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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • No, as much as high school guidance counselors try to tell you different, there’s nothing magical about any STEM degree that will reliably get you a job.

    For most jobs, the “filter” is getting the job itself. Not having a relevant degree might prevent you from getting a job, but having the degree doesn’t mean you will be selected. There are exceptions like getting into medical school really sets you on a pathway where as long as you stick with it, you should end up with a job, bit that’s cause it’s really hard (and expensive) to get into med school, so that part is the “filter”.

    You might hear of a particular skillet being really hot that guarantees you a job, and that does happen, but it is really ephemeral. By the time you get a 4 year degree, the landscape may have changed.

    You can absolutely get a job with a 4 year hard science degree, but you can’t just go to class, get all A’s and step into a job. You need to be connected throughout the process. Also keep in mind what type of job you want to do, and where it is geographically. You might have good job prospects with a geology degree and fossil fuel expertise, but the jobs might be in undesirable locations.


  • The first step, in my opinion, is to find any existing local-ish datasets. I reckon that around you, there could be trees that go back well over 1000 years to use as a reference. You could then try to find the oldest ring of the wood in your house. It’s probably pretty hard to count back before that, but you could try to make estimates based on the circular ark of the grain pattern to determine a trunk diameter.



  • Bunch of city people want to destroy rural people’s lifestyles.

    CAFOs are not “rural people’s lifestyle”. They are a relatively modern invention to create the largest amount of meat while employing the fewest people possible. Trying to defend them as “rural people’s lifestyle” is very disingenuous. If you want to defend them, there are reasonable arguments to make, like the price of food, the land use, water use, etc, compared to meat produced other ways.

    Even if somehow having a corporation own 100,000 chickens that they raise down the road from you was an important part of your lifestyle, I cannot stand the constant argument that somehow, rural folks’ way of life is more important to preserve than urban folks’. As we make the climate worse, and pump out more pollution, and have more kids, and create more technology, everyone’s life is going to change. Rural folks have significantly more kids than urban folks and they produce more burden on the environment, yet somehow, it’s on people who live it cities who are supposed to bear the costs because we can’t possibly do anything that affects people who live rurally?

    I, and most people, want small, family run operations to succeed. There’s no reason we have to protect Big Ag to keep small operations. Big Ag is the biggest threat to the little guys.




  • I don’t understand why people like Facebook marketplace. It’s so transparently a way for them to just gather more shopping habits data on you, and it’s too easy for scammers to use. They act like having an account somehow makes it harder to scam.

    I would much rather support the website run by a skeleton crew that has no unnecessary features than get a few bucks more on FB marketplace. If I’m selling something that I’ve used, it’s cause I want to get rid of it, anyway.




  • This whole post is a good illustration to how math is much more creative and flexible than we are lead to believe in school.

    The whole concept of “manifolds” is basically that you can take something like a globe, and make atlases out of it. You could look at each map of your town and say that it’s wrong since it shouldn’t be flat. Maps are really useful, though, so why not use math on maps, even if they are “wrong”? Traveling 3 km east and 4 km north will put you 5 km from where you started, even if those aren’t straight lines in a 3d sense.

    One way to think about a line being “straight” is if it never has a “turn”. If you are walking in a field, and you don’t ever turn, you’d say you walked in a straight line. A ship following this path would never turn, and if you traced it’s path on an atlas, you would be drawing a straight line on map after map.


  • The problem I have with that is the same problem I have with the way people talk about most colonizer-colonizee(?) relationships. In many cases, you don’t have the big bad powerful people going in and doing violence against natives. The powerful sit at home, and force their local poor into a position where they have to do violence in order to survive. Yeah, you had your Christopher Columbus types, but they weren’t/aren’t the majority.

    Odds are, those loggers are members of another local tribe, who have been economically forced into illegal logging. Logging is super dangerous, and there’s no way that the people actually responsible, who are the ones making real money off of it, are out there with chainsaws.

    Tl;dr, they need glocks and bus tickets



  • Some of that selection seems suspect to me. It’s weird to include central Mississippi, but exclude the blue ridge mountains. With government definitions like this comes money, so I bet there was a lot of politicking involved. That said, jd’s hometown is definitely not Appalachian, though I dont think he claims that. He claims (and this is my memory from reading the book when it first came out), that his family is Appalachian, so he claims heritage that way. Not to defend him, cause I think he’s a POS, but I think it is fair to claim he feels Appalachian.

    There’s plenty of substantial things to criticize him for


  • I am not familiar with the bags you are talking about (our bread bags aren’t stretchy), but this has a fairly straightforward explanation. Things that are elastic usually get stiffer when cold. This is part of why winter tires exist. There’s literally less molecular movement.

    You did say they stay crinkly/brittle even after warming up, though. This is likely due to another mechanism. When a solid is created from a liquid, there is typically some type of crystal structure (with notable exceptions like glass). A material can have multiple crystal structures due to how the molecules line up. Often, the crystals are tiny, so you don’t see them, but you can have large crystals if something is cooled slowly. That’s how you get gems.

    When crystals start to form, they start to incorporate as much of the surrounding material as possible. When they run into a neighboring crystal, they run out of material. Unless they just so happen to line up perfectly, they will remain separate. The space between them, called a grain boundary, can be a weak spot in something like a diamond. In metals, more grain boundaries actually make things stronger, usually. This is because metal crystals can slide along the plane of the crystal. This is why blacksmiths will quench stuff; the rapid cooling leads to smaller crystals, which leads to more grain boundaries.

    A metal won’t completely form crystals from every available molecule. Every process happens over time, and cooling a metal down extra cold causes it to shrink, which can cause any straggler molecules to join up with the crystals, which makes the metal stronger. That’s why some metal objects are “cryohardened”.

    The last factor is that changing temperatures can change the most energetically favorable crystal structure. Tin pest is a famous example where in really cold weather, tin can change from its useful form to a brittle crumbly useless form, and it can only be fixed by remelting it.

    It’s all a bit weirder with plastics cause they can be crystalline, non crystalline, or a mix, but my guess is you’ve changed the structure of it.


  • Many states have multiple universities named after them, so you can have university of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania state university.

    Ohio state used to be " the ohio mechanical and agricultural school" when they were founded. They changed their name to “the Ohio state university” when they became a university. They were competing with “Ohio university” to be the main big state school, so the tried to emphasize it with “the” prounced with the long e (thee). It’s become a bit of a meme since then. No one really cares but it’s a funny thing for them to embrace and everyone else to make fun of.




  • They need to do better at wording the titles of articles like this. It should read something like “34 dead after drinking tainted/poisoned liquor”. Contrary to popular belief, brewing does not produce enough methanol to be toxic, and distilling does not concentrate it relative to the ethanol to a point where moonshine could be toxic. Media likes to portray like you have to be careful not to produce methanol, when really, you would have to intentionally make it. Here’s a good writeup about it.

    Methanol toxicity only really occurs when people deliberately add methanol to alcohol, either as a deterrent to keep you from drinking it (e.g. hardware store “denatured alcohol”), or to counterfeit real drinking alcohol. I can guarantee you this is a case of someone dumping a bunch of cheap, industrial methanol into watered down real booze to increase profits.