K‮ly‬e @khird@qoto.org

@freemo right, I was thinking more from a perspective of "How do we limit the utility of this object for the perpetration of a mass casualty event, while still making it otherwise practical for its intended purpose?" That's ultimately the reasoning behind many gun laws, like bans on automatic weapons or large magazines. Regardless how easy it would be to circumvent, I just don't think the same reasoning could justify a tank limit. What mass casualty event saw the guy burn more than five gallons of gas, such that it could've been prevented had he been forced to stop and refuel?

@freemo maybe a more workable parallel for magazine capacity limits would be a kinetic energy cap? So you can have a 300kg motorcycle that goes 250km/h or a 3000kg SUV restricted to 80km/h. Incentivise people to choose the right vehicle rather than burning the gas to haul a couple extra tonnes of steel to the office and back every day. The protection against ramming attacks is just gravy.

@freemo I feel like there's a lot of overlap between people supportive of gun control and people who would like to see SUVs replaced by lighter and more fuel-efficient conventional sedans.

@freemo Looks good! I favoured the heat-from-below hypothesis at first, but I prefer your answer to mine right now. This is the sort of thing I was comparing it to.

@freemo I suspect it is not lab glassware - I thought it was, initially, and that's why it caught my eye, but I can't really square that with how it's built. The oil lamp hypothesis makes some sense - but there's so much space under the bulb I tend to think it's meant to be heated from below. Might be an oil diffuser for aromatherapy or something, designed to run off a tea light - but the hollow tube seems unnecessary then. I really don't know

My best guess is that it's supposed to be a chimney - you could put a candle in the bottom and it would heat the air in the cylinder, driving it up and replacing it with fresh air from the bottom, driving its own circulation. At the same time, it would heat the contents of the bulb like a retort.

But there's no fitting to attach anything to the top of the bulb, so any vapours would just be exhausted upward with the combustion products of the candle. I also don't get the point of the serpentine tube - if it were just for support, why would it be hollow and matched to an orifice in the side of the cylinder? If it's for filling the bulb, why not just use the orifice at its tip, since you can't have anything attached to that anyway? Were it straight, you could maybe use it to stick a thermometer into the bulb, but the bends in the tube prevent that.

@freemo I just found it at a secondhand shop. I can work out the purpose of lots of kinds of glassware just by examining how they're designed, but this one isn't obvious to me.

Can anyone #identify this piece of #glassware I came across today? It's a bulb suspended in a cylinder, with a serpentine tube connecting the bulb to an orifice in the side of the cylinder. The bulb also has an orifice at its tip, and the cylinder is open at both ends.

@r1k Thanks! Unfortunately this option, while it still exists in Cinnamon, is marked [unused] and, as that marking would suggest, has no effect.

I also think this is a problem that should be solved by conforming Octave to Cinnamon rather than the other way around. Globally blocking focus stealing isn't really desirable - if I double-click on a file, I want the application that opens it to take focus, regardless of whether or not it's already running. Octave in particular just steals focus in a very specific and inappropriate circumstance: when I switch over to its workspace.

@r1k

According to your link, if I see "access-control-allow-origin: *" in the headers it should work... and I do. So I don't think that's the problem.

I reproduced the problem with developer tools open, and I don't even see any requests to QOTO showing up in the log. My guess is that Pinafore creates a malformed request that the browser never even sends correctly.

@freemo @arteteco @Sphinx

@freemo don't trust a definition a mathematician invented.

My 9th grade math teacher once told us whoever got the highest grade on a test was exempt from the next class period, which was dedicated to reviewing our mistakes. Turns out there was a tie for first, so the teacher says, "Okay, Kyle AND Evan can leave," with a funny little smirk. We pack up and start walking towards the door when he tells us to stop and go sit back down. Why? Because in math "and" means the intersection, not the union. Evan and I are separate people (disjoint) so our intersection is an empty set. The teacher had really dismissed nobody at all.

@freemo

Seems pretty obvious those are the facts; and I don't really see any mitigating circumstances. I have no objection to defederating.

@arteteco @Sphinx

@freemo thanks! What's the context here? In particular, was this experiment conducted under sunny conditions?

@freemo the sun may be a small portion of the sky, but the temperature difference between the sun and your body is thousands of kelvin, whereas the difference between your body and your other surroundings is tens of kelvin. Since radiative transfer scales with the fourth power of temperature, I don't think you can neglect that mechanism (and the ballpark numbers I ran above suggest that it actually dominates over the IR transfer). On top of that, the snowy surroundings are going to be reflecting sunlight at you from a much greater area.

@freemo why does that dominate over the benefits of absorbing maximal energy from solar radiation? It looks like it's about an order of magnitude more energy in this mechanism

@freemo So ideally you'd want something "black" to visible light and "white" at infrared wavelengths to both absorb external radiation and reflect internal black body radiation inwards. Assuming you can only have one or the other, a quick back of the envelope calculation suggests that the sun's radiation, which is on the order of a kilowatt per square metre and would be irradiating roughly your frontal area (let's call it one square metre, total 1kW) at polar midsummer, is the dominant effect over your body heat, which I estimate as 2000 kcal/day, roughly 100W. So I'll go with black.

@freemo

White clothes are better camouflage in a snowy environment. Getting killed by a polar bear would cause your body temperature to drop to ambient; thus white clothes are an advantage for staying warm.

@valleyforge

@valleyforge I remember trying to figure out what that project was a while ago - I eventually concluded that it is the zombocom of software

@freemo is this the same principle as groundwave/skywave differences that make AM radio much better at night?

@rchrd

@namark enough bells & whistles to make it worth it. Little file browser follows you around, resizable tabular view of variable matrices like spreadsheets, command history log, it adds up to a rather nice experience. The built in IDE can go choke on a porcupine though - its auto indentation in particular really fights me every step of the way.