Notices by Alistair K (libroraptor@mastodon.nz)

@skinnylatte This is something that I don't understand about some of our local climate change activists. "But you can eat this instead!" But their "alternative" entails abandoning a culture, and they simply don't give a damn about making feasible pathways for that. So much of climate change activism here is rich white retired people pushing low-end anglo culture. I suppose that they don't really have much of a culinary culture – they talk about "feeding people" in the same phraseology as "feeding livestock" – so the criticality of rice lies far beyond their ken.

Just been helping my son with chemistry, and accidentally flipped the narrative. He was looking at the Haber–Bosch process for making ammonia. I asked him about what ammonia's good for, the timing of the development, the timing of World War 1...

He was so suddenly interested like he's never been interested in chemistry before.

Then we got onto older ways of extracting nitrates from urine, something that Germany also had an advantage in because they drank so much beer.

And then to the initial extraction of phosphorus.

And then to calculating that, if only one person were involved, it'd take about a decade of collecting urine to replicate Brand and Kunckel's work.

Apparently the chem teacher never talks about things like this.

Even though we've been talking about the importance of doing so since the 1990s, and it's supposedly REQUIRED by the national curriculum.

#school #chemistry #histSci #histSciTech

@skinnylatte I used to shop occasionally at Costco but didn't like it. Found BJs better for range but we didn't binge-shop, and always pined for things like a freshly caught fish. Fresh fish is very much a foreign food in the areas where we lived. But there was one Chinese fishmonger in a crappy neighbourhood of New Haven in Connecticut. We used to walk over to his shop every week or two. Most of the stock was conspicuously stale, and his market was fine with it. He'd always tell us which ones were fresh in the sense that we like, versus fresh in the sense that most of his customers like.

We had a Japanese friend who wouldn't touch fish at all after his first taste of sushi in the area. "It tastes old, like it was caught yesterday," he said.

@skinnylatte Much of Europe's nice in the same way. Even people with huge houses generally don't binge-shop from what I could tell. And why would you when your culture is about _fresh_ food to dine on rather than _impressive_ food to fawn over and feed on?

@inthehands Crikey, that high!? We might explain this by few respondents knowing what AI is, and reporting "AI skills" when they meant something more like "get answers from a chatbot because I don't know what search engines are either" skills.

Last time a "professional" raved at me about how great it was that AI was saving him so much time writing reports, I told him that my time is increasingly spent on fixing the garbage in those reports and theses. I lamented how it unfortunate it is that these tools are being used by people who've never heard of basics like Hebbian backpropagation and he stopped talking.

@chunshek @skinnylatte You might be surprised how many people get good jobs through not being checked for their falsified degrees and job histories. I don't have stats but I've encountered it personally more times than would seem reasonably possible. Catching them late can sometimes leave the employer helpless to dismiss because by then it's the employer's fault for having been slack about checking.

Recently we heard about this clown in New Zealand who says that CVs are future-oriented aspirational expressions of value and attitude, not a chronology of the past. https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360762966/justice-appointee-whose-law-degree-claim-was-mistake

Over here, such employees generally can't be dismissed over old lies. And not even for incompetence: that's been construed as the employer's failure to train.

I haven't been able to find my last diploma for something like five years. The last three of them were in Latin so good luck to local employers who want them... but then again, as you say, by the time HR's going through the motions, their goal may be merely to have it, not to verify it. Verifying is actually a lot easier than getting the documents in many cases because you can do it so quickly via the universities' registry or alumni websites.

@inthehands un doppio is the default now?

That's alas also a New Zealand problem. If you want a normal quantity, you have to remember to ask for it.

The neighbour's dog has been visiting us for a month or so, bringing himself over, climbing through our fence, and slipping in through the back door up to three times in a day. He's only a month younger than our dog but a total layabout who just wants pampering, whereas our dog wants energetic play, so they don't fully get along but increasingly tolerate each other and seem to want each other's company.

Our dog communicates vocally when he's got something to express, whereas the neighbour's dog was always silent until just a couple of days ago, when he started talking to us. Last night he mouthed my wrist with a big smile and puppy-eye roll. Labrador ancestry at play, perhaps?

