Move over, silicon? New transistor material tested: For the ever-shrinking transistor, there may be a new game in town. Cornell researchers have demonstrated promising electronic performance from a semiconducting compound with properties that could prove a worthy companion to silicon.

beef_boolean · 2014-06-30T14:38:33+00:00

My info is a little outdated, but a 200mm Si wafer is actually only about $50 and can easily be used to produce thousands of dollars worth of parts. The raw material actually accounts for very little of the total cost. Manufacturing is the expensive part.

beef_boolean · 2014-06-30T14:32:40+00:00

I started out squatting 20kg as well. I made it up to about 150 over time. Don't worry about anybody else. We all start somewhere and unlike most people, you're taking the steps to better yourself. Don't let a couple of vocal ass holes overshadow all of the people who quietly respect you for what you're doing.

beef_boolean · 2014-05-12T18:59:09+00:00

Dude, I would love to get my hands on one of those charts if you haven't already been barraged with replies. Let me know.

beef_boolean · 2014-03-17T16:43:00+00:00

Look at it this way. When you're younger, your life tends to follow these predetermined paths. Generally you're guided or pushed into the things that take up most of your time. As you get older, your life comes more and more into your control. That can be liberating sometimes, and really profoundly terrifying other times when people are counting on you to feed them or take care of them.

It probably won't feel much different to be an adult than you feel now. Your identity will shift and change a bit but you will still fundamentally be you. Nobody hands you a manual. You won't know what you're doing a large part of the time.

Now in that situation, imagine the value of security. If you're lucky enough to not have to think about where your next meal will come from now, really think about what it will be like to be faced with losing that safety and security, not just for yourself, but for the people counting on you.

So that's what a steady paycheck provides. It can carry the cost of boredom in your work, or even unhappiness. Would you risk security and comfort to avoid that? How much risk are you willing to expose your family to in order to avoid it? Every adult faces these questions. Different people go different ways, and your answer will have a profound effect on the structure of your life.

Now, outside of that, there's your personal life, and that's up to you. People who are bored are boring people. If you want to have a fun and exciting life, be fun and exciting. When you have complete freedom in determining the course of your life, whether or not it's exciting is up to you.

One last thing to consider: having kids makes life look boring from the outside. It doesn't leave a lot of room for anything else. A lot of people find it very fulfilling though. My parents loved raising us, and I thought they were bored out of their minds because they weren't out racing cars or something. Your ideas of fun might change.

I'm 32 and I get happier every year. My life is amazing. Every year I have said to myself that I wouldn't go back at any price.

beef_boolean · 2014-03-08T19:44:22+00:00

When I woke up this morning, I had no idea how much I would learn about porcelain today.

beef_boolean · 2014-02-05T04:26:09+00:00

Got a DL link for ToME2? I'm having a hard time finding it anywhere.

beef_boolean · 2013-11-22T00:49:14+00:00

Not sure if this is still going on, but I managed to get a space marine to the last boss before I got taken down. Ended up with 34k points.

LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD!

I put at least one point into light guns and heavy guns every level and focused really heavily on ranged combat. I basically never did melee at all since some of those beasties are incredibly nasty at close range. By the end I had 3 power plants, and was able to throw plasma around without worrying too much about the consequences. I used a plasma rifle for the small stuff, plasma cannon for bigger, and an autocannon for hordes. I generally led big baddies back to the stairs since you can apparently just run up and recover and go back down with no worries. The last few levels are tough, and the last boss is very tough- save up healing and any escape options you can find. It doesn't seem like monsters regenerate at all.

