NIN is 29yo angst with heroin addict angst thrown in for good measure.

And some of those same scientists later organized a mass slaughter of thousands of platypuses in order to determine if the stories about them were true. Science, bitches!

Fun uranium facts: during WWII, one method that the Manhattan Project used to refine uranium (i.e. separate U235 from natural uranium which is mostly non-fissile U238) relied on magnetism. A charged particle moving through a magnetic field experiences a force perpendicular to the direction of motion, which makes it follow a slightly curved path instead of a straight line. This force is the same for both U235 and U238 but since U235 weighs slightly less, its path is slightly more curved. By charging particles of natural uranium and shooting them through a powerful magnetic field, separate collectors can be set up to gather the U235 particles.

Creating the magnetic field required powerful electromagnets. Normally these would have used copper wire but copper was a valuable strategic metal needed for much of the other military hardware the US was producing, so the Manhattan Project “checked out” the United States’ reserves of silver to build the magnets. For good measure, the electricity for the magnets came mostly from the hydroelectric dams built as part of the Tennessee Valley Authority projects of the 1930s (this is mainly why the Manhattan Project’s uranium processing facilities were located in Oak Ridge). These dams were originally meant to power the production of aluminum, but the US had plenty of other sources for that.

I always claimed in job interviews to be good at debugging, but there are no certifications for debugging and there’s really no way for an interviewer to verify such a claim. So even though it is an incredibly important skill, companies just do not look for it. There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there’s no need for debugging.

One thing I always liked about the various flavors of BASIC was that nobody ever pushed that shit as a religion.

So you’re saying hotdog pizzas aren’t really pizza?

Peche (peach-flavored lambic) and framboise (raspberry-flavored) are awesome, too. As expensive as wine but at least it has the same alcohol content as wine.

Romans were food snobs too, though. One common insult was “chickpea-eater” because roasted chickpeas were poor people food. Thing is, roasted chickpeas are fucking delicious - I really wish fresh chickpeas in the pod were easier to find (in the US).

I’ll stick to my mammoth steaks, thanks very much.

Not since the 17th century.

1847 called, they want their dick pic back.

Quest Diagnostics.

Impersonate a masque

Macaque?

I used to hang with some behavioral psychology grad students (the type that follow the practices of B.F. Skinner and operant conditioning) who were researching the effects of various drugs on pigeons. We were drinking in their lab one time and there were about thirty white pitchers sitting on a table; eventually I noticed that they all had little white, twitching tails sticking out of them - each one contained a pigeon face-down waiting to be put into the testing chamber. I asked them how they managed to get the pigeons into the pitchers and keep them there and they just laughed. They took me into the cage room and showed me how they just opened the cage door and held up a pitcher and the bird would fly like a rocket straight into it. Sometimes they went in so hard they would knock themselves unconscious.

There are some obvious ethical issues with animal experimentation, but as a certified druggie myself their lives didn’t seem all that bad.

We can get decent bread at bakeries in the US (sometimes), but it’s not like having a process that is fine-tuned to your personal tastes, and even at these places what you buy can be a couple of days old. There’s nothing like fresh bread that has just barely cooled off enough to eat.

We have LiDL here, too, and although their bread is just heated-up frozen dough it’s still pretty good. Better than anything prepackaged, that’s for sure.

My schedule is levain in the afternoon, stretch-and-fold after dinner, bulk ferment to around midnight, proofing in the banettons until around 4 AM, then into the fridge for most of the next day and I bake after dinner. It’s that 4 AM alarm that I’m managing to completely ignore lately. An extra hour or two of fermenting isn’t fatal, but it does reduce the height of the finished loaf a bit.

I’ve been feeding my local crows roasted peanuts for a couple of years now. Selfish fuckers refuse to murder my enemies. Won’t even shit on their cars.

No, it’s not difficult or really time-consuming at all, but it does tie me to the house for a couple of nights in a row whenever I make it, and I have shit to do. I’ve also started sleeping through my alarms so I’ve developed a tendency to over-ferment a little bit.

The Birdcage is definitely a romcom. Two for one, in fact!

I recommend not getting into baking your own sourdough. I started during COVID because we couldn’t get bread or even yeast at the store, just 50-pound bags of bread flour online. Now I’m stuck doing the whole process every fucking week because the bread is just so much better than anything you can get at the store.