I once bought a couple copies of a book as an inside joke for a couple friends.

It was not at all a popular book, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ve never heard of it or it’s writer, and odds are you’d probably hate it if you did ever read it.

I think when I bought them they were going for about $5 a pop.

And immediately after I ordered them the price shot up to like $15

I can only assume that the algorithm assumed that something happened that made that book popular all of a sudden, instead of just one asshole buying a couple copies to give to his asshole friends as a joke.

Took a few months before the price dropped down again.

Also not a biologist and I’m similarly out of my depth, but I’m pretty sure this part of the quoted text is kind of explaining that, but from the perspective of laypeople like us, is kind of glossing over it.

Based on the body surface area of humans and animals, and considering the metabolism and absorption of fluoride in rats

Surface area and mass/volume don’t scale the same way (for example the square-cube law- a 1inch cube has a volume of 1 cubic inch, and a surface area of 6 square inches, so a 1:1 ratio of volume to surface area,a 10inch cube has a volume of 1000 cubic inches, and a surface area of only 600 square inches, so a 5:3 ratio of volume to surface area )

I don’t know where/how in the body fluoride gets absorbed, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it gets absorbed through your stomach lining, so a big limiting factor in how much and how fast you absorb it is how much surface area the inside of your stomach has. More surface area means absorb fluoride more quickly.

So if rats were just scaled-down humans, you’d expect them to need a lower concentration to absorb the same kind of dose as a human.

But rats aren’t just scaled down humans. They’re rats.

And again, not a biologist, I have basically no idea what the inside of a rat looks like. Maybe their stomachs are roughly the same size proportionally to us, or maybe they’re significantly bigger or smaller, which would throw off how much stomach surface area they have available to they absorb fluoride.

And of course their metabolism and body chemistry is going to be different than a human. I’m pretty sure their metabolic rate is way higher than ours so basically everything inside the rat is happening faster, stuff is getting absorbed faster, but also excreted faster, and food/water is spending less time in the stomach leaving less time for that fluoride to get absorbed.

And maybe rats are just fundamentally better or worse at absorbing and metabolizing fluoride than we are, maybe their stomach lining is just more or less capable of absorbing fluoride, maybe they have more or less of some protein or enzyme or something that does something with that fluoride so it gets used more or less efficiently by their body, etc.

So all of that would need to be taken into account. Whole lot of math involved figuring that out that I don’t even want to think about.

And, of course, experimentally, we want to be able to see and measure the effects. The study is looking for its effects on the brain, not, for example, liver and kidney function (or whatever organs would be damaged by too much fluoride.) Trying to measure the IQ of a rat I’m sure is already hard enough in general, let alone trying to measure potentially very minute changes in it. It may be they’re trying to push the dose as high as they can to try to create any measurable cognitive symptoms, if we’re giving the rats 6x the normal dose, maybe to a level where it might damage their kidneys or something, and still not seeing any cognitive issues, it’s probably pretty safe to say that a normal, safe, dose isn’t going to cause issues either.

Once in a while I get a notification that, for one reason or another, doesn’t actually bring me to the content it was supposed to link to and instead brings me to the main page of an app, and sometimes it’s difficult or impossible to find where the link was supposed to go

But going in through the notification history, the second try usually takes me where it was supposed to go

I really only need 1 HDMI port on my TV- to connect my AV receiver to, everything else gets plugged into that receiver, it’s got about 8 HDMI ports.

Right now there’s 3 consoles, a pc, and a Chromecast hooked up to it, so I have ports to spare, and I haven’t had to use anything on my tv since I initially set it up and set the input to HDMI 1

It’s not necessarily feasible for everyone, it does take up a little more space in your entertainment center that not everyone has, but I also think it’s 100% worth it to at least have a decent set of speakers hooked up to your TV if you can find the space and budget to do so.

Yep.

Also not sure how they work it where you are, but as far as payroll goes we basically just pretend it doesn’t happen since the way our shift rotation works, if you work it in the spring you’ll work it again in the fall.

Fuck that, give me my hour of overtime for turning my 12 hour shift into a 13.

Purely anecdotal, but I work in 911 dispatch

And for a few days after the clocks change it always feels like we get a bunch of calls from/about people acting strangely.

My pet theory is that a lot of people with mental health issues are either really dependent on taking their meds at certain times, or just really need a steady routine to keep them stable, and in either case shifting things by an hour throws that all off.

