evasive_chimpanzee
@evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world
- Comment on 3D Printing Patterns Might Make Ghost Guns More Traceable Than We Thought 14 hours ago:
If there is a demand for a forensic capability, there’s someone willing to sell it to a police department (and a jury).
- Comment on xkcd #3118: iNaturalist Animals and Plants 1 day ago:
People usually don’t log stuff that they see every day. So a person who lives in Oregon (statistically more likely to be in doug-fir country) goes east and notices that a different tree predominates and they want to know what it is, they’ll log it.
Personally, I log stuff that I don’t normally see cause there’s a chance that it’s either: a rare native plant, a native plant on the edge of its range, or a non-native. Those are all things that I’m less likely to know off the top of my head, and I think it’s probably more important to tag for scientific purposes.
- Comment on Is possible to learn to swim, just by reading a lot about it? 1 week ago:
Yeah, it’s really frustrating when someone with higher body fat that floats like a cork tries to tell you how to do it.
Technique can’t overcome density. I will say that I got slightly better at it after learning to SCUBA dive (or maybe I just got fatter). In scuba, you move up and down in the water column by adjusting the range of your breathing. You basically try to get your neutrally boyant setpoint at 50% lung capacity. To go down, you try to control your breathing from 0-50% and to go up, you breathe from 50-100%. It made me slightly better at keeping my lungs really topped up with air.
To float, I basically have to hold my lungs at max capacity, and then exhale-inhale as fast as possible, which is unnatural and takes concentration. I usually have to use my arms for a little bit of upward thrust through that breath.
There’s no lungs in my legs, so those will sink no matter what. People claim you can “use your core” or some other BS to keep your legs afloat, but the fact of the matter is that if your upper body is positively buoyant and your lower body is negatively buoyant, there will be a rotational moment pulling your legs down, and it can only be counteracted by external application of force (i.e., kicking your feet). I can either float on my back with a mild amount of kicking, or i can do like a face-in-water deadman float, and just pull my head out of the water occasionally to quickly breathe.
- Comment on Is possible to learn to swim, just by reading a lot about it? 1 week ago:
I’m going to disagree with everyone here. Loads of people throughout history have learned to swim by literally being thrown in. It’s not a good way to learn, but people do it. Even babies can do it.
Given a little bit of reading first, you’d do just fine. Yeah, the motions might be a little off cause it’s hard to learn a complex movement from a book, but it would be good enough.
- Comment on Wild kangaroo harvests are labelled ‘needlessly cruel’ by US lawmakers – but backed by Australian conservationists 2 weeks ago:
I’m not sure. I know in a lot of those places, the rationale is that the terrain is too flat, so rifle bullets can travel too far.
The problem is that I don’t know if that actually corresponds to increased risk of death. It sounds plausible, but idk if there are real stats to back it up.
A quick search for some plausible data turned up California’s official stats, and going back a few years, I never saw more than 5 deaths in a year. Extrapolating the rate to the whole US, that’s like 50 per year. Other sources just say “less than 100 per year for the whole US”.
Without a specific study, it’s just as plausible to attribute the fatalities to sheer proximity of the shooter to the victim rather than bullets traveling far. Bigger targets are easier to hit. Just looking at the California data, which includes injuries, this seems to bear out, and most injuries and fatalities are due to close range shotgun bird hunting (i.e. the Dick Cheney).
And really, if you wanted to completely eliminate the risk of rifle bullets traveling further than intended, you could mandate the use of any elevated shooting position (which some places do for archery).
- Comment on Wild kangaroo harvests are labelled ‘needlessly cruel’ by US lawmakers – but backed by Australian conservationists 2 weeks ago:
Here’s an example: Delaware only allows shotgun, pistol/pistol caliber long guns, and muzzleloader, no true rifle.
www.eregulations.com/delaware/…/deer-seasons
Connecticut only allows rifle on private land.
portal.ct.gov/deep/hunting/…/deer-hunting#PVSHOT
Iowa has no rifle allowed.
www.iowadnr.gov/things-do/…/iowa-hunting-seasons
Lots of states have restrictions against modern (and by modern, i mean bottlenecked) rifle rounds, and if you want to use a rifle, you have to either find a 150 year old cowboy gun, or buy a really expensive new gun using one of several specialized cartridges that cost like $2 a round.
