wolframhydroxide
@wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on do what you love 1 day ago:
Excellent points!
- Comment on do what you love 1 day ago:
Karl Popper, “The Logic of Scientific Discovery” is a seminal work in the modern philosophy of science. It led the way for modern statistical methodology in the form of null hypothesis rejection, proposes to solve the problem of induction, and his proposal of falsifiability is, to my knowledge, the most popular philosophical framework for modern scientific practice.
- Comment on Best strategy 1 week ago:
The other commenter is slightly incorrect. Bookworm’s light novel is complete, but the manganese is currently being published. Also, some of the best worldbuilding I’ve ever witnessed, as someone who primarily reads SF & Fantasy for worldbuilding.
- Comment on Microsoft's Windows lead says the next version of Windows will be "more ambient, pervasive, and multi-modal" as AI redefines the desktop interface 1 week ago:
Untrue! Let me give you some examples of things that are both ambient and pervasive!
Slime Molds! Entropy! Capitalist violence by the hoarding of wealth and refusal to engage with other humans with empathy Your Mom!
- Comment on Microsoft Is Now Being Sued Over Sunsetting Windows 10 1 week ago:
As someone who recently made the switch, DM me if there’s anything I can help with. A lot of the Linux Bros on here will be completely unhelpful out of smug superiority. Also, if you have an HP, you will almost certainly have to do a LOT more work (I had to learn to edit GRUB config files pre-startup). It will be much easier if you don’t have an HP. Anyway, open offer. Also, do Linux Mint.
- Comment on Microsoft Is Now Being Sued Over Sunsetting Windows 10 1 week ago:
As someone who recently made the switch, DM me of there’s anything I can help with. A lot of the Linux Bros on here will be completely unhelpful out of smug superiority. Also, if you have an HP, you will almost certainly have to do a LOT more work (I had to learn to edit GRUB config files pre-startup). It will be much easier if you don’t have an HP. Anyway, open offer. Also, do Linux Mint.
- Comment on YSK: US Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem publically bragged about killing her puppy 2 weeks ago:
Legionnaire’s, Lead and a legal amount of raw sewage.
- Comment on Imagine being a billionaire, running one the most powerful, corporations in the United States, and prostrating yourself to Donald Trump in this very public and embarrassing way. 2 weeks ago:
It is. Except that the law doesn’t protect people. People protect the law. If a law is there on paper, but no one will enforce it, then it isn’t a law. It’s just some words on paper.
- Comment on One Angry Man 2 weeks ago:
The exclusive or killed me. Thank you.
- Comment on Apart, low in cholesterine 2 weeks ago:
That’s more like it.
- Comment on Apart, low in cholesterine 2 weeks ago:
Story time! Courtesy of my 7th–grade Biotech teacher:
Many years ago, he was working in a bio lab where they were studying the effects of drugs on the brain. Specifically, they were trying to isolate the specific paths and locations in the brain that these drugs would build up in the highest concentrations. That year, they were studying cocaine.
Of course, you couldn’t be experimenting with cocaine on humans, because that would lead to everybody having too good a time, I guess, and the federal government wouldn’t stand for it. As such, they were injecting cocaine into rats. Now, giving these little guys the time of their lives was still not the purpose of the research, so they needed a way to easily find out where the cocaine was going in the rats’ brains. As such, they tagged the cocaine. In order to ensure the tagging didn’t affect the binding and distribution in the body, however, they had to tag it, not with a dye, but by making it radioactive, at which point they could use whatever Magical Machine™ to take a 3D scan of their heads and find the radiation (though It’s possible he was simply leaving out the bit where they dissected the rat brains to find where they were radioactive, which I now think far more likely)
Unfortunately, aside from getting these rats literally blitzed out of their minds on a one-way-trip to the land of cheese and honey, no super-rats were created by what otherwise sounds like a plot straight out of an offbeat MCU movie.
No, the practical upshot of this was that it was some poor sod’s job to actually mix radioactive cocaine into solution for injection. Since they needed to do it a LOT, they needed a lot of solution. So, in their infinite wisdom, they had the following setup:
- a refrigerator, where they kept the saline and radioactive cocaine (and whatever else they were using to make the solution)
- immediately to the right of the fridge, a fume hood, where they would actually do the mixing.
- atop the fridge, two unlabelled beakers: in one, the saline, ready for mixing, in the other, the radioactive cocaine solution, prepared and ready for injection.
This was the point at which an entire crate of lab rats was toppled, releasing all of them onto the floor…
Of course, the entire lab is suddenly in chaos. One person is trying to use a net they had prepared for such an occasion to catch the rats that are running around the desk area, while two more are trying to tag-team a rat that ran behind a bookshelf. My teacher, though, is chasing a rat. A rat that is running straight for the cozy space under the fridge. With all the alacrity of a wastrel postgraduate who has never heard the term “dexterity” outside the context of tabletop games, he runs headlong into the fridge, and suddenly feels a splash on his head and the shattering of glass.
While it didn’t take too long for them to pull out the Geiger counter and determine that he was not going to get a supervillain backstory (with the high of his life and cancer on the side), you can bet they labeled those beakers after that, and kept them in the fume hood.
And that, dear friends, is how we learned about Lab Safety in my school!
- Comment on Apart, low in cholesterine 2 weeks ago:
As a chemistry teacher who regularly ignites Hydrogen gas, I cannot even imagine how dangerous it would be to ignite a hydrogen belch. That shit POPS.
