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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • If I stood up straight, my eye level was above the window. Also, glove boxes. The shorter group members could use platforms to raise their height but had trouble reaching the corners, while I had to do a mix of taking an uncomfortably wide stance and slouching. I wish they had been more suitable for my height… I thought everything would be better with taller hoods in my current workplace, but all they did was extend the sash to the floor.


  • I got one because I was intrigued by its lead rotation, but I found that it really didn’t rotate the lead enough while I wrote. I kept having to rotate the barrel manually to keep a thin line like I do for every other mechanical pencil, and then would get annoyed every time the clip came around to brush my hand. I’ve been wondering if I’m doing something wrong, or if Japanese just uses more shorter strokes. Do you also like it when writing English?


  • 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.








  • The intended joke is that hypervalent iodine compounds like Dess-Martin periodinane flip between different oxidation states like you often see for transition metals. As an example, the mechanism usually drawn for oxidations by DMP is similar to those drawn for PCC/Jones reagent, where the electrons removed from the substrate are “banked” at the metal center. Obviously, redox chemistry is not at all limited to transition metals, but I am often surprised at iodine’s propensity to engage in it. A lot of research over the past decade or two has also developed redox catalysis with these reagents, reactivity which is commonly (though again not always) the purview of transition metals.






  • 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.





  • I think the biggest difficulty when starting out is that you don’t know common endings and syllable structure, and so it can be hard to parse where the morphological boundaries lie. It’s much easier once you understand those, though you will still find instances where two components are combined in an unintuitive (for the learner) way, particularly if the translation maps to a (apparently) indivisible root in the learner’s language.