SoleInvictus
@SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on in all fairness italian cuisine is a relatively recent invention 1 day ago:
I hate Italian breakfast. My stomach doesn’t fare well with coffee, sugar, or wheat. I skip breakfast when I’m there.
- Comment on Truth hurts! 1 day ago:
Good question. Slender is a better term. Their skeletal structure is horizontally compact, more so than a Border Collie. Scientists can estimate musculature based on the size and shape of attachment points, but it’s all speculative.
- Comment on Truth hurts! 1 day ago:
Plus they were much smaller than depicted in movies. They are estimated to have weighed about 15 kg and were about 2m long, but over half of that was tail. A Border Collie has about the same body length and a much thicker build.
They were long, skinny murder turkeys.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
Those were the days, when Musk still had a “will they, won’t they” relationship with being a total piece of shit.
- Comment on You don't say. 4 days ago:
Can confirm. I was given it to help with a medication known for spiking anxiety during the initial doses. Not only did my anxiety not increase, I was better able to do things I was usually reluctant to do because of stress or anxiety. It’s like I just didn’t care as much.
The major downside for me was lower blood pressure than normal, so I got dizzy easily if I stood up too fast.
- Comment on Lab anxiety 4 days ago:
Same. I’ve used tens of thousands of pipette tips. I can’t imagine what my lifetime plastic consumption is like compared to your average person. I’m guessing I’m like a small neighborhood.
- Comment on Annual merit increase 1 week ago:
I worked for a call center as a stop gap when I was younger. The economy had shit itself and while this company was doing great, it was looking to save money because they knew they could squeeze desperate people. Annual raises were coming up. They were based on a system heavily influenced by disciplinary action, so many of my coworkers started getting verbal and written warnings for ridiculous things.
I finally got written up for not pulling up a reference before telling a customer about a past event. I didn’t pull the reference up because I already had it and other common topics open for easy access, which my supervisor told us to do.
I disputed the write-up but the department manager denied it as “the information could have changed between calls, so you should have looked it up through our knowledge base”. I asked how the past could have changed and was told it doesn’t matter: it’s policy. I asked to see the policy. The goalposts immediately changed: “disciplinary action is at management’s discretion and this was a serious error in judgment”. I told them that I was shocked anyone could say that and still expect to be taken seriously, even by themselves, and refused to sign my write-up. I was pulled into the HR manager’s office and given a “Final Warning” write-up for my attitude and not signing my initial write-up. I signed that one and got on a PIP, so they were happy.
Annual reviews were that week. I had extraordinary performance stats but got a $0.04 per hour annual raise - $83.20 per year! I walked out once I got a new job.
I just checked: my old manager is now a “boss babe” who sells essential oils and scented candles for MLMs. Sometimes a life well lived really is the best revenge.
- Comment on Valid Theory: Scientists Are Actually Wizards 1 week ago:
I’m even the kind in your picture!
- Comment on dating 1 week ago:
I agree, you just should tell people first! Unsolicited story time:
We had been dating for a few weeks. She was smart, nice, and very fun. I really liked her and had decided to consider getting serious. I thought she had ghosted me for our dinner date, though, so I had left and was feeling sad. She called over an hour later to apologize profusely and beg me to come back, saying she’d explain and buy everything that night as apology.
What she didn’t mention was that she was going to alternate between incoherent rambling and staring, silent and unresponsive, into one corner of the cafe’s ceiling. I had no idea what was going on. I got ahold of her roommate, who said she had eaten a bunch of shrooms and walked to her friend’s house. I left after he arrived and I learned he was her roommate… and her boyfriend. Fun.
I went full no contact. Years later, we worked together briefly in graduate school, where she pretended not to know me despite having already told our lab mates we used to be friends. Super awkward, maybe mental problems.
- Comment on Valid Theory: Scientists Are Actually Wizards 1 week ago:
I am one, and it’s the closest you can get to being a wizard. You use the in-depth knowledge and tools of your domain to do things the general population often doesn’t fully understand and can’t do well themselves, if at all.
Sounds like wizards to me.
- Comment on dating 1 week ago:
I had a formula: “Hi!”, my real first name, a brief mention and open-ended question about something I found interesting on their profile, then closing with something like “Online dating can be a lot. I’d love to hear from you, but only when you’re ready. No pressure. I hope you have a great day.”
So about four sentences. It took me like two minutes. I got about 1 response in 10 instead of over 1:30 that way, at least from women. Success!
I then proceeded to have all of the worst dates I’ve ever been on. One person showed up on shrooms, a woman interrogated me about marriage and children within ten minutes of meeting, another seemed to be fabricating their entire life story on the spot… and more! There were good dates too, but soooo much bad.
- Comment on Hooded Horse ban AI-generated art in their games: "all this thing has done is made our lives more difficult" 2 weeks ago:
I had never heard about temp tracks, but this makes so much sense. That’s a powerful homogenizing force.
- Comment on Generation Wars 2 weeks ago:
Do you mean the pistil? The stamen is the part of a flower that creates pollen.
Assuming yes, it grows a tube down the pistil into the ovary, then sends sperm to fertilize the flowers ovules.
