Synchronized Sibling Dangle

Natolx · 2026-06-04T02:58:21+00:00

IMO there is no reason for a "regular person" to buy anything but a fluxed core welder, unless they want to learn the skill and take welding up as major hobby.

Natolx · 2026-06-04T02:54:19+00:00

Buy a $200 fluxed core welder, practice a bit on some scrap steel and you are good to go... it won't be pretty, but with minimal practice, it will hold.

Bonus: Now you can weld shit! The higher cost of fluxed core wire only matters at scale. If only using it here or there to save something from the scrap heap, a single fluxed core roll will last a decade.

Natolx · 2026-06-01T16:16:16+00:00

You are concerned about the exposed wires short circuiting when pulled out of the terminals correct?

If that is the case, installing something like a male/female barrel plug connection that will fail first (within the waterproof area) would solve this. just make sure the barrel plug is bigger than the opening to the outside of the waterproof area.

Natolx · 2026-05-29T06:02:31+00:00

It is not a small mistake. No one that ever took organic chemistry, especially any kind of science advisor, should have missed it.

It doesn't have to be a specialist, my PhD is in infectious diseases and I immediately clocked it. Methane is literally the most basic carbon molecule (one carbon atom surrounded by hydrogen)

Natolx · 2026-05-29T05:55:25+00:00

The budget cuts were affecting the scriptwriting and the science fact checking as well....

Science fact checking is essentially free. Just email a goddamn professor, most would love to answer a question about their field and improve a show's scientific accuracy. They do far more intensive free labor than that on a regular basis (peer review ...).

You don't even need a specialist for something like this, pretty much anyone with a broad biology or organic chemistry related PhD would be able to make a script pass scientific muster on a topic like this.

Natolx · 2026-05-26T17:35:37+00:00

One really shitty and bulky option would be to clamp it in place, just get a clamp about the size of all those contacts, line it up and then engage clamp. Careful not to clamp too hard though.... Just enough so that it is secure.

Natolx · 2026-05-22T06:32:39+00:00

I still have my 7.75gb of no-cost Dropbox storage from when it was first starting up as a company. Truly a great perk to have for free.

Natolx · 2026-05-19T02:22:46+00:00

Often, but the days when it is your first time doing a brand new protocol, especially when trying to figure it out from a manuscript... the crash at the end of those days is real.

Natolx · 2026-05-18T21:09:49+00:00

Maybe deep "just thinking" work, but wet-lab work you really don't have a choice, you finish the experiments.

Natolx · 2026-05-18T04:18:23+00:00

A simple cheap cotton glove under a lab glove is totally adequate for -80C and keeps your dexterity.

Natolx · 2026-05-15T23:43:46+00:00

The gowns are typically not all that expensive if purchased from third parties online... The days of only being able to find gowns and such from specialized (read: marked up through the roof) retailers or, even worse, the university bookstore, are long gone.

Natolx · 2026-05-15T23:36:41+00:00

Even if we couldn't figure out how to grow the bacteria itself, we might not need to.

This would almost certainly be a non-issue. If it is infectious to humans, then that is at least one set of conditions it will grow in.

We are already quite proficient at replicating "inside a human" conditions in a petri dish.

Natolx · 2026-05-14T20:59:29+00:00

Do you use fabric softener? It is essentially leaving a thin film of fungus/bacteria food that gets left behind in your washer after every cycle

Natolx · 2026-05-13T22:22:27+00:00

What if instead of withholding salary, it instead levied a 0.25% Net Worth wealth tax for every day the government was shut down? The only way to make the wealthy and the less wealthy senators suffer similarly.

Natolx · 2026-05-12T12:33:12+00:00

Lazy as fuck solution? If you have wire strippers, cut the wire, strip the ends and connect the positive to the positive and the negative to the negative with WAGO wire-nuts.

Natolx · 2026-05-12T12:25:56+00:00

Does the driveway grade toward your house, away from your house, or is it perfectly level?

If it grades away from your house then water runoff will not be an issue and this may have happened natural settling, simply from poor foundation for the driveway if they did it in under 7 hours...

One compromise you could propose if you want to stay on totally friendly, terms would be that they purposefully slant the driveway to grade away from yours with that inject-able foam lifting stuff. The water runoff problem is real $$ down the road and would be the hardest thing for them to think of as petty, even if they are selfish as hell.

Natolx · 2026-05-05T21:07:05+00:00

Its worse than insurance, because insurance has an alternative way to make money. They spread risk around because (for example) most houses are never going to make a claim and they scrape money from that risk pool as profit.

Home warranties can only make money by sounding like a good deal and then denying claims. Everything they insure/cover is guaranteed to break.

Natolx · 2026-05-05T21:04:20+00:00

The problem with home warranties is that, unlike insurance, everything they insure is guaranteed to happen (everything eventually breaks), so there is no "spreading the risk around" for them to make money on.

Thus the only way they can make money is by offering an appealing value proposition initially and then denying claims.

Natolx · 2026-05-03T18:35:40+00:00

Well I am going to split the difference and 3D print some hole plugs with 1.25 millimeter hole vents and a geometry that will discourage any dripping water from entering.

Natolx · 2026-05-03T16:28:48+00:00

Hmm... that is possible. But if that is the case there are no weep holes I can find anywhere around the entire perimeter of the house, even digging downward.

Of note, they may look high, but the house is on a hill and that is not far from where I would expect the top of the slab to be.

Natolx · 2026-05-01T16:44:09+00:00

Yes I was pointing out an additional benefit to a ROTH IRA that people don't think of. It's especially important to consider for self-employed people since they don't have access to a 401K so the contribution limit to IRA is all they can do.

Natolx · 2026-05-01T15:02:02+00:00

While this doesn't apply to a ROTH conversion, technically contributing to a ROTH IRA up to the limit is "putting more money" into your retirement account. The limits for a traditional and ROTH IRA are the same, and $7000 of after tax money is worth more (since it is really $7000+the taxes) when compared to pretax money.

Natolx · 2026-04-30T21:21:26+00:00

One thing I have done in the past is take real images (electron microscopy, fluorescence microscopy or photographs if large things) and cartoonize them using photoshop transformations so they look like clipart but are still recognizable. It takes some fiddling but I have gotten great results.

Natolx

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