exasperation

@exasperation@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Things are getting really crazy.⁩ ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m a subscriber to their monthly print copy, and a lot of the stories in the print version don’t make it to the website as quickly. I’ve got the February copy on my desk with the following headlines:

  • Trump Administration Offers Free At-Home Loyalty Tests: Tool That Diagnoses Disobedience to be Mailed to U.S. Households
  • U.S. Military Bans Men With Girl Names From Combat - Wars Will No Longer Be Fought By Male Shannons, Terrys, or Carmens
  • Baby Saves Affair: Illicit Relationship Rekindled by Out-of-Wedlock Birth

  As far as I can tell, these articles never made it online. And they are funny. Good coffee table material.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Although i love it⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  In my opinion, cauliflower sucks unless it’s been roasted/fried/seared with dry high heat to the point of being brown and crispy.

  If it is overcooked, the rupture of the cell walls makes that cabbage stank run out into the dish.

  If it’s still raw or cooked at too low a temperature (which includes any temperature in which liquid water will exist on the surface), it’s missing the delicious browning that happens at high heat.

  That means it doesn’t work as cauliflower “wings.” The breading/batter protects the cauliflower too much, and it ends up steaming itself inside. Just batter up some firm tofu instead, those are great wings.

  It can work as cauliflower “steak” I guess, but that doesn’t really taste like it should fit the culinary role of a protein/main. I’m all about roasting cauliflower, and flat slices make it easy to grill or sear evenly, but that just doesn’t fit that ecological niche that a steak does.

  So I generally don’t like cauliflower served with broccoli. They cook too differently to be able to actually cook them together in the same batch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Choose a number, 1-5!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  When I got married, sitting down with the caterer and choosing between dozens of flatware types, I realized that I personally like three dimensional smoothness, with round, cylindrical handles that have some heft but not too much width. I also like cylindrical tines that don’t look like it was made from a flat sheet of metal cut and bent into shape (I prefer tines that are cylindrical, not rectangular prisms).

  I also like curves along where the head meets the handle, and along the head itself. No sharp corners or edges.

  I dislike ornamentation on the handle itself. I like plain, smooth handles.

  I chose the forks for my wedding, and then later on in life, based on what I learned about my own preferences, I bought some flatware that fits those general principles (looks like the Sambonet Hannahs, but cheaper than that very expensive line), and replaced the ones in my house. Now I basically don’t have any forks that I don’t like.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨1994 white Kevin⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  John Mulaney has a joke about how his parents knew Bill Clinton that way, from all going to undergrad together at Georgetown. Apparently all the women loved being escorted by Bill Clinton, and the men were all jealous.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What else are they hiding from us?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup. Electrical engineering does something similar. The addition and subtraction of voltages, currents, resistance, capacitance, and inductance in AC circuits is basically unworkable without the shortcut of converting the sinusoidal waves into imaginary phase angles and doing math on them, and then converting them back to sinusoidal waves as necessary.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Me want cookie⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Cookie is already a slang term for pussy, you can skip that step.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Me want cookie⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, cookie monster is blue, but this particular shot has so much dark shadow in that textured fur that it’s nearly black in most places.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Me want cookie⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Industrious eye

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Infinite Monkey Theorem⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You don’t need a normal distribution or statistical independence. It just requires that any given key combination remain possible.

  No matter how unlikely, anything that is possible will eventually happen in an infinite time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Infinite Monkey Theorem⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Some infinities are bigger than others, though.

  Even if you have countably infinite monkeys typing countably infinite strings for an infinite period of time, there will be an infinite number of strings that the monkeys haven’t typed, that will never be in the set of completed typed strings.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Infinite Monkey Theorem⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Two new monkeys show up, and even though the infinite rooms and infinite typewriters are already occupied, you can make room for them by making all of the monkeys move over one room, and putting the new monkeys in that newly vacant room with the newly available typewriters.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pens in Space⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ok there Ongo Baglogian

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elevated⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not just purely aesthetic, although that is a big part of it.

