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2 yr. ago

  • Elbows have always been allowed on the table. The rule for fancy dining was that you couldn't have elbows on the table during a course, i.e., when people are actively eating, but before/after, it's fine. That's a reasonable rule to be considerate of space.

  • Fold your clothes immediately after drying, while they are still warm. Also, dryers that can add steam really help if you've got a few things that need wrinkle removal. Also, handheld steamers are cheap.

    Mostly, avoid needing to iron by avoiding wearing formal business attire.

  • Keeping the air dry reduces both the length of time microorganisms can live outside your body and the length of time that vapor particles can harbor them.

    Pretty sure this is only true for some microorganisms. Well, I'm not sure about length of survival time, but I've definitely see studies that have shown that lower humidity causes respiratory droplet evaporation, resulting in more airborne virus particles and increasing spread. There is some evidence that this increases infection rates

  • Any info on surface roughness? I'm thinking shiny side would be smoother and therefore less sticky, though I don't know how much the passivation layer would affect it. Probably no where close to making a difference at the end of the day, but I'm curious.

  • You just gave me a flashback to a system I encountered as a student where my password got truncated, so I couldn't log in. I had to ask the teacher what to do, expecting her to have access to a reset or something, but she just told me what my password was. It was like 3 and a half words, clearly truncated and stored in plain text.

  • Sentry Safes aren't safes, they are fire boxes with a fancy lock.

    Judging by the one I bought when I went off to college to keep some documents safe, they don't even have fancy locks. I misplaced my key, but I was able to open it in the same amount of time with a pumpkin carving knife as a jiggler.

  • The current tunnel is a relic from a long time ago when trains were slower, and there were competing train lines that had to try and fit through baltimore where they could. If you look at a map of the train line, it actually sharply curves out of the way of that currently Black neighborhood to go under the currently white neighborhood. This means the top speed is 30 mph. Under the new plan, they could hit 100 mph.

    There are other problems with the current tunnel, mainly just down to being old, and those you could fix by redoing it in the same spot, but that wouldn't fix the speed issue, because the speed is governed by the curvature (and grade).

  • Yeah, definitely. Baltimore also has a good record of combatting that in the case of highway 70, too. In this case, though, it's just tunneling under that neighborhood, not carving a path through it. Oddly enough, further down the track, there are ~20 people getting displaced (might have already happened), but that's in a different neighborhood, and I think that would have happened no matter where the tunnel was moved.

  • The problem is that the current tunnel has a sharp curve, and to make that curve less sharp, they need to increase the radius. That puts the path of a good new tunnel under a new neighborhood, which happens to be Black because most Baltimore neighborhoods are. Those 14 options are likely all under the same neighborhood.

  • That doesn't appear to be good journalism. The article does not mention that the reason they want to move the location of the tunnel is to remove the biggest bottleneck on the northeast corridor, and redoing the current tunnel location keeps that bottleneck. Removing that bottleneck would have huge benefits to public transit on the eastern seaboard.

    Additionally, they mention "train emissions", but don't mention that the trains that would use the tunnel are all electric. The only time there would be any emissions would be in the case of a fire, which is very uncommon in passenger trains. The highway and other busy streets in the area are a far bigger problem.

    Overall, it seems like standard nimby-ism.

  • this explains it a bit. The quick and dirty answer is that when you boil a mash, you are boiling a solution, not just 3 individual liquids (ignoring all the other stuff in there). It's similar to how adding salt to water lowers the freezing point and raises the boiling point.

    Water is polar, while ethanol only has mild polarity. Methanol is more polar than ethanol, so it holds onto the water more. If you had a mixture of methanol and ethanol with no water, you'd probably get more methanol first, but the water changes things.

  • They need to do better at wording the titles of articles like this. It should read something like "34 dead after drinking tainted/poisoned liquor". Contrary to popular belief, brewing does not produce enough methanol to be toxic, and distilling does not concentrate it relative to the ethanol to a point where moonshine could be toxic. Media likes to portray like you have to be careful not to produce methanol, when really, you would have to intentionally make it. Here's a good writeup about it.

    Methanol toxicity only really occurs when people deliberately add methanol to alcohol, either as a deterrent to keep you from drinking it (e.g. hardware store "denatured alcohol"), or to counterfeit real drinking alcohol. I can guarantee you this is a case of someone dumping a bunch of cheap, industrial methanol into watered down real booze to increase profits.

  • Yeah, I definitely agree we'd be better off cutting land used for livestock. I guess it's a slightly different story in Germany because any land you're using for livestock (or livestock feed) is presumably land that could be used for human food. In America, much of the land used for cattle is ranch land not suitable for agriculture. We do still have massive amounts of land cultivating crops like corn and hay for cattle that is suitable for agriculture, though.

    Just going down that pro and con list, though, it really does seem unclear to me. OA releases less CO2, but it also stores less CO2 in the soil. Lower energy use/higher efficiency per land area is great, but what we really want is lowest energy use per X amount of food. The "enhanced soil and water quality" part is also debatable. this study shows a higher eutrophication potential from OA, so worse for water. It does seem to be dependent on the crop, and the impacts of beef are so insanely higher than plants, that it almost seems irrelevant how you farm crops.

    It's somewhat like saying that a suburban block is better for the environment than a city block. It's true, but only if you consider just that plot of land. A city block is way more efficient in terms of per person effect on the environment.

    I think the crux of the problem is that the original tenets of organic agriculture were set by some scientists a hundred years ago, but also people like Rudolph steiner who was an occultist. There's still a mix of actual science and hippy pseudoscience mixed in to this day. For example, the focus on only "natural" pesticides means using compounds that have higher runoff, persistence in the soil, and broader impacts to insect life. I wish that there was more flexibility for OA standards to change to the best evidence that we have.

  • This is going to be different country to country, but organic farming can still use pesticides. I posted a link below as well, but organic farming is also not conclusively better for the environment. It has lower yields, and therefore requires more land. You have to balance the effects of converting more land into organic farmland versus the benefit of, for example, less fertilizer runoff.

    At the end of the day, "organic" is a marketing term, not a statement of health or ecological benefit. Most complaints about conventional agriculture (and GMOs) are actually complaints about industrialized agriculture as a whole.

    I wish there was a good, regulated term for food that was produced with the best known processes (and perhaps there is for specific foods), but "organic" is not it.

  • There is not conclusive evidence that organic food is better for the environment. Obviously there are facets of the environment impact that will be better than conventional agriculture, but there is a ~19% reduction in yield, and lower soil carbon in organic agriculture. A reduction in yield means more land must be cleared for agriculture, so the other facets of organic ag would need a to be substantially better than conventional to make up for it.

  • Yeah, that's the thing. Weight loss by pill is only possible in a few ways. Diuretics temporarily cause weight loss. The only real options are drugs that decrease your food intake (like the new diabetes drugs), presumably drugs that could interfere with nutrient absorption (not sure if any of those are out there, but it seems like it would be sketchy), or drugs that increase what you burn.

    People think that last category could be magic, but burning calories is called burning calories for a reason; it's an oxidation reaction, and it generates heat. There are a few others that also seem to really work, basically all stimulants: nicotine, caffeine, and methamphetamine (which is available by prescription).