antlion

antlion, 15 hours ago

Electronic but all the instruments are recorded from nature - bird chips and rocks and thunder clapping. Maybe some toads for the bass.

antlion, 11 hours ago

Here are my tick tips.

• Do not wear denim or yoga pants. Wear some kind of water repellent type of polyester hiking pant from REI. Ticks can’t jump they have to grab on. They can’t grab onto slick pants that don’t have holes.
• Use trekking poles to whack any grass before you brush your leg against it. They get really excited when something touches their blade of grass and they let go and fall to the ground. You don’t have to whack it hard. Whack it gently.
• Keep your eyes open. They aren’t too hard to spot on a blade of grass. They don’t jump. Take a close look.
• Ticks can be higher up than grass. When you see ticks don’t walk through manzanita or other shrubs, getting stuff in your hair.
• Should go without saying but stay on the trail.

antlion, 1 day ago

Orcas are cool. They work as a team and they’re clever. Great White shark is just a blood-smelling chomp chomp. Orcas grab onto the sharks fins, and start dragging it around. Sometimes they rip the fin off. Sharks need to keep swimming to breathe so they don’t like being dragged around. Then the orcas eat the liver and the heart and go hunt another one.

It seems they’ve adapted their great white strategy to boats. Instead of grabbing a fin they grab the rudder. Makes perfect sense. Maybe they’ll learn to stick old boat parts into the spinning props. The article says they’ve encountered hundreds of boats but most of them get away. If they get more clever about immobilizing them they’ll be quite deadly.

antlion, 1 day ago

Interesting, my rake makes some sounds when I use it. It’s pretty loud on hard surfaces.

antlion, 1 day ago

California has required child:staff ratios for childcare. Under 1 year is 3:1, age 1-2 is 4:1, age 3 is 7:1, and ages 4-5 is 8:1.

Our childcare center is non-profit. It’s about $1800/month for infants and $1300/month for 3-4 year olds. They cover all the food and diapers, and they do the laundry (sheets). The teachers are paid poorly. The government pays nothing. Anyway I agree with you, for infants it makes sense for the cost to be about the same as renting a small place.

antlion, 4 days ago

Bullies are part of a cycle of abuse. They belittle others so they themselves can feel less pathetic. The strategy my mom taught me is to be untouchable. Don’t give them the satisfaction of getting under your skin. Shrug, chuckle, and genuinely forget about them. They’re insignificant. No need to butt heads. It also an effective strategy for road rage. You can’t lose if you’re not playing the game. You can even make them think they won. Some of these assholes genuinely get furious at unwavering positivity.

antlion, 5 days ago

Make sure you also avoid Kona, Stella Artois, Goose Island, Elysian, Four Peaks, Golden Road, 10 Barrel, and any other whack-a-mole AB-InBev brands that pop up.

antlion, 5 days ago

If you use the actuary life tables for your expected lifespan, you can have a true mid-life crisis when you turn 39 or 41 depending if your male or female.

Or if you’re the age of one of the presidential candidates you’ll know what it feels like to have under 10 years of life expectancy remaining.

Anyway, I do think it’s weird. You have plenty of time to waste at your age. It would be a misuse of your youth to try and allocate your time wisely.

antlion, 6 days ago

10 years in consulting. 2.5 to 3.0 billing multiplier for my labor. Even an “employee owned” corp. Still basically a pyramid scheme run by rich white men.

antlion, 5 days ago

An employee owned S-Corp is little more than a tax shelter. It doesn’t have much bearing on equity among employees. It mainly gives the company more un-taxed cash to buy out competitors. It’s like a pyramid scheme because employees have to buy their way in. That cash is used as more bonuses for the upper management. The only people getting wealthy are the ones already with millions of equity. Employee “owners” can’t do anything meaningful with that ownership.

Anyway after arguing for all kinds of raises, after nearly 10 years I didn’t have a whole lot to show. A 401k and Roth IRA. It’s not nothing but that too is like a pyramid scheme. My friends who worked in state government made just as much money and earned a pension worth 20% of their future salary.

antlion, 6 days ago

Further reading for those who haven’t heard of it:

en.m.wikipedia.org/…/Land_and_water_hemispheres

antlion, 7 days ago

I solved the 5/11/2024 New York Times Mini Crossword in 1:10!

antlion, 7 days ago

We show that a 5-HT1A-selective 5-MeO-DMT analogue is devoid of hallucinogenic-like effects while retaining anxiolytic-like and antidepressant-like activity in socially defeated animals.