  Some of it is actual quality not related to safety: if fruit is being processed after insects have already gone to town on it, that’s not the same quality of fruit that should’ve been used, and might actually affect the flavor.

  Some of it is still safety. Freezing foods generally don’t kill bacteria, and sometimes don’t even kill molds or other fungi. Neither do packaging for shelf stable dry foods like flour, rice, cornmeal, etc. That’s why the danger in raw cookie dough comes from the flour, not the eggs.

  And it’s an indirect issue, but insect contamination may also be an indicator of other dangers that aren’t solved by processing. Metal shavings or bits of rock can get into food, and having a tightly controlled process should prevent those dangers, too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You cannot learn without failing.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A course I took in undergrad on the history and philosophy of science really stayed with me, and is a really helpful way of understanding how science actually works.

  Karl Popper wrote the revolutionary work The Logic of Scientific Discovery, which proposed that what separated science from pseudoscience as whether the discipline actually makes predictions that can be proven wrong, and whether it changes its own rules when it observes exceptions to those rules.

  Well, Thomas Kuhn came along and wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argued that not all scientific theories were equally falsifiable. Kuhn argued that science actually tolerated a lot of anomalous observations without actually rejecting the discipline’s own paradigms or models. In Kuhn’s view, scientists performed “normal science” by accumulating knowledge under an established paradigm, including tolerating observed anomalies, until someone would have to come along and use the accumulated anomalies to actually propose something revolutionary that breaks a lot of previous models, and throws away a lot of the work that came before, in a scientific revolution. Under Kuhn’s description, science is quite resistant to criticism or falsifiability under the “normal science” periods, even if it accepts that revolutions are occasionally necessary.

  The prominent example was that Mercury’s orbit didn’t quite fit Newton’s theory of gravity, and astronomers and physicists kept trying to rework the formula on the edges without actually challenging the core paradigm. For decades, astronomers simply shrugged their shoulders and said that they knew that the motion of Mercury tended to drift from the predictive model, but they didn’t have anything better to turn to, if they were to reject Newtonian gravity. It wasn’t until Einstein’s special relativity that scientists did have something better, and learning that Einstein’s theory works even when near a large gravity well was revolutionary.

  Others include the phlogiston theory of combustion that persisted for a bit even after it was measured that combustion of metallic elements increased the mass of the resulting burned stuff, as if phlogiston had negative mass.

  Imre Lakatos tried to bridge the ideas of Popper and Kuhn, by observing that each discipline had their own “Research Programs” that weren’t necessarily compatible with others in their own field. Quantum physics was aware of cosmology/relativity, and it didn’t much matter that these two sets of theories and research methods had different scopes, and contradicted each other at times. But each Research Program had its own “hard core” that was not subject to questioning or challenge, while most scientists did the work in the “protective belt” around that core. And even when a particular Research Program gets battered by a series of contradictory observations, it’s perfectly rational for scientists in that field to rally in defense of that hard core to see if it can be revived, at least for a time until that defense becomes untenable. In a sense, Lakatos described the fields where Kuhn’s “normal science” and “revolutionary science” actually happened, and how Popper’s falsifiability criterion fit into each space.

  Paul Feyerabend also added a lot of color to these theories, too. He described the tenacity of ideas as being driven by more than simple falsifiability, but also of just how attractive of an idea it was. In his descriptions, ideas basically fought for popularity on many different metrics, and the sterile ideas of falsifiability didn’t actually account for how ideas compete in the marketplace, even among allegedly rational scientists.

  So yeah, this comic is basically Karl Popper’s views. The world as a whole, though, has definitely moved on from that definition trying to demarcate between science and pseudoscience.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elevated⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you don’t have the time for homemade, store bought is fine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Make gravity your bitch⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Gravity ain’t shit. It’s not the falling that kills you, it’s the impact at the bottom. Which are electromagnetic forces.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨logs are for quitters⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup. If, for example, you’re designing a deep space mission, where every gram counts, there’s a conversation to be had about whether it’s cost effective (and appropriate risk) to send nuclear reactors and fuel aboard those spacecraft.

