In grocery stores in many parts of the US at least, it is extremely hard not to find bread in plastic bags. Even the one of 3 near me that has its own bakery puts the bread in a plastic bag, and then in another bag that is paper with a plastic “window”, and the paper part has a PE wax lining for god knows what reason.

Mitochondrion

Oh, I’m sure this’ll end well.

/s

Nah, reach is a huge advantage. I’m not sure how rapier fencing differs from regulation sabre/epée/foil, but here’s my 2 cents from that perspective:

Smaller people are not, as a rule, substantially quicker than larger. If you see any difference in your experience, it’s likely a selection bias (shorter people have to be quicker to compete at the same level). The shorter person must enter the strike range of the taller person before the taller person comes within theirs and must be significantly quicker or more skilled to overcome that dead space. If the taller person can maintain a proper distance, gg. Taller people can also lunge farther, giving a wider active range.

Targeting is a smaller issue than you make it out to be; footwork and maintaining balance, which reposition the core, are at least as important as leaning to dodge, and advantage the taller person (longer legs = more movement range). If the taller person is coming from above as you say, they can just continue their slash (sabre) downward toward that less mobile core, or squat a bit deeper if the arc won’t reach. If instead you were referring to a poke, they’re either already targeting the torso anyway (foil) or whatever body part is most easily reachable (epée; still often torso, but cheeky wrist/arm strikes can be something of an equalizer here), and anyway they are already striking at a range that the shorter person cannot, making a successful counterattack more difficult.

Besides reach, a height difference is brutal when it comes to sabre fencing; the shorter person is restricted to targeting arms and torso (can’t reach the head easily), so the taller person can anticipate strikes from fewer angles. The taller person can come from any direction and has gravity on their side for own overhead strikes. Those suck to defend against.

Good article, reactive web design notwithstanding (stop. breaking. my. scrolling). I’m not surprised that obtaining the chemicals was that easy, even accounting for the mislabeling and fake products. A lot of these chemicals are pretty simple and have pretty general use cases in the fine chemicals space. Hell, I had occasion to use (2-bromoethyl)benzene, aniline, and propionyl chlorde in school for making random precursors and ligands, albeit separately. I wonder if they are at all harder to procure nowadays because of the fentanyl epidemic.

Edit: checked some of my old work, didn’t actually use (2-bromoethyl)benzene but did make a related compound as an intermediate for ligand synthesis using a very satisfying Appel reaction.

That’s some expensive cereal…

So could we produce a surface tension-free water?

Homie dats a gas. Or supercritical fluid, which actually is indeed used for “washing” (SC CO2 is used to decaffeinate coffee). However, like others said, surface tension /= cleaning ability. Part of what soap does is increase the effective solubility of things that are not normally soluble.

So you’re saying that you don’t like trying to relight the thermal oxidizer for the formaldehyde stream that went out due to spillover from another process, with an emergency flare? Got it.

I mean, sure, stuff like that is super dangerous, but at least it’s obviously, flashily dangerous and for that reason have a lot more attention paid to them. The real nasties are arguably the ones that aren’t so flashy but are much more common amd don’t have immediate effects. Formaldehyde and benzene will give you cancer, and acrylate monomers will make it so you one day wake up allergic to the mondern world.

TIL that influenza virions can be stick-shaped.

Not gonna lie, I thought about your comment multiple times today trying to make sense of it, and only just now did I realize what you meant by it.

Yes, like Alan Turing. Ugh.

Ya “an historic”, when the h is clearly pronounced, strikes the wonderful double blow of being both pretentious and wrong as far as I’m concerned. Looking at you, NPR. Go run up an hill, why donchya?

I think cleanse and clean are not quite interchangeable. Cleanse has a gravitas that clean. For example, growing up, I heard a lot of things like “be cleansed of your sins”. “Be cleaned of your sins” makes me vaguely uncomfortable.

Hard agree on business lingo, though.

Homogeneous, meaning having a uniform composition. Hoe-moe-jee-nee-us (or hoe-muh- and/or -jee-nyus; point is, there’s an ee sound before the last syllable). Saying homogenous (huh-mah-jeh-nus) in that sense is not only wrong but also means something else.

Mr. fancypants with a garage over there. Meanwhile, ain’t no public chargers for miles around here.

So many solver solutions that day, either Z3 or Gauss-Jordan lol. I got a little obsessed about doing it without solvers or (god forbid) manually solving the system and eventually found a relatively simple way to find the intersection with just lines and planes:

1. Translate all hailstones and their velocities to a reference frame in which one stone is stationary at 0,0,0 (origin).
2. Take another arbitrary hailstone (A) and cross its (rereferenced) velocity and position vectors. This gives the normal vector of a plane containing the origin and the trajectory of A, both of which the thrown stone must intersect. So, the trajectory of the thrown stone lies in that plane somewhere.
3. Take two more arbitrary hailstones B and C and find the points and times that they intersect the plane. The thrown stone must strike B and C at those points, so those points are coordinates on the line representing the thrown stone.
4. Use the equation for the thrown stone to find its position at time = 0
5. Translate that position back to the original reference frame.

It’s a suboptimal solution in that it uses 4 hailstones instead of the theoretical minimum of 3, but was a lot easier to wrap my head around.

Didn’t realize this was happening and yay -Syu went brrr and it broke my shit. Probably doesn’t help that I’m running nvidia with linux (endeavouros). Wayland doesn’t work at all (black screen on login with only mouse ptr, wrong resolution), while Xorg is now much less smooth e.g. on the switching desktop animations. Moving windows around and in-window graphics are fine. Some graphical config stuff changed too; I’m still taking inventory.

I’m also currently playing with nvidia vs nvidia-dkms with different kernels to see if that solves anything.

Huh TIL. Growing up with the merger, I suppose I’ve come to assume that non-merger folks have different pronunciations for any words with a- or o-adjacent spellings.

cot-caught merger be like that sometimes

The only thing you can know for sure is that you exist.

Or maybe not, depending on your definitions of “you” and “exist” :)