acid to the water. The reaction is a lot less lively that way.
"Erst das Wasser, dann die Säure, sonst geschieht das Ungeheure!"
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@ixvedeusi In English, the letters ATW (acid to water) are in alphabetical order (right); WTA (water to acid) is backwards (wrong). At least that's how I (used to, before I completely internalized the knowledge) remember it.
