So I was using a wood sealer (www.amazon.com/dp/B01AQTX3XU) on my newly built catio. Unfortunately I didn’t notice how much I had sprayed on the adjacent window....
Like others have said, I’d give scraping it off with a razor blade a try, glass is actually significantly harder than the steel of the razor so it’s difficult or impossible to scratch your glass with the blade. Razors are cheap and readily available (if you don’t already have some kicking around) so you have basically nothing to loose by trying it. Also mentioned we’re magic erasers/melamine sponges, also a pretty solid bet, they basically work like micro sandpaper.
Failing that, I’m no chemist, but from googling around a bit for siloxane and solvents, I think your best bet for solvents youre likely to find at most hardware stores are mineral spirits, turpentine, and xylene, which should all be readily available in most hardware stores in the paint section with other paint thinners. From what I could find, it kind of looks like you’re going to want a non-polar solvent, not a polar solvent like acetone. They may dissolve it outright, or may at least soften it up enough for you to scrub or scrape it off easier.
Also what I gleaned from Google, is that siloxanes are basically silicone, so you may also have luck with products to remove silicone caulk, I know goo gone makes a product for that purpose (although it looks like the main ingredients in that stuff are acetone and benzyl alcohol, which are both polar solvents, so I have no idea how that jives with what I was getting from my other Google searches that suggested non-polar solvents, so again, I’m not a chemist and I’m out of my element)
Any solvents you end up trying, just make sure you’re following proper safety precautions, and be careful about anything else you may spray, drip, splash it on, you might ruin finishes, strip paint, damage plastics, etc.
OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency cleared the way Friday for a higher blend of ethanol to be sold nationwide for the third summer in a row, citing global conflicts that it says are putting pressure on the world’s fuel supply....
I’ve done a bit of googling around about e15 gas, and I’m not gonna lie, I really don’t know what to make of it, there seems to be a whole lot of contradictory info about it out there, some sources say it’s cleaner, others say it’s dirtier, and pretty much all of the articles I can find feel like they’ve been bought and paid for by one big megacorp or another.
When I kind of try to average together what I’ve read, and make no mistake I’m no scientist so I very well may be way off the mark on this, I think what I’ve come up with, is that it’s worse for smog and general air quality, but better in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
It’s also ever so slightly more renewable, though really that’s kind of a negligible difference, 85% of it is still basically just regular gasoline, and the regular gas you usually buy is probably 10% ethanol anyway, so it really doesn’t make a major change in terms of how much petroleum you’re burning at the end of the day.
As far as saving money goes, you may get slightly worse MPG and/or performance using it, although annecdotally when I’ve used it, any difference was completely unnoticeable to me, YMMV (literally) depending on your car, the kind of driving you do, etc.
There’s also a deep rabbit hole to go down about corn subsidies and such that I’m not going to touch with a 10 foot pole right now.
If, and that’s a big “if,” my assessment is right, which I’m by no means confident about so please don’t take this as anything other than the musings of some asshole on the internet who’s skimmed a bunch of articles and is trying to piece together the facts, I kind of feel like this may be a bit of a wash. Probably something that needs to be really considered at the local or individual level to weigh the pros and cons, taking things into account like what your local air quality is like, how efficient your vehicle is, what you’d do with the money you save, etc.
Of course, everyone should do some research about this, make some informed decisions, seek out more info, be skeptical of claims on both sides, etc. Please do not take my word for it, my words, thoughts, and opinions about this issue aren’t really worth anything.
I just tend to hedge my bets with lots of disclaimers for things I’m not totally sure of. I know I’m not an expert on these matters, and I don’t want anyone taking what I say and spreading it has hard facts when I know there’s a real possibility that I may have it completely wrong. Hopefully no one can read my comment and go “well this guy sure seems to know what he’s talking about, I’m going to take his word for it and tell all of my friends,” but maybe it’ll get them to take a second look, see what info is out there and be mindful about where that information is coming from and try to draw their own conclusions.
And really, as far as having an opinion goes, this shouldn’t really be the kind of thing we’re dealing in opinions about. This should just be a matter of hard facts and numbers, but unfortunately due to industries like agriculture and oil sticking their fingers into, those hard facts are usually too hard for most of us to come by, so we’re kind of left with nothing but opinions based on what spotty facts we have.