And then when it comes down to it, if you live in a state where it is legal to hunt with a regular rifle, you end up finding that half the time any public land that you can hunt on is restricted to archery only, so unless you happen to be a large landowner, you can’t hunt with a rifle.
- Comment on Wild kangaroo harvests are labelled ‘needlessly cruel’ by US lawmakers – but backed by Australian conservationists 2 weeks ago:
There are a lot of differences between how the US and how Australia do hunting. For one, there is no commercial deer/elk harvest in the US. Commercially sold venison can only be from farmed deer/elk. I think deer leather can be sold, but there are a lot of hoops to go through.
Also, in the US, most hunting regulations exist not for ethical or conservation purposes but to prevent people from being able to subsistence hunt. They wanted hunting to be a rich man’s game like in the UK. The existence of hunting seasons is a good example. Another is regulations on method of take; for example, you often must use outdated equipment like bows and muzzleloaders, and the use of modern, effective rifles is severely curtailed. Compare that to Australia where you can use night vision/thermal scopes and rifles with supressors, and i believe there is no “hunting season”.
The reality is that both countries have an overpopulation of large herbivores in areas, and the answer anti-hunting people give is the reintroduction of large carnivores. While we should do that in more rural areas, it’s not feasible in urban/suburban areas where deer proliferate.
Many municipalities actually have to pay to have deer culled, and they do that rather than making it easier for people to hunt.
Tl;dr, i think there are some things I like better about how Australia handles hunting, but theres also things about the US’s method i like.
- Comment on Slrpnk.net outage 1 month ago:
Seriously, I think a big part of solarpunk ethos is combating the notion that everything has to always be available 24/7. Society pays a lot to deliver every convenience like fruit out of season from the other side of the world.
- Comment on Getting serious now 1 month ago:
Generally, when you want to heat the beer is after fermentation has peaked. Higher temps means faster fermentation (obviously to a point), and fermentation generates heat (positive feedback loop), which is why you need to cool beer through the initial stages of fermentation). After peak though, the temperature drops and causes a positive feedback loop downwards. This means that your beer really crawls to the finish line. Your beer might be 90% done after 3 days, but then take a couple weeks for that last 10%.
Another benefit is if you are bottling the beer, you need to know how much sugar to add. Calculators ask for the beer temperature post fermentation to determine residual CO2. With a dropping temperature, it’s hard to say what that point is, and if fermentation is just stalled, not complete, you could have residual fermentation sugar. Bumping the temperature up at the end solves both problems.
I also second adding a fan. No need for anything crazy, just something little to move the air. I used a old computer case fan wired to a random DC charger from the “miscellaneous chargers” bin at the thrift store: just make sure the voltage works with the fan.
Moisture can be an issue when you are keeping a fridge above the designed set temperature, but below ambient. I just keep a long sock filled with silica beads in mine. To recharge, I can just pop it in a low oven. They sell devices to do this (evadry is the brand name), but you might get literally 20x less silica for the convenience of a case and built in heating element.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
The last paragraph is a good catch. Someone from outside the US is not going to catch the difference between “a Wisconsin state senator” and “a senator from Wisconsin”.
- Comment on AI model collapse is not what we paid for 1 month ago:
It’s such an easy thing to predict happening, too. If you did it perfectly, it would, at best, maintain an unstable equilibrium and just keep the same output quality.
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 1 month ago:
Total War: Empire. I’ve previously played Rome 1/2, Medieval 1/2, and Atilla. For anyone who’s played other total war games, there are a couple of game mechanics that are new in Empire.
