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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I shall tell you the story of FrankenPod. One iPod had a broken hard drive; one had a tear in the connector to the screen. I managed to reassemble a funtioning iPod from the pieces of each. Eventually, though, it became too onorous to find the old-style iPod charging cables, so I had to move on. But I do miss FrankenPod.







  • The wet bulb temperature is a type of measurement, not a particular temperature cutoff.

    While most of the temperature readings we normally encounter are “dry bulb” measurements (the thermometer is measuring the air temperature), the wet bulb temperature is measured by wrapping the thermometer in a damp cloth. If it is hot and dry, you will get a lower wet bulb reading than if it is hot and humid due to evaporative cooling happening more effectively when the air is dry. This can give us a more physiologically relevant temperature measure, since the human body also uses evaporative cooling, aka sweating.

    There is still some debate on what the lower bound of the wet bulb danger zone is, how this number changes depending on regional factors (physiology is complicated, and humid vs dry heat is not the full story), the “standard” levels of activity to use when providing guidance, etc.


  • COVID really killed my faith in humanity, and it blindsided me. I truly believed people in general would come together in such a situation, but it just… didn’t happen. Giving people shit for wearing a mask? Or, heaven forbid, having the audacity to request someone wear a mask around you? Let’s not forget the people hoarding toilet paper like that’s an appropriate response. I know it sounds small in the grand scheme of things, but it requires a certain level of “fuck you, i got mine” to buy three-dozen rolls of TP when the shelves are already bare.





  • I really don’t think you have anything to worry about. The plastic these little guys eat needs to be partially degraded and broken up into smaller pieces for them to make any meaningful digestive progress. It’s exceedingly unlikely the bacteria themselves are going to get efficient enough that your non-waste plastic stuff is in any danger. More likely, the enzymes themselves will be used as part of a larger controlled industrial process (enzyme recapture is important to staying cost effective after all). Even if that wasn’t the case, these bacteria are suited for life in a landfill, not in your pipes.