• 2 Posts
  • 383 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Do you primarily use hand tools or power tools? Also, are you looking for a primary work bench, or an assembly bench?

    Hand tool benches, you want them to be really heavy and sturdy since they get loaded in shear a lot by things like planing and sawing. For a hand tool bench, you basically need to decide what you have to work with, and what your work style is like. I like go be able to just clamp stuff to my bench top, so a Nicholson bench is a little annoying for me. Also, think about the space you have available, and whether you are right or left handed. For handtool work, I would prefer a face vice and a tail vice, with plenty of dog holes.

    For power tools, the name of the game is modularity and mobility. Everything should be the same height and on wheels so you can move stuff around to act as infeed/outfeed tables. They don’t need to be as heavy or sturdy, so you can use some space under the bench for more efficient storage. It’s also nice to have a few ways to clamp other tools down.






  • Community canneries still exist, but they used to be way more popular. In rural communities where people grow a lot of their own food, people can their own food, but pressure canners take a lot of time for a single batch to come up to pressure, cook, and cool.

    Community canneries have much bigger pressure canners where you could feasibly can everything in one batch. It’s also really enables people sharing surpluses, trading, etc.

    Many hobbies are better shared, too. If you have 20 people sharing a super high quality “item”, they will have a better experience than if each of those people had to buy their own crappy versions.

    Basically, a whole lot of things can be “libraried”.




  • Yeah, reviewing is about making sure the methods are sound and the conclusions are supported by the data. Whether or not the data are correct is largely something that the reviewer cannot determine.

    If a machine spits out a reading of 5.3, but the paper says 6.2, the reviewer can’t catch that. If numbers are too perfect, you might be suspicious of it, but it’s really not your job to go all forensic accountant on the data.



  • No, as much as high school guidance counselors try to tell you different, there’s nothing magical about any STEM degree that will reliably get you a job.

    For most jobs, the “filter” is getting the job itself. Not having a relevant degree might prevent you from getting a job, but having the degree doesn’t mean you will be selected. There are exceptions like getting into medical school really sets you on a pathway where as long as you stick with it, you should end up with a job, bit that’s cause it’s really hard (and expensive) to get into med school, so that part is the “filter”.

    You might hear of a particular skillet being really hot that guarantees you a job, and that does happen, but it is really ephemeral. By the time you get a 4 year degree, the landscape may have changed.

    You can absolutely get a job with a 4 year hard science degree, but you can’t just go to class, get all A’s and step into a job. You need to be connected throughout the process. Also keep in mind what type of job you want to do, and where it is geographically. You might have good job prospects with a geology degree and fossil fuel expertise, but the jobs might be in undesirable locations.


  • The first step, in my opinion, is to find any existing local-ish datasets. I reckon that around you, there could be trees that go back well over 1000 years to use as a reference. You could then try to find the oldest ring of the wood in your house. It’s probably pretty hard to count back before that, but you could try to make estimates based on the circular ark of the grain pattern to determine a trunk diameter.





  • Hyperloops business model is to scoop up funds meant to develop technology to combat climate change. It’s Teslas business model, too. It definitely makes me skeptical right off the bat. It’s just a matter of if the airships are like electric vehicles (oversold climate harm reduction, but likely still a harm reduction), or if they are like hyperloops (complete scams that can be defeated with high school level math).