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9 mo. ago

  • the flushing kind or the hole in he ground kind?

    Any kind. There's further breakdowns in access to flushing toilets, dry latrines, composting toilets, etc., but this is part of a long standing project to get people to stop open defecation in places where untreated human waste will mix into drinking water, food supply, etc.

  • India basically introduced toilets in a single generation.

    According to this article, in 1993, 70.3% of the Indian population did not have access to toilets. By 2021, the number dropped to 17.8%. So literally more than half the population of India got access to toilets within 30 years.

  • Throw it away once it's cooled. If it's a solidified fat, you can just scrape it into the trash bag. If it's a liquid oil, then you can throw it into a disposable container (I have a million takeout soup containers on hand at any given time) so that it doesn't leak everywhere.

    Oil is compostable, but only in proper ratios to the overall organic material being composted, so it's fair game to put into compostable containers for industrial composting, or maybe small quantities in your backyard compost, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you know what you're doing.

  • Around 10 years ago I switched to a specific big airline and started building frequent flyer status. Before that I was willing to do the regular budget airlines (Southwest, Frontier, JetBlue) for $100 savings or the ultra budget airlines (Spirit, Allegiant) for another $100 savings over that.

    But I've had bad experiences with Frontier (canceled flight, next available flight not available for 3 days) and Spirit (more time on the tarmac than in the air). Both resulted in missed events (and for the Frontier flight I needed to just buy a last minute ticket, out of pocket, with another airline).

    So now, when it's important for me to be on time, I tend to prefer airlines that have multiple flights per day between my origin and destination, and have some redundancy and resilience against the unexpected. There are still network effects that provide some major value, to where I'm generally willing to pay $200 more for flights on my preferred airline.

  • We made steampunk a reality by developing the technology to transfer steam power efficiently over long distances through metal wires.

  • That's not even a government thing. It's a finance/banking thing, as most major banks are still using mainframes and legacy COBOL code for most of their business logic.

  • For gases, volume is inversely proportional to pressure, which means as pressure approaches zero, very slight changes in pressure will make a big difference to the behavior of the gases.

    But for solids and liquids, the absence of pressure doesn't make that big of a difference. Yes, vapor pressure means that water will boil at lower temperatures in a vacuum, but the way the actual liquids stay together, especially when enclosed in in a way that limits vapor pressure, remains the same in low pressure environments as they are in medium pressure environments.

    So when you go scuba diving, the doubling of pressure when you hit a depth of 10 meters is simply accommodated by you breathing denser air out of your tank. But nothing else about your body feels any different under that pressure. Go even deeper, and some things might start getting affected by the dissolved gases in your blood and other bodily fluids, but we're talking about huge pressure differences from the surface, basically 1 atmosphere of pressure for each 10 meters you descend.

    In contrast, the difference between sea level atmospheric pressure and the vacuum of space is only one atmosphere of pressure. The liquid and solid parts of your body will be fine. Your reliance on breathing might not fare so well, but see how militaries deal with it: pressurizing the cabin to some degree but making sure that the actual breathing mask is delivering the right amount of oxygen even when the cabin pressure is the equivalent of a high altitude.

    So when that blobfish gets yanked out from 900 meters deep up to the surface, that's a sudden loss of pressure from 91 atms to 1 atm, a 90 atm swing. But for a human going from 1 to 0 atms, that's just a 1-atm difference. If you open your mouth and exhale while it's happening, maybe relax your eustachian tubes if you know how to do that, you probably won't have any issues from the decompression, until you start to try to breathe.

  • Abe Froman? The sausage king of Chicago?

  • One big advantage is that we can run while breathing out of sync with our steps. Four legged running pretty much requires each inhale and exhale to sync with the compression and expansion of the torso with each stride. Humans, on the other hand, can run full speed while taking multiple steps per breath, depending on terrain and fatigue, which gives more options for pacing.

  • Controversy and debate about whether the condition exists for literal hostages in a violent/deadly situation is a step removed from talking about whether people become irrationally attached to manipulative romantic/sexual partners, and stay despite all rationality pointing towards leaving.

