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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Steven Gould - Jumper

    Barring the character names and teleportation it shares little with the movie, though I think the movie wasn’t all that bad tbh. The idea is a kid with an abusive single dad discovers he can teleport. He acts like a kid would, making lots of mistakes, and figures out his teleportation and how to live.

    The novel is a little old so characters are a little shallow and stereotypical but honestly way less than expected. I have listened to the novels before but come back every so often for a repeat.




  • There are three genomes that go into an embryo. One from the chromosomes of the large gamete, the egg, one from the chromosomes of the small gamete, the sperm, and one from the mitochondria, in humans from the egg as well. If you had two XX donors you could make XX kids. If you had two XY donors you could make XX, XY, and YY variants. The only viable ones would be XY and XX, YY would not reach gestation.

    That said, if you took the DNA from gametes from each, removed the nucleus and mitochondria of an egg, added the total gametic DNA from both to the cell, added a mitochondria from either donor, then it should, in theory, be a viable egg like in IVF. This is actually a strategy for dealing with a mitochondrial disease by donating mitochondrial DNA from another source rather than those impacted by the disease. The problem would be there are many ways for this to go wrong and be left with an unviable embryo, so it would likely take many many eggs and many many donated cells to get a single viable egg with the donated DNA. That said, it could technically work.


  • I don’t have photos of myself on the internet and do not participate in group photos. If I see a photo of myself online I know, for a fact, that the person who posted it does not respect my privacy, therefore they do not respect me. I will not trust them with any information about myself and others and in general will cut them out of my life if at all possible. Because of this I don’t have people who violate boundaries they don’t share, so if I said “Actually, I think I may be a woman” or “I have been thinking about leaving the country” they would not immediately judge or try to prevent my doing so, they would let me be and respect my needs. Also because of this I am much more comfortable working on things with these people to make life better and to invest in their wellbeing.





  • Well it depends too on how long things take to settle out. Salt is easily suspended in water, but silt is not, so the water would be salty but not muddy. The water would also probably have lots of photosynthetic bacteria/algae in it, so you would probably have blooms of green, blue, red, and brown all over. Those blooms would uptake light and carbon through that process then as they died drop the content down the long water column. All sorts of feeding below that would create a full eecological web. If there were deep sea vents, volcanic activity breaking through the sea floor, you would have a second source of energy and chemistry at the bottom. That said, the over level of life at the surface would be limited by things like iron, phosphorus, copper, and so on. Any heavier ions would be less available at the surface because there is no surface erosion bringing them in at the top so as they are bound up in dead algae they will drop to the floor.

    The rate limiting at the sea floor will be based on energy but not too bad, you would likely see a lot of diverse life around vents and it would have a fairly large complexity over time. That said, the depth would make for less complex life due to the lack of light and associated vision. Some things would make light but it would be dangerous to make and would not be super common.

    Another interesting consideration is the geography of the sea floor. Would there be fault lines? If there are continental plates but way under the ocean they would still have movement, so subduction and so on would play out, so you would probably have chains of vents along the diverging or merging plate boundaries. Life would spread along these lines, so life would be closely related at nearby vents but distant over the surface of the planet. I would anticipate a fairly heterogeneous population over the surface of the planet in the deep, but far less so at the surface.


  • It depends on the composition of the planet. If it is just a massive ball of water floating in space then it will be whatever purity that is, plus whatever space dust and impactors bring in.

    If it is basically a terrestrial planet with water on top, say earth plus a lot of water, then it would be salty. The thing with salt water is contact between the water and rock. If there is sufficient heat it will circulate, so salty water from the bottom of the ocean may be heated by magma or similar and then it will be less dense, floating upwards to the surface. Along the way it will mix and cool, leading to dispersal of the dissolved salts.

    The only way I can imagine a planet with a solid subsurface completely coated in freshwater would be if the planet snowballed hard, no radioactive materials left in the core making heat, no significant tidal pull on the core, and then after reaching a very cold temperature having slow addition of clean water from comets. That said, comets are dirty, they have lots of stuff, so you would need somehow clean comets. Still, at that point once sufficient water has hit the surface it could form a thick enough layer over the salty ocean below and start to melt, maybe from greenhouse effects. As soon as it runs away and keeps heating enough it will start to melt the core ice though, so you could have a short lived window in that freak occurrence but it will be very temporary and not at all likely.