There are actual naval battles, where you put ships into a battle line, and you can board enemy ships. It’s cool but hard (for me) to control. Also many of the buildings in a territory aren’t located in the capital because it’s meant to represent colonial holdings, so you can have a sugar plantation or something outside the protection of a city, and a lot of the warfare ends up being small skirmishes sacking outlying buildings.
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 1 month ago:
The new campaign missions seem a lot longer than what I remembered of the original campaigns. I like that they tutorials now give you some strategy, too.
- Comment on I fixed my air conditioner! 2 months ago:
One of my friends had their water hookups backwards, too, and they had no clue until I checked after they complained to me about how all their clothes were shrinking despite only ever washing on cold and hang drying. Sounds like a nice feature to have a sensor in there.
- Comment on I fixed my air conditioner! 2 months ago:
I’ve definitely got a soft spot for any electromechanical appliances. Computers have gotten so cheap that every appliance built now runs on them, but it’s much hard (for me, at least) to do anything about it when one stops working.
-
My chest freezer stopped working, and i was able to put in a new relay for $2. The circuit diagram made it easy to diagnose with a multimeter. Oddly enough, i had to buy a 10 pack, so i likewise have a bunch of spares I’ll never need.
-
My dishwasher stopped working, and the manual specifically showed which wires to connect to to test resistance of each component to see if anything needed to be replaced. It turned out that the float was gunked up, so it read as having enough water even though it didn’t.
-
My fridge ice maker stopped working, and I just had to stick in a jumper wire to put it through a test cycle that immediately made it clear what was going wrong (a short), and i was able to fix it.
This is all in contrast to my clothes washer that runs on a computer, and it gives me an error message that basically just means “it’s not draining right”, and there’s like 8 potential causes, and I’ve tried to address them all, but it’s still get the error message.
-
- Comment on 2 months ago:
What kind of workshop are you running? I’ve been intrigued by direct solar applications since learning about this place on this low tech mag article.
- Comment on 2 months ago:
1st thing to do is to figure out what you need to power. Solar panels are way cheaper than charging and storage. Try to decide how much on-demand power during the dark part of the day you really need. If you can do most of what you need during the sunny part of the day, you can directly power stuff with no need for batteries. It may be that for your use case, you are better off buying 4 times as many solar panels, but no batteries.
Batteries account for 80-90% of total costs and energy invested in an off-grid solar system
- Comment on 2 months ago:
Yeah, i would definitely look at LIFEPO4. People just have the name recognition of “lithium” so they don’t really understand the differences between that and lithium ion, and so from what I saw last time I checked, the price was not really different, even though LIFEPO4 lasts longer and is safer.
- Comment on It would require about 31 hectares of corn ethanol to produce the same amount of energy generate 2 months ago:
From wikipedia:
Figures compiled in a 2007 report by National Geographic[70] point to modest results for corn ethanol produced in the US: one unit of fossil-fuel energy is required to create 1.3 energy units from the resulting ethanol
Add on top of that the environmental impact and opportunity cost of the land use, and corn based ethanol becomes a non-viable solution.
- Comment on It would require about 31 hectares of corn ethanol to produce the same amount of energy generate 2 months ago:
Yeah, I dont think we’ll ever be in a place where we don’t want to be producing some combustible fuel. We can electrify a whole lot of things, but it’s hard to beat the energy density of stuff you can burn.
- Comment on Balcony solar is all the rage in Germany. Why not in the US? 2 months ago:
To summarize for anyone not reading the article:
German balcony solar panels are connected directly to their home power through a smart inverter that will kill power if the grid power goes down, so lines don’t stay live when you’d think they are dead. Those devices are designed for the voltage and frequency of the German grid, and can’t be used in America. Companies won’t makes devices if they aren’t legal to use, but one state has legalized it, so hopefully we get there soon.
