Like, why does transferrin exist? Why isn't all iron transport done with ferritin? (There's probably some extremely obvious reason, but I'm not a biochemist sadly.)

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It feels really weird that we have proteins that transport something small (like oxygen or iron, below 100 daltons heavy) that can transport something like four of the things in question at a time and weigh _tens of kilodaltons_. And they're still more efficient than direct dissolution.

@noondlyt @bruces

Why is lead yellow but mercury red? I thought metallic mercury won't absorb through mucous membranes (without being oxidized first) essentially at all. Is maybe the same true of lead?

@noondlyt@hellions.cloud @bruces@mastodon.social

Why is lead yellow but mercury red? I thought metallic mercury won't absorb through mucous membranes (without being oxidized first) essentially at all. Is maybe the same true of lead?

ph~ 

@phil

Ah, and it's not B12-related: I have a very reasonable level of it iiuc (1.3nmol/l).

ph~ 

@phil

No obvious ones, but perhaps I'm failing at eating enough of it. I did give away half a liter of blood a month ago, but that shouldn't have such effects.

(I have 15ug/l of ferritin, but a month or so ago had completely normal hemoglobin level)

ph~ 

In other news, it's likely that we know the proximal reason for my recent poor sleep.

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Amusing differences in prescriptions: apparently >30mg of Fe2+ per dose requires prescription in Poland. According to pharmawiki something with 100mg/dose is in category D in Switzerland.

@_dm do you have statistics on victims in those two countries? (I suspect reporting bias and hope to find traces there.)

@androcat @ics

How does it work with animals or nonhermaphroditic plants? Doesn't this give some information about your opinion of whether something is living/sentient/sapient?

(Polish had a similar distinction for some words in plural, where the declination depends on sapience. Cue two ways to declinate elves, depending on whether you think of them as people.)

@_dm I think one conspiracy theory of that shape is "and this is how they sell vitamins".

@aredridel @dpp @infotroph @afeinman

This speaks to them being more likely to incorrectly believe cops, not so much to them being incentivized to pretend to believe them. Or do I miss something?

@whitequark Sorry, my example was wrong (the weirdness in there was purely to handle rounding in negatives).

godbolt.org/z/WTajrPKze is an example with the additional weirdness I was thinking of.

@whitequark

All compilers I've seen can do this optimization. See for example godbolt.org/z/v34E58deK, which has the "add a fixup from the upper word of the multiplication result". The reason why it's necessary is that you don't actually want multiplicative inverse modulo 2^wordsize in the case when the input value is not divisible by the constant.

@ireneista my, I think favorite, realer variant of trolley problem is using coal to heat your home in a city. It pits you and family not being extremely cold against small increase in suffering/chance of earlier disability to all people in the city (via dust pollution).

@whitequark of I remember by the time I'm home in the evening I will get godbolt to spit out the more general case of this witchery

@whitequark try using different constants to suicide by; this is a special case of since mine and this approach usually requires a small correction afterwards (to the tube of conditionally adding one or something like that).

Or am I misreading and this is more witchy?

@infotroph @afeinman @aredridel

What incentivizes judges to pretend to believe them?

@bagder

I would understand this as saying "there are legitimate configurations which cause curl to reveal the password to a third party". If such a configuration exists, the third party can trivially get the password next time a request that triggers the bug is made.

Is there a separate field there for "likelihood of prerequisites"? (e.g. if we had a hypothetical vulnerability that gave RCE to anyone on the network but only if the timezone of the victim was set to Antarctic, how should that be assessed?)

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