- Comment on Generation Wars 2 weeks ago:
Yep! Pollen are haploid, but technically they’re actually monoploid (or equivalent, depending on polyploidy) given they’re a fully functioning organism.
This is surprisingly common. All the pollen, male bees and ants (and actually a bunch of males in the order Hymenoptera grow from unfertilized eggs), and algae, for example. Certain fungi go through most of their lifecycles haploid and have a brief diploid phase, which undergoes meiosis to get right back to haploid, albeit for gametes this time. Tons of stuff! Nature is fucking wild.
- Comment on Generation Wars 2 weeks ago:
I was about to respond Jarvis to continue the chain, then realized the name sounded familiar. Yep, right in the comic.
It’s me. The comic is about me.
Ask me about microbes!
- Comment on Generation Wars 2 weeks ago:
Totally. Each pollen grain is a more or less self-sufficient organism, at least for its task, which is being transported to another receptive plant, then producing sperm for fertilization.
The closest analogy would be if humans had loads of tiny testicles that they sprayed everywhere, hoping one would hook up with a female so it could produce sperm in them for fertilization.
- Comment on Ubisoft Closes Canadian Studio After It Unionizes 2 weeks ago:
But what does it say?
- Comment on Anon thinks about wheat 3 weeks ago:
It’s so substantial, even chewy. I love oat groats for this too.
- Comment on Anon thinks about wheat 3 weeks ago:
Thank you! I was looking for this comment before posting about it. Almost every grain can be cooked in large amounts of boiling water, like pasta.
- Comment on What common American habits do people find quietly annoying? 3 weeks ago:
I can tell you, I’m a real molecular/microbiologist!
Tl;Dr: It’s mostly bunk.
Most of these services don’t analyze your entire genome*, but instead just regions of genes, looking for something called SNPs: single nucleotide polymorphisms. DNA is composed of four nucleobases, commonly represented by their initials: T and A, C and G. A SNP is a spot on a gene where there’s some variability in these, e.g., a C or A or even a T instead of a common G.
Through whole genome sequencing and statistical analysis, these companies were able to identify frequency trends in SNPs according to where the person lives and their self-reported ancestry. Now they use a cheaper, less comprehensive (but still fairly accurate) process to look for the SNPs that data suggests are most strongly correlated with different regions/ancestries and dole out your supposed ancestry.
There are problems.
Conclusions are only as good as your data, and the data are often based strongly on self-reporting, which is usually pretty inaccurate.
SNPs aren’t static - every child has some, about 20 to 60, that their parents don’t have. Many detrimental SNPs can lead to death, so most that persist have no effect, though some are weakly detrimental or, even more rarely, beneficial. That means there’s a limited pool of viable options, so your kid might have spontaneously developed a few strongly associated with a region they’re not at all connected to. You have a few too, as does your coparent and all of your parents. Through a couple of generations of new SNPs, a person’s ancestry results can shift. Through random chance and no new SNPs, one might inherit a combination of SNPs commonly seen in other regions, simply through the right combination of ancestors not at all from that area.
Some SNPs are better than others. Those on what are called “highly conserved” genes, i.e., fuck this gene up at all and you die, tend to be less common and more stable. If a defined group has an unusual SNP or SNPs on these regions, it’s a far better indicator of relatedness than a SNP on a gene for something like vitamin C synthesis, which we have but the process is broken so it doesn’t matter if we break it more.
In summary, these services are built on data of varying quality (shitty data) and moving targets of variable utility (shitty targets).
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
*If you can swing it, genome sequencing and analysis can be really interesting and useful for healthcare decisions. You can learn a lot about how you, specifically, work, and we’re learning more all the time.
Just be sure to get sufficient sequencing coverage, at least 30x if you want “good enough”, 100x or more if it’s medically vital and/or you’re looking for rare genes. 1x is fairly worthless, paying for it is a waste of money.
- Comment on What common American habits do people find quietly annoying? 3 weeks ago:
I also find it maddening, not only because it’s silly, but because the analysis is largely crap anyhow.
My mother’s family touted their “Irish heritage for three generations”, then quickly shut up when their genome analysis “proved” they were instead largely English. I’ve had to point out Ireland and England’s relative positions and ask them if they thought anyone in our ancestry might have ever moved from island to island. Maybe consider that they were from somewhere else in Europe even earlier? Now they’re “Irish” again.
Point entirely missed, JFC. They were Irish, their ancestors were maybe English, and way back, their ancestors were definitely African, but I don’t see them getting into African cultural heritage. Thankfully.
You’re United Statesians. I get the draw, they’re looking for genuine but effort-free connection, identity, and belonging in a country whose dominant culture is homogenization, commoditization, and exploitation, but their search for culture through tenuous connections to long-dead ancestors instead of family, friends, and neighbors is just as hollow and unfulfilling.
Don’t obsess about great³-Grandpa Pádraig’s life harvesting peat from the bogs; he’s long dead and probably would have hated you. Embrace what and where you are and utilize and improve what you actually have.
- Comment on Wikipeter was the founder of the site in 1993 when he wanted to know more about model trains without having to visit the library 3 weeks ago:
Or that the editor misquoted the source entirely. I’ve even found articles that are littered with “citation needed” that have persisted as such for weeks or months.
