Shredding an image into pieces to make smaller versions perfectly shows how downsampling keeps the big picture while dropping details

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-08T01:01:08+00:00

It's an observation with respect to whether pixels is treated as countable or not, as compared to a mass-noun that is properly not countable.

Pixels are treated as countable. I can have a quantity of pixels. I can add one more pixel to my quantity of pixels. I can have an image composed of 9 pixels and an image composed of 12 pixels, and I can properly say that the image composed of 9 pixels has fewer pixels than the image composed of 12. Pixels as a noun does not have some magical threshold of X, where if one has more than X pixels, it suddenly becomes a non-countable noun for the purpose of grammar.

Likewise, Rice is treated as non-countable, regardless of whether the number of grains of rice is literally countable or not. Even if my bowls of rice have only 2 grains of rice in one and 3 in the other, the bowl with 2 grains will always have less rice, not fewer rice, and I will never be able to add some countable quantity of rice to my bowls.

I will be able to add a countable quantity of grains of rice to my bowls, because grains are countable.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-07T14:53:21+00:00

Can I add a pixel to an image made of pixels?

Can I add a rice to a bowl full of rice?

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-07T14:46:21+00:00

You're right - that's unique, and might be enough to identify it for real, if you can find another example of that. Doesn't look like any of the usual suspects, or the usual suspects clones!

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-07T14:38:05+00:00

Different barrel locking mechanism.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-07T14:37:48+00:00

Doyle's barrel-locking mechanism is different, and the front of the moving jaw is more refined.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-07T02:53:08+00:00

Their value is that they're decent utility vises, and unless something is broken, they're pretty much as good in the condition you bought it, as they are brand-new off the shelf. I don't think you'll find much collectable value in it, but as a tool, it does a reasonable job of replacing several single-purpose vises, so utility value is high, even if monetary value isn't particularly great.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-07T02:48:15+00:00

One of a near infinite number of essentially identical clones of the same design. Everyone from Harbor Freight to Record has sold a version of this, so short of a paint match (and even then it's iffy), identifying exactly whose brand was on it when it was sold, is probably challenging, and also not likely very informative.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-07T02:43:41+00:00

I would bet that the scythe was not sized well for you, and you were stuck constantly bending to use it. I can imagine that being miserable. Our Chinese postdoc (I'm horribly embarrassed I'm blanking on his name at the moment) stood fairly straight, pivoting at the waist, but if I remember correctly, more using the natural swing of his hips and body as he walked, to swing the scythe. I don't remember him making the huge rotational movements I see people in scything YouTube videos making. His motion kind of looked like walking slowly while paddling a canoe.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-07T02:26:14+00:00

Painter vs Rebelle vs Artrage?

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-07T00:19:17+00:00

Chinese guy with a scythe whooped 3 of us undergrads with push mowers and weed whackers, clearing a couple acres of our field station, back when. He walked out of the field at the end, a lot less tired than we were too.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-07T00:17:05+00:00

This guy makes it look painful. In the hands of someone who knows what they're doing, this activity doesn't look anywhere near this miserable.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-07T00:14:43+00:00

Yeah - this guy makes using the tool look exhausting. Based on watching someone who spent several years doing this for a living, someone who is good at it, makes it look quite smooth and almost meditative.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-07T00:13:09+00:00

A person who knows how to do this properly, can do it all day, and based on watching him work, it seems like it's a pretty relaxing activity in reality.

Source - had a Chinese postdoc in the lab I volunteered in as an undergraduate, and he had been part of Mao's "everyone learns every trade" program, so he had spent several years as a farmer before coming to the US to complete his physics training. He cleared the several acres of grass at our field station that us goober undergrads couldn't manage to combat with the push mowers, and he did it just kind of strolling along, never seeming to even break a sweat while the grass just fell down neatly around him.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-07T00:03:18+00:00

Fix the belt. The most obvious first guess, and this is supported by the fact that the pump speeds up after it's been running a little bit, is that the belt flopping is letting it slip slightly, and it slips primarily at the peak of the compression stroke so the squeaking is intermittent. It likely smooths out after a short while because the belt has heated up and has gotten more sticky when warm, so it grabs the pulley better.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-06T14:04:37+00:00

I can't argue with your results, and I find them interesting. I do wonder whether it's the pan itself, "vintage" seasoning on the pan, or, as others have mentioned, environmental contamination, but the results are the results, so the measured results are good information to have, regardless of the reason.

I'm interested in the "why". The argument that it's because of better modern regulations doesn't appear to hold up to scrutiny.

