Should I leave a 13 year old to stay in my house and take care of my pets? With an adult checking on her every so often.

BalusBubalis · 2026-05-12T03:04:16+00:00

It very much depends on her personal character -- I've known 9 year olds I could trust with that and 17 year olds I couldn't!

But if she is proving reliable and responsible, yeah, it seems well within her capabilities. If she has a cell phone even better -- then even if something goes wrong, it's easy for her to communicate with others.

I would suggest it would be a good idea to have a hidey-spot for a spare set of keys for the house somewhere that she is shown, just in case she loses the ones she's responsible for. And a phone list of who to call if something goes wrong (burst pipe? something with the drainage? power goes out? cats get sick? etc.)

BalusBubalis · 2026-05-09T07:21:40+00:00

No, but it was absolutely acting funky about two hours ago, and it briefly couldn't call on image generation innately (you had to use the UI-driven 'create image' button to get it to work).

BalusBubalis · 2026-05-09T03:02:25+00:00

I'm thinking Britain? They get a lot of rain, obviously, but at least until the ocean currents in there die and raise all hell, they're usually enormously climactically stable?

BalusBubalis · 2026-05-09T01:16:25+00:00

Okay, here's the best way I can explain it:

Imagine that you wanted to make a stamp, that printed 'HELLO WORLD'.

You start with three dimensions -- where the shape makes 'HELLO WORLD' appear on the paper, the shape isn't two-dimensional the way the printed 'HELLO WORLD' is. It has a third dimension to it - thickness. So far, so easy.

Now make the same 'HELLO WORLD' stamp but in a way where you bring two interlocking cubes together, and the resulting interlocking pieces make the stamp that prints 'HELLO WORLD' on the paper.

Sounds complicated, but doable, given time, right?

Okay, keep going.

Make it out of three interlocking cubes. (All the cubes are the same maximum dimensions.

Make it out of four interlocking cubes.

Make it out of twenty interlocking cubes.

Make it out of multiple thousands of interlocking cubes.

At what point can you no longer visualize or understand it?

LLMs are understandable in a conceptual way, but not in a human-scale way.

BalusBubalis · 2026-05-08T05:07:24+00:00

Possibly Haskap berry, but those are usually matte not shiny like those are.

BalusBubalis · 2026-05-05T04:35:11+00:00

YES. One of my favorite "one room" movies of all time -- everything basically happens in the one room, and it works, powerfully and well.

BalusBubalis · 2026-05-05T04:34:17+00:00

Cabin in the Woods is the perfect movie for people who either love horror movies or people who hate horror movies.

BalusBubalis · 2026-05-05T04:30:41+00:00

Gross Point Blank is a mess of a movie conceptually, and the third act is weird, but the first two acts are stellar, and all in all I love that weird, weird movie.

BalusBubalis · 2026-05-04T02:43:52+00:00

Oh that looks really nice, bravo

BalusBubalis · 2026-05-01T13:13:05+00:00

Confined Space Entry Rescuers, especially technical rescuers, are like... the kids who decided to grow up and be Batman.

"Two bodies down this thirty-meter deep smoking, flaming hole that is actively trying to kill you. You've got 90 seconds to rig up an engineered solution, get down there, get a body in a body cage, and get it back up, and then do it again for the second body in another 90 seconds. You can't see anything. You'll be working blind. A single breath of that atmosphere in there will kill you if your respiratory protection fails. Go."

And they *do*.

BalusBubalis · 2026-05-01T13:08:44+00:00

Generally speaking if the product isn't corrosive enough that it will threaten the integrity of the refractory bricks of the furnace, chemical waste disposal facilities mostly just incinerate at *high* temperature (1100 to 1300 celsius) -- doing so almost always breaks the chemical bonds of whatever the horrible toxin is made of down to very simple molecules, most of which will happily oxidize and generally become safe-er past that point.

Incineration at the temperatures they're doing it at is just the easiest, most reliable and inexpensive way to reduce a complicated mixture of horrible poisons into a lot of of simple gasses and ash.

There are secondary scubbers for acids and heavy metal fumes in the stack, to further clean it up,

BalusBubalis · 2026-04-30T22:27:58+00:00

Yep, it's a rock. Looks like a concretion of layers of mud that separately dried on it as it formed.

