There was an incredible post on HN a couple years ago about a guy who would test experimental sweeteners and one of them left his mouth tasting sweet for several months. I tried to find it in the past but never could.
Was it his mouth or his kitchen? I remember a post about someone who ordered a sweetener from some Chinese industrial supplier and accidentally spilled/destroyed the packaging in his kitchen, making everything cooked there taste sweet for a long time.
At an old job I was responsible for blending custom alcoholic drinks before we sent it to bottling. One required stevia which when you opened the bag it came in would float into the air everywhere (it’s a super fine powder) and being young and stupid we didn’t wear any masks or anything. For the next couple days you’d have a constant taste of it in your mouth / nose that reminded me of sweetarts candy.
> I have a slight fascination with sweeteners. About five years ago I imported a kilo of "Neotame" sweetener from a chem factory in Shanghai. It was claimed to be 10,000-12,000 times sweeter than sugar. It's a white powder and came in a metal can with a crimped lid and typically plain chemical labeling. Supposedly it is FDA-approved and a distant derivative of aspartame.
US customs held it for two weeks before sending it on to Colorado with no explanation. When received, the box was covered in "inspected" tape and they had put the canister in a clear plastic bag. The crimped lid looked like a rottweiler chewed it open and white powder was all over the inside of the bag. I unwisely opened this in my kitchen with no respirator as advised by the MSDS which I read after the fact (I am not a smart man).
Despite careful handling of the bag, it is so fine in composition that a small cloud of powder erupted in front of me and a hazy layer of the stuff settled over the kitchen. Eyes burning and some mild choking from inhaling the cloud, I instantly marveled at how unbelievably sweet the air tasted, and it was delicious. For several hours I could still taste it on my lips. The poor customs inspector will have had a lasting memory of that container I'm pretty sure.
Even after a thorough wipe-down, to this day I encounter items in my kitchen with visually imperceptible amounts of residue. After touching it and getting even microscopic quantities of the stuff on a utensil or cup, bowl, plate, whatever, it adds an intense element of sweetness to the food being prepared, sometimes to our delight. I still have more than 900g even after giving away multiple baggies to friends and family (with proper safety precautions).
We have been hooked on it since that first encounter. I keep a 100mL bottle of solution in the fridge which is used to fill smaller dropper bottles. I've prepared that 100mL bottle three times over five years, and that works out to about 12g of personal (somewhat heavy) usage for two people in that time. Probably nowhere near the LD50.
I carry a tiny 30mL dropper bottle of the solution for sweetening the nasty office coffee and anything else as appropriate. Four drops to a normal cup of coffee. We sweeten home-carbonated beverages, oatmeal, baked goods (it is heat stable), use it in marinades, and countless other applications.
I don't know if it's safe. The actual quantity used is so incredibly tiny that it seems irrelevant. I'd sweeten my coffee with polonium-210 if it could be done in Neotame-like quantities. Between this, a salt shaker loaded with MSG and a Darwin fish on my car, I'm doomed anyway.
Pretty neat. Could you do this outside of a pressure vessel by filling the balls with water and hitting it with microwaves? Then we can get crawling terminator fluid.
From what I understand there are many gaming mice with multiple programmable buttons. The razer naga has a 12 programmable buttons which is probably used mostly in RTS games like starcraft.
It might be suitable and it's on my radar along with maybe two other mice, but from my understanding Razer Synapse 3.0 isn't supported on macOS, my primary OS for productivity. I know that there is third-party software that I can use so I may end up still getting the Naga.
Using third-party software isn't that big of a deal and is not uncommon in the keyboard world. I suppose what's most surprising to me is the lack of discourse and community around on the topic.
He's been under UK detention for 5 years now. Only a vague statement from the Australian prime minister saying that "there's nothing to be gained by Mr Assange's continued incarceration" so the media could write nice headlines.
Keep in mind that is the constant (average) power. Assuming this is a Q-switched laser with ~10 ns pulse duration, peak power is ~70 kW. (Kind of low as far as lasers go these days, but it's just a laser marker)
I've experimented with using a 60 W (I think*) laser on a small steel bracket, and even with the beam holding on a single point for a minute, it made a barely visible dot that you couldn't feel by running your finger over.