The other issue is that a circuit breaker essentially monitors the amount of current going into your home’s circuit from the grid as a way of preventing your wires from being overloaded. Since the micro inverter is on the other side of the circuit breaker, you could overload the circuit without tripping the breaker, and that is why they are limited to 800 W.
- Comment on Unpopular popular opinion - fiat 2 months ago:
Reject bartering, embrace gift economy
- Comment on Starlink is now accessible across the White House campus, which was already served by fiber cable, after service was “donated”, as some cite security concerns. 4 months ago:
Plenty of federal facilities have garbage reception. I think it’s probably due to the bureaucracy involved in telecoms installing their hardware on sensitive property. The White House in particular probably has lots of thick walls/armor attenuating signals, too.
- Comment on No, renewables don't need expensive backup power on today's grids 4 months ago:
The story here doesn’t really seem to line up. Generally, for a fossil fuel based system, coal is cheap, but slow to start (nuclear is similar in that regard), so it is used to generate the base level of electricity needed. When demand starts to go up, generation is added by natural gas plants that can start and stop more easily. Whether natural gas is cheap or not, the fact that these plants aren’t always on means that the energy they produce will cost more.
Solar/wind are predictable enough that they can be used to reduce the baseline demand, supplied by coal. Peak demands still end up getting addressed by natural gas.
If renewables were putting the expensive natural gas generation out of business, we’d see those plants closing while coal stays level, but we see coal going down and natural gas going up.
Using the Texas example from the article, you can see their coal plants closing or converting to gas while more gas plants open. …wikipedia.org/…/List_of_power_stations_in_Texas
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 4 months ago:
Yeah, I want one of those, too. I think it fits different needs, though. Stove vs grill.
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 4 months ago:
I think there are some municipalities with that in code, but it’s definitely not universal in the US.
codes.iccsafe.org/…/chapter-5-chimneys-and-vents
I live in a house with a gas stove that vents into my kitchen.
I definitely hear you about the coffee roasting. I assumed when they said that it smokes that it would just be like thin wisps, and I definitely smoked out my house. I’m not going to do it inside again.
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 4 months ago:
For a lot of these large scale, epidemiological findings, it’s important to remember that the effects are small enough that you pick them up on a population level over a lifetime. I’d say that if you can, find a way to properly vent your stove outside if you are doing some home improvement. If you are replacing your stove, consider induction instead, and in the meantime, having an air purifier is good. Opening a window is probably also good. Other than that, I wouldn’t be super alarmed. Obviously, if you have little kids or something, you might have a lower tolerance for potential pollution, but it’s good to think about these things in context. Alcohol causes cancer, but everyone still drinks.
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 4 months ago:
I think the people who claim gas stoves are best likely grew up either not cooking much, or had a decent gas stove, so their first exposure to an electric stove was super cheap, crappy electric coil stoves in student housing, or wherever they first lived as a young adult. Then when they were able to afford better, they got a better gas stove.
I have a really crappy gas stove, and it makes me yearn for the cheap electric coil stoves of my youth.
People say that gas stoves are more powerful and responsive, when the truth is that more powerful stoves are more powerful, and “responsiveness” is a fake concern. My crappy gas stove takes forever to get a pot of water boiling, especially compared to coil stoves. Yeah, you can turn a gas stove to 100% quickly, but that’s only better if it can put out more power. It won’t heat up any faster than an electric stove if the electric stove takes double the time, but also has double the power. There’s also not many cases where “time to maximum heat” is what you care about, I can’t think of any.
Responsiveness the other way (hot to cool) doesn’t matter when you have a high thermal mass in the pan (or the pan itself has high mass), it only matters when the pan and contents are light, in which case, you just take the pan off the heat.
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 4 months ago:
I’ve never seen a gas stove with temp control. I’m not even sure how that would work. Controlling the amount of gas, sure, but not the temperature. In an induction stove, you can set it to 150 degrees, and it will hold that.
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 4 months ago:
Or they have a fan that just redirects the exhaust into the house