heturnedleft

[heturnedleft]

TFW you're trying to run a double blind clinical trial, but the med you're testing has such obvious effects that it ruins the blinding.

(source)

[heturnedleft]

I actually love abortion, because I don't think pre-viability embryos are people, and having unwanted children is bad in a lot of ways (harmful to the children, harmful to the parents, harmful to society, ...). I also support people's right to do things I don't approve of with their bodies, but abortion is something I actually approve of.

pro-choice it's your life and none of my business

#pro abortion #pro choice

[heturnedleft]

As an example of the curb cut effect, bodybuilders often end up drinking liquid meal replacements. Apparently you get better muscle growth if you alternate between intentionally gaining and losing weight. The problem is that when you have that much muscle on you contributing to your resting energy expenditure, it gets hard to eat enough food to gain weight. So they add liquid meal replacements because it's a way to fit in more nutrition without feeling so full and getting tired of chewing.

“ew thick water gross and weird” ITS NOT FUCKING FOR YOU!!!!! “ew why buy pre-cut vegetables when you can cut your own” ITS NOT FUCKING FOR YOU!!!!!! “I don’t need a device to help me put my socks on I’m not lazy” ITS NOT FUCKING FOR YOU !!!!!!!!! “Why drink liquid meals when you can cook them” ITS!!!!! NOT!!!!!! FOR!!!!!! YOU!!!!!!!!

[heturnedleft]

Domestic blue mold (P. roqueforti or P. glaucum) is less toxic than wild blue mold, but more toxic than domestic white mold (P. camemberti). You can grow domestic blue mold on other substrates like bread and damp grain, and outside the chemical environment of cheese it'll actually make significant amounts of poisons.

I happen to be allergic to a different domestic mold species that almost no one reacts to. Sometimes you lose the genetic lottery, I guess.

food sensitivity test...since when is being ok with bleu cheese comparable to eating bread or jelly that has mold on it? the cheese mold is a domesticated creature that we care for and replicate in exchange for making us funny snacks. I know her and I trust her. mold on a fruit could be anybody

[heturnedleft]

Yeast stops working and goes dormant once the partial pressure of carbon dioxide gets too high. But I don't know if your pressure cooker will hold that much pressure. IIRC it's between 10 and 20 PSI. You could find out more by looking up "pressure fermentation" -- some brewers use a method a lot like your thought experiment to produce carbonated beverages faster than the traditional two-step process of primary fermentation followed by bottle conditioning.

Sometimes describing things to my grandparents is like. You ask. Hypothetically. What would happen if you put activated yeast in an airtight container. And my grandmother asks. What recipe is that for? And we’re like no this is a thought experiment. Maybe a real experiment. Perhaps we could seal tight the pressure cooker and just not plug it in to see what would happen. And then my grandfather asks what kind of bread we’re making. And we’re like no we’re thinking through a hypothetical experiment with an unplugged pressure cooker. And then my grandmother asks why you’d make bread in a pressure cooker. And we say no for the millionth time we’re just wondering what happens to yeast if you put it in an airtight container. Do you think they’d just run out of oxygen and die? We could probably look this up somewhere. And then they ask where we found this recipe and why it’s in a pressure cooker and we say no it’s not a recipe in fact what we’re considering could create botulism or something and then they ask what has botulism and we’re like there is no botulism we’re considering the possibility of it if we were to do this hypothetical experiment. And then they ask. What experiment? I thought this was a recipe. And then we say no it’s not a recipe we’re talking about performing bad science in our garage with yeast and a pressure cooker and then they ask why would you put yeast in a pressure cooker

[heturnedleft]

"so expensive" and "high" are opinions formed relative to something, not absolute facts. The headline doesn't say "higher than they were in the past" or "above [number]," it says "high."

People form opinions about what's a high price by comparing to the amount of money they have available to spend and the amount they typically spend on other goods and services. South Korea hasn't always been inundated with news articles about high prices, even though almost everything in a store will cost more than a thousand South Korean won. The won is worth about a tenth of a US cent, so ordinary people have a lot of them and are used to spending thousands on everything. That's why spending a thousand won doesn't feel like high price the way spending a thousand USD would.

It might be natural to assume during a period of rapid inflation that prices seem high to you because the economy is temporarily out of equilibrium. But when rapid inflation stops and prices don't begin to seem normal, you have to wonder (and maybe write Washington Post articles about) why they're still high relative to other sums of money you're interacting with. The answer to that isn't that people should learn calculus.