Not quite what you’re looking for, but I recently did NYC to Montreal on Amtrak, about a 12 hour ride (officially it’s somewhat shorter, but delays can happen at the border crossing, and as others have noted Amtrak doesn’t have right of way over freight trains so you may get delayed over that, I’d plan on about 12 hours on this particular route)
Overall I enjoyed my experience. It would have been faster to drive or fly, but that comes with its own hassles, and since it was snowing for a good part of our ride, I definitely appreciated not having to drive through that.
The seats (all coach class on this train) were pretty roomy, plenty of leg room, and comfortable enough for my tastes. There’s power outlets at every seat, the wifi is basically useless so plan on having any movies or ebooks or whatever you want to watch downloaded before you go.
The cafe car onboard doesn’t have an amazing selection, hot food is pretty much all microwave stuff, but I found it adequate to hold me over, I wasn’t looking for a gourmet meal, just some snacks and drinks, and it was pretty nice being able to enjoy a beer or two on the train ride.
On the ride back, it seemed like the train’s air conditioning wasn’t working well and it got a little warm, not ridiculously hot, but enough that you might want to take off an extra layer or roll up your sleeves. They also mentioned that since their train fleet is aging a bit, some of them can start to leak a little in the rain, we didn’t experience any of that even though it was raining a bit, but that’s something to keep in mind.
We didn’t have any issues with the bathrooms, but at least on that route they won’t get cleaned during the trip, so if they get too gross they do sometimes apparently have to put some of them out of service.
The wording is kind of wonky, a lot/some/not much/not at all leaves a lot to be desired for me.
“Some” is kind of ambiguous. I’d like to believe that most people would read it as it’s intended from the context, but I’m certain that some idiots probably interpreted it as something like “he has respect for some women” and not as “he has some respect for women in general”
“Some” also just feels like it leaves too much open to interpretation as to “how much is some.” Personally, in a lot of other contexts I’d tend to read “some” as pretty much synonymous “not much” and while in this poll those responses are right next to each other, they are still supposed to be distinct from each other. This should probably have been a “‘On a scale of 1-4, how much do you think trump respects women?’ With 0 being ‘not at all’ and 4 being ‘a lot’” type question
There’s also the matter of what is meant by “respect.” Does he respect them as equals? Does he respect their rights? Their opinions? Does he respect them because they’re able to bear children? Does he respect their physical beauty?
It’s hard to get truly representative sample sizes of the voting population because it’s such a large and diverse group, and 875 respondents doesn’t really inspire a whole lot of confidence in me about this poll’s accuracy when there’s well over 100,000,000 registered voters, especially without any other demographic info about who responded.
It’s an important fact, but hardly a major or unique case. I know I’ve personally never felt like any of the candidates in any of the elections I remember were great, just “good enough” or “better than some of the alternatives,” I certainly would’ve replaced them if I could.
Looking at some recent primaries
Back in 2020, Biden only had 51.7% of the votes in the democratic primaries. That made him by far the biggest single candidate, but that also means that almost half of democrats would have probably been happy to replace them with one of the other 4 candidates if they could (though they would have disagreed on which of the 4.) Most of them would still go on to vote for biden despite him not being their first pick.
In 2016, trump won with 44.9%, again the biggest single candidate, but that means that 55.1% wanted not trump. Of course most of that majority still held their nose and voted for him in November, but the majority of them probably would have been happy to replace him at that time if they could.
2008 was really fucking close for the Democrats, Obama beat out Hillary with 48.1% of the vote to her 48%, and the remaining 3.9% voting for various other candidates, that means that the majority (51.9%) of people wanted a candidate other than Obama. Same year, McCain won his primary with 46.7%, so again the majority did not vote for him but for various other candidates.
And I think it’s pretty safe to say that in just about any election throughout history, voters would like to replace the opposing party’s candidate if they could, no surprise there.
A really big news story would be if the majority of the party not only would replace their candidate if they could, but were actually in agreement on who they would replace them with. If 6 in 10 Democrats said “We would like to replace Biden with this one specific other person that we all agreed on” then that would be big news.
I like guns, I don’t currently own any, that will probably change at some point in my life, but one of the several reasons I don’t have one is because I don’t have any space in my house that I’d want taken up by a gun safe.
