plantteacher

joined 10 months ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

That’s surprising. Acetone dissolves a lot of plastics even when they are in a new state. I might try it in a small area but I’m skeptical. I would expect it to worsen the situation.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

oh shit.. I never thought of the canning. I suppose the canning process kill it. Which I suppose also means buying kimchi in jars loses the probiotics for the same reason.

The fresher kraut in the grocery store seems to be in plastic bags in the refrigerated section, but I’m not sure I can trust that either.. those bags have to be sealed just as well. OTOH, I’ve bought food in the fridge section with plastic film over it which really balloons out when close to expiry, apparently due to gas emitted by the bacteria. So maybe they aren’t killing the bacteria in those cases.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

actually after using alcohol and letting it dry it’s not really coming off on my hands. Just still a little sticky. But temp could be a factor. I wonder if on a hot summer day it will be more likely to mark things that touch it. If that happens, my temptation will be to cut out a piece of sheet metal and try using a 2-component epoxy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Someone in my family seems to be suffering from digestion problems due to lack of gut bacteria, which was likely killed off through docs over-prescribing antibiotics like crazy.. like candy. So I searched for info on restoring gut bugs. A common dietary recommendation for gut bug restoration is to stop eating red meat, or to cut back on it, I forgot which. IIRC it’s because some gut bugs thrive on red meat much more so than other gut bugs and it creates an imbalance.

I have no idea how solid that info is but someone should be checking that. Only like 1% of the population qualifies to donate their feces for fecal transplants. Not joking. Their shit is literally valuable. Those people are found to have a strong healthy variety of gut bugs. When their feces gets packed into gelcaps and someone swallows them, the consumer can repopulate their gut with good bacteria. Someone should follow those stool donors around and see how much red meat they are eating.

Note as well recent research shows that race horses which have the healthiest gut bugs win more prize money. Not sure about mortality, but @[email protected]’s article focuses on mortality when maybe that’s a little too blunt of an instrument.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

One problem with all Lemmy instances running later version than 0.19.3 is the front-ends are broken with Ungoogled Chromium. Lemmy instances running 0.19.5 essentially force me to use Tor Browser (firefox). This is unrelated to the onion problem but one of my other workarounds is to use a non-stock front-end with ungoogled chromium. So for example slrpnk.net has alexandrite.slrpnk.net, which is an alternative FE. The landing page of slrpnk.net lists a few other alternative front ends as well.

I don’t know if there is a way for users to run alexandrite and then specify another backend of choice. But if not, it could be useful to make other front-ends available on the onion.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

You don’t seem to be accounting for university image. Are the optics of this worthless? IMO, this guy should pitch a tent on the campus grounds and make a media spectacle of it.

Might be a good test to see how quickly a dorm room can be freed up and administrative red tape overcome.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I would not focus on the low pay (that’s a complex problem), but rather the embarrassing fact that this prof cannot get housing in the university dorms. WTF.

from the article:

Others questioned why the university doesn’t offer housing for professors. One commenter shared their own experience: “I was an adjunct professor for a year and realized I would be headed towards homelessness, so I left.”

Surely only administrative incompetence can be the cause of profs not qualifying for dorms. If there is enough professor demand for dorms, they should be organizing a dedicated floor or building for profs.

Consider as well this prof’s academic enthusiasm could be (rightfully) exploited further by putting him in a dorm. He might even be happy to answer questions from other dorm residents after hours.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Yeah we do eat some disgusting things. What works on me is if you start feeding it to me before I know what it is. Then after I’m accustomed to something it takes a higher level of disgust to turn me.

Hot dogs in fact crossed that threshold. I ate them as a kid then one day questioned what they were, heard John Candy call them lips and assholes, saw a video of that pink slime in big vats, and that turned me. No more hot dogs for me. OTOH, I had a quite tasty vegan hotdog that was good at simulating the real thing using nuts.

I’ve mostly ditched dairy milk out of a combination of mild disgust coupled with better alternatives (coconut milk). I’ll do Bailley’s but pass on the milk stout beers.

Anyway, you can feed bugs and cockroach milk to your kids and maybe they grow up accustomed to it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I’ve lived in roach infested regions and encountered many. But never smelled them. Are you holding them up to your nose? I’m not sure I ever got closer than ~50cm from one. I wonder if you have an extra sensitive olfactory sense.

In any case, the odor could be a defense mechanism perhaps sucreted and maybe not in the milk. The smell of fish is off putting to me but I can eat a fresh prepared white fish because the odor of the meat is fine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Goat cheese tastes like goats smell.

I occassionally visited someone with a goat farm. The odor around the farm was quite distinct and far from pleasant. Then when I tried goat cheese, the taste was spot-on the same as the external odor of goats. Really put me off. I cannot do goat cheese because of that. Yet goat cheese is somewhat popular so I don’t get it. I wonder if aroma is unimportant to some people.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Not sure why that is necessarily the case. Recall how wine was made at one point: people barefeet got in a tub of grapes and smashed them by running around. Roach milk could be a matter of rounding up some 8 year old boys and giving them gummy bears or a candybar if they stomp around in a vat of roaches.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

I cannot help but think about that future-set movie with a non-stop train conditions non-survivable outside the train, with a class system on the train. The lowest class people were at the back of the train were fed something called nutrition bars or blocks (or something like that), which looked like mysterious black jello-like bricks. They were made on the train from cockroaches. Anyone know what movie I’m talking about? This research fits nicely into that movie narrative.

 

The manual for my dishwasher says to refill salt just before running a wash cycle, because if any grains of salt spill onto the stainless steel interior it will corrode. If it runs right away, no issue because the salt is quickly dissolved, diluted, and flushed.

So then I realized when I cook pasta I heavily salt the water (following the advice that pasta water should taste as salty as the ocean). But what happens when I leave that highly salty brine in a pot, sometimes for a couple days to reuse it? Does that risk corroding the pots?

 

In the 90s campus to me was like a small city that was self-sufficient in a lot of ways. The school provided its own services in-house. A prof also told me he would teach us what industry is doing wrong so we can correct it -- that academia was ahead of industry. The school chose the best tools and languages for teaching, not following whatever industry was using.

These concepts seem to be getting lost. These are some universities who have lost the capability of administrating their own email service:

  • mit.edu → mit-edu.mail.protection.outlook.com
  • unm.edu → unm-edu.mail.protection.outlook.com
  • ucsc.edu → aspmx.l.google.com
  • ucsb.edu → aspmx.l.google.com
  • cmu.edu → aspmx.l.google.com
  • princeton.edu → princeton-edu.mail.protection.outlook.com

I have to say it’s a bit embarrassing that these schools have made themselves dependent on surveillance capitalists for something as simple as email. It’s an educational opportunity lost. Students should be maintaining servers.

These lazy schools have inadvertently introduced exclusivity. That is, if a student is unwilling to pawn themselves to privacy-abusing corps who help oil¹ companies find oil to dig for, they are excluded from the above schools if required to have the school’s email account.

Schools pay for MATlab licenses because that’s what’s used in industry. But how is that good for teaching? It’s closed-source, so students are blocked from looking at the code. It contradicts education both because the cost continuously eats away budget and also the protectionist non-disclosure. A school that leads rather than follows would use GNU Octave.

Have any universities rejected outsourcing, needless non-free software, and made independence part of the purpose?

  1. Google and Microsoft both use AI to help oil companies decide where to drill.
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