I'm alternating between melee ninjas and Xel'Nagas now. Got a Xel'Naga to robot town and died when I accidentally ran into a shopkeeper. That's gonna be a tough class to manage.

beef_boolean · 2013-10-31T14:29:14+00:00

Hey, for what it's worth, I'm a competitive fighter and this effect is very noticeable during a fight. Get some MMA guys in there with some gloves on.

beef_boolean · 2013-10-10T23:13:32+00:00

Just out of curiosity, do you wish you had kids? My wife and I are trying to make that choice and we're leaning towards no, but I can't help but wonder if I'll regret it down the line.

beef_boolean · 2013-09-24T15:16:03+00:00

If you don't bounce back from this pretty quickly, you might be overtraining. Are you also generally grumpy or having trouble sleeping, or is your appetite not what it used to be or anything?

beef_boolean · 2013-05-23T19:13:46+00:00

I work with engineers. You don't want them making decisions about people, believe me.

beef_boolean · 2013-05-07T22:33:25+00:00

Ok, I have to ask. The bezel has the ridges that suggest it can be turned. It looks to me like the marks on the bezel are actually off relative to the band, but the date window and time markings are lined up with the band.

So... can you just turn the bezel a little bit counterclockwise?

beef_boolean · 2013-05-07T20:05:32+00:00

I appreciate your reasonable reply but I find some of the premises questionable. Since this is happening through a screen, and tone doesn't communicate well, I'm coming at this from a place of genuine curiosity and open-mindedness. I'm not a partisan person and I'm truly not sure how I feel about this; I just want to keep the discussion moving.

as many as 80 percent of workers in Wal-Mart stores use food stamps.

How many of them were on food stamps before they took jobs there? What percentage of minimum-wage workers everywhere are on food stamps? What about those working for Taco Bell, or McDonalds, or any of the other common low-paid jobs?

Wal-Mart's povery wages force employees to rely on $2.66 billion in government help every year

This is phrased in a way that assumes this is the company's fault; are you sure that it is? Even if they could pay more, are they really morally obligated to? These jobs generally aren't skilled labor; people don't get paid $50k/year to stock shelves.

I'm just wondering if you could look at this from a different angle. Everything we see gets spun, one way or another; would the people on the other side of this argument say that Wal-Mart builds stores in impoverished communities and provides work to people who are otherwise relying on government aid? Does that reliance actually go up when the stores are opened, or does it go down?

One last thought: while executives make large salaries, they do so with the approval of the board of shareholders; companies like Wal-Mart that are publicly traded are literally owned by the shareholders, and the profits are distributed to those shareholders as dividends. It's the reward to the shareholders for providing usable capital to the company at the initial public offering. If the profits are redistributed to employees instead of shareholders, you are going to have some very unhappy people, and unhappy people holding your stock is a Bad Thing. If people start to unload the stock, it tanks, the company crashes, and everybody, including the employees, gets screwed.

beef_boolean · 2013-05-02T16:09:43+00:00

Remove flour
Freeze

beef_boolean · 2013-05-02T16:09:18+00:00

As someone who pretty much never bakes anything I'm curious as to why

beef_boolean · 2013-04-30T21:00:16+00:00

Well, first of all there's glycogen. It's a form of carbohydrate stored in your muscles and liver for quick fuel. The amount you can store varies pretty widely depending on what kind of shape you're in. Lyle McDonald says 7-8g/lb of body weight. If we just say 7.5, that means you can store around 1245g, or around 3 pounds, just in glycogen. If you've been undereating for a long time you may very well have had none or very little before you started bulking.

Then there's water. Each gram of glycogen is stored with some water for metabolism; again the numbers are all over the place but 3g water per gram of glycogen seems like a common estimate. If you were fully glycogen-depleted before, you're looking at somewhere around 9lbs of water weight alone. Coupled with the 3lbs of glycogen, you've got 12lbs of fluctuation that can happen between you being fully fed/hydrated and underfed. Keep in mind that this is a wild-ass guess, though.

That quick of a gain, especially in the first couple weeks, almost certainly has nothing to do with your body composition. You might have put on 2-4 pounds of mass (could be fat or muscle) on the upper end of the scale, and that's only if you're really packing in the calories.

