This is the lab behind the poop knife. They are absolutely experts in this kind of thing.

I need to read the whole paper, but I suspect the weight/wind resistance ratio of the javelin is better, and that the motion of launching an atlatl dart is affected by the downward angle. The railing on the scissor lift likely has an effect, too.

Community canneries still exist, but they used to be way more popular. In rural communities where people grow a lot of their own food, people can their own food, but pressure canners take a lot of time for a single batch to come up to pressure, cook, and cool.

Community canneries have much bigger pressure canners where you could feasibly can everything in one batch. It’s also really enables people sharing surpluses, trading, etc.

Many hobbies are better shared, too. If you have 20 people sharing a super high quality “item”, they will have a better experience than if each of those people had to buy their own crappy versions.

Basically, a whole lot of things can be “libraried”.

I’m not a medical doctor, nor am I in your exact situation, but I do know a little bit about sleep. There’s a broad category of things known as sleep hygiene that are basically supposed to be the “best practices” around sleep. Evidence is good for some things, and inconclusive for others, but in lieu of going to an actual sleep specialist, these sorts of things shouldn’t hurt to try.

Stuff like only being in bed to sleep (no watching TV from bed, etc.), avoiding alcohol and caffeine, and giving consideration to your circadian rythym (low blue light prior to sleep, coupled with increased blue light upon waking, it’s apparently the contrast that matters more than the actual amounts).

There’s also plenty of people who have undiagnosed issues affecting sleep. Obviously you said, for you, it’s depression, but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be something else at play that could be addressed. If you have the means, something like a smartwatch or an oura ring (which is hsa/fsa eligible if you are in the US) could help tell you if you are moving around a lot in your sleep, or could have something like apnea. Again, not the same as going to an expert, but that’s not an option for everyone.

Yeah, that’s mostly true, but the front porch of a home is part of the home for 4th amendment purposes. Police obtaining warrant-less access to your front porch would violate this.

If someone is out on the street, it can still be illegal depending on the state. In new york, for example, the definition of illegal eavesdropping includes:

“Mechanical overhearing of a conversation” means the intentional overhearing or recording of a conversation or discussion, without the consent of at least one party thereto, by a person not present thereat, by means of any instrument, device or equipment.

There’s no no stipulation about location.

The doorbell cameras that everyone have all record audio, in blatant violation of law, and they hand it over to police. I’m surprised there hasn’t been a court case to really slap those companies on the wrist.

Yeah, I definitely understand that. I certainly have things that I don’t use as much as I hoped (I’m staring at a solar panel doing nothing leaned against my wall). For me, I really need the resulting “thing” to be something that I will use/be excited about.

That’s why, for me, fixing stuff that’s broken, upgrading stuff, or repurposing stuff you already own is good. Replacing a worn out jack is a relatively simple task that can turn an expensive brick back into a nice thing.

The tools you need are not a very long list. You can get a cheap, crappy soldering iron for $6, solder for $4, a crappy multimeter for $7, and one of those magnifying glass/alligator clip things for $6 from harbor freight. Despite being poor quality, a lot can be accomplished with just those tools.

I ended up buying a bench power supply for like $40, but you can just get DC power supplies from the bin of assorted cords at your nearest thrift store for basically free.

Wow, you couldn’t be more different than I am. Over the years, I’ve bought kits that had tutorials along with them, and I could never get hooked by them. I guess there’s better tutorials for things now than “make a bunch of LEDs blink in order”, so maybe the terrain is different.

There are so many kits you can find online, and I think a lot of them are more or less interchangeable. I suppose it depends on what extent you want to focus on digital vs analog circuits, but given that you mention robotics, I would assume digital. Grab one of the kits that has an arduino or raspberry pi and a bunch of other components. In the grand scheme of things, components are cheap, but no one is going to ship you the 5 exact resistors you need, so you need to have a fairly large assortment to choose from for different projects. Kits are going to come with different components like digital readouts, joysticks, etc, so just choose one that looks like it has the things you would like to learn to use.

It seems like kits are divided into “contains every part of a specific project” or “contains parts for 1,000,000 potential projects, and here’s a booklet of tutorials for some”. I prefer the second, but you could prefer the first depending on if you want to go right for robotics use cases.

Personally, my best learning has been through repairing home appliances and stuff like that. Even just “necropsies” on broken things to understand how they work.

Something that you’ll notice with electronics these days is that sometimes the difference between a base model widget and the “premium” widget that is 1.5-2 times the price is the addition of a handful of cheap parts. They might be easy to put in and cheap, but they are going to remove as many costs as possible for the base model. For example, a $350 dollar espresso machine with $100 of extra parts added can easily compete with a machine that costs $1000 or more.

