ChickenLadyLovesLife
@ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
- Comment on xkcd #3148: 100% All Achievements 2 days ago:
Another exploit is to start your own journal and “publish” shit-tons of your own papers. When I was in grad school I was involved in evaluating potential new professor hires. One guy’s entire CV (which was massive) consisted of papers published in journals that he was editor and founder of. He probably would have gotten away with it except that he also listed his editorship of these journals in his CV – like, we didn’t even have to do any research to expose it.
Amazingly enough his application was not immediately tossed out, and he was even flown in for an interview. That is modern Anthropology for you.
- Comment on xkcd #3148: 100% All Achievements 2 days ago:
As an undergrad, I did all the coursework and thesis writing required for a BS in Physics and a BA in Anthropology, but my college had a policy of not granting dual degrees. For no reason I can remember, I chose the BA in Anthropology. Since I ended up as a programmer, this decision was almost meaningless, except for one job where our billable rate was dependent on our degree and there was a $15 an hour difference between a BA and a BS. This difference translated into how much I was paid, although after stewing over this for a month I threatened to quit and they upped my salary. The joke was on them anyway: it was College Physics and not University Physics!
- Comment on 1919 (correctly) 3 days ago:
I haven’t been able to find this again, but there’s a short film that was made in England in 1946 that perfectly nailed how cell phones were going to work. There was even a man in a grocery store calling his wife at home to find out what ingredient he needed to pick up. The only difference was scale: the man was using a walkie-talkie, which despite the movie images of an officer using a device about 1’x4"x4", in fact also required a ginormous and heavy backpack thing lugged around by some misbegotten private.
BTW a fun fact: the word “ginormous” (a portmanteau word combining “gigantic” and “enormous”) dates to WWII or earlier. I’d always assumed it was valley-girl speak until I encountered it in a Battle of Britain memoir written by a pilot who was killed in 1942.
- Comment on Good one! 5 days ago:
I was a camp counselor one summer and while processing a bus of arriving 7-year-olds one kid got off, pointed at me and said “if you give me any trouble, I’m gonna bite off your head and shit down your throat”. I couldn’t stop laughing.
- Comment on What even is money at this point 1 week ago:
I went to Lowe’s the other day and bought a couple of drill bits. While there, I looked at some cabinet pulls – didn’t buy any or even picked any up, just walked past them and looked at them. That night on Amazon I got ads for drill bits and cabinet pulls. I assume it was something linking store footage with my phone data, but who knows. Maybe I got the neural implant already and the implant makes you forget you got the implant.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 1 week ago:
PC game “Lemmings”
Best game of all time IMHO. “I’ll just try one more level” followed by the sunrise.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 1 week ago:
Why did we think think the USSR fell?
The most common belief was that it fell because Ronald Reagan ordered Gorbachev to “tear down that wall”.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 1 week ago:
It goes well with “we only use 15% of our brains”. Oh, OK, let’s remove 85% of your brain and see how things go.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 1 week ago:
They made cheese and butter
The Nuer (a cattle-herding people from Sudan) would pour milk into gourds and add cow urine and leave it in the sun for months. I love eating food from around the world but that is one thing I would pass on. They never drank milk, but if they needed liquid calories they would poke a hole in a cow and drink some of their blood.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 1 week ago:
When the real story of Vietnam is: we shot a bunch of Vietnamese people and then dropped our entire back stock of WWII-era bombs on them (and their neighbors) and then up and left and now they make our shoes for us.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 1 week ago:
Edison being a giant dick of a patent troll is one of the main reasons Hollywood exists. I’m not sure Musk has anything that impactful on his resume.
- Comment on whats your dumb purchases? 1 week ago:
My skoolie is semi-usable, basically just needs the utilities (electric, propane and water) hooked up. I bought a house two years ago and that has suspended work on the bus completely. Someday …
- Comment on whats your dumb purchases? 1 week ago:
I did a coop at IBM many many years ago. My project used a 1" thick slab of aluminum that was about 3’ x 4’ and it was so much fun to just touch that thing. We also had CADCAM which was not at all widespread in the '80s. It was so much fun to design parts and send them to the machine shop electronically and have them show up on a cart outside the lab the next day. Quite a shame how far IBM has fallen since those days.
- Comment on whats your dumb purchases? 1 week ago:
I grew up obsessing over synths in the '70s and '80s. Now I’m a programmer who writes (more accurately wrote) software synthesizer apps, and I find it amusing that my cheap smartphone from ten years ago has orders of magnitude more sound generation power than those keyboard-based beasts from my childhood did.
That being said, I would probably be willing to kill somebody to get my hands on an original Moog to play around with.
- Comment on whats your dumb purchases? 1 week ago:
I drive a roadster myself. Recently I’ve noticed that to get out of it, I have to lift my left leg up with my arms and set my foot on the ground, otherwise I get a sartorius muscle strain. I now understand why used roadsters are so cheap: there is only a tiny window where you’re old enough to afford one but young enough to actually get in and out of it.
- Comment on whats your dumb purchases? 1 week ago:
I would trade sourdough starter for homemade chutney.