- Comment on Apart, low in cholesterine 2 weeks ago:
Chemistry teacher here! Hydrogen would only acidify it if it dissociated. Much like how you can dissolve oxygen or nitrogen gas into water, any gas can be dissolved into water. They don’t break apart, they just float as molecules inside the water. It’s just like when sugar dissolves. Salt breaks apart, because it’s ionic. Sugar, most organics, and diatomic gases like H~2~, N~2~, and O~2~ don’t have enough affinity with the water molecules to dissociate (or, at least, not sufficient to dissociate appreciably)
When you get something gnarly is if you have a molecule containing something that does have stronger affinity with the water. Carbon Dioxide, Sulfur Di- and Trioxide, Nitrogen Oxides, and other oxygen-bearing covalent gases react with water because the central atoms attract the oxygen in the H~2~O, while the oxygens surrounding them have partial negative charges from the unpaired electrons, attracting the hydrogens in the water. This causes the water to be ripped apart, creates oxyanions such as CO~3~^2-^, SO~3~^2-^, SO~4~^2-^, NO~2~^-^, or NO~3~^-^. Same goes for elemental Chlorine, Fluorine and Bromine. All of these rip the water apart and create the hypo- oxyacid and the hydroacid of the specie (e.g. Cl~2~ + H~2~O --> HClO + HCl)
- Comment on Apart, low in cholesterine 2 weeks ago:
Chemistry teacher here. No way do those hydrogen molecules ionize. If they ionize, that would require making the entire solution positively charged, or filled with singlet hydrogen. Just like dissolving oxygen of nitrogen in water, the gas will dissolve, but not dissociate.
- Comment on Everybody gets one [choose wisely] 4 weeks ago:
You find yourself suddenly 3 meters up in the air, which is sufficient to change your personal gravitational acceleration by 0.00001 m/s^2. As you can imagine, it is not fun to fall 3 meters. You do anyway.
- Comment on Everybody gets one [choose wisely] 4 weeks ago:
That is, canonically, almost exactly what Saruman’s robes are supposed to look like:
“I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours…” - Gandalf the Grey, The Fellowship of the Ring
- Comment on Brave browser blocks Windows feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC 4 weeks ago:
Nice
- Comment on Everybody gets one [choose wisely] 4 weeks ago:
Yes, unlimited access to universal truth, with error reporting.
- Comment on Everybody gets one [choose wisely] 4 weeks ago:
Fair. I would argue that “many people going insane” would be covered under the sacrifice clause, but hey, this seems like the best of all possible outcomes from mucking about with reality.
- Comment on Everybody gets one [choose wisely] 4 weeks ago:
One of the best shows in the history of television.
- Comment on Everybody gets one [choose wisely] 4 weeks ago:
I’d like to be granted the ability to, at any time and without limitation on scope, number, or length, ask the universe questions (asked in the dialect of modern english in which I am fluent) and know the answers, but with the following stipulations:
- that all answers are to be formatted and delivered in such a way that I understand them, without any changes or consequences that my current self (as of the writing of this statement, in my current condition) would consider a significant change to my physical and mental stability, and without requiring more than 3600 metric seconds (relative to my worldline) to understand in fullness, and being delivered in a timeframe of less than 3600 metric seconds (relative to my worldline).
- that any redactions due to such stability concerns as in the prior stipulations are to be formatted and delivered as part of the reformatted answer
- that any answer which is inherently unknowable returns an explanation for why it is unknowable, formatted as an answer pursuant to the prior stipulations
- that no answers pursuant to the ability lead to circular logic
- that this ability, its answers and enabling factors shall not require a sacrifice which my current self (as described above under my current circumstances when informed of the context of the sacrifice in plain English communication) would not think reasonable.
- that if such a sacrifice is required, an explanation of the requisite sacrifice and the factors requiring it be returned to me, formatted as an answer pursuant to the prior stipulations
- that I am to be able to choose to transfer any of these answers to another individual of any species, and that the individual be able to understand the answers, so long as the prior stipulations on sacrifice and physical and mental stability are satisfied both for myself and the secondary individual.
- Comment on Everybody gets one [choose wisely] 4 weeks ago:
Is that still from Life After People?
- Comment on Brave browser blocks Windows feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC 4 weeks ago:
Well, let me know if you’ve got any trouble. Oh, and do you have an HP? Those things SUCK at installing Linux.
- Comment on Brave browser blocks Windows feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC 4 weeks ago:
I recently switched, and would be happy to give whatever rudimentary pointers I can. I’ve found that Linux mint is the best option for me. You can also easily flash it onto a USB and try it out to confirm compatibility.
- Comment on sardonic soup 5 weeks ago:
If you’re really looking to spit in the eyes of Death:
Mince some destroying angel and deadly webcap into a nice mushroom ranch, sliver some bitter almonds and untreated cashew nuts over a nice hemlock cress with some of the shaved hemlock roots mixed in with some thinly sliced manchineel apple and add in some belladonna berries on the top for additional sweetness. From what I understand, all of those actually taste pretty decent, so without the deadly poisons this’d be a bomb salad.
- Comment on Orb 5 weeks ago:
My hypothesis would be that, in order to keep that membrane taut, the internal salinity would have to be fairly close to the exterior salinity, otherwise it would shrink due to hypertonicity. That cytoplasm will probably just taste like slimy seawater
- Comment on Panama Proxima 5 weeks ago:
As it is written in the ancient texts.
- Comment on Since we're doing magic eyes now... 5 weeks ago:
These ages were created by NASA, though you can make your own by taking two pictures about 4-5 inches apart. Try going to the Parallel View community to see more
- Comment on Since we're doing magic eyes now... 5 weeks ago:
Yeah, try the wall-eyed version I posted as a top-level comment
- Comment on Can I lick it? 5 weeks ago:
Just like how lithium should be red.