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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • Being able to fold down a larger “sheet” display so that it fit in a pocket would be pretty cool. Having extra room for reading things like maps and comic books is so much better than pinching and zooming on a pocket sized display. What you call limited purpose, I call functional design. I’m kind of over all-in-one devices. They’ve turned into Jack of all trades, but master of none.

    Obviously that’s not what this device is, but it got me thinking about why I’d want a device with multiple e-ink displays or a foldable display.




  • I have induction; anything magnetic will heat, pans sized to your elements work best. Pans with too much aluminum and not enough iron (or other ferro magnetic material) won’t work very well. Getting induction was a great excuse to dump the cheap pans I’d wanted to replace anyway. When shopping the discount racks like Home Goods, Marshalls, etc. I always grabbed some fridge magnets and tried them on the bottom of any prospective purchase; the stronger the pull, the better it will perform with induction. The only item I really missed was my moka pot (stovetop espresso, usually all aluminum casting), but I was able to find one with a stainless steel base that works great. Your pots and pans will also need a flat bottom to react to the induction elements, so woks and such built with a slope or curve to encourage flames to lick up the sides don’t work so well compared to gas. Finding a Teflon coated pan that works with induction was difficult (I don’t often use it anyway, but SO insisted we have one for their use). I’m looking into replacing the Teflon pans with nitrided carbon steel soon.

    Cast Iron and induction are a match made in heaven though. The cast iron heats fast and evenly and the induction means you can be very precise about how much heat you apply and when. When you turn off the element, the only heat left in the whole system is what you’ve already put into the pan, which is a big deal in my tiny kitchen when I don’t always have room to move a pan off to the side to rest or cool. The cast iron and stainless pans I have heat fast enough that I can basically cook starting from a cold pan for most things. Heating an empty pan takes seconds. I can bring a pot of a water of a couple quarts/liters to a roaring boil in about 4 minutes, then back down to a gentle simmer in seconds.

    If gas is cooking with fire, induction feels like cooking with science. As may be clear from the rant, I love my induction range.






  • Sorry for the rant. I long story short, I agree with you.

    The quadratic formula.

    When we learned to use it in algebra, it was just rote memorization that made little sense. We knew there was a proof for it, but we were told it was beyond our level and to just wait. When we finally touched on it again in Calculus, it was little more than a footnote. Since we had developed better tools for finding roots already, we did little more than note its existence and solve the problems more generally. I don’t think we got around to the real proof of the quadratic formula until later with Linear Algebra. Most people aren’t going to get that far. Most people don’t have any need to. The quadratic formula is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You need upper level math skills to prove it, but we learn it early in order to practice algebraic skills to get to that level.

    I just wish that we’d have been taught some of those calculus fundamentals and ideas earlier. It would have been like a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe we wouldn’t be ready to rigorously work through limits and integrals before all that algebra practice, but even a child can understand acceleration and its relationship to changes in velocity. We have so many documentaries about special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Almost no one watching these documentaries can do that math, but we don’t worry about that. Our society could benefit from everyone having more general knowledge about the very broad strokes of calculus, differential equations, statistics, and combinatorics long before we worry about teaching the mechanics of those maths to them. Not everyone needs to know HOW to do them, but everyone can be taught to appreciate WHAT they do and WHY they are important and a part of every facet of our lives.










  • I stopped drinking soda regularly decades ago and went through the same thing, drinks I once enjoyed were now either “meh” or way too sweet and acidic to be able stomach more than a few ounces. Cutting out soda also meant cutting out a lot of artificial sweeteners (because I was never very picky about diet or not, I just wanted the bubbly sweet. That meant that when I did try diet sodas after having quit for some time, they tasted even worse or sometimes even made me feel worse. This is all anecdotal obviously, but it seems like you’re experiencing something similar. It’s not just you. There’s nothing wrong with you.



  • First, 400 pounds is a pretty beefy fridge, most basic units are a lot lighter. 400 pounds is coincidentally the top end of the average weight search AI gave me too, the lower end being 200 pounds. I’ve moved a few fridges over the decades, they’d have been hard pressed to get a 400 pounder wedged in there like that.

    Second, a fridge is mostly empty space. The weight is certainly not distributed throughout. If they put the heavy end (usually where the compressor is) hanging out the back, they probably wouldn’t have made it very far anyway before the thing ejected itself. They are primarily difficult to move because they are bulky and lack safe handholds for lifting.

    Third, police modifications adding weight would necessarily require modifications improving the suspension. It would be pretty bad design if putting three 200+ adults in the rear of a police wagon were enough to make the vehicle unsafe.

    This is all a pretty dumb thing to argue about. After all, I agree that the cop in this case was an idiot. That’s mostly because storing a fridge on its side is a dumb move, but also because I do actually believe that storing it as we see in the photo would be bad for the car too. Fridges have lots of sharp edges, plenty of opportunity to destroy the interior, shatter a window, or cause an accident. I just don’t think weight or its distribution is the problem.