And not for nothing, I work nights, and when I work the clock change, it’s nice when I get to work 1 hour less, but it absolutely does not make up for when I have to work an extra hour.

It’s a weird case, but I know there’s one company working on it to regrow foreskins for guys who wish they hadn’t been circumcised.

They’re making progress, but still probably a few years out, and I feel like that kind of says a lot why you haven’t seen news about it- it’s just not there yet. I’m pretty sure a liver is lot more complex than a foreskin, so if we can’t even manage that yet a liver is still a long way off.

The way this kind of research goes kind of tends to have a lot of plateaus, lots of researchers working on it and not making much progress until someone has a major breakthrough, then it plateaus again until the next big thing. Sometimes those breakthroughs lead to something actually deliverable as a treatment/procedure/product, other times it’s just a stepping stone to get to the next one.

If I were the type of person who was willing to give AI the benefit of the doubt and not assume that it was just picking basically random numbers

There’s a lot of cases where it can be a shorter (by distance) walk than drive, where cars generally have to stick to streets while someone on foot may be able to take some footpaths and cut across lawns and such, or where the road may be one-way for vehicles, or where certain turns may not be allowed, etc.

I have a few intersections near my father in laws house in NJ in mind, where you can just cross the street on foot, but making the same trip in a car might mean driving half a mile down the road, turning around at a jug handle and driving back to where you started on the other side of the street.

And I wouldn’t be totally surprised if that’s the case for enough situations in the training data where someone debated walking or driving that the AI assumed that it’s a rule that it will always be further by car than on foot.

That’s still a dumbass assumption, but I’d at least get it.

And I’m pretty sure it’s much more likely that it’s just making up numbers out of nothing.

I don’t know the knife laws in Italy, especially not for the specific part of Italy this occurred in

But often laws about switchblades and such have to do with carrying them, or occasionally selling them, but often just owning a switchblade and keeping it at home isn’t really an issue

As far as manufacturing, I again don’t know about the specific regulations, if there’s maybe any kind of licensing or something needed, but I know for a fact that it is either not totally illegal to manufacture a switchblade in Italy, or they are *very * selectively enforcing those laws because there are some very well-known manufacturers of them based there (if I had more disposable income I’ve had my eye on a Frank Beltrame stiletto for a while)

I’m sure it’s more complex than I’m making it out to be, but each gas in the air has its own freezing/melting boiling/condensation/sublimation points, so I’d imagine you could just kind of take advantage of that

Basically just cool it down to x temperature at y pressure, and all of the carbon dioxide should be solid, the oxygen a liquid and the nitrogen still a gas, and they’ve all sort of separated themselves out. Fish out the dry ice, siphon off the oxygen, and you’re left with nitrogen.

Might need to do a couple more rounds of that on each of those to account for other gases in the mix depending on how pure you need it to be, but in theory I imagine it could be that simple (again in practice I’m sure there’s probably a lot of details I’m missing)

I mean, we live in a time when 3d printed guns exist, I’m pretty sure having a 3d printer and ordering filament is probably about as likely to get you on a list as ordering some whistles

But whistles are readily available and cheap, without looking too hard I can get a dozen from them at target for less than $5 with lanyards. Leave your phone at home, pay cash, take a bus or park in the next shopping center over or wear a mask like you’re getting over a cold and a baseball cap and you’re about as anonymous as you can get.

Can probably get them even cheaper if you shop around a bit, if you have a party store around you I’ll bet you can get a bunch there for cheap as party favors for a children’s birthday party goody bag or whatever.

Yeah that seems to be the key here, I’m doing a 60 second burn-in time for the bottom layers now, and lowered the lift speed and things are coming out a lot better

I’m still having adhesion issues on about half the plate, but I’m pretty sure I’m just going to need to re-level again to fix that

May still look into a heating solution but as long as they stick to the plate, everything seems to be coming out fine otherwise

I’m worried about your ventilation and PPE situation.

It’s vented outside through flexible ducting with an inline fan, I have VOC monitors around my basement, and I wear a p100 organic vapor and acid rated respirator, disposable nitrile gloves, goggles, and a rubber apron

But do go on being a judgemental prick for no reason. I’m not skimping on safety, but if I can save myself a few bucks not buying a boring piece of hardware I don’t really need, I’d prefer to do that.

That’s money that could buy me more resin, paints, disposable gloves, beer, coffee, ice cream, books, movie tickets, or countless other things that I’d rather be spending my money on.