I don’t even have kids and I don’t plan on having any, I can count the amount of times there has been a child in my house on one hand with fingers to spare, and if I have it my way my count will never reach my other hand, and the only time those children were out of an adult’s immediate supervision while they were here was when they were in the bathroom, but I can’t guarantee that will always be the case, I don’t know what friends or relatives may bring kids over and what may happen that will distract us from what they’re doing.
I live in a pretty safe neighborhood, but break-ins happen, and I don’t want my guns out on the streets, so not only will my safe be merely child-proof, it’s also going to be securely bolted to the wall and/or floor, and it’s going to be hard to break into, and ideally hidden from sight. No one’s getting guns out of my house against my will without at least some time and power tools.
Should my wife or I ever have a mental health crisis, I want to make sure that we have the means to secure those guns until we can get them out of the house by changing the combo or hiding the keys or whatever (and that would also be the end of guns in our house for good)
Anyone who doesn’t think of these kinds of circumstances has no business owning a gun.
I listen to a decent amount of audiobooks and I’ll occasionally miss a one-off description of something important. I was wondering if there are projects to add a visual component to audiobooks? Official or fan-made it doesn’t matter. If it does exist what would I search for to find something like this?...
I’ve seen a couple places offering what they’ll call something like “enhanced ebooks”
I admit that I haven’t given any of them a try, but the gist is that they’re an ebook with some extra multimedia content. It kind of looks like some places that do them do the absolute bare minimum to slap the “enhanced” label on them and just add some extra pictures and maps and such, and others go whole hog with added video, the full audio drama treatment with sound effects, different actors for the various characters, narration, etc. so some of them may potentially fill the role you’re looking for
I work in 911 dispatch, nursing homes are one of the banes of my existence.
Do they have any medical history we should know about?
No.
Oh, I guess they’re just putting perfectly healthy 57 year olds in nursing homes now, good to know.
Half of them can’t tell me the address of the damn place they work, which is really nice when they call from their cell phone which barely gets any signal inside the building. Sometimes it’s a crapshoot if they can even tell me the name of the facility
For whole lot of the people who work there, at least at the homes around me, English isn’t their first language, and they don’t speak or understand it very well and speak with a very heavy accent. I’m not knocking them just for that though, they speak more languages than I do, and are clearly trying to make a better life for themselves, I certainly can’t fault them for that, but it does make me a little concerned for their patients. If I, as someone with all of my mental faculties and hearing intact, can barely communicate with you, how effectively can they be treating and supporting patients who often have significant cognitive and/or hearing impairments?
Don’t get me started on the med techs. I’m not any kind of a healthcare professional, so I have only the vaguest idea what their role actually is in a nursing home, but from when they call 911 you would get the impression that they’re kept in a dark soundproof closet until they need someone to call 911, then they’re abruptly yanked out of the closet, spun around a few times, hit over the head with the phone, and told to call 911 while a strobe light flashes in their face, because they never have any idea what’s going on
Now don’t get me wrong, some nursing home staff are great, they have all of the information ready when they call, they’re polite, professional, everything I could hope for, but unfortunately they’re kind of the exception. 90% of the time when I see a call coming in from a nursing home I need to brace myself to deal with someone who is just an absolute mess, disorganized, ill-prepared, unintelligible, uncooperative, sometimes outright rude. Sometimes I consider myself lucky if they don’t just outright hang up on me halfway through the call.
Also some of them love medical jargon, and as I said I’m not a medical professional. They’ll call, rattle off a bunch of stats and vitals that mean nothing to me and aren’t going in my notes even if I could type as fast as they’re spitting them out. When I try to determine what the chief complaint is they’ll spit out something like “their potassium is low,” forcing me to ask for further clarification in plain english, so I know whether to code it as a cardiac thing, a respiratory thing, etc.
That makes me think of my own grandfather (in a good way) I will never claim that he was the most forward-thinking, tolerant, or politically correct person out there, there were a few stereotypes and bits out outdated terminology he never quite shook (for example, the term “colored” never quite left his vocabulary, and he had a tiny bit of lingering distrust of the Japanese having served in the Pacific during WWII)
But for a man who grew up in the time he did, he wasn’t half-bad.
