The pharmacist did say that it was to reduce the queasiness since both the antibiotic and the steroid I was prescribed are apparently quite rough on the stomach, so I have to take the pills with food, which I inferred to mean as a meal. Which was fine when I took them with lunch and dinner yesterday since obviously that’s gonna be tons of food to go with it, but then it came to this morning, and I don’t normally eat breakfast. I wasn’t sure if something simple like toast or a granola bar which I would take with the morning dose would be enough food to counteract it, since obviously I didn’t want to spend my morning with a miserable stomach.

I remember Dolly Parton singing about her.

They sell them cut like that as dog treats, with the hole packed with food. Probably either dragged out as a treat for some camper’s dog or scavenged by wildlife and abandoned when the good stuff was gone.

Could be exercise-induced asthma? I get this as well and only found out it wasn’t a common affliction a few weeks ago, when it was pointed out that this might be a cause. For me at least, after a while the pain gets so bad that every time I swallow it feels like my throat doesn’t want to reopen.

Nuclear power, genetics, steam power, modern explosives…

The big question then becomes: “is that behaviour inherent to all systems like this, or just this one?” Like, if you go to the store, buy a basic sprinkler, and then test it and it behaves exactly opposite to how you might expect it to. Or it does something completely unexpected, like phases into another dimension and starts pumping strawberry jam. Your next step shouldn’t be to say “Oh, weird, I guess that’s that.” You’d start knocking down variables. Is it the same with every sprinkler or just this one? Does the amount of suction applied affect it? If I replace the water with something else does the outcome change?"

If you’re doing research like this, you’re kind of expected to do the same sort of elaboration even if the result of a basic experiment conforms precisely to your hypothesis, because the question isn’t if any given sprinkler setup behaves in this way, it’s about whether this is a universal phenomenon across all similar setups. Because there’s an xkcd for everything, it’s this.

I think it’s also fair to say that “too cold” is generally more livable than “too hot”. It’s quite a bit easier to generate and conserve heat than to ward it off, and even a planet that is so cold that its atmosphere has precipitated into snow could theoretically be survivable with habitat domes or the like, much like a proposed moon base. “Too hot,” on the other hand, can potentially be hot enough to melt basically anything we send there, which is why there’s a lot more focus on colonizing Mars right now than Venus.

FR It ain’t like anyone’s gonna be popping by for a visit. Landed nicely on the surface or energetically buried 30m below the surface, the ashes are still on the moon.

I suspect it isn’t that the test can’t be done in the wild, simply that it hasn’t been. There’s some logistical issues to marking, releasing, and observing animals in the wild without being noticed that I expect makes working with captive animals an easier first step.

I can’t help but feel like if we didn’t live in a capitalist hellscape, the increasing democratization of art would be unambiguously a good thing. I’d be more than happy to see “art as decoration” (as opposed to “art as a human means of expression”) opened to being something shunted off to machines, if it weren’t for the fact that this is a method that people currently use to make sure they have enough money to not starve to death in the cold. Advertising art of polar bears drinking Coke is nicer to look at than big block text saying “consume”, but it’s hardly a soulful expression of the human condition. Or maybe it is, which is even more depressing, but the ultimate apotheosis of this is pushing that sort of messaging to robots to make anyway.

Meanwhile, giving people who aren’t necessarily “artistic” a vehicle to create art as a means of expressing themselves is also really neat, and in the hands of people who are artistic, it gives them a low-impact tool for pre-visualization, inspiration, and a new medium to experiment with. It also reduces barriers for people with disabilities to make art. I’d love to see artists training LLM systems on their own work as a way of sharing their “style” with the world — something which is difficult to justify in a world where your style is something that needs to be jealously protected against copyright infringement, which again comes down to needing to monetize your expression as a matter of survival.

The ampersand (&) was so commonly used that for a while it was taught as a letter. British schoolkids in the mid- to late-19th century would include it as the 27th letter on writing work and needlework samplers, usually after “z”.

There’s some discussion that the Alphabet Song ends with “w, x, y & z” specifically to include it.

Q.E.D. is “quod erat demonstrandum”, meaning “thus, it has been demonstrated”.

I hated these Dairy Queen commercials so much I haven’t done DQ willingly in over 20 years. It used to be a regular thing to grab ice cream in a hot afternoon during the summer.

The real question is if there is something that can exist and “live” in the parts of the universe that are so unusual and beyond our experience, would we even recognize what it is if we saw it?

I used to do land surveying in Canada and we’d use “decs” for decimetres when laying out points. You’d put down the rod, they’d tell you something like “dec and a half left” then you’d move closer and it’d be “two cents right” and you’d be even closer and then it’s like “3 mils right.” Then you’d take the shot and they’d tell you how much closer or farther you’d have to go to get the point. If you were way off to the point where you might have tens of metres, usually for rough layout we’d rarely use “dee-kays” for dekameters, but typically it would be just “30 metres north”.

The landscape company that maintains the condo I live in uses them exclusively to “clean” the paved common areas and every time they do, the dust blows up into the air, and then 15 minutes after they pass it resettles right back where it came from, while also leaving a fine film of dust on every flat surface in the apartment, as well as small piles of long-accumulated gunk in every corner and crevice. I can’t help but think how much better and quieter this place would be if they just used brooms.

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Finally, the emoji sensory homunculus!

For some reason my phone always wants to use “it’s” regardless when Swyping. I’m not sure if they just figured they’re going to be wrong half the time anyway so they’ll just default to the one they figure people will use more.

Sweetie seems fair right up until I needed to go back and reevaluate everything I’ve said and change half the words because the store system has made it’s own decisions about what I’ve said.

(Swype seems fast right up until I need to go back and reevaluate everything I’ve said and change half the words because the Swype system has made its own decisions about what I’ve said.)