  • What I have always wanted from a phone since Android came out is what I had with my HTC Dream (the first android phone, slide out keyboard, trackball, oh god, I loved it). I had a super chunky extended battery which made it last multiple days on a single charge, or for someone such as myself made it last the full day. My current phone has a 5003mAh battery and is 8.9mm thick. I would happily take something that was 20mm thick to have all that space taken by a battery, which based on the dimensions of the battery is about 0.17Wh/mm^3. The remaining space should provide enough space for about 23500mAh which would bring the total to just under 29000mAh. At my current usage of charging twice a day from about 20% up to 100%, so around 4000mAh x2, and assuming we want to work between 20% and 80% for extended battery longevity, that would make about 17000mAh or just over 4 days of usage. That would be a delightfully chonky phone with the easy ability to keep the charge within the healthy range, not to mention the ability to have it stand on its side or upright without a stand in many cases.


  • Our little monster is the same about cooked chicken, if you have it you have obviously made a mistake, that is his food and while he is a gentle god he can also be a jealous god.

    As for the fat, we have recently tried using fat from pork roasts, the fat cap is thick and soft so we can take a little of that and add it to his containers. I tried more refined fats, he will definitely eat butter, but he ends up missing the stop point and having loose stools if we use a refined fat.


  • This is the exact type of situation for BARF or PMR. BARF (Biologically Appropriate Raw Food) and PMR (Prey Model Raw) basically focus on hitting the nutritional needs of animals like cats and dogs by matching what they would get from prey animals. This includes a fair bit of digest for dogs but less so for cats.

    My cat is doing very well on BARF and is not showing his age at all. He used to have bad hairballs, lots of itching, and very bad fur. He is now sleek and healthy with very shiny teeth and lots of energy.

    Cat tax

    His food consists of chicken cutlet (for skin, bone, and meat), chicken or lamb liver, chicken or lamb heart (for taurine), sheep brain, usually lamb kidney but sometimes beef, and then some selection of rotating meat which includes beef, pork, lamb, chicken, salmon, and prawns (sometimes called shrimp). It is about 7.5g for each of the heart, liver, kidney, and brain, then the bone is varied to change stool consistency (more bone makes harder stool) so he has an easy time there, then the meat is rotated to keep deficiencies in any specific meat at bay.

    It takes about half an hour once a fortnight to make his food and he is fed every morning. He sometimes carries his meat somewhere else to eat it so we have to clean carpet or surfaces, but honestly, he is just way too cute for us to try and do something about it.

    Anyway, maybe switching would help, the process of switching takes a while and requires building jaw strength so it is a little slow going at first, but the improvement to health is pretty great and it isn’t that much effort. Oh, and his poop smells way less, and there is less of it. He has much smaller and smoother poops, nothing runny, nothing girthy, and the cat litter is able to contain the smell more effectively than previously.


  • Ah, sorry, missed that. So the missed alarm notification is happening way later, like hours later, than the alarm time? That sounds like the background process is being killed in some way. In Android when you set an alarm it uses the intent system to wake itself again later. If this is failing for your alarm app only then it could be an issue with the app, but this looks like the default clock application, is that correct? It looks like you maybe installed it from the play store but it may just be an update, so just checking.

    That all said, if the clock is the only app with this problem then I would address it by replacing the app. If this is impacting other apps I can only think of a few ways that it could be caused but it should be fairly obviously problematic for other apps and solving that is beyond my understanding.

    I would recommend trying another alarm clock app from a source you trust. I would install something from IzzyOnDroid on FDroid but your milage may vary.





  • Yeah, the whole “China is doing propaganda using TikTok” line is kind of like saying Russia is using bots on YouTube. Like, yeah, maybe, sure, but focussing all your efforts on one single platform and ignoring the rest is silly. As the red team you would use as many different platforms as possible, make sure your disinformation output was broad and came from multiple, even opposing, ideological positions, and absolutely swamp the information space with junk. If nothing is reliable people don’t approach things carefully, they just check out. Once people check out it is a win.



  • Both. China is where most consumer tech comes from, and the rest often includes parts from China as well. Taiwan has TSMC which makes all the big CPUs, but honestly all the small stuff like consumer electronics comes mostly out of China. If they did want to integrate some sort of spying they would have the opportunity, and in the past individual threats to the state of many countries have had supply chain attacks carried out, so it is not an unfounded fear.

    That all said, China is run by the CCP, an ostensibly Communist party, so red scare, not to mention Chinese, so racism, and Party, because Americans are against fun, or at least in government they seem to be. China also has an abysmal record on human rights, though coming from anyone in the west criticism is somewhat hypocritical given prison labour, proping up dictatorships, coups, exploiting slave labour, and so on. Nobody is doing a perfect job, nobody is saintly, but there are fair and unfair criticisms against China as a nation state and those do inform some of the fear of their potential for spying.

    Now TikTok, Reddit, Meta, etc… There are the really scary tools with far too little attention.