* It was nearly a decade ago, but I looked up the relevant hacker space and unless they changed the model, it was 60 watts.
The bracket was around 1cm by 5cm, and around 1mm thick.
A 60W CO2 laser won't touch steel (or even paper thin aluminum foil), while a 10W diode can cut through it. The type/wavelength of laser matters greatly.
60w back then would be a CO2 LASER - that's 10600nm and that basically bounces off any non-oxidized metal.
The fiber marking LASERs at work are 1064nm, and at a mere 20w output, will absolutely eat away at steel with no problems.
Edit: I should note there are CO2 metal cutting LASERs, but they are at very, very high output powers to overcome that reflectivity barrier. You need 500w 10600nm to cut through what a 30w 1064nm could cut. My 80w CO2 barely cuts through heavy-duty aluminum foil, and in many spots it isn't a full cut. A 20w marking LASER at 1064 would obliterate the foil.
I'm sorry, but there's no way around it, with 5W you can cut metal just as easily as you can cut a tree with a knife. At least with contemporary technology (In the future who knows).
There are abundant portable galvo head lasers out there. A lot of them targeting the hobby market, but also more powerful ones (that are less cheap) meant for marking or engraving parts in situ.
Everlast now has a laser welder, too.
I think it’s only a matter of time before we get cheaper cutter in the 1kw range.
On that note, did anyone ever make a handheld inkjet or spray nozzle, so you could print graffiti on walls or things on the go? I imagine most of the tech in it would be the same as in the kind of laser device you're asking about.
Years ago, I tried to retrieve a webpage link[1] that had an important article to encryption and the website had a redesign and all of their articles were removed.
I reached out to them later and asked if they had a copy of the article, or knew where I could get one, but they reported that they no longer have any of that. The same for a commercial that my father was in for a local mall, the mall was purchased by another company and lost ties with the media company that shot the commercial-- this media company is no longer around and thus no more archives.
Not necessarily and it depends a lot on what the materials were. IEEE publications were mentioned, it was founded in 1963 and there's a good chance that anything from the first 10 years may no longer be in archives unless donated back by a recipient.
I'd probably have more faith that IEEE publications still existed somewhere in some form. But the vast majority of publications either don't exist at all or they exist only in physical form someplace and aren't readily accessible.
>A group of economists recently performed an experiment on around 100 of the largest companies in the country, applying for jobs using made-up resumes with equivalent qualifications but different personal characteristics. They changed applicants’ names to suggest that they were white or Black, and male or female — Latisha or Amy, Lamar or Adam.
Why is 'white' uncapitalised yet 'black' is... immediately after using white?
It's a form of communism/marxism but it's hard to explain in short (by design). It's basically an ideology that has substituted class struggle with race and identity struggle. There are oppressors and there are oppressed, and the oppressed need a voice and people to fight on their behalf. The oppressed also get elevated and receive special treatment (hence the capital proper noun), and at the same time this is all done in a subversive way in order to smuggle it or shoehorn it into the culture. Additionally, if you question it or point it out you are accused of siding with the oppressors and called names like bigot, racist, etc.
> It's basically an ideology that has substituted class struggle with race and identity struggle. There are oppressors and there are oppressed, and the oppressed need a voice and people to fight on their behalf.
Do you think that treating people poorly and outright discriminate against them based on racism is only an ideological issue? To put it differently, do you think that South Africa's apartheid system is only a problem if you frame it through a communist/marxist perspective?
> Actually, yes, because racism is an ideology and a world view that says your own race/lineage is better.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
> Racists do exist, AND communists try to control society.
Clearly racism exists, but not because of ideologies or political and/or economical theory.
Institutionalized racism in private companies has absolutely no relationship with any red herring like communism or marxism.
Blabbering about communism in a discussion over racism sounds like a lame attempt at a false dichotomy and whitewashing institutional and casual racism.
The contention the moon landings were faked is ridiculous. The most obvious rebuttal is that the USSR would have asserted it if there was a modicum of truth to it.
There is also a hilarious movie called The Moonwalkers which did that also. I think it completely missed its audience which probably killed the director's career which is a pity.