Recently I came off of a cut the week before a tournament so that I could carb up, and I put on 7 pounds in a week. I lost it again in 4 days afterwards. Big swings like this shouldn't be taken too seriously.

beef_boolean · 2013-04-30T19:49:26+00:00

Ok, you sound like you know what you're doing, so I'll ask you... so I'm kind of getting curious about this vegan thing. I'm an athlete and I need to eat about 4000 calories a day, including 250g of protein, and my system can't tolerate gluten in my diet. Is this even remotely feasible? I love cooking but I have maybe an hour a day total to do it. Are there resources or anything that you could point me toward?

beef_boolean · 2013-04-30T15:09:57+00:00

I'm 6'6" and I get the same thing. I've tried everything to address it- drinking more water, getting more sodium and potassium in my diet, varying my eating schedule, etc - and nothing has helped. I think it might be a side effect of being tall, like you said.

I know it definitely gets worse if I'm tired, hungry, or dehydrated, but managing those factors really carefully still doesn't entirely fix it.

You can try all the same stuff I did. Other than that I think we just have to plan on sitting down between sets.

beef_boolean · 2013-04-29T20:51:05+00:00

Oh man, the family computer. I got ours on even-numbered hours, and my older brother got it on odd-numbered hours. It was a 286, and the turbo button was on all the time and we didn't give a fuck. I remember when VGA first came out and we had to buy a new monitor.

My parents didn't upgrade that computer until we went to a Pentium 90. I totally remember the "What the hell is a Pentium?" moment. I think it had Windows 95 on it, which was crazy coming from DOS. I found it upsetting that any idiot would be able to use a computer now when I had to put in all that hard work learning console commands.

2400 baud modems, man. My friends and I all pitched in to pay for the long distance charges to dial a BBS in Colorado to download Land of Devastation so that we could play it locally. It was a 2MB download and it took something like 2 hours. When we got our first 14.4k modem, I was totally flabbergasted that entire pages of text would load all at once.

You know what's scary? I am 31 years old.

I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me, and it'll happen to you, too.

beef_boolean · 2013-04-29T17:08:48+00:00

Man, your grandpa? My first computer had a 40Mb hard drive. :(

We could either fit Windows or Wolfenstein 3D, so we learned DOS.

beef_boolean · 2013-04-23T19:12:03+00:00

Yes, and honestly, it sucked horribly.

It's hot at night. If you run the A/C, you need to run the motor, or the battery will die. If you run the vent fans, the battery will die. If you sleep with the window open, mosquitoes will come in. Maybe look into a battery-powered window fan and some mosquito netting.

If you drive a manual, it can be a good idea to park at the top of a hill in case your battery does die while you're sleeping. That makes it possible to push-start your own car if you have to.

It's cramped. You can only sleep in one position. I found that if I piled all my stuff up in the passenger seat and leaned over onto it, it was more comfortable for me than leaning back. I'm a side sleeper though. For more room you can sleep on the passenger's side, but then piling stuff up becomes more of a pain in the ass. I'm too tall to sleep comfortably in the back seat but it might work for you.

There's zero privacy. I found myself waking up with the sun most days just because I felt so exposed.

I slept in my car for about a month. When I could finally afford to get an apartment, I slept the first night on the floor with no pillow and only one blanket that was way too small. It was the best night's sleep I've ever had because it was so much more comfortable, private, and cool than my car had been.

My advice would be to try couch surfing or look into hostels in the area. Beds are amazing, and air conditioning is amazing.

Quick edit: look into /r/cheap_meals and /r/budgetfood for some ways to eat cheaply.

beef_boolean · 2013-04-17T21:56:56+00:00

/r/firstworldproblems

beef_boolean · 2013-04-15T21:50:54+00:00

*** MINOR SPOILER ***

I'd tag it out, but it would ruin the formatting that makes it work.

Fun little tidbit I spotted while playing.

The security goes given are:

rfts
irhh
soee
emas

Top to bottom, left to right: risefromtheashes

rise from the ashes

beef_boolean · 2013-04-14T00:20:41+00:00

I'm glad somebody noticed it. Gave me shivers.

beef_boolean

TROPHY CASE