It’s not Kessler Syndrome until it’s so bad that we can’t feasibly launch anything new. A single cascading collision chain might calm down again after breaking a lot of stuff without any catastrophic long term impact if all the debris ends up either in a stable orbit that can be predicted and avoided by other objects, or unstable orbits that decay until the debris falls out of orbit.
I’ve definitely noticed less shininess than the same filament was getting at the same temperatures on my previous printer, except for the first layer. As the first layer prints without part cooling, my guess is that the extra part cooling versus the other printer means it’s setting before it’s had time to self-level. If that’s right, then turning down the part cooling (and then also the speed so you can get away with the reduced part cooling) would make things shiny again. I’ve not bothered investigating that, as most of what I print is either functional, where I wouldn’t care about shininess, or gets painted, where any shininess would come from paint or clearcoat.
As someone who’s just spent half an hour reading Wikipedia thanks to this thread, I can now dispense a summary of what I read to make it feel like I didn’t just waste a chunk of time I should have spent in bed by wasting another chunk of time I should be spending in bed.
Fats are made out of fatty acids, which are carboxylic acids with a longish carbon chain. A saturated fatty acid only has single bonds between carbon atoms, a monounsaturated fatty acid has a single double bond somewhere in the chain (and these are sometimes things that turn into buzzwords, e.g. omega three oils are ones where there’s a single double bond three along from the end of the chain), and a polyunsaturated fatty acid has more than one double bond.
Single bonds in a carbon chain can only be one way around, so you don’t get isomers of saturated fatty acids, but double bonds in a carbon chain can be in either of two orientations. If the hydrogens are on the same side for both sides of the bond, that’s the cis orientation, and if they’re on opposite sides, that’s the trans orientation. Most natural unsaturated fats are cis, so they generally don’t get explicitly labelled as cis fats, and just the trans ones get the extra label. Notably, though, vaccenic acid, which is about 4% of the fat in butter, is trans by default, so it’s cis-vaccenic acid that gets the extra label.
Unsaturated fats tend to be more liquid at room temperature, but can be made by growing cheap vegetables. They also go off faster as free radicals can attack the double bonds. Saturated fats tend to be solid at room temperature, but mostly need to come from animals or more expensive plants (palm fat is an exception - it’s cheap and mostly saturated). It’s therefore desirable to use industrial processes to artificially saturate fats, and we can do that by heating them up and exposing them to hydrogen in the presence of a catalyst like Nickel. You don’t necessarily want to fully saturate your fat, though, so might stop part way, and if you do, unless you intentionally tweak the process to avoid it because it’s the 21st century and you’re legally obliged to, you get some of the partially hydrogenated fat switching from cis to trans.
Over the course of the last century, we realised that (except for a few like vaccenic acid) trans fats are harmful in lots of exciting ways, e.g. messing up cholesterol, blocking your arteries, and building up in your brain. They’ve therefore been banned or restricted to certain percentages in a lot of the world. You can get a similar effect by fully hydrogenating things to get safe (or at least safer) saturated fat and mixing it with the unmodified fat, or by switching everything that used to use hydrogenated vegetable oil to using palm oil, which is one of the driving forces behind turning rainforests into palm plantations.
Apparently, this was twenty five minutes of writing, so I’m nearly up to an hour of thinking about fats.
I ran the printer’s pre-sliced 12-minute benchy with cheap Geeetech PLA filament, and it didn’t come out great, but then realised that when I’d removed the nozzle clog that was there from the factory (apparently they test some nozzles during QA, so mine had some dregs of filament with a lump that needed a cold pull to shift it) I’d accidentally plugged one of the part cooling fans into the wrong header and it wasn’t running. After fixing that, it came out much better than what you’ve got here, despite a pause part way through due to trying to do it with the tail end of a roll.
I’ve read that the throat cooling isn’t great for PETG as the fan as it draws warm air from inside the toolhead shroud, and there’s an alternative one on printables that avoids this problem (although a duct to isolate the fan and its cutout in the shroud from the rest of the shroud interior might be simpler), so that could be related as you’re running PETG.
It makes sense, but it also makes sense to design society so that situations where it’s helpful happen as rarely as possible. If some people are predisposed to being a good firefighter, it doesn’t negate the fact that you don’t want buildings to catch fire in the first place, so you still want to teach children not to play with matches, teach adults not to keep lighter fuel near their heater, and ban companies from selling combustible cladding to insulate tower blocks. Prevention is better than cure. You just then have a load of people who aren’t great at being anything except a firefighter, ready for fires that never happen, and under the current system, forced either into jobs they’re bad at, or into chronic stress to get consistent productivity.
