robryk @robryk@qoto.org
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
Science museum is nice (and when you have questions they search for a staff member who can answer then and sometimes you end up puzzling things out together).
Novelty Automation is a small arcade with largely social commentary games by Tim Hunkin.
@whitequark would your headmate perhaps be willing and able to give a pointer to a reasonable point to start reading about this?
@aeva yeah, the spectrum is pretty nice. It's easier to validate that with a diffraction grating (e.g. a CD).
@jzillw I can't decipher worm color
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.)
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@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~
Ah, and it's not B12-related: I have a very reasonable level of it iiuc (1.3nmol/l).
ph~
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.
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.)
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).
https://godbolt.org/z/WTajrPKze is an example with the additional weirdness I was thinking of.
All compilers I've seen can do this optimization. See for example https://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
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
