• 0 Posts
  • 36 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 29th, 2023
  • ornery_chemist@mander.xyztoADHD memes@lemmy.dbzer0.com•I'm right, ain't I?English
    6·
    1 month ago

    I mean, sure, the choice of the “nice” numbers here is eccentric, but this is essentially the way math is taught nowadays. Only, instead of making 8 in this special case, the goal is usually to make 10 + leftovers because adding to 10 is always easy.

    Here’s my (upper midwest) spicy mental math take: it should be big-endian and solved with backtracking for ripple carry/borrow. None of this starting-from-the-1’s-place-and-successively-incorporating-higher-order-digits nonsense. Extended carry/borrow is rare, and if you start with the most significant digits and give up/get bored part way through, the intermediate answer is in the ballpark of the real answer.

  • ornery_chemist@mander.xyztoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•What strategy would you use to estimate the number of hazelnuts
    13·
    2 months ago

    Roughly a truncated cone with diameters ~7 nuts and ~9 nuts, and the cup is ~12 nuts high (loose guesses, it is hard to tell due perspective and nuts of different sizes). Throw in an extra layer to account for the heap at the top (which is a dome taller than 1 hazelnut, but treating it as a shorter but full layer should give some error cancellation) to give a height of 13. The volume of a truncated cone of those dimensions is ~657 cubic hazelnut diameters. Random sphere packing is 64% space-efficient (though wall effects should decrease this number) giving a total of 420 nuts (nice).

    Multiple edits for clarity and typos.

    Answer

    This ends up being about 5% lower than the true answer. I’m surprised it’s that close. This is in the opposite direction from what I expected given wall effects (which would decrease the real number relative to my estimate). Perturbing one of the base diameters by 1 nut causes a swing of ~50, so measurement error is quite important.

  • ornery_chemist@mander.xyztoMemes@sopuli.xyz•Why
    4·
    6 months ago

    For those who did a search only to get back pages of less-than-useless SEO slop that just recites the number line, here is something that better describes some of the grammatical insanity.

    also, czterydzieści cztery is imo one of the less pronounceable words (well, two of them) in Polish.

  • ornery_chemist@mander.xyztoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•What are some slow acting poisons?
    9·
    8 months ago

    Arsenic is a classic murder poison. It’s been known since anciemt times, though possibly unsuited to your onset requirement. Acute poisoning by ingestion is generally within a few hours, but if your character sustains lower doses over time, you could probably draw out the timeline to whatever you wanted. It would be obvious that the character is unwell during this time, but the symptoms aren’t super specific and could be confused with e.g. food poisoning.

    Or just invent a mushroom like others said. The toxins are diverse enough that I doubt anyone would be too upset if you tuned it exactly to your timeline and desired symptoms.

  • ornery_chemist@mander.xyztoMemes@lemmy.ml•It's scientific! I promise! :)
    3·
    9 months ago

    So I found this website that lists specific heat capacities for various foods, and while it doesn’t list “snacks”, dry foods values seem to range from 0.3 to 1 cal•g-1•K-1 = 0.0003 to 0.001 Cal•g-1•K-1. Assuming no phase change (i.e., melting) and otherwise temperature-invariant heat capacity, the energy required for heating a 100 g snack from freezer temps (-18 °C) to body temp (37 °C) is 1.65 to 5.5 Cal. More realistically, we can compare to eating an ambient-temp (20 °C) snack; that difference is only 1.1 to 3.8 Cal… in either case, the difference is negligible, generally < 1% of the calorie count of the snack itself.

  • ornery_chemist@mander.xyztoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Do you agree with my unpopular opinion about height in rapier fencing?
    11·
    1 year ago

    Nah, reach is a huge advantage. I’m not sure how rapier fencing differs from regulation sabre/epée/foil, but here’s my 2 cents from that perspective:

    Smaller people are not, as a rule, substantially quicker than larger. If you see any difference in your experience, it’s likely a selection bias (shorter people have to be quicker to compete at the same level). The shorter person must enter the strike range of the taller person before the taller person comes within theirs and must be significantly quicker or more skilled to overcome that dead space. If the taller person can maintain a proper distance, gg. Taller people can also lunge farther, giving a wider active range.

    Targeting is a smaller issue than you make it out to be; footwork and maintaining balance, which reposition the core, are at least as important as leaning to dodge, and advantage the taller person (longer legs = more movement range). If the taller person is coming from above as you say, they can just continue their slash (sabre) downward toward that less mobile core, or squat a bit deeper if the arc won’t reach. If instead you were referring to a poke, they’re either already targeting the torso anyway (foil) or whatever body part is most easily reachable (epée; still often torso, but cheeky wrist/arm strikes can be something of an equalizer here), and anyway they are already striking at a range that the shorter person cannot, making a successful counterattack more difficult.

    Besides reach, a height difference is brutal when it comes to sabre fencing; the shorter person is restricted to targeting arms and torso (can’t reach the head easily), so the taller person can anticipate strikes from fewer angles. The taller person can come from any direction and has gravity on their side for own overhead strikes. Those suck to defend against.