#dogs

Sorry, mother Yale, but unless you get at least partly out of the US and off Twitter, no.

#university #yale #USPol

Today's paper is so rattling :( The work is like an undergrad report but it's done by full-blown permanent academics who shouldn't be feeling their way through basics.

The scariest part is that it's a radiology paper. So much is said about healthcare problems but not enough, I fear, about the quality of research being done and the vast quantities of money being spent, alas, on maintaining the broken research and publishing systems rather than improving them.

All I can do, though, is leave comments pointing out all the problems that I see in the hope that the researchers will advance their skills a bit.

So frustrating when they come to me at the end of a project instead of at the beginning.

#editing #AcademicChatter

@skinnylatte I like cheese and yoghurt but, if either is served for dessert, I'm disappointed. Only sweet dessert for me!

@outfrost @josephcox That is the point where I stopped reading. I always stop reading when a site does that – I don't have all that much cognitive capacity, and it's quickly exhausted by visual clutter, so I walk away when disrupted by bullshit like this. Same with newsletters. I could go along with a login. But why a newsletter? And not a nice monthly or quarterly newsletter on paper in my mailbox, but daily clutter in my e-mail?

Until that popup, I was sympathetic. Now I don't, and probably won't, know what they're on about. But I do know that they don't really care as much as they initially seemed to.

@Xas this from the party whose brand is all about bailing farmers and big business out of disasters, and the guy who used to run an airline bailed out of disasters

People are understandably focused on all the water brought by these atmospheric rivers over the past few weeks. But it is starting to worry me that they don't bring only water, but also heat. Not just some abstract heat predictable from the specific heat capacity of humid versus dry air, but so much heat that you can feel it. Of course we need to deal with flooded houses, washed-out roads, downed trees, drowned fields. But it feels to me that there's a long-term problem much bigger in the heat than in the water, and when the water is all that we talk about, the heat still comes regardless.

#climate #atmosphericRiver #Nelson #flood

@cwicseolfor @skinnylatte How does one eat it – just by itself?

Here's a recipe that looked convincing to me – what do you think?

@skinnylatte "Not too sweet" is becoming more important for me as I age, too. My tastes have been shifting a lot in the last few years. I suspect that it's about losing sensitivity to other flavours and now I don't want the sugar to blot them out.

Someone gave me a few frozen pandanus leaves. I've never cooked with them before, and have eaten pandanus so seldom that I don't know what it's meant to taste like. What would you recommend as the first thing I should try?

@skinnylatte My youngest brother has threatened me with diabetes for decades because of my unending inclination towards all things sweet.

One of my favourite breakfasts is sweet red bean porridge. It is maybe a good thing that I live in a town without a Chinese bakery; having to make everything myself does limit the quantity that I eat. I made 煎堆 sesame balls for dinner a few nights ago. Mainly because the oil was hot from frying chips, I had dau saa in the fridge from not making enough bao dough earlier in the week, so the stars were obviously lined up.

We have some English-style bakeries here but none of them are good. I bought a cake a few weeks ago for a party (after not having time to bake that day) and it was disgusting. It looked like a rolled chocolate sponge but tasted neither sweet nor chocolate, and the cream inside was just a whipped-up fat-and-water emulsion, no vanilla or anything.

We did have a passable pâtisserie for a while but it was too expensive and then the owners vanished. Their debts are becoming public now...

@skinnylatte Following up on that cultural gap – "dessert" itself is a tricky word, too. I wouldn't call any of those desserts because they're not dessert courses. But I'd eat 糖水 tong sui or cake any time. I feel weird about applying the European "dessert" concept to Chinese dining, like when French people say "raviolis Chinois" for 蝦餃 har gaau as if they couldn't possibly understand it except by metaphor through Italian.

"Dessert" seems to mean something different again in US English, though – almost anything sweet regardless of when it's eaten. Yet not sweet potatoes with grilled marshmallows on top.

@grammargirl @aaribaud The same can be said of many non-software AI detectors who call themselves "Professor".

I just received mail from Algeria that was sent last August. Or was it July? The duration is surprising but I'm even more surprised that it arrived at all, and I'm wondering where it has been: where does mail sit and wait, or slowly meander, on journeys so temporally long?

#mail #post