He was never someone who was above holding a a grudge, and he’d gladly tell anyone who would listen who he didn’t like and why. His reasons weren’t always good, he got mad at people over a lot of petty bullshit, but I never heard him disparage someone because of their race. He ended up in a nursing home where a lot of the staff was black, and we never heard a peep from him about their race, he found plenty of other things to complain about, but there was no racial bias to it, he complained about the white employees as much or more than the black ones.
Little bit of fun family history with him, for most of his life he worked as a bus driver. Buses in our part of the country were racially integrated from pretty early on so that was never something he dealt with directly, but he did drive his bus at the same time that bus boycotts and such would have been happening in other parts of the country. He never told us this story himself, we heard it from some other older locals who remembered him driving the bus. There was one particular bus stop that was near a business that employed a lot of black women, and many of them took the bus. The bus would come at around the same time the business closed for the night, so they didn’t have much time to get to the stop before the bus came. A lot of other drivers wouldn’t wait for them, but my grandfather always did, and decades later many of them still remembered him for that.
I’ve been dealing with dandruff since I was a kid, it’s always made me really insecure and always wear a hat. I’ve tried plenty of different hair products, none seem to work. It’s not just my hair on my scalp, it’s my beard as well. I’m a 19 year old male (Caucasian), I’ve been already deciding if I want to go bald...
This is sort of second-hand advice, because luckily I’ve never really had any kind of skin/hair issues (except that I’m now losing the later, but I made peace with that and shaved my head)
But my wife has had some dandruff issues in the past, so I’ve learned a little from her.
Part of the issue is that there’s kind of several different issues at play that cause dandruff or dandruff-like symptoms, and common usage of the term often doesn’t really differentiate between them very well, even though the appropriate treatments for them may be very different.
For a long time, a lot of focus with dandruff was on fungal causes, and so a lot of the commonly-available anti-dandruff shampoos and treatments work, at least in part, by being antifungal.
Of course, if your dandruff isn’t actually caused by fungus, antifungal ingredients won’t do anything to help with your dandruff problem, and may even make it worse by drying out or irritating your scalp. That turned out to be my wife’s case, and her issue improved significantly by basically switching to any other shampoo besides anti-dandruff. It took a little fine-tuning and trial and error to figure out which shampoo and conditioner worked best for her, but the big first step was staying away from anti dandruff products.
There’s a lot of different combinations of hair types, skin type, and underlying conditions that could be at play, so there’s no-one-size-fits-all solution. If you haven’t already, a good first step is probably to talk to a dermatologist, or if you already are working with one, it may be time to look for a new one.
Failing that, do some research, figure out what send like is most likely to be causing your issue and the l how to treat it, try some things, if they don’t work, try some different things, repeat as necessary.
In inpatient psychiatry I tell my coworkers “I hope your shift is mind-numbingly boring” or something similar (keyword being boring) because in my line of work, interesting (usually) = bad....
I think there’s room for a little bit of nuance here
It’s pretty much always going to mean you’ve been a little dumb, or naive, etc. so it’s an insult in that sense.
But I tend to hear it used by southerners in sort of a “aw, they don’t know any better/can’t help it” sort of way.
So more like when I call my dog an idiot because she got her leash tangled around a street sign again. There’s no malice in it, she’s dumb, but she can’t help it, she’s just a dog.
Not like if I call my coworker an idiot because he’s continuing to fuck up the same basic shit no matter how or how many times you explain it to him, he should know better and can help it.
Now, there’s arguably another level of insult/disrespect implied because they are talking about you in the same way they would a dog or a small child. I don’t think that’s really something they usually intend, but of course the intention isn’t really as important as how the target actually feels about it. You can also probably get really psychological about it and dig into how their word choice reflects how they view others in relation to themselves or something, but I’m neither interested in nor qualified to go down that rabbit hole right now.
Disclaimer- those are just hypothetical examples I gave, both my dog and my coworkers are actually pretty pretty smart and capable. She’s actually the first dog I’ve ever had who actually seems to understand how to not get tangled on a street sign, so I mean no disrespect to her, or to my coworkers either I guess.
It will definitely vary from place to place, but I work in 911 dispatch, and I’m pretty sure you’d have to be in a really dysfunctional hellhole for police to not show up to an OD call involving a child.