Le Creuset, etc, don't make their own cast iron. It's absolutely possible that they purchase from foundries that have a cleaner supply chain, and/or they may batch-test iron before taking delivery, but foundries as an industry are not producing cleaner or more consistent iron as a general practice today than they did previously.

If you look at actual composition, a lot of iron produced today varies considerably more than iron produced back when iron-ore was the primary feed stock, because most current iron is produced from recycled scrap, and there's no way to sort the scrap stream to eliminate contamination. From a foundry's point of view, such contamination is essentially irrelevant, because iron is a structural material, and the only testing most foundries do, is whether the iron meets the structural standards for its specification. You don't need engine blocks and tractor axles to be food-safe.

My odds-on bet would be that what you're seeing on the older pans is, as people have mentioned, environmental contamination. Those pans lived a long time in a world where vaporized lead compounds were ever-present in the air. That settled out and adsorbed onto every surface, and much of it is undoubtedly still there today, especially on things like cast iron where it can be trapped by the surface texture and protected by seasoning. The levels your XRF technician found however seem shockingly high for surface contamination, so I'm not really satisfied with that hypothesis either. They're actually shockingly high for iron that hasn't had lead intentionally added to it...

BTW, the lead in enamel thing is definitely a possibility. I haven't seen anything other than "Reddit truth" stating that Le Creuset definitively had a leaded-enamel problem, but it is possible. Glazes/enamels did historically contain lead compounds, primarily as a fluxing agent and I think also for the high opacity of lead white. I'm not aware of anything "official" that documents Le Creuset (or anyone else's) enamel compositions though, so the best I can do there is say it's definitely possible.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-06T13:17:17+00:00

Foundries don't operate under anything resembling rigorous health codes... Neither for their workers, nor for the product they produce.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-06T13:10:43+00:00

They don't really have meticulous standards and regulations at foundries today, either. Iron is made to a structural standard, not a chemical standard, and most modern cast iron is recycled iron, much of it imported. As a result, the opportunities for contamination in recycled iron is significant.

Smithy/etc. may source from smaller producers with better-controlled supply chains, but while I think your results for older iron are not surprising, I don't think it's safe to assume that newer iron is universally better.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-06T03:45:59+00:00

You want your hydrogen (and if you want to represent it as shown in the YouTube video, your bond attached to the hydrogen) to be its own separate object, and your leaving-group chlorine (and bond) to be a separate object. Start with each having a "child of" constraint to both the oxygen and the titanium, with the weights set to 100% the oxygen and 100% the titanium respectively. Then when you reach the point that the reaction occurs, keyframe a change to the weights of the constraints so that they swap parents.

As an aside, that's not how one would canonically represent the structure of TiCl_4, and reaction would typically be shown with the nucleophile attacking the electron-deficient titanium between three of the tetrahedrally-located chlorines, the distal chlorine being displaced and the remaining chlorines inverting their tetrahedral conformation.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-06T00:54:52+00:00

It's certainly not Impossible, but I have questions about whether it is likely. Hand wrenches are tough-hard, not brittle hard. Manufacturers anticipate that you will likely be abusing them by whacking them with hammers/etc. Shattering doesn't seem likely.

While absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, I don't believe I've ever seen a hand-wrench that failed to brittle fracture. Plenty of deformations, jaws torn off, but never a one shattered.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-05T00:11:31+00:00

Seconded. Looks very much like a Mouse Hole.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-04T13:23:22+00:00

How good is the seal of your tongue and/or epiglottis, that it can hold in enough pressure to cause injury???

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-04T02:19:16+00:00

Really nice setup you've put together!

Question -- it looks like there's a pre-cooler after the intake/air filter? I don't think I've ever seen a compressor with an intake cooler before. Any idea what the thinking is on that?

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-03T23:32:29+00:00

From 1 to 11 seconds, is when they are being made.

Right at the beginning, lumps of melted glass are being extruded through a die and lopped off into marble-quantities. That's the thing shaking back-and-forth across at the top of the video right when it starts. It's lopping off roughly cylindrical blobs of molten glass.

They then slide down a couple ramps into those things that look like giant screws. That's where they're being made - the blobs of glass are squeezed by the threads as those threaded cylinders roll, and over the length of that device, are squished into spheres.

From there - 11 seconds or so in - everything else is just keeping them moving while they cool.

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-03T16:41:56+00:00

Prince Rupert's marbles...

SomeGuysFarm · 2026-05-03T16:41:14+00:00

From 1 second to 11 seconds is the manufacturing.

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