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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • Left pedal looks more like a dead pedal to me.

    And as others have said, change in direction is still acceleration. That’s part of Newton’s (apocryphal?) apple story — he witnessed an apple falling, and wondered why the moon doesn’t also fall. His amazing insight is that it does fall (accelerate), it’s just that it falls in such a way that it orbits, rather than hits, the Earth (for timescales relevant to a human).



  • I grew up with a hand-cranked popcorn maker. Then, in grad school, I realized that you don’t actually need any of that, just a pot with oil.

    I heat up (medium) a tiny bit of neutral oil with a few kernels until they pop. Then I add ~1/4C neutral oil and ~1/3C popcorn kernels. When I can count to ten between pops I turn it off, empty in bowl, drizzle with olive oil and add salt and nutritional yeast (and MSG if you have it).








  • It is really powerful per watt, and has a built-in UPS. Any homelab type things you could do with that? macOS+homebrew will give you a nice *NIX feel, very familiar if you’re a Linux user.

    I’m a fan of having a remote homelab computer+disk for off-site storage. This would be a good candidate in that it wouldn’t use excessive power at a friend/family’s place, but may be overkill (I use a pi3 for that).



  • Most of the time that leads to them dying.

    Well, squishing has a 100% chance of them dying. With a toddler and a baby, having them run loose sadly isn’t an option.

    We live in a very mild climate, and there’s under-deck and fence space around our house, in addition to bushes, trees, and underbrush — fairly suitable for a variety of arachnids. It’s not the same as indoors, and survival rate certainly isn’t 100%, but it’s not the death sentence of going from a climate controlled house to below-freezing outdoors.





  • I think large planes “look” like they can’t work because their “relative speed” is really low — that is, their speed relative to their length. We’re used to seeing birds cover tens of lengths per second, whereas a large airliner covers ~1ish per second at takeoff.

    Or not, but this always seemed like a plausible explanation as to why planes look impossible. (Though given that hovering birds don’t look funny, maybe this is a silly observation…).