Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

Lessons learned from the “eating Tide Pods” meme: people love it when you blur the lines between soap and food.

We legitimately could not tell whether this is something edible. The front side of the label says “Yummmers”, but the container doesn’t have a tamper-evident seal, and there are no nutrition facts anywhere…

“So you are saying I need to eat… more calories than I burn?”
“Yes, if you want to make gains, you’ll need enough energy and protein to build muscle.”

TFW your main experience with “getting in shape” is weight loss and you finally reach the point where you are supposed to increase calories to gain muscle:

After months of diet and exercise: “I wonder if I’d look ok in a slim-fit shirt?”

After one large-ish brunch: “I wonder if they make maternity clothes for men…”

The more time that goes on, the more I appreciate how rare and amazing #Wikipedia is.

It is an absolute staple of the web and the backbone of most people’s information diet, and for decades it has resisted so many of the dark patterns and negative incentives that the other major players of the internet have fallen prey to.

I feel like Reddit could have been a community pillar like Wikipedia; a central hub for curated discussion fora, but the actual experience of using the site gets worse every day (likely driven by the drive to monetization).

The saddest part is that Reddit is the rule and Wikipedia is the exception. From what I can tell Craigslist is the only comparable story of a high-quality website maintaining its dominance while putting user experience first (and sacrificing revenue in the meantime).

Oh yeah, and I just realized — there are two pediatricians that asked about the medical records and I gave up on them because I only called them because the records were taking so long! Had I actually abducted the child, this would keep him away from mandated reporters!

So basically this actually is more likely to keep abducted children out of the hands of someone who might notice if something was wrong while not actually catching anyone abducting children, and has negative side effects for the vast majority of children. Bravo, CT. 👏

And mind you these are the same people who refuse to give your kid a vaccine unless you are a patient of theirs. They could, you know, catch the flu in a 30 day delay.

I grilled one of these people and they said their office policy is that they need it because “children come from wherever these days”. When I asked what the fuck that means, they said, “You could have abducted the child!” It made me laugh out loud.

How many child abductions would be caught by requiring someone to fax over a child’s medical records (they seem trivial to fake even if you don’t have them), as opposed to like.. ear infections doing permanent damage because the child has no access to medical care.

Man, every interaction with children’s medicine in Connecticut is the worst. Last year I had to drive to Massachusetts to get him a flu shot. Now no pediatrician will talk to me unless I have his full medical records ready to go.

I guess his new pediatrician is the ER?

Fun fact: This is also a great way to solve “spot the difference” pictures, because when you treat two basically identical photos as a stereogram, you get that “shimmer” effect on anything different between the two, making the answer obvious: https://www.funwithpuzzles.com/2017/02/spot-differences-picture-puzzle-tutorial.html

You can get something of a sense for how it looks by looking at the 45° and 135° photos side-by-side, then letting your eyes unfocus until the details line up like a stereogram (e.g. magic eye puzzles).

Here are two pictures I’ve stitched together to make that easier:

#light #polarization #photography

Around mid-morning, though, it seems that a lot more sunlight in the sky is scattered off the atmosphere, which causes it to become polarized, which gives the sky a very strange appearance.

Here’s the sky at 11 AM in CT with no filter, 45° filter and 135° filter:

#light #polarization #photography

For some time I’ve been interested in what the world looks like with a different sensorium, so I was curious to know what the world would look like if we could see the polarization of light. To try it out, I bought these glasses and started wearing them: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B017V9VQ8C

They are linearly polarized like polarized sunglasses, but the polarization of one eye is 90° off the other. The result is that unpolarized light passes through unmodified, but linearly polarized light shows up differently in each eye, which gives an interesting “shimmer” effect.

Usually the world doesn’t look that interesting with them on, TBH. For most of the day, the only polarized light you see is reflections, so your attention is drawn to cars, plastics and other man-made things.

#science #light

I’ve made this a few times now and this time around my wife finally reminded me to take a picture of it when it was done 😅

#food #curry #japanese

Also, earlier this month I finally got a picture of a red-breasted nuthatch!

I’ve been hoping to get a photo of one of these ever since I thought I saw one during PyTexas 2020: https://qoto.org/@pganssle/105091007608910051

#birding #birds