I’m no nanotech scientist, so I won’t pretend I know all of the ins and outs here, but I’m sure when most people think about nanotechnology, they’re probably picturing something like the later generation iron man suit from the marvel movies made up of billions of tiny nanobots that can reconfigure themselves and such. If such things will ever be possible, they’re still a long way off
I have a hunch you probably have some visions in your head of tiny robots similar in size to a red blood cell swimming around in someone’s blood stream, that seemed like a trope that was used by a few different sci Fi series when I was growing up, and certainly the kind of thing I personally picture when I think of nanobots. Problem is, at the nano scale, those kinds of things are kind of huge, a blood cell is a few thousand nanometers across. Most of what we’re doing with nanotechnology is just a handful of nanometers in size, at the scale of a few molecules or even atoms. Eventually we may be able to put some of those parts together to make tiny robots and computers and such, but right now we’re still kind of figuring out how to make the nuts and bolts and gears and such to make those bots out of.
There’s also a lot of nanotech research that you may not really think of as technology but more as something like material science or chemistry. Any time you hear about new developments with carbon nanotubes or graphene, that’s nanotechnology. Practical applications for stuff like that are still mostly works in progress, we’re probably years, decades, maybe even centuries out before some of those things really come into their own, but when we do work out the bugs, they will absolutely be revolutionary.
But it’s not all far future stuff, it’s almost guaranteed that you have used and maybe even have in your home or on your person right now something that makes use of nanotech in some way. One example I saw mentioned a lot is sunscreen, there’s a lot of sunblock that makes use of zinc oxide and/or titanium dioxide nanoparticles, clothing may contain nanoparticles to help with things like waterproofing, reducing odor, etc. there’s lots of mundane nanotech that you’re probably already taking advantage of.
I don’t really like that they seem to be floating the idea of adding ads to the mix, but as long as this stays a separate part of the service from the on-demand section, I don’t exactly hate it.
I’ll occasionally have parties where we’ll use Pluto or similar services just to have something on. Usually something like the The Asylum channel to have a stream of something going that we’re not really invested in but that we can comment on and go “what the fuck was that‽” once in a while, and kind of do our own little MST3K thing.
And sometimes you just kind of want something on in the background while you’re doing stuff, and I know I’ll sometimes get a little bogged down trying to choose what I want to have on even though I’m not really going to be actively watching it.
I remember once upon a time there were some people who really wanted Netflix to add a “random episode” option, I wasn’t really one of them, but this could kind of fill that niche.
Also, if they curate it right, it could be kind of a cool way to drop new episodes. Say a new episode of a star wars show drops at midnight (or whatever-o’clock) For those who care to watch it immediately as it drops, they just need to be tuned to the star wars channel and it will come on automatically, no having to refresh and hit play. And leading up to the new episode they can do a mini marathon of relevant episodes from other star wars shows and movies that will help you understand what’s going on in the episode, maybe even create some new content summarizing content from the books, comics, and video games, etc. sort of an extended “last time on…” segment for the new episode. I’d also want it to be immediately available on-demand when it drops, but it could be kind of a good way to get yourself back up to speed about what’s going on in the show.
So there are ways this could be a cool addition to the service. Whether they actually use it that way is another matter entirely.
Never been committed or had to go through the process myself, but I do have some second-hand knowledge from my work as a 911 dispatcher.
Most important to keep in mind is that the specific laws and processes are going to vary depending on what state or country you live in, who can initiate it, what’s involved in the process, how long they can be held, what the process is is to extend that hold if needed, etc. will all vary a bit.
Most commonly, the requirements include something like the person must be a danger danger to themselves or others, and the relevant law will likely spell out how that is determined.
In general, an involuntary commitment should be a last resort. Probably not surprisingly someone who doesn’t want to be there probably won’t try very hard to keep up with their treatment, and since they can usually only be held for a few days without taking extra steps to extend it, they may be able to keep themselves out of trouble for just long enough to get released and then go right back to whatever they were doing to get committed in the first place. If you can somehow convince them to go of their own free will, they’re probably going to be a lot more cooperative, and sometimes, depending on the exact circumstances, it can actually be harder for them to leave before they’re better when they go voluntarily than when it’s involuntary.
Again, things are going to vary from one place or a person to another and I’m afraid there probably isn’t a simple, satisfying, one-size-fits-all answer to that question. There’s a lot of room for improvement at basically every level with mental healthcare, though it’s pretty hard to pick one or even a couple things and say “do this one thing differently and things will be better” because each of those one little things tends to lead straight down a rabbit hole of 10,000 other things that would also need to change for it to work.