(Source)

[heturnedleft]

It's not because of the second fundamental theorem of calculus. I get the impulse to make math memes, but it's not right in this case.

Groceries are expensive because the market power held by large corporations causes consumer goods to rise in price faster than the overall price level rises and wages to rise slower than the overall price level. If inflation applied to wages and consumer good prices equally, groceries might cost more nominal dollars, but they wouldn't cost a larger proportion of typical households' incomes.

If everything costs 50% more than it used to but you get paid 50% more, then you're no worse off than you were before. If groceries cost 50% more but you're still getting the same Federal minimum wage you got before the recent inflation, groceries are meaningfully more expensive for you.

The solution probably involves some combination of regulation to prevent price gouging and/or limit consolidation of industries, increasing corporate taxes tied to wealth redistribution, raising the minimum wage, and unionization of workplaces. The solution is definitely not to make fun of people for being bad at math when they're not actually being bad at math.

(Source)

#economics

[heturnedleft]

I think part of what's going wrong at the root of the situation is that people don't actually know what the Trolley Problem is. You're not supposed to debate whether the bystander should pull the lever. You're supposed to reach the obvious conclusion that the bystander should pull the lever and quickly move on to the interesting question of why that conclusion doesn't generalize to all similar thought experiments.

Most of the really infuriating issues we see around the Trolley Problem descend from this misunderstanding. When you treat the Bystander at the Switch dilemma like a serious question instead of like the preamble it is, some people get mad at you for wasting their time and start making fun of you (e.g., "I stop the trolley by putting my massive dick on the tracks"). Some people, given time, convince themselves that reasonable debate can exist and make up reasons to doubt the obvious conclusion. Some people see you not accepting the first answer they tried and start trying other ideas. But most people won't start having high-quality philosophical insights without a prompt more thought-provoking than this.

This disaster of bad philosophy wouldn't be happening if we taught the actual Trolley Problem instead of teaching the Bystander dilemma under the wrong name. Yes, there probably is some Copenhagen ethics and waiting for the Rapture/Revolution going on here. But part of this is a learned response after people treated too many simple situations like trick questions worthy of serious debate.

You know I used to think "tumblr's absolute refusal to actually engage with the Trolley Problem in favor of insisting that there must be a third, morally pure option that doesn't require them to make a hard decision and anyone who asks them to make a binary choice is just a short-sighted idiot is really fucking annoying, but I guess it's not actually doing any harm".

Anyway that was before we asked tumblr at large to decide between "guy aiding a genocide but making progress elsewhere" and "guy who would actively and enthusiastically participate in a genocide and would also make everything else much, much worse for everyone elsewhere" and the response was that there must be a third, morally pure option that doesn't require them to make a hard decision and that anyone who asks them to make a binary choice is a short-sighted idiot.

#trolley problem #philosophy

[heturnedleft]

We have "citron" in English too, but it's a different fruit. If an English-speaker offers you a citron, they mean Citrus medica (which is one of the original wild citrus species), not Citrus x limon like a French-speaker would mean.

The word ‘lemon’ in European languages.

by Ave-Nar

[heturnedleft]

What happened to that power strip? The switch on the left side is supposed to be a circuit breaker that'll cut the power if something tries to draw too much current. Did it seize up? Was it a piece of cheap crap that was always only pretending to have overcurrent protection?

If your power strips have working overcurrent protection, nothing you plug into them will burn them like this. Something went wrong here other than the decision to plug in the heater.

[heturnedleft]

I may not be all that educated in complicated electronics, but I'm damn sure I can figure out how to recharge or replace a battery in a well-designed device. To the multimeter! If I measure the voltage and internal resistance of the battery, I can find an equivalent set of settings on a benchtop power supply.

There's some chance that I accidentally break something and the robodoc doesn't work ever again, or that it has some asshole serialization/DRM software on the battery and refuses to cooperate with a benchtop power supply even with nothing broken. But I'm willing to risk that in exchange for a chance to get it really properly working without a time limit.

So you find a robodoc from the far future, but the only problem is that the battery is nearly dead. It says it can fix one problem, but then it will power off forever, and you gotta use it now, no saving it until you get cancer or something.

[heturnedleft]

Phenylephrine doesn't work at all. (Source) So you're really not giving your home remedy very high praise when you say it "worked better than phenylephrine."

