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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Yeah the locker/towel thing would be a habit especially if you don’t actively think about it.

    You may not have a strong daily routine but all humans have habits and it’s precisely because you don’t actively think about them a lot that it’s can be hard to become cognizant of them.

    They also include behavioral preferences such as scratching your chin with your right hand when lost in thought 🤔, calling your girlfriend ‘honey’ frequently, consuming certain foods/beverages more than others, separating the trash, opening up social Media on your smart phone when bored, or taking your jacket with you when you go outside.

    Those are not the same for everyone but everyone has them useless maybe some severe medical condition is present.



  • That’s my point though: to me buying new garments just because they aren’t as white as they used to be is both economically and ecologically wasteful. Ideally you just adjust your sensibilities or else purchase colors, fabrics, patterns less affected by tinging.

    I have to admit though I’m looking at this from my own biased perspective of a single household though. I do basic separation of light, dark and hygienic (anything that needs high temperatures to kill germs) but also spontaneous mixed loads depending on what’s in the laundry bin and what I need soon. If you’re in a big household you can actually do real nice sorting like all the reds together, all the sports wear together, all the rags and towels, etc.






  • The ¿ and ¡ prepare the reader mentally for what’s coming and let the speaker adapt pronunciation.

    Consider the following 2 sentences in English:

    It’s raining.

    and

    It’s raining?

    Meaning and intonation are different. Luckily our eyes don’t read strictly in one direction like a scanner but instead they skip back and forth a lot (saccades) which means your brain registers the question mark even before you get to pronounce the first word. Still it’s helpful to have an extra signal at the start of the sentence.

    So why no extra dot at the beginning? Because it’s the default case. And since the function of the dot is to separate sentences a single one already does the job. Note how there is also no double period when a sentence ends with an abbreviation or abbr. And in headers it’s often fully omitted because the layout itself signals the separation from what precedes or follows.



  • Do you just sweep with a broom? A good vacuum cleaner is a lot more thorough. And if you mopp right after there’s a better chance to get most of the dust.

    The other question is where the dirt is ultimately coming from. Most notably rom outside via air movement and shoes, but also consider shedded hair and skin from humans & pets, dropped food crumbs, lints from textiles and any hobbies/activities.

    I like to avoid any “dust catcher” objects like carpets or rugs. In the end it’s a tradeoff between how clean you want it to be and how much time you’re willing to invest.


  • Went to a open cast lignite mining operation once. The scales are quite impressive. Once standing at the bottom of the pit vision of the surrounding landscape just fades and you feel a bit like in a wasteland of sorts.

    open cast mine

    I assume many people are familiar with hydrocarbon gas for cooking or heating. Coal can also be converted to liquid or gas fuel form chemically but the process is quite complex and usually not economical.

    Then there’s crude oil. Never been near it but its ubiquitous in its refined forms, just go to a gas station.

    EDIT: the coal typically used for barbecue (charcoal) is made from wood and is different from the stuff mined from the earth. Many people seem to not know this.



  • Yeah, rabbits as a species are not only tolerant to eating their own poop pellets but also gain calory extraction benefits from it. Usually mammals don’t completely break down food they eat, ie there is still energy to be gained from it. Microorganisms have the necessary biochemical pathways to do it but for mammals it’s not efficient.

    Basically any animal has only a few ways to into crease its energy budget. First it can simply eat more or more rapidly. Second it can find ways to make use of resources that are less contested (think of a giraffe reaching for the top of a tree or a koala being able to digest eucalyptus leaves). Third it can simply be more efficient: that’s the slow metabolism of a sloth, but also a rabbit eating it’s own feces alongside fresh food. It’s basically an evolutionary strategy to extract more energy from the environment.




  • When I was extracting sounds from the sound banks from the Nintendo 64 game F-Zero X I simply couldn’t find certain sound effects. It turns out that some effects are created during runtime by taking a sound sample and applying certain effects or filters, for instance pitch shifting the sample and looping it in rapid succession.

    It’s a clever way to save on memory and the player doesn’t notice if it’s well done. The original Pokémon Red/Blue on the gameboy is an example where it’s not so well done in some places. If you pay attention you’ll notice that some Pokémon’s battle cries are simple pitch shifts of other ones and they didn’t apply any other effects to obfuscate this.