It’s funny that you specifically mentioned the '60s, because back then they were pretty routinely administering the oral polio vaccine on a sugar cube for school children

That’s how my dad got it back then

It’s possible I missed it, but I didn’t see where it said how they came up with this strain of yeast. I was kind of assuming they used CRISPR or some other kind of gene editing to make it.

Regardless of if it was edited or selective breeding and random mutation, I do share those same concerns about how fast it might mutate and lose its effectiveness.

As far as it mutating into something harmful, sure it’s a possibility, but the same possibility technically exists with any strain of yeast out there in the world, untold millions of generations of yeast have lived, mutated, reproduced, and died in breweries, bakeries, and vineyards since humans first started brewing beer and baking bread, and it hasn’t gone horribly wrong yet. It’s certainly worth being cautious about, and I’m certainly no geneticist to make an educated statement about it, but I suspect it’s probably a pretty low likelihood.

There’s a lot of questions to be answered here but I feel like this could potentially be a pretty cool thing

He’s created a strain of yeast that seems like it could function as an oral vaccine

You could just filter off the beer and eat the yeast, or maybe put it into pills or something, or purify it into a normal injectable vaccine

But there’s a lot of people out there who are skeptical of pills and afraid of needles, or who just won’t want to eat powdered yeast

But a lot of those same people will happily drink a beer.

It could also be a way towards sort of decentralizing vaccine production. Imagine he starts selling little packets of dry vaccine yeast for people to brew beer with. Yeast is pretty forgiving in its storage requirements, keep it in its little sealed envelope and keep it reasonably dry, and it should be good for a couple years. You can ship that around the world without much fuss.

And people all over the world know how to brew beer. Get that packet of yeast into the local hooch-maker’s hands anywhere in the world, and they can turn it into a bunch of 1-pint vaccine doses in a week or two. No particularly special equipment or distribution networks needed, and vaccine distribution becomes as easy as hosting a kegger.

And if they’re able to reclaim some of that yeast to brew another batch, you’ve potentially even set them up for long-term vaccine beer production.

You might also be better able to convince people who might otherwise be skeptical about taking a traditional vaccine to just drink a beer. It’s not something scary like a needle, or weird and unnatural like a pill, it’s “just” a beer.

And you can focus your efforts a bit more on who you need to convince about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. You don’t need to convince a whole village to trust vaccines, you just need to convince the local brewer that the people already trust, and then you can piggyback off that existing trust.

Hell, I’m pro vaccine, but I know I’d probably be a little more proactive about getting mine if it meant I got to go have a couple beers.

Again, there’s a lot of questions that need to be answered, not the least of which are the basic safety and effectiveness of this

There’s also informed consent, making sure that the people drinking the beer understand that the beer is a bit more than just a beer, and the risks of alcohol (although if this is an effective delivery system, I think it’s likely that those risks are well-outweighed by the benefits of vaccines)

I definitely think it’s something worth exploring.

It’s actually not terribly uncommon for people to take roadkill if it’s fresh and in decent shape.

In my state (PA) you’re supposed to report it to the game commission within 24 hours, and you’re supposed to surrender the hide and antlers to them unless you pay for a separate permit.

Same boat, my computer is basically the computer my wife built probably about 12 years ago before we got together, it was pretty beefy for its time. I basically stuck her old components in a new box (and also stuck a newer graphics card in it because I got a really good deal on a used 2060)

Still manages to run most games out there on acceptable (to me) settings.

Made the switch to Linux about a week ago, no major issues, some things are arguably running better now. It’s not without its hiccups but so far things have gone pretty smoothly.

EDIT: went with Mint over Zorin though.

I’m pretty much in the same boat, 720p looks fine to me in the vast majority of cases, and while I’m not great at going to my eye doctor regularly, the last time I had my vision checked it was fine, and it was right around the time I was shopping for a new TV and upgraded from 1080 to 4k, and still had a 720p in my bedroom.

If I looked really hard at them, I could tell the difference from the 720 to the 4k, but truth be told, I’m just not scrutinizing the picture quality of my TV that much.

Except for a few obvious spam posts, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of any specific posts or comments I’ve seen that struck me as bots (although to be fair, I’m there may be some bias due to which communities I choose to follow)

There are, however, plenty of idiots, people who don’t speak fluent English, trolls and other people whose motivations may not be purely good-faith discussion, people who probably have various types of neurodivergence and/or mental health issues

And I could see some of those categories being very easily mistaken as a bot under a lot of circumstances.