Not sure how to phrase it but I guess making it more therapeutic, and less recreational makes it more likely to be a candidate for passing FDA regs.

antlion, 8 days ago

I solved the 5/10/2024 New York Times Mini Crossword in 0:51!

antlion, 8 days ago

It’s justified by power line maintenance and safety, right? Then the amount should be based on how many miles of power lines are running out to your house. That would make it more expensive to live out in the country, where the largest fire-related expenses already are, and cheaper to live in the city. Or we can keep subsidizing sprawl. We already spend billions protecting a few hundred homes from wildfires. Spend billions on freeway widening too. This is probably small compared to those other things.

antlion, 8 days ago

It would be considered rape if the alleged rapist was poor, or any race other than white. It would probably not be considered rape if the perpetrator was a white man (especially Christian), or a woman.

antlion, 9 days ago

No use of your body is a pretty desperate situation. Before the procedure he had to yell for his parents that he wanted to use the computer, they’d come sit him upright and put a joystick in his mouth, leaving him unable to speak. And he was often very uncomfortable in that position, so he couldn’t do it long. Now, he can use the computer fully laying down, without anyone’s help. The next logical step would be to have some robotic helper arms.

Anyway he can’t shoot himself. He can’t hold a gun or anything else. There’s little reason for this to be about Musk at all other than money. This is the culmination of decades of research from many medical professionals. It’s about a lot more than one person.

antlion, 9 days ago

Nobody is making you get a brain chip. Noland did the research, talked about it with his family, and wanted to proceed in spite of the fully disclosed risks. Bodily autonomy is a fundamental human right - if you want to do something or have something done to your body it’s not the governments place to stop you. Safeguards are necessary, and they do exist. You don’t need laws to make sure everybody has the same risk tolerance as you. I can’t fully imagine what it would be like to have no use of my body and no hope of recovery. But I wouldn’t want people like you or me who aren’t in my shoes deciding what I can and can’t do. Honestly if he wanted to have a lethal injection, I believe he should be allowed to make that decision, but he can’t. I’m happy he was able to make some kind of decision, and regain some autonomy, if only temporarily, and not just be a vegetable head in a bed for the rest of his life.

antlion, 8 days ago

Are you suggesting that the FDA gave Neuralink special treatment in the approval process? Or are you suggesting that the government should specifically shut down anything Musk tries to do, like SpaceX?

antlion, 8 days ago

I don’t think it’s obvious at all. This is a sample size of one, and it is still working after 3 months.

Globally, a staggering 310 million major surgeries are performed each year; around 40 to 50 million in USA and 20 million in Europe. It is estimated that 1–4% of these patients will die, up to 15% will have serious postoperative morbidity, and 5–15% will be readmitted within 30 days. An annual global mortality of around 8 million patients places major surgery comparable with the leading causes of death from cardiovascular disease and stroke, cancer and injury. If surgical complications were classified as a pandemic, like HIV/AIDS or coronavirus (COVID-19), developed countries would work together and devise an immediate action plan and allocate resources to address it.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7388795/

Implants are rejected by the immune system. Stents fail. Hip and joint replacements fail. Does that mean we shouldn’t do them?

antlion, 8 days ago

My takeaway from that article is mostly that primate research is a big emotional topic for some people, and maybe tech writers shouldn’t write about medical research. Do you think it would be so interesting if it was done on mice? The primate research center in Davis has been there since 1962, and it’s always been controversial. Do you think they’ve just been twiddling their thumbs for 55 years waiting for Neuralink to come along? No, that shit is routine for them. They keep doing it because primate research is still an important step before human trials.

There is no need to ethically green light a medical procedure that is voluntary, of sound mind, and of one’s own will. It’s not your body. It’s not your life. People implant beads and magnets into their bodies and tattoo their faces. People hang themselves from meat hooks for fun. People get circumcised, and pierced. It’s all none of your business.

antlion, 9 days ago

Cavitation is literally boiling, but the bubbles of steam are tiny, only last for an instant, and then collapse and cool back into the fluid.

antlion, 9 days ago

Yeah, they didn’t even invent it. One company basically tried to do the same brewing technique commercially, but I guess they didn’t get the word out in time: engadget.com/osma-pro-cold-brew-coffee-machine-re…

antlion, 8 days ago

🤷‍♂️ Tomato / Potato. Cavitation occurs (the bubble formation) at a temperature below 100C, yes. As the steam bubble shrinks, very high temperatures are reached (super-heated steam). All of that energy, plus the latent heat of condensation is released back into the fluid. At that instant, there is a very small yet-to-be-mixed portion of liquid that may be near the boiling point. That small portion of fluid may undergo a warm-brew process as it cools and mixes. I’m kind of conceptualizing this brewing process like: what if you could heat, mix, and cool the coffee all at once everywhere. But I’ve never observed cavitation and bubble collapse with an ultra high-speed microscope camera, so my concept may be off a bit. I have seen photos of what it does to hardened steel hydropower turbines.

My next question would be, what if you start with ice water? That may give you something like true cold-brew. Another factor to consider is that I believe most cold brew is very oxidized. It might be interesting to try ultrasonic degassing for some period of time before the grounds are added, to see how much of the cold brew flavor is just oxidized coffee.