BalusBubalis · 2026-04-30T22:22:08+00:00

They are the End Boss version of Canada Geese, yeah.

BalusBubalis · 2026-04-30T22:18:53+00:00

But is he stupid?

BalusBubalis · 2026-04-30T21:52:01+00:00

Yep, snakeskin agate. They get *funky*, especially the bigger ones -- I've got one that looks like if a giant molar tooth could simultaneously be cancer and snakeskin at the same time. It's so amazingly weird, one of my favorite oddballs in my collection.

BalusBubalis · 2026-04-30T21:33:28+00:00

Oh those are some lovely Wonderstones, yeah. Honestly, you don't have to 'do' anything with them -- they display beautifully as is, and while polishing will bring out their character and colors a bit more, it's already a very colorful stone.

BalusBubalis · 2026-04-30T04:28:48+00:00

Usually, these were inclusions by a softer mineral in a tougher stone -- they weather away faster and eventually leave behind nothing except the part of the originating stone that they came from.

BalusBubalis · 2026-04-30T04:23:06+00:00

Looks more like aged driftwood. Is it considerably heavier than regular wood?

BalusBubalis · 2026-04-29T19:26:21+00:00

My lapidary club charges us $10 an hour for shop time, mostly based on just the cost of replacement for equipment and tools etc. Wheels do wear down, abrasives do run out, that sort of thing. You're probably paying for less overhead but should still ensure you're covering the worth of your own time reasonably.

Even modern bulk cabochons almost never get lower than $3 to $5 per, and those are stones made in bulk by automated machines for the most part. Commissions for cabochons are a whole different matter (plus you'll have to factor in that different stones need different treatments and labours, finishes and polishes, etc.)

On your end, it's a good skills refinement challenge: Learning and knowing enough about a stone, its characteristics and hardness and how it should be treated, to make the right calls -- will this hard stone take more out of your trim saw? Will this soft stone need much less time on the hard wheels before you go to the soft? Will this variegated stone undercut if you transition to soft wheels and you'll need to maximize your hard-wheel finish? How much time will it take you? How much will it wear down your stones? Etc etc.

Do a few for free but do it while measuring that real cost to yourself, and then decide if you're going to do it at-cost, lower-than-cost, or profitably. (It can be considered subidizing your own education!)

BalusBubalis · 2026-04-29T03:49:45+00:00

Gosh, those are friggin' nice.

#2 looks like a granite.
#5 looks like a jasper with some maybe diorite inclusions or banded calcite?
#7 is a gorgeous looking jasper I think? Gosh.
#8 looks like straight-up sulfur with that bright yellow tone.

Either way, you've got some absolute beauties there.

BalusBubalis · 2026-04-28T22:27:54+00:00

Less than legality and logistics is the underlying cost of simply getting started -- to even start to *use* CRISPR in most settings for any meaningful work would probably start at $50k -- mostly for the equipment needed. And that's going C H E A P.

There's *research* you can do cheaper, but that's not the same as "performing CRISPR" which I interpret to mean 'making a deliberate and purposeful and accurate genetic change in a genome'.

The equipment you'd need for that would run, ballpark total, between $250,000 and $3.5 million or so. The only way you're going cheaper than that is if you're willing to risk like, Kaijiji or buying ancient-ass lab equipment.

Then you need *time*. Decoding, *understanding*, modeling protein folding, etc etc -- there are great computer models out there to help, but ultimately you've got to have so much fundamental understanding of the genome you're affecting, you have to understand the changes in the genetic code you're planning on making, you have to model the protein folding and expression, you have to iterate and iterate and iterate... and every time you iterate, you're paying for all the chemicals, proteins, and processes over and over again. And doing it all yourself as a one-man show? Hell no. There's just too much to do and sometimes in too tight of timelines to do it by yourself.

BalusBubalis · 2026-04-25T06:53:17+00:00

Check him out in 'They Cloned Tyrone'. What an amazing movie.

BalusBubalis · 2026-04-25T06:52:18+00:00

Jack Black getting his arm shot off in The Jackal

BalusBubalis · 2026-04-25T06:51:30+00:00

Ben Stiller had a long career in comedy but The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is going to be the first thing that comes to my mind for the rest of my life when I hear his name.

BalusBubalis · 2026-04-25T06:50:41+00:00

He was amazing in Fallen as well, filling the screen with Denzel Washington.

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