ornery_chemist

@ornery_chemist@mander.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What strategy would you use to estimate the number of hazelnuts⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Roughly a truncated cone with diameters ~7 nuts and ~9 nuts, and the cup is ~12 nuts high (quite hard to tell due perspective and nits of different sizes). Throw in an extra layer to account for the heap at the top (which is a dome, but the dome is taller than 1 hazelnut, so treating it as a shorter layer should give some error cancellation) to give a height of 13. The volume using the formula for a truncated cone of those dimensions is ~657 cubic hazelnut diameters. Random sphere packing is 64% (though wall effects should decrease this number) giving a total of 420 nuts (nice).

  Answer

  This ends up being about 5% lower than the true answer. I’m surprised it’s that close. The underestimate makes sense given the wall effects I mentioned, but the error bars on my eyeballed measurements are surely higher.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YOLO⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What’s the point of math if you can’t verify it empirically?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨🤡 We've all been played for fools. 🤡⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah shit are you me a few years in the future? Currently in the corporate phase, only, instead of my PhD convincing people that I know what I’m talking about, I get told to pound sand and, for everything I do, every slight change I make, consult our minored-in-chemistry EHS focal points whose only hands-on lab experience is neutralizing bicarb with food-grade acetic acid solutions inside a molded clay vessel.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YAYAYA CONGRATS!!!!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The woman is covered in 3 different kinds of power series that certain kinds of scientists (presumably personified here by the man) love to swap in for more complicated terms by waving their hands and chanting “first order”. Truncated series give fugly equations a more tractable form by applying certain assumptions (e.g., x is very small, x is very large, or x is fuck-it-we-ball).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨gotta blast!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The current administration has removed all genders from science, so quantum tense verb stems are now uninflected, sorry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Zotero is still better.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Meanwhile, my advisor: you will buy endnote and you will like it because that’s what I use.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Healthline won't let you access their anti-sucicide article if you decline their tracking⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly, searching for decent medical info with search engines is a pain in the ass these days. And no, don’t start with that AI chatbot nonsense with me. I end up adding -healthline -verywellhealth -medicalnewstoday and a bunch of others that I’m forgetting to the query just to have a chance at a non-paywall, non-slop site. Typically the crap drowns out the likes of basic overviews like Mayo and Cleveland Clinics, which even 10 years ago tended to rank quite high on the results pages.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why can't you be more like him⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  OSHA

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨salty child⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re missing the fuckton of heat that is generated during neutralization. I’ve had a few lab volcanoes because of it (LOC due to the low-boiling organics flashing boiling).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It’s the little things⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes and no. No surface tension implies vanishing intermolecular forces, so the liquid would not be cohesive and would expand in all directions to the volume of the room… which is pretty much the definition of a gas. Not quite though: supercritical fluids also do this as long as temperature and pressure remain high enough, and are indeed useful in niche applications industrially.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When you work for a company owned by a A..hole⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pretty sure I just got ~anti-bribery~ ethics and compliance training that said no one in my company is allowed to accept such gifts lol

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨But I am mighty!!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure I’d call US sunscreens way worse (they are still very effective at blocking UVB, just not UVA as effectively), but there are definitely better options abroad. There definitely aren’t many options; that’s part of why Hawaii banning two common sunscreen ingredients for marine toxicity reasons was such a big deal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Signal – an ethical replacement for WhatsApp⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not saying that it’s necessarily a bad option, but my biggest issue with delta chat is that it does not offer forward secrecy (if a user’s private key is compromised, past messages can be revealed); Signal does. Delta no question beats signal in decentralization, though email is less decentralized than it seems–how many people do you know who still use gmail? Delta also inherently leaks metadata on whom you’re communicating with to the email host (that’s just imap/smtp). Signal can mitigate this somewhat with Sealed Sender (which gives one-way anonymity), though it can be broken with statistical analysis, and signal metadata is more identifying due to requiring a phone number.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Signal – an ethical replacement for WhatsApp⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  FYI, while Threema front-end clients are open-source (and offer reproducible builds, which is surprisingly uncommon in open-source land), the server component, though supposedly audited, remains closed-source.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SUNS OUT GUNS OUT⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know much about this, but I can’t help but think that “complete” and “consistent” are doing a lot more work in that sentence than my current understanding of the terms would lead me to believe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A potential ‘anti-spice’ that could dial down the heat of fiery food⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  and gey rid of my one kitchen crutch? absolutely not

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't ask for more pixels⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, there may be a maximal element, but not necessarily a maximum (there might be multiple people of equal and maximal gayness, not just one person).

  Also, not relevent to the logic here per se, but last time this went around the conclusion was that a spectrum implies a total order, not just partial.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Good to see someone caring about BiLions⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  According to my buddy who worked for Dow, part of these “savings” apparently was taking a hatchet to their R&D segment with a bunch of spray-and-pray layoffs (apparently a common happening these days). I realize Dow is mostly commodity chemicals these days which is much more preservative in nature than other segments of the chemical industry, but even so it sounds like they are killing any hope of competing with new technologies and moving to the “squeeze as much as possible out before it goes tits up” stage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Definitely didn't waste half an hour making this⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I got one because I was intrigued by its lead rotation, but I found that it really didn’t rotate the lead enough while I wrote. I kept having to rotate the barrel manually to keep a thin line like I do for every other mechanical pencil, and then would get annoyed every time the clip came around to brush my hand. I’ve been wondering if I’m doing something wrong, or if Japanese just uses more shorter strokes. Do you also like it when writing English?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some slow acting poisons?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Arsenic is a classic murder poison. It’s been known since anciemt times, though possibly unsuited to your onset requirement. Acute poisoning by ingestion is generally within a few hours, but if your character sustains lower doses over time, you could probably draw out the timeline to whatever you wanted. It would be obvious that the character is unwell during this time, but the symptoms aren’t super specific and could be confused with e.g. food poisoning.

  Or just invent a mushroom like others said. The toxins are diverse enough that I doubt anyone would be too upset if you tuned it exactly to your timeline and desired symptoms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some slow acting poisons?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Cyanide poisoning is famously pretty fast though…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NASA cuts off international climate science support⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  later?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨i'm gonna need directions⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey look, it’s a kürzlich aufgebaute vom Aufbauprinzip verbaute Bau

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Precision takes time⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  one gets silicosis and the other gets siliconetits

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Problem?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Goos rule of thumb: if someone else hasn’t solved the problem yet, it’s more complicated than you’re assuming. If the problem is worth solving, other people smarter than you have almost certainly attempted the easy “solutions” already, and they were inadequate to solve the problem. Heck, even if it’s not worth solving, there’s a non-zero chance that some pre-Reagan weirdos took a crack at it with bonus mercury and thallium compounds for the lulz and published it all in a vague 200-word comm in a now-defunct journal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This feels wrong. I love it.⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Isn’t the squaring actually multiplication by the complex conjugate when working in the complex plane? i.e., √((1 - 0 i) (1 + 0 i) + (0 - i) (0 + i)) = √(1 + - i^2^) = √(1 + 1) = √2. I could be totally off base here and could be confusing with something else…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yep, it's me⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I so badly want to be as smart and articulate as Feynman when ever I grow up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I hate that that happens⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  dass das das das dass da ersetzen kann ist falsch

  translation: that “das” can replace “dass” there is wrong.

  same shit different barbarians

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ah yes, regression⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This relation between temperature and resistivity can be shown to be exponential in certain temperature regimes by waving your hands and chanting “to first order.”

  for some reason this is the line that got me

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Half as Hot⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  New strategy to prevent global warming: just freeze all of the CO2 out of the air!