Bathtub Thoughts

I made this drawing:

The brown things (labeled R and L) are bones. They're hard and protect the vital organs in the tummy (labeled F) which are soft and would break easily.

That's kinda how human society (through its architecture and infrastructure) is supposed to keep us squishy humans safe

Let’s see if I got the gist of this community right.

(And yes I did eat at All’antico Vinaio and wanted it again.)

The bread they use is schiacciata. It’s like focaccia but not - different hydration and made with something called a “poolish”, where you take a certain amount of yeast/flour/water and let it ferment for an extended period of time (multiple hours/overnight) then add more water/flour and let it it proof again. Because the hydration is so high, it is sticky as hell, so be careful when working with it.

The cheeses, obviously, are not just regular sliced cheese. What they frequently use is stracciatella, which is mozzarella mixed with cream and cooked. It’s the center for burrata. But there’s also a “cheese cream” like “pecorino cream” which seems to be a mornay sauce (aka grated/shredded cheese + bechamel (roux + milk)). Looks to be a way to make sure cheese doesn’t go to waste, makes it go further, and is spreadable. (And hecking delicious)

Finally there are other creams like pistachio cream, which is finely chopped pistachios mixed with Parmesan or Pecorino Romano and Olive oil (and maybe some lemon). It’s delicious and entirely different from what I as an American use as sandwich condiments.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/32957140

I thought of this after reading the first example in the comm sidebar.

In elementary Microwave Math (the subset most people learn during the normal operation of a consumer microwave), there are two places, the seconds place and the minutes place. The seconds place is constrained to [00 - 99] inclusive for one hundred total possible values in that place. The minutes place can be constrained to the same set of symbols, in which case Microwave Math is simply a base one hundred numeral system operating in a base sixty place value system, leading to the mildly humorous situation of having two ways to represent the same numerical value, e.g. 01:20 = 00:80. Some microwaves may have an hours place, or different constraints on the possible values of the minutes place, for which we'll need...

Advanced Microwave Math! This introduces the concept of nested place value systems. Most of us are so used to place value numbering systems that we hardly notice how often we use them, but most numbering systems follow an implicit rule that the number of symbols is the same as the value of moving up a "place". This makes sense for counting because you don't need to move up a place until you run out of symbols, so you may as well make the value of the next place the next number you need to represent. Numeral systems don't have to follow this rule, and Advanced Microwave Math breaks it.

The simplest case is where the minutes place is bounded to the set of all non-negative integers. In this value system there are two places, each with their own rules governing which symbols are allowed and what values they can represent. the seconds place is constrained in value to 00 - 99 (decimal, or DEC), and has a place value of one. The minutes place might be constrained to [00 - 99DEC], [000 - 999DEC], or it might be that the minutes place can contain any non-negative integer.

After that, we come to the hours place, which functions more or less the same way as the minutes place, in that it can have various constraints on what values can be used, but it still has the same place value relationship to the minutes place of sixty that minutes has to seconds. This changes with the introduction of the days place, which has a value of 24DECxhours instead of 60DEC.

Expanding this system into weeks and months and years introduces the idea that, though the system is generally presented one with positional notation (the value of place n is some [usually fixed] multiple of the value of place n+1). This isn't necessary for Microwave Math, if each place can be defined by an arbitrary multiple of the of a base value e.g. the years place could be defined as 31557600DEC seconds (the "Julian Year"). The only requirement is that instead of position dictating the multiplier, each place must have a unique symbol denoting which multiplier is being used by that place. By convention they are arranged from largest multiplier to least, but 3 years, 6 months, and 12 seconds can just as unambiguously be written as 12 seconds, 3 years, and 6 months and refer to the same amount of microwave time (c.f. the American middle-endian date representation, a similar rule-breaking place value system that, if we insist upon using it, could really benefit from some non-positional place value indicator).

The value multiplier for a place doesn't have to be an integer either. The introduction of leaps (day and second) and other vagaries of calculating means that we might prefer to use a "mean" value where a year might be some non-integer multiple of seconds, depending on which period of earth's history one is in. There's no reason the multiplier has to be an integer, or non-negative, or real, or rational, or continuous or differentiable or have any particular reference to any other place. In addition, each place has its own rules about what values can be in it, and those rules may mean that each place can have infinitely many symbols representing infinitely many values.

The inner place value systems can themselves be a simple positional place value system like decimal, or they can themselves use Microwave Math, meaning that place value systems in Microwave Math can nest infinitely. I'm not sure what kind of number that is but Microwave Math has some crazy implications to it.

Technically, there's only two sources of energy in the universe: nuclear energy and the expansion of the cosmos.

Like, solar is fusion, ofc, the light coming from the sun. So is wind and water and bioenergy (indirectly). Geothermal is fission (heat comes from radioactive decay inside Earth).

But then there's another source of energy that nobody ever talks about: tidal power It works by converting the rise and fall of water with the tides into electrical energy. This energy ultimately comes from the moon orbiting around Earth, more precisely, its mechanical energy: The fact that the moon is distant from Earth is only because the universe expanded after the big bang. Had it not done this, the moon and earth would be located at the same location, and there would be no "orbiting" to extract energy out of :P

I wrote more about the subject of extracting (useful) energy out of cosmic expansion in this post here

In scientific literature there's generally two ways to cite someone:

• If you're writing a technical paper about something related to technology, you typically cite the paper in square brackets.[The Art of Citation; Johnson et al.; doi: 10.4208/jcm.1512-m2015-0242]
• If you're writing in sociology, you typically cite the author in round brackets. (Clarke 2013)

Nevermind the square/round brackets, my point is that in technology-related fields, typically the name of the paper is considered more important than the author. A paper can have many authors, and not always all are listed. Meanwhile in sociology, the author is considered more important than the name of the paper.

This reflects the main difference between Mastodon and Lemmy:

• Lemmy is content-centric, where you have communities (focused on a topic) as the central element of organization, and they can have posts.
• Mastodon is people-centric, where you have person/user as the central element of organization, and they can have posts.

This is why lemmy mostly appeals to people working in IT and tech, and that's why there's mostly nerds here.

Just to put things into proportion:

This is vienna. Vienna has an area of around 400 km².

And the blue area is the area that would have to be covered by solar panels to produce enough energy for the whole city:

Source: I did the maths myself. I assumed that per person around 30 MWh of energy/year are needed. Data for this: our world in data, energy usage per person. It's well known that 1 m² of solar panel produces around 200 Wp and that's 200 kWh/year. So you need about 150 m² of solar cells per person. Vienna has about a million inhabitants, so that makes 150 km² of solar panels approximately.