- Comment on whats your dumb purchases? 1 week ago:
I bought a used rusty school bus. Six years later, at least I know how to weld now. Sort of. I also learned how to survive hitting my head on a large steel C-clamp nine times without suffering any brain damage. Additionally, I learned how to survive hitting my head on a large steel C-clamp nine times without suffering any brain damage.
- Comment on Come back to this post in 2030's 1 week ago:
I grew up in NE Ohio in the 1970s. Generally the first snowfall was in early October and by November the ground was entirely covered in snow. You didn’t see even hints of green grass until the end of April and the snow wasn’t entirely gone until some time in May (and the giant mounds of snow thrown up by the snow plows would often still be there into June, after school at let out). That is literally half the year in snow cover. Granted, being right next to Lake Erie makes the snow situation about as bad as possible, but it’s nothing like this today.
That shit made me move to the South as soon as possible, but it took me a couple of decades to realize that institutionalized racism is worse than trudging through snow once in a while.
- Comment on Lies, all lies 1 week ago:
I (not Indian) used to play Hindi film music on my stereo at college at top blast. It’s actually very listenable overall, but the women singing in falsetto can be hard to get used to – it is one of the most penetrating sounds on earth. Everybody on my floor hated the living shit out of me.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
My local Target has a serious Kmart-at-the-bitter-end vibe going. Lots of empty shelves, stuff sloppily displayed, sullen and unhelpful workers etc. etc. Everything in the grocery section is way more expensive than it is at local grocery stores. I just don’t get why anybody shops there. I only go there because I’m a school bus driver and a good chunk of the tips I get from parents are in the form of Target gift cards. But all I can find worth buying is cheap bicycle gear.
- Comment on Has this happened to you? 1 week ago:
It’s state-dependent. And in my state, unfortunately, severance above a threshold amount is deducted from the amount of unemployment benefits you’re eligible for. I would have been eligible for something like $300 total, and this would have been payable only after nearly six months of filing claims and (pretending to be) looking for work that entire time. Certainly not worth it.
- Comment on Has this happened to you? 1 week ago:
My (small) company got acquired by a massive West coast tech giant and six months later all the employees (but not the executives and managers) of the original small company were laid off. This was not even remotely surprising to me, and would not have been even if any of us had been given any work to do during that six months. When my boss told me I was being laid off, I laughed and said “of course I am” which surprised him as apparently everybody else was massively shocked and upset. Which surprised me as I don’t see how anybody could have possibly not seen it coming.
All things considered, this company was actually slightly decent about it, as they gave us two months’ notice and severance equal to about what we would have been able to get from unemployment. The severance disqualified us from unemployment, but at least we got the amount up front and we didn’t have to spend six months pretending to look for work.
- Comment on Samsung brings ads to US fridges 2 weeks ago:
Ergonomic AND energy efficient
FWIW I don’t think it’s really all that energy-efficient. Air, being much less dense than solids, contains comparatively much less heat energy. The “cold” of a refrigerator is mostly stored in the things inside it, not in the air inside it, so letting all the cold air out to be replaced by warmer air does not have a huge effect on the overall temperature of the fridge. I think you’re right that having a door which interferes with the insulating envelope is going to be worse than just opening the main door once in a while.
- Comment on Samsung brings ads to US fridges 2 weeks ago:
some products are already as good as they can get and no longer need innovation
I just saw a poster for a sort-of cool fridge innovation: It has a door-in-the-door that you can open to get out commonly used things without having to open the main thing and let all the cold air out. It’s called a “Conservadoor” refrigerator.
The kicker is that I saw this on Antiques Roadshow and it’s from the 1950s.
- Comment on Samsung brings ads to US fridges 2 weeks ago:
Even cheaper to tape up a piece of paper that says “GO BUY SOME USELESS BULLSHIT”.
- Comment on Stop Talking to Technology Executives Like They Have Anything to Say 2 weeks ago:
I helped a former girlfriend move out of her apartment years ago. I brought along a tub of spackling paste to fill the nail holes she’d left in the wall (it was even the kind that goes on pink and then dries white, which is pretty handy). She was mind=blown as she’d never seen anything like it before. I asked her how she filled nail holes and she said she used chewing gum and white-out.
- Comment on Don't spend your life in front of a live camera 2 weeks ago:
they go the house!
They go the 'ouse!
- Comment on Don't spend your life in front of a live camera 2 weeks ago:
He didn’t really mean gang violence – he meant black people violence, and Tyler the Destroyer isn’t black.
- Comment on Don't spend your life in front of a live camera 2 weeks ago:
he valued “open debate and the exchange of ideas”
My parents are avid watchers of the PBS News Hour and this is exactly how that show was portraying Kirk. My parents were all “oh this is terrible that he was murdered”, but fortunately they’ve started learning about the things Kirk actually said from other news sources. PBS News Hour is not at all what it used to be (when it started out as the MacNeil/Lehrer Report) and a quick glance at their list of corporate sponsors makes it crystal clear why not.
- Comment on It's always Brassica 2 weeks ago:
Fractals all the way down