Based on Drew Builds Stuff:

• Stuff Made Here, applying high technology and robotics to low-stakes challenges.
• The Thought Emporium (Also on Nebula). One day, they’re artificially aging whiskey with ultrasound, the next, the host is editing his own genes to remove lactose intolerance.

Based on the intersection of building and the great outdoors:

• Quiet Nerd, who’s been building a lot of camping equipment lately.

Some shots in the dark, based on exploration and documenting the unseen:

• Exploring the Unbeaten Path, urban exploration with some unique locations.
• Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t, identifying plants.

Based on Baumgartner Restoration:

• Hand Tool Rescue, a channel where they lovingly restore antique tools and machines.

Ships can register any nation as their flag state, so they often choose flags of convenience based on whoever has the lowest fees or regulations – or more insidiously, whoever has the least ability to hold companies accountable.

This is why so many shipping companies register in Liberia, Panama, and the Marshall Islands. Also Mongolia, which is landlocked.

So unless we want to fill the oceans and ports with ships that have nuclear reactors with no regulation, no safety measures, and no accountability, we’re gonna have to fix the last hundred years of international maritime law.

It’s more about the how and why.

How: CCS pumps liquefied or pressurized gas into an exhausted oil or saline reservoir. These reservoirs didn’t hold pressurized gas before, so it’s difficult (if not impossible) to prove they won’t leak. In the Decatur case, about 8 kilotons of CO2 and saltwater either found or created a crack in the reservoir, exactly as critics predicted. Locals are worried about groundwater contamination.

Why: CCS is largely unregulated in the US, and the companies interested in it are ones with awful environmental track records – ADM is no exception there. To claim the 45Q tax credit, they only need to store the CO2 for 3 years. Why would they care about preventing leaks if they already got their payout? Doing shoddy work is in their best interest.

Does this event prove that underground CCS is literally impossible? Of course not. But feasibility isn’t a pass/fail test, it’s judged by factors like cost and risk. This event proves the approach isn’t foolproof and the companies aren’t trustworthy. So it’s high time we stop acting like they are.

It seems that IPL effectiveness varies a lot based on the texture of the hair, not just color. It eventually worked on my legs, but not my face.

The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is one of my favorite games of all time. It’s the last isometric Zelda game, and they made it a swan song. The main quest it pretty short, but it’s the sort of cozy game where doing the sidequests just feels right.

In the game, you shrink down to the size of a mouse to traverse rafters and explore tiny temples and float on lillypads. It’s the sort of thing that would be no big deal in a 3D game, but is wildly ambitious in 2D. Not only do they pull it off, but they fill the environments with lush, lived-in detail that springs to life when you shrink down and look at it up close. The art style still sticks with me after 20 years.

Also, forget all the “hey, listen” stuff, your sidekick Ezlo just sasses you the entire time. It’s great.

a bit melancholic sometimes

Viewer be advised: If you’ve ever lost someone you took for granted, or hurried through what should have been a formative time in your life instead of slowing down and appreciating it while you had it, then this show knows how to punch you in the tender bits, and it will not stop.

I cried during every one of the first four episodes.

10/10

Playing hardball.

She doesn’t have the bona fides for the presidency, but I’d love to see Katie Porter show up to a presidential debate carrying that whiteboard.

Beegenerates. 😆 Beelinquents. Cowbees? (I’m joking here, but that’s actually kinda not bad.)

I’ll bee here all week.

That’s the only way to offer free services?! What about donation-based models? Maybe Mozilla could have set up something like what Brave has, except not based around a sketchy cryptocurrency.

Please correct me if I’m mistaken, but I thought Brave only gave donatable tokens to users as a reward for watching ads… ads which Brave curated for the user based on their activity. It’s just targeted ad revenue with extra steps.

At first blush, it seems to me that both Brave and Anonym want to be the middleman for targeted advertising. What am I missing?

Makeover day!

I admitted to some of my friends that I’d love the chance to get some makeup tips from them, and they pounced on that with unexpected enthusiasm. They scheduled an appointment at the mall, saying it was a rite of passage. So I got my makeup done by a professional makeup artist who taught me how to do things like foundation matching and mixing color changer, all while a gaggle of absolutely wonderful people took notes and told me I looked beautiful.

I’ve been running on that high for weeks now.