All news has a bias, some news just doesn’t tell you what their bias is. I’m not advocating for intentionally aiming for biased news, I’m advocating for knowing what the bias of the author/editor of the story is, so that when you read it, you know what conclusion they might be trying to lead you to. Even if a journalist tries their best to be impartial, that’s not possible, and like I said, it’s very easy to tell a one sided story with exclusively facts.

News sites often have multiple feeds, but many these days don’t. And the feeds still aren’t as granular as I’d like sometimes. My regional newspaper has a feed for news more specifically local to me, but it’s bogged down with children’s sports and obituaries.

I think my dream setup would allow some intelligent filters to get rid of any categories I just don’t care about, and any “top 8 widgets to do X” filler advertisement articles. Also, a way to lump together all news articles covering the same story, so I could either choose which outlets to actually read/compare, or mark all as read.

I’ve not read 1440 at all, so this may or may not apply, but I’d offer a word of caution to any news that purports to be “just facts”. You can absolutely promote an agenda with only facts by choosing which facts to publish (and what stories to even cover). It’s sometimes better to aim to get news from sources that are just very transparent about their biases instead of claiming they don’t have any.

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.

I think most jus soli countries also have jus sanguinis

It actually screws us 2 ways. First, by removing liability/responsibility from the company and putting it on people. Second, by forcing everyone to have to car about the stock market, and be subject to its whims

Keeping the air dry reduces both the length of time microorganisms can live outside your body and the length of time that vapor particles can harbor them.

Pretty sure this is only true for some microorganisms. Well, I’m not sure about length of survival time, but I’ve definitely see studies that have shown that lower humidity causes respiratory droplet evaporation, resulting in more airborne virus particles and increasing spread. There is some evidence that this increases infection rates

Sentry Safes aren’t safes, they are fire boxes with a fancy lock.

Judging by the one I bought when I went off to college to keep some documents safe, they don’t even have fancy locks. I misplaced my key, but I was able to open it in the same amount of time with a pumpkin carving knife as a jiggler.

It’s hard to tell from the pic cause I can’t get a good view of the leaves, but based on the bark, it looks like maybe it’s in the willow family. I’m thinking populus deltoides (cottonwood), but I could be way off. They often have a lot of dead branches, especially in the rocky mountains. It seems like your neighbors tree might have broken a little bit in that crotch, allowing infection to get in. It seems like there is a bit of slime flux causing that staining. If it’s close to housing, it is worth having an arborist look at it.

Like someone said below, do some due diligence to make sure you are getting a certified arborist cause otherwise, you’ll probably just find a “tree guy” who will automatically just say it needs to be trimmed or taken down. There’s a decent chance the two sides of the tree could be bolted together to reduce stress on that joint.

Yeah, it’s pretty BS. No one would ever make fun of someone driving a car for not being 100% human powered.

I will say that the only time I get a little uptight about ebikes is when I come across them on trails/paths that are designated for non-motorized traffic only. Somehow people think that motorized only means combustion engines.

Something that I’ve learned is that it’s basically built to contain steam, while an air fryer or regular oven is built to vent steam. If you are doing something like dehydrating, it basically has to run for forever to actually dehydrate things since the interior stays humid. It’s easy to get around though by just leaving the door ajar by a little bit. I prop mine open with a dish towel.

It’s harder when air frying cause you don’t want to let all the heat out. If I’m air frying something like Brussels sprouts that have a lot of moisture, I’ll just open the door a few times during cooking to let out all the steam.

I recently learned about it, but haven’t used it. From what I understand, it’s similar to how the fediverse works; individual instances are run by whoever wants to run them. If you run your own instance, you have complete trust in it, but you effectively aren’t anonymous (unless you support a whole bunch of users to pool together. If you join someone else’s instance, you have to trust them. There’s public and private instances.

The other downside is that, like many other small players, they are a metasearch engine, so they rely on the big players like Google and Bing who actually crawl the web for information to index. If Google or Bing want to hide information, that trickles down into metasearch engines, too. It’s somewhat buffered by thr fact that your metasearch can look through a whole bunch of different indexes, so you aren’t held to one countries censorship, but it probably still has an effect.

I personally don’t want anyone going in my room while I’m there. I thought covid finally changed this when hotels started only doing housekeeping between customers, or if requested, but unfortunately it seems like they are changing this back. It just seems like a waste of labor to have someone else make my bed.

I’ve never tipped people going into my room. I’d do it if I made a mess or something, though.