Personally, I can ignore the effects of artificial sweeteners on insulin levels as they, like everything else, have no effect, and my insulin levels are only affected by when I inject it. I’m type 1 diabetic. When people make incorrect claims based on effects that aren’t reproducible or weren’t statistically significant in the first place about the safety of sweeteners, it causes direct problems for me. I’ve had bartenders mess up my blood sugar levels by lying about serving diet drinks because they think they’re dangerous. Plus, if the people who push for artificial sweeteners to be banned had their way, there are plenty of things I couldn’t ever eat or drink again.
Aspartame is very mildly carcinogenic. An equivalent amount of sugar is much more carcinogenic, and is harmful in other ways, too. If you have to have a can of cola, diet is the healthier choice.
Minoxidil is produced in 5% concentration creams and foams, and that study is comparing rosemary oil to a 2% preparation. It’s impressive that rosemary oil is comparable at all, but obviously if you’re not taking a therapeutic dose of Monoxidil, it’s not going to work properly.
I use topical Minoxidil. It’s clearly made some difference, replacing a bald patch with a thin patch, and making my scalp noticeably warmer to the touch due to the extra bloodflow. It wasn’t the brilliant instantaneous wonderdrug some people told me it would be, nor totally ineffectual like others said, so I guess it’s something whose efficacy varies from person to person.
But it does mean you can spend forty hours a week or thereabouts putting effort into a particular goal and maintaining the knowledge, skills and experience to keep doing it to a high standard without having to sink time and effort into something else in order to get paid enough to live on.
Those forks aren’t maintaining Firefox itself, just their own modifications. If a bug is found in Firefox, the LibreWolf team don’t have to fix it themselves, they can wait for Mozilla to do it, and incorporate the fix once it materialises. There are forks that diverge further, but they either get quickly abandoned after their creator realises how much of a headache maintenance will be, or they’re left with gaping security holes.
When the internet was becoming a world-changing technology, there weren’t thirty years of websites to keep working and malware to protect from, web standards were far simpler, and a much higher proportion of users were enthusiasts who were excited by anything they could get and didn’t mind if things were rough around the edges. Similarly, two brothers could make the world’s first aircraft that flew under its own power, and yet with the combined might of everyone working for Boeing, people are worried about airliner doors falling off and an eight-day space trip has become an eight-month one. Mature technologies need a lot more effort to build and maintain than emerging ones.
UX isn’t universal. What intuitively clicks for one person might be unusable for someone else. Good UX is adequate for as many people as possible, but it can’t be perfect for everyone at once when some people work best with large labelled buttons with big, clear icons that have to go into submenus to fit on the screen, and other people prefer lots of small buttons whose purpose and location they’ve memorised which all fit on screen at once to save them needing to click into submenus.
Maintaining a web browser in the 2020s is an expensive thing to do. You need full time employees who specialise in all the systems that make up a browser, and can’t leave security-critical parts like ensuring the integrity of the JavaScript sandbox to volunteer hobbyists. It’s far from the only thing Mozilla spend money on, so if they need to mage cost savings, it won’t necessarily stop them being able to maintain Firefox, but another organisation picking it up if they do stop isn’t likely.
Yes. Every time, it’s gone less well than opening a banana from the stem end, unless the banana was horrendously underripe. I’ve never had the problem the alternative approach is claiming to fix unless I’ve intentionally opened the banana badly on purpose to prove a point about the problem really being people opening from the stem end incompetently.
A) The peel becomes easier to tear faster than the inside gets softer. You don’t need to snap it, it doesn’t need nearly enough tension to count as a snap once it’s ripe.
B) The banana’s been selectively bred to want to be as delicious as possible. It only wants you to be happy.
Bananas are the way they are through millenia of selective breeding, so there’s no reason to think that monkeys know anything we don’t. If pinching the bottom is easier than bending the stem, your banana isn’t ripe yet and doesn’t want to be eaten until later.
Coal, not oil, but it’s still an interesting fact.
It does ask, but often the Yay, thanks for changing my setting that I didn’t ask you to change button is much more prominent than the Wtf I didn’t ask for this put it back how it was button, so people think they’re being told rather than asked and just confirm it without realising they had a choice. Also, a lot of people just click the Next/OK button without reading and are surprised by the consequences. It’s not a major difference than just changing the setting of people don’t realise they’re being asked to opt in and can therefore opt out, but it is a bit of a difference.
Once I was tasked with doing QA testing for an app which was planned to initially go live in the states of Georgia and Tenessee. One of the required fields was the user’s legal name. I therefore looked up the laws on baby names in those two states.
Georgia has simple rules where a child’s forename must be a sequence of the 26 regular Latin letters.
Tenessee seemed to only require that a child’s name was writable under stone writing system, which would imply any unicode code point is permissible.
At the time, I logged a bug that a hypothetical user born in Tenessee with a name consisting of a single emoji couldn’t enter their legal name. I reckon it would also be legal to call a Tenessee baby 'John '.