I think sometimes people unfairly discount Wikipedia’s utility and overinflate its problems, while others are too cavalier about them. Wikipedia is a useful starting point for research as long as the researcher has the knowledge required to evaluate articles and perform further inquiry into their sources.
- Comment on My kitten loves his hammock in the bathroom window, but my neighbor's trash pile ruins pictures 4 weeks ago:
I was thinking a “poorly aimed” bottle rocket “from a neighbor kid”.
- Comment on I need to vent about plastic milk jugs 4 weeks ago:
This is awesome. Thank you! I think the collective efforts of everyone here may have made this the Internet’s definitive post about milk jug construction.
I’ve now spent literal hours reading about and discussing jugs for milk, something I don’t drink. This isn’t even my area of expertise! I’m providing all of this to my therapist as further proof that yeah, I’m probably autistic.
- Comment on I need to vent about plastic milk jugs 4 weeks ago:
Bingo, you got it. It only shrinks so much in volume because there’s a ton of surface area. If it was something with less surface area in relation to volume, like a sphere, it’d be much less dramatic.
Yeah, the shipping thing doesn’t really make sense for exactly the reasons you stated. The issue is more about the temperature when the bottle is made. This is done by inflating a warm plastic tube in a mold. Cooler plastic has a bit more rebound, where it shrinks a little when the air pressure is removed. This still happens in the summer, but since the environment is a touch warmer, it shrinks just a bit less. Since a 0.5-1.0% overall change has a significant effect on the volume, you get the compensating dimple.
- Comment on I need to vent about plastic milk jugs 4 weeks ago:
You’re welcome and encouraged to look into it yourself. You misunderstand what I’m saying and draw further conclusions based on that, though, so I can see why it doesn’t make sense. I’ll take a stab at explaining.
I did mean surface area, not thickness. As volume decreases, so do the dimensions of the object. The thickness of the plastic is already negligible and any change within that plane is a fraction of that, so even less pertinent here. The remaining two planes of the exterior, being several orders of magnitude larger, do experience functionally significant, easily measured change. Those two planes as they relate to volume are most succinctly explained as surface area.
I mentioned the SA:V change to illustrate that this size change isn’t visually apparent, so it’s important to adjust the volume via the dimple. This maintains a steady milk level so jugs can hold an entire gallon in the winter and ensures customers don’t think jugs are underfilled in the summer. In cold weather, the dimensions of the jugs reduce less than 1%, which means visually the change is difficult to notice, but the volume changes a fair amount, around 5%. A change in size imperceptible to most reduces the volume of the jug by about 1/20 without compensation*.
- This is how manufacturers can so easily fly under the radar with shrinkflation. It’s hard to see, especially since they use shapes that obfuscate these changes, but they’re easy to calculate.
- Comment on I need to vent about plastic milk jugs 4 weeks ago:
You’ve got it! My work was about sustainability, but that includes plastic consumption, so I learned about the factors that affect the amount used. You’re right on the process - they’re gross immediately after molding, so washing is next. The molds are water cooled, so they’re pretty consistent, it’s just heating the tube and the temperature of the compressed air that’s affected the most.
The volume change is unintuitively high. Jugs have a high SA:V ratio, being a curvy semi-rectangle with a hollow handle. A 1% surface area reduction results in a >5% drop in volume, about 7 fluid ounces per 1%, or 0.875 cups. Manufacturers really only see <1% reductions, but if they stuck with the same mold through the summer, they’d end up with a jug that looks to be about 0.5-0.75 cups low after filling. That’s pretty conspicuous for customers, especially since the top portion tapers, making the level drop even more dramatic.
- Comment on I need to vent about plastic milk jugs 4 weeks ago:
Believe it or not, this person is correct. It’s to adjust for differences in jug size caused by temperature.
Plastic jugs are made by blow molding, where a tube of plastic is warmed, then inflated within a mold using compressed air to create its shape. In winter, the air and environment are cooler so the plastic is also cooler and accordingly a bit less elastic while getting blown. This results in jugs that contract a bit more while cooling and are a bit smaller. To compensate, winter jugs have a shallower dimple. The alternative is either warming the air or warming the molds more, both of which cost more, while this actually slightly saves money by using a bit less plastic. The converse is true for summer jugs - bigger dimple, warmer air - as the warmer plastic molds more easily.
The dimple also adds a bit of structural stability, so the jugs can be made of slightly thinner plastic. These factories pump out millions of jugs, so even a $0.005 saving per jug adds up.
I actually did some work for a company that makes plastic containers, so I got it straight from them. Otherwise I’d provide a source. What I could find online that corroborates is low quality local reporting, so I didn’t bother with URLs.
- Comment on Some people prefer corn for some ungodly reason 5 weeks ago:
You can totally nix the pineapple! I’ve made it without when I didn’t have any. The dominant flavor is the corn and all spices. The drink tastes kinda like a very complex Kool Aid.
- Comment on Some people prefer corn for some ungodly reason 5 weeks ago:
I have an unhealthy love for corn. Ever try chicha morada?