Some very broad categories of things I’d like to see improved
More funding, resources, training, etc. there’s only so many psych hospitals, so many beds, doctors, nurses, etc. so even if we could somehow funnel everyone who really needs treatment down a path towards getting it, there’s really no way for them all to get it. We need to make sure that everyone who needs it is able to access high quality mental healthcare.
A whole lot of education, public awareness, societal changes, etc. need to happen. There’s still a whole lot of stigma and taboos about mental health issues and treatment. People don’t know what’s involved, are afraid of getting branded as crazy, don’t know what resources are available to them, how to access them, what their strengths and limitations are, they can’t afford it, a long stay in a psych hospital may mean losing their jobs or their home. Damn near every night I get a call for a domestic where I hear one of the parties yelling at the other that they’re going to get them committed, and often there’s no real sign that anyone involved actually has any kind of mental health issue, they’re mostly just idiots or assholes, so it’s usually an empty threat and paints the picture of treatment being some sort of punishment or a weapon to use against someone, and that sort of thinking really damages the reputation and efficacy of mental healthcare.
There probably need to be new categories of healthcare created, or if they do already actually exist, they need to be expanded. I can’t tell you how many calls I get a night from people who clearly have some kind of psych issues, but wouldn’t meet the bar of being a danger by any reasonable definition. I could probably rattle off a dozen names and addresses off the top of my head of people that I speak to almost every shift who probably really need to be in a psych hospital for a while to get themselves straightened out, but since they’re in no way dangerous, our hands are kind of tied, and the best we can do is offer them a mental health crisis line they can speak to, or send a cop out to check on them, make sure they’re ok, maybe talk to them for a while or leave them some pamphlets or business cards or something for resources they can try and hope they take the next step themselves, or at the very least tell them to stop calling 911 (which doesn’t really have any teeth, no one really wants to go through the paperwork and court hearings and such to get them in trouble for abusing the 911 system, I’ve only heard of it actually happening once in these kinds of cases in the 5 years I’ve been working here, and in their minds they’re calling about an actual emergency, and we don’t want to discourage them from calling if/when there actually is something going on, it’s happened before that they’ve actually called in a real incident) so there needs to be some sort of middle ground between hauling them off kicking and screaming to be committed and just making suggestions and hoping they follow through with them, and I don’t really know what that middle ground is.
You’re being really critical here for no good reason, it almost feels like you’re the one with a troll account.
You could clear up your confusion about the username by a quick Google search. The library of babel is a story Jorge Louis Borges, about a vast library that contains every possible combination of letters and words, and if you Google “dhcmrlchtdj,” you can see that it’s one combination of letters that he specifically calls out to illustrate that point.
And like you said, an involuntary commitment is a serious issue to contemplate and a sensitive topic for a lot of people, I think it’s pretty understandable that someone may not want to share a lot of details about what their friend is going through.
TranscriptionTumblr post by arctic-hands: > When I was a teenager and still on Neopets I was part of a pretty big Star Trek guild and eventually became part of its council, with the solemn duty of creating weekly polls. Well one day I created the poll “Which would win in a fight? Borg Cube or Death Star?”. Naturally, since...
It’s specifically the size of a small moon, remember that the Earth’s moon is actually pretty large, 5th largest in our solar system and by a pretty good margin the largest in comparison to the planet it orbits, just in our own solar system we have Deimos at only about 6KM, and in other parts of the universe I’m sure they could be even smaller, in our own solar system Jupiter pretty regularly captures small asteroids into its orbit that could be considered temporary moons.
From the various wikis and such, the death stars were about 120 (1st death star) and 160 (2nd) km in diameter, so 60 and 80 in radius, so still significantly larger than a cube, but far less so than the 1000km you’re thinking.
And size doesn’t necessarily correlate to how much power they have at their disposal or how much they can absorb/deflect. Their weapons/shields are probably based on very different technologies, it could be like comparing a Davy Crockett nuke (basically the real-life equivalent of a fallout mini nuke) to an equivalent sized bomb made of black powder, or like an inch thick plate of steel to the same sized sheet of plywood.