If you want a real decongestant pill, you need pseudoephedrine. Which in the US means you need to walk up to the pharmacy counter, ask the pharmacist for pseudoephedrine, and hand them your ID (so they can put you on a government watchlist to keep you from making meth).

Mucus Buster

Everyone's got lingering congestion this year, so as someone who's no stranger to phlegm, and inherited the folk wisdom of a stage actress (the show must go on!) I share with you my recipe for making things better:

2L water

the juice and rind of one lemon (just dump the juiced rinds in, don't zest them, you maniac)

a small thumb of fresh ginger, sliced in coins

about a dozen cloves, some star anise, peppercorns, and maybe whole cinnamon or allspice or whatever else you like, in a tea ball (except the cinnamon if it doesn't fit, obvs)

good dollop of honey, to taste

Bring the water to a boil then dump in all the stuff. Keep it hot but not boiling – a slow cooker is good for this. Keep this pot on a low heat all day and serve yourself a mug every so often, adding water as necessary. At some point you will need to add a new lemon and some more honey, but the spices can generally carry over two pots if you're drinking it regularly.

The acid helps clear the gunk, ginger is good for the circulation, and clove/aniseed/pepper have some sort of decongestant/soothing properties. Honey is both nice and antiseptic, and apparently is a cough suppressant as well? Anyway, I just got over another run of Covid and this was wasn't 100% effective but it worked better than phenylephrine.

#cold medicine #phenylephrine

[heturnedleft]

If you find the inventor of sore throats, let me know. I'd love to help with your murder project.

who invented sore throats as a response to viruses I'll kill them

[heturnedleft]

Let me recommend this essay:

It's about how we're losing general-purpose computers, as the progression of cloud software turns people's computers into dumb terminals for accessing datacenters.

So, Microsoft is terrible. Yes yes, the oldest claim in the world.

But specifically... I just hate how Windows 10 tries to conflate and confuse web searches with things on one's own computer. The start menu should never do anything related to web-searching, especially if it purports to try to give examples of things that are on my hard drive!

This will make old, computer-illiterate people more malware-vulnerable. You have to maintain a strong distinction between "things that are on this computer (and maybe even included in Windows)" (safe, one hopes, or you already got pwned by it, probably), and "things on the web" (scary, dangerous, not to be trusted at all).

Eroding that barrier in the UI is awful. It just FEELS like a violation every time I start typing into the start bar, and it tries to show me ANYTHING web-related. My computer is NOT just an internet-portal! It has tons of stuff on it, and when I'm interacting with the OS, I ONLY want to see things that are already on here!

If I wanted to see something online, I would go to my browser! All the online stuff should be segregated into the browser!

Specific programs can access the internet; that's fine. But my OS's functions and interface should JUST be about the things that are already on my computer.

[heturnedleft]

I saw one of my posts on reddit. I do not like being perceived.

I was minding my own business on reddit and saw that somebody had screenshotted something I said on tumblr and put it on r/CuratedTumblr. This made me uncomfortable (I do not like being perceived). I'm thinking of deleting a bunch of my tumblr posts sot there'll be less to screenshot.

If I go through with this, will I regret it?

[heturnedleft]

Cognitive Trope Therapy

“I’m not saying TV Tropes is right about everything,” I typed into the chat window, “but right now it understands your life better than you do.”

I have invented a new form of psychotherapy

I call it Cognitive Trope Therapy

the way it works is that when you have a thought, you write it down

like, say

“You are different from the others. You will never know their innocence… and that is why you should hate your own existence. Die. Die. Die.”

then you figure out whether, if your life were a fantasy novel, these words would be spoken by figures wearing black robes, and speaking in a dry, whispering voice, and they are actually withered beings who touched the Stone of Evil

and if so then you don’t listen

I would write this up as a pop psych bestseller but it would be only two pages long

now

I know what you are thinking

you are thinking “but what if the whispering voice seems like it might have a point”

Keep reading

#sorry i had to

[heturnedleft]

Anon could test the voltage/frequency curve at a certain temperature and see if it changes. The Theseus gnomes probably can't find a CPU with identical overclocking characteristics even if they can find the same model number -- AFAIK the technology to build perfectly identical pieces of silicon just doesn't exist, no matter how hard the gnomes try.

That won't stop the gnomes, but at least it'll prove they were there.

#computer hardware