    I don't know if Stockholm Syndrome exists for hostages held at gunpoint. But I do know that plenty of people have behaved irrationally about attachment to abusive people in their lives. And we don't have to call that particular condition Stockholm Syndrome, but your argument doesn't really disprove the topic of this discussion.

  • Power is what matters, and power (in watts) = current (in amps) times voltage (in volts). US residential power outlets are 110V and typically cap at 15A, for a power output max of 1650W. But it's also pretty common to have 20A outlets in kitchens, which would max out at 2200W. Still, there aren't a lot of 2000W kettles in the US, and it's pretty standard for the ones you'd buy in a store to only draw about 1500W.

    Meanwhile, in the UK, the standard outlet is 230V, rated for up to 13A, for about 3000W. And culturally, in terms of consumer expectations in the UK, the kettles are generally designed to max that out to use the full capacity of that outlet.

    So on average, the typical US kettle is only about half as powerful as the typical UK kettle. It's a combination of the US electrical norms and the cultural/consumer expectations, because it is entirely possible to have a 2200W kettle on a pretty standard kitchen circuit in the US.

  • It's convenient for a lot of things. Curly quotes, specialized dashes, mathematical symbols or Greek letters used in math/science, foreign currencies, things like paragraph symbols (¶) or section symbols (§), etc.

  • Em dashes often replace parentheses:

    The company has a policy of having any newly hired employee (like Steve) introduce themselves at the monthly all hands meeting.

    The company has a policy of having any newly hired employee—like Steve—introduce themselves at the monthly all hands meeting.

    Em dashes also often replace colons:

    I'm going to bring my signature dish: bacon-wrapped dates.

    I'm going to bring my signature dish—bacon-wrapped dates.

    Em dashes are commonly used to denote interrupted speech:

    He started to explain, "I was hungry and you weren't home yet so I—"

    "You're not a diabetic, you can handle waiting a few extra minutes to eat"

    Replacing commas is unusual and probably incorrect according to most style guides.

    This is also highly localized. Style guides tend to apply only to one particular country, not all English-speaking countries. The AP guide is used by most American newspapers and magazines, and the Chicago Guide is used by most American book publishers. Each have their own rules on dashes.

  • Long pressing the hyphen on the Google keyboard on Android also gives the option of selecting an en dash or em dash.

    On Linux, if you have the compose key enabled, Compose key + three hyphens in a row will generate an em dash (en dash is two hyphens).

  • The "circle of life" is a song about a sex position

  • Some fungi found to be thriving in Chernobyl, and seemingly growing towards radiation sources, are hypothesized to be able to capture and use the radiation energy to support biological processes. If it turns out that some fungi can synthesize compounds that convert ionizing radiation into chemical bonds that can be metabolized by biological organisms, one could theoretically imagine some kind of symbiotic relationship between organisms that comes out of that.

  • Can't find another source for this tweet from either Twitter or Reddit, but here's a screenshot of this tweet by Twitter user @hiimbobbi:

    Personally, Belle was not fooling me or anyone. When the Beast changed into a human, I saw that look on her face. That was DISAPPOINTMENT.

  • As this thread shows, back pain isn't caused by just one thing, so each specific person's back pain won't be cured by the same one size fits all approach.

    If your back pain is caused by poor posture exacerbated by a weak posterior chain, lifting weights at the gym or doing other strengthening exercises/physical therapy can be helpful. As plenty in this thread can attest, gym time to offset laptop time can go a long way.

    If your back pain is caused by repetitive stress from physical labor, adhering to proper form/technique and rest/recovery cycles to the best of your ability can help.

    If your back pain is exacerbated by the weight you carry, losing weight (or in certain circumstances, breast reduction surgery) can help.

    We're all just trying to get through life. Sometimes other people's tips can help, so it's worth sharing, but we also shouldn't get too tied to a particular solution that worked for us, as a the solution for everyone else.

  • Jupiter

    Jump