And the death star crew was much larger, somewhere around 2 million people plus a few hundred thousand maintenance droids. Those humans need a lot more space and creature comforts than the Borg who just need alcoves to recharge in. I’m sure that they weren’t exactly providing luxury accomodations for most of the rank-and-file grunts and contractors and such, but they certainly got more space than the Borg need, plus dining halls, kitchens, medical bays, recreation areas, meeting rooms, offices, throne rooms, detention levels, etc. a lot of things the Borg have little or no use for. The Borg may be able to dedicate more space on the cube to weapons and shields than the death star could.
The main issue with lead contamination in cast iron cookware is that people sometimes use it to melt lead for things like making bullets and fishing weights.
So in most cases griddles are probably pretty safe, they have a very shallow if any rim, so they’re not exactly ideal for holding a puddle of molten metal and pouring it into a mold. I’d be more concerned with pots and skillet that could hold liquid a little better.
That’s not to say there’s no risk though, I could certainly imagine someone using a griddle as a convenient heat-resistant surface to pour out leftover lead to cool on afterwards, but that’s probably significantly less common.
I recently set up a LLM to run locally on my desktop. Now that the novelty of setting it up and playing with different settings has worn off, I’m struggling to come up with actual uses for it. What do you use it for when not doing work stuff?
I’ve had pretty good luck getting cocktail recipes out of chatgpt. They sometimes need a little tweaking but it hasn’t steered me horribly wrong yet.
I’m also going to be officiating a wedding for a friend in a few months, so I’ve been using it to work out what I want to say for the ceremony.
I have a coworker who’s been taking some college classes. He struggles a bit with writing papers, he knows all the material just doesn’t quite know how to get started putting things down on paper. I told him to give it a try, with some strong warnings to rewrite and fact-check everything it spits out, and so far it’s been working out great for him and he’s been heeding my warnings, he pretty much punches in some prompts and bullet points and then goes through and rewords everything it spits out and fact-checks it as he goes.
Just to be clear, you’re not getting downvoted because people disagree with the idea that the oil industry is a problem that’s holding back greener energy sources.
And most probably aren’t down voting because the guillotine remark being a call to violence or anything like that.
The downvotes are purely because that was a very cringy comment to read, it wasn’t funny, and it didn’t really add anything useful to the conversation.
The wikipedia article for “Easter” covers the bases pretty well.
TL;DR- The date of Easter is determined based on a lunisolar calendar, similar to the Hebrew calendar, so it falls on a different date every year, similarly to how Jewish holidays fall on different dates.
The rule is it falls on the Sunday on or after the full moon that occurs on or after the spring equinox (although not the actual solar equinox, because it was decided a long time ago that for church purposes they would use March 21 as the equinox date)
That was decided with the council of Nicea in 325, before the schism between eastern and western churches, so pretty much the whole Christian world was on the same page at the time. When they split 1054, they still stayed on the same page, because they were both still using the Julian calendar, but that March 21st date slowly drifted further and further away from the actual equinox because they didn’t account for leap years properly.
Then in 1524, The Catholic Church decided to do something about that, and came out with the Gregorian calendar. Catholics made the switch pretty much immediately, and most protestant Churches did too over the next couple of hundred years, so they’re all pretty much on the same page
Most of the eastern orthodox churches, however, still base their holidays off of the Julian calendar, even though for pretty much everything else people use the Gregorian calendar, and the two calendars are currently 13 days off, so March 21st in the Julian calendar is April 3rd on the Gregorian calendar (and in 2100 after the Julian calendar has a leap year that the Gregorian doesn’t, it’ll increase to 14 days difference)
So depending on how the full moons line up, there can be a pretty significant difference in when Easter falls for the two churches. Next year they will actually fall on the same date, which will happen occasionally until the year 2700 when the two calendars will have drifted too far apart for it to ever happen again (or at least until they get so far out of sync that they’re almost a full year behind, I’m too lazy to do the math but we’re talking like tens or hundreds of thousands of years in the future when that happens, so hardly even worth worrying about right now)
Similarly, most Orthodox churches celebrate Christmas on January 7th currently, because it’s 13 days after December 25th on the Gregorian calendar. It’s still December 25th on the Julian calendar though. And after 2100 it will be on January 8th (unless they adopt the Gregorian calendar before then, or like most Ukrainian orthodox churches decided to do last year, decide to just celebrate it on December 25th with most of the rest of the world)
This is not the first time I’ve ranted about the previous owner’s wiring jobs, though I think they were on the other site (and I had a different username there)....