  Or using modern engineering, whether an aircraft carrier should be powered by nuclear fission or internal combustion of hydrocarbons.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is there steam coming out of the streets in New York⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t seen a new bank branch open with a drive through in a long, long time. Most banks just have multiple ATMs in the drive through, as there’s very little you’d need a teller to do compared to what the ATMs can do now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is there steam coming out of the streets in New York⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It was the fastest way to get original physical documents from one side/floor of the building to another.

  When I was a kid that was the standard way that banking drive throughs worked, too. You’d drive up to the multi-lane drive through, each station would have a pneumatic tube for handing off cash or checks or receipts between the car and the teller in the window. It pretty much ended when ATMs could start handling cash and checks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨purpose⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think in Lilo and Stitch the aliens mention in passing that they use Earth as a wildlife preserve for mosquitoes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Genius⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Taco Bell was a cynical invention by Alexander Graham Bell to sell more Bell peppers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A dating app just for us⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Code switching is a thing.

  I have my professional voice for work emails and meetings and stuff like that. I still joke, but usually it’s the kind of mild humor that can be broadcast on TV no problem. I also avoid self deprecating humor on anything actually related to the job (I can still joke about being a bad dancer or singer or athlete or whatever).

  I have my parent voice when dealing with my kids’ schools, doctors, friends’ parents, etc. Most of my jokes here are relatable parent humor.

  I have my casual voice when dealing with strangers outside of work: friends of friends, neighbors, etc. I joke but don’t really do anything with politics, religion, sex, profanity, etc.

  And as I get to know friends, I have several distinct voices that I use, depending on our connection and their own style. I know whether they’re on my wavelength for political humor, crass/sexual humor, etc. And perhaps most importantly, the style of humor: I’ll make references to specific TV shows I know the other person loved (Simpsons, The Office, Tim Robinson, etc.), other specific interests (sports, programming, food), which style of online meme is popular with the other person, etc.

  My wife has seen all of these parts of me. We still exchange funny stuff we find on the internet on our shared interests and style of humor, even if it’s only a subset of all the things we find funny.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This is unfair!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, do these sound like the actions of a man who had all he could eat?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I wonder how much of it is horny old dudes and how much is actually lonely old dudes. These types of arrangements, somewhere in the gray area between transactional paid sex work and companionship between equal partners might not satisfy the loneliness part of the equation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨the sweet sound of turtles fucking 😍 🐢⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Use context clues. It’s about sounds, so it’s obviously sax.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon takes an exam⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I had an engineering professor in freshman year give exams expecting the class average to be 50% of the available points, and just graded on a curve based on how many standard deviations we were from the mean. So a 50 was generally good enough for a B. It was not a statistics class, but I think I learned more about statistics from that class than any other.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should a movie released in 1995 be considered an "old" movie?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The plot of Austin Powers revolves around thawing a man who has been frozen for 30 years, from 1967 to 1997. Only 2 years to go before we reach 30 years from that movie’s release.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should a movie released in 1995 be considered an "old" movie?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Colin Farrell in Phone Booth perfectly captured that early 2000’s feeling of where we were, technologically.

  1998’s You’ve Got Mail does, too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is worried about men⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s none of my business

  Isn’t it, though? I’m in my 40’s and still rely on my family for advice, and to continue to grow and develop as a person. I have a lot to learn, and I think other people’s thoughts and experiences are helpful for getting through things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is worried about men⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  18-25 in 2025 means 13-20 when COVID happened.

  We’re going to see the long term effects of people in that micro generation losing much of what the high school social scene represented, that low stakes junior league of forming new relationships, where meeting is easy, with lots of natural opportunities for free interaction, and making new connections is normal. Learning to flirt in that environment is a stepping stone towards being able to navigate the adult world, where people don’t have your schedule planned out for you, and you won’t naturally see the same people 100+ days out of the year, and have 50+ chances to shoot your shot when you’re ready.

  And yes, sure, the loss of third places and changing social dynamics and gender roles and the economy play a role, too, for pretty much everyone under 40. But it’s worth pointing out that this specific age cohort has special challenges on top of the issues that everyone else is living, too.