I’d argue your SO might not be displaying neurotypical behavior.

Between 50-85% of autistic spectrum people (plus a significant portion of people with PTSD or depression) experience Alexithymia, or significant difficulty in recognizing and analyzing their emotional state.

When I’m feeling bad, my SO frequently assumes I’m withholding the reason from him in some sort of passive-aggressive mindgame, and I have to remind him that I barely know what my mood is, let alone what’s causing it.

I’m getting better at it, but it’s a lot of work and I still regularly mistake stomachaches for anxiety.

When a smaller nation aligns itself with a larger empire or coalition, it will gravitate towards that collective’s philosophy. Sometime’s it’s imposed through political or military pressure, or “encouraged” through subversion, but it can just as easily happen through the natural influence of a larger and more prolific culture.

Historically, there have been more socialist and/or communist states associated with the USSR than not. Especially when measured by population.

2-3°C is the worst case if we stick to existing policy. If we flinch or back down on those policies, then the sky’s the limit.

Youtube videos often gloss over the details for the sake of uninhibited futurism.

Large-scale hydrogen electrolysis has a cost of around 55kWh/kg, and when you combust the H2 directly you get about 39kWh/kg back. Without compression/transport, using H2 as a heating fuel is 71% efficient.

H2 is usually compressed for transport. Compression of 1 kg of H2 to 700 bar costs about 5kWh of additional electricity. I’ll spare you the calcs, but truck transport is under 1kWh/kg H2. This reduces our efficiency to 39kWh/61kWh or 64%.

Converting H2 to ammonia takes the place of the compressor and truck. 2 mols of ammonia burn for 162kcal, less than the 204kcal you’d get from 3 mols of H2. The Haber-Bosch process reduces output to 31kWh per kg of H2 put in. This reduces out efficiency to 31kWh/55kWh or 56%.

With currently-proven cracking technology, it costs around 23kcal/mol of ammonia, reducing overall efficiency to about 55%. It is more effective to burn ammonia directly than to convert it into H2 and burn the H2.

Using ammonia as a transport medium removes a bunch of technical problems, but it introduces new ones. It’s corrosive, it’s toxic, it burns eyes/lungs/skin, and it wastes more energy than you’d think.

There are quite a few comanies now that follow some version of “name-blind hiring,” where the system scrubs the name from the resume before the interviewer sees it, for the sake of avoiding biases. These companies would be a good place to start.

Outside of name-blind hiring, a lot of people use nicknames or given names on resumes, particularly if they have non-english names that could tempt biases or be hard to pronounce. It is widespread and completely kosher as long as HR has your current legal name for your background check and W-2.

No matter what, HR will need your legal name. But in my experience, HR departments tend to be accepting and accustomed to maintaining confidentiality. And they don’t make the hiring decisions, anyway.

Tangential: ranked choice voting seems to be gaining momentum in progressive states. Definitely keep pushing for that, too.

I’ve only just recently begun exploring my gender identity. This is all very new for me, and very raw.

Gender is subjective. Defining it is like trying to nail jello to a wall. I cannot think of a single description that is exclusively feminine. When I imagine myself as a woman, I see myself in a new light, through a new lens. It feels like home. Gender is a construct, but that’s not to say it’s meaningless – marriage is a construct, too. If it truly is possible to redefine gender as anything you want, then why do I want so very badly to be a woman and not a man?

I never realized how much I despised my body hair until the first time I removed it. The first time my spouse called me “beautiful,” I cried, because until that moment I did not realize how many decades I’d been waiting to hear it. Gender is expressive. It’s how I see myself, but also how others see me. The desire to express is the desire to be known; I want people to know that I am gentle and nurturing, fragile yet strong, irrational yet relatable in my strangeness.

But I could be wrong about this, every single word of it, and it wouldn’t make any difference. Because I started down this path by deciding to want what I wanted, to feel what I felt, to act without trying to justify my actions to some invisible judge. And when I wear a cute outfit and see myself in the mirror, I smile. When my spouse calls me “wife,” I blush. When I think of femininity, I think of reinventing myself. To me, femininity is daring to live a life I have dreamed for myself. It is not troubling my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood.

Gender is nothing. But it’s also everything.

Yes. Discontinued for 2024. They’ll revamp it at some unspecified point in the future, for some unspecified price point.