I don’t *think *it’s actually against code (not an electrician,) just kind of lazy and not really the best practice provided that strain relief and everything else is done properly. Electrically it should be pretty much exactly the same as doing it the normal way.
I encountered it on one light switch in my house when I was replacing it. I really didn’t feel like running out to the hardware store to buy another couple of inches of wire to redo it, so somewhat to my shame I just hooked up the new switch the same way.
I just realised that I have never seen or used it, neither crude oil of course, but there are more variants of it than this natural mineral that powers a lot of the world....
How to get wood sealant off of a window
So I was using a wood sealer (www.amazon.com/dp/B01AQTX3XU) on my newly built catio. Unfortunately I didn’t notice how much I had sprayed on the adjacent window....
The EPA is again allowing summer sales of higher ethanol gasoline blend, citing global conflicts | AP News (apnews.com)
OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency cleared the way Friday for a higher blend of ethanol to be sold nationwide for the third summer in a row, citing global conflicts that it says are putting pressure on the world’s fuel supply....
Those of you that have AmTrak'd cross-country (East-West/West-East), how was your experience?
Did you enjoy it? Was it worth it? How were you able to pull it off?
Trump Respects Women, Most Men Say (www.nytimes.com)
62 percent of Biden voters want to replace both candidates on the ballot: Poll (www.thehill.com)
Michigan father 1st charged under new safe gun storage law after son shoots himself in the face (abcnews.go.com)
Are there audiobook releases that have a visual component?
I listen to a decent amount of audiobooks and I’ll occasionally miss a one-off description of something important. I was wondering if there are projects to add a visual component to audiobooks? Official or fan-made it doesn’t matter. If it does exist what would I search for to find something like this?...
Biden administration finalizes controversial minimum staffing mandate at nursing homes (www.cnn.com)
The Biden administration finalized on Monday the first-ever minimum staffing rule at nursing homes, Vice President Kamala Harris announced....
For people who have psoriasis/eczema/bad skin, how did you get rid of your dandruff?
I’ve been dealing with dandruff since I was a kid, it’s always made me really insecure and always wear a hat. I’ve tried plenty of different hair products, none seem to work. It’s not just my hair on my scalp, it’s my beard as well. I’m a 19 year old male (Caucasian), I’ve been already deciding if I want to go bald...
What's your best unconventional "blessing" like when people tell an actor "break a leg!"
In inpatient psychiatry I tell my coworkers “I hope your shift is mind-numbingly boring” or something similar (keyword being boring) because in my line of work, interesting (usually) = bad....
Father and aunt waited hours to call 911 for 2-year-old who ingested fentanyl, later died, warrant shows (www.usatoday.com)
What ever happened to nanotechnology? Seems like it disappeared.
Most are probably too young to remember but nanotechnology was supposed to be the most super amazing thing ever.
Disney+ could introduce linear cable-style streaming channels to increase app usage time and user engagement. (alternativeto.net)
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Who would win: Borg Cube or Death Star? (aussie.zone)
TranscriptionTumblr post by arctic-hands: > When I was a teenager and still on Neopets I was part of a pretty big Star Trek guild and eventually became part of its council, with the solemn duty of creating weekly polls. Well one day I created the poll “Which would win in a fight? Borg Cube or Death Star?”. Naturally, since...
How do I test cast iron cookware for lead
cross-posted from: lemmy.today/post/9250689...
What do you use AI/LLMs for in your personal life?
I recently set up a LLM to run locally on my desktop. Now that the novelty of setting it up and playing with different settings has worn off, I’m struggling to come up with actual uses for it. What do you use it for when not doing work stuff?
US aiming to ‘crack the code’ on deploying geothermal energy at scale (www.theguardian.com)
Recent $74m investment made alongside assessment that 10% of electricity could be generated by geothermal by 2050...
Republicans slam Biden for proclaiming Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter, though it’s yearly observed on March 31 (www.cnn.com)
Latest rant...wiring by the PO
This is not the first time I’ve ranted about the previous owner’s wiring jobs, though I think they were on the other site (and I had a different username there)....
Have you ever seen coal in real life?
I just realised that I have never seen or used it, neither crude oil of course, but there are more variants of it than this natural mineral that powers a lot of the world....