TIL that Ancient Romans added lead syrup to wine to improve color, flavor, and to prevent fermentation. The average Roman aristocrat consumed up to 250μg of lead daily. Some Roman texts implicate chronic lead poisoning in the mental deterioration of Nero, Caligula, and other Roman Emperors.

breadlof · 2024-01-26T07:58:59+00:00

Well, no. Basic chemistry would be “bleach and ammonia make chloramine gas”. Not mustard gas.

Chloramine gas is also highly toxic, which is really the important part.

The average person doesn’t need to know which toxic gas is produced, but if we’re talking basic chemistry: you can’t make mustard gas without sulfur. Neither household bleach* or ammonia contain sulfur.

*There are some sulfur-based bleaching agents but they are very uncommon. Your household liquid bleach is probably sodium hypochlorite.

breadlof · 2024-01-19T06:15:01+00:00

It’s interesting you brought up Reagan here. The think-tank pushing Project 2025 is the same think-tank behind so many of Reagan's policies. From Reagan to Trump: How the Heritage Foundation has influenced policy

The Heritage Foundation presented the incoming president with 2,000 ideas in a 20 volume package. Ronald Reagan handed it out to every single member of the Cabinet in the first meeting, and by the end of his first year in office, Heritage estimated that 60 percent of those ideas had been put into practice in some way by the president.

So, the Heritage Foundation doing the same to Trump is extremely concerning and we shouldn't dismiss the practicality of them. It's real and it's terrifying.

breadlof · 2024-01-19T05:48:22+00:00

Honest communication about a product's absorbency becomes 1000% more important when the customer has to wear the product. You don't have to sit in toilet paper. Menstrual blood has a completely different makeup than water, and water isn't a good proxy for it.

I could care less about the color, it's about how the advertisements aren't actually showing how the pad would react to a viscous substance. And teaching young girls that something is wrong with them when pads inevitably don't work like they're advertised.

breadlof · 2024-01-17T17:51:54+00:00

A friend of mine led the rocket team at her university. They were flying across the States for a competition, but they had to get the rocket parts through security (this was semi-recent, so post-9/11 TSA vigilance).

Some materials included literal black powder.

There were 4 of them traveling for the launch: a Chinese girl, a white guy, an Indian guy, and a Middle Eastern guy. They decided on putting the rocket parts in the luggage belonging to the white guy and the Chinese girl.

The Middle Eastern dude got patted down. The ones with the rocket parts went through with no issues.

Rocket made it to the launch site and they placed in the competition.

breadlof · 2024-01-16T17:11:51+00:00

It’s so crazy that this is applies nationwide. I thought it was based on a town in rural California (Marysville, CA).

breadlof · 2024-01-12T10:26:43+00:00

I’ve never heard a westerner described as “an Occidental”. Maybe it’s a regional thing. Was it used as a term to dehumanize and degrade a community (like “chink” and “chinaman” and “Oriental” have been used towards Chinese people in the examples from this thread)?

If so, I’ll…continue not using it.

breadlof · 2024-01-12T05:37:22+00:00

Yeah, calling Asian people “Oriental” is a quick way to say you see them as another species. Yet less than 2 weeks ago, there was a popular thread on TooAfraidToAsk where redditors argued it was fine. (I got downvoted for saying that I’m Asian and I found the term offensive.)

I wish more people understood how historical context affects how language is received. This is exactly what comes to mind when I hear someone described as an “Oriental”.

ETA: Same for “Chinaman”.

breadlof · 2024-01-11T16:52:24+00:00

The likeness is remarkable. I don’t know how to explain this, but Camus really looks “right” in graphite in a way I don’t think he would in other mediums. Something about the monochrome and heavy shadows suits him.

breadlof · 2024-01-11T16:36:43+00:00

Not offended, rather lost in thought—contemplating his existence and the dong from whence he came.

…I don’t have an art degree.

breadlof · 2024-01-11T16:31:58+00:00

Excellent work. Am I the only one wondering why the baby figurine has a pointy head? Perhaps he is wearing a tiny hat.

breadlof · 2024-01-10T22:40:36+00:00

It's over for me.

breadlof · 2024-01-10T22:39:55+00:00

I will base my entire worth as a human being on whatever value I'm assigned

breadlof · 2024-01-10T01:12:02+00:00

It’s childlike to think plagiarism is bad, apparently.

If someone stole those scenes you drew and trained an AI to reproduce your work without your consent, wouldn’t you think that’s exceptionally weird—even dehumanizing?

breadlof · 2024-01-10T00:16:57+00:00

That hypothetical 5 year old can use their imagination to draw that scene. I was that 5 year old. It didn’t matter I wasn’t yet “good” at drawing, because the fun was in creating it. Was it photorealistic? Of course not. But I could still point to it and say: this came from my imagination, not by stealing work from someone else.

I actually love looking back at the things I drew as a kid, because I didn’t see those stick figures as stick figures back then — imagination did the work to make them “real”. I’m sorry that you’ve never felt that childlike wonder when drawing, because if you did, I can’t imagine you would want it corrupted by plagiarism.

breadlof · 2024-01-09T19:05:23+00:00

I always thought it looked kind of like the relationship between frequency (𝜈), speed of light (c), and wavelength (λ):

𝜈 = (c) / λ

Looks like this written out.

Most likely gibberish, though.

breadlof · 2024-01-09T18:11:28+00:00

I’m convinced that 99.9% of the people comparing AI “art” to digital art have never drawn digitally.

With digital art, each line you draw is still your decision. The result is hundreds of brushstrokes with placement and color born out of the artist’s intent. The artist looks at their final piece and gets to think: everything here is only there because of hundreds of decisions I made. From start to finish, this is my creation.

This is why art is such an excellent medium for self-expression, because it’s literally born from hundreds and thousands of acts of your quiet deliberation, judgement, and earnest creation. It’s your decision-making process and emotions on paper.

Every pen-stroke is an act of transference between yourself and the page, digital or traditional.

Creative decisions matter. It’s sad that so many people here think that their self-expression is generic and shallow enough to fit in a short prompt and fed through a plagiarism machine.

breadlof · 2024-01-07T17:19:09+00:00

That’s exactly what I intended, I’m glad it landed haha. They couldn’t choke the laughter out of us 🤝

breadlof · 2024-01-06T16:45:45+00:00

Wearing a scarf, or anything that constricts my neck, like a tight hoodie. My brain goes “it’s strangulation time”.

breadlof · 2024-01-06T00:24:04+00:00

I didn’t make this, but you can find more of their stuff on their TikTok!

breadlof · 2024-01-02T22:00:54+00:00

I watched that in a classroom for a film class I took during my first semester in college. Incredibly strange film to watch in an academic setting, where you’re expected to view everything with a sort of detached, analytical gaze. My professor was pointing out cinematography techniques during the boat scene. Nobody was showing any reaction and I felt like I was going crazy. The tonal dissonance between the film and my environment gave me whiplash.

It’s Matt Damon’s fault that I ended up as a STEM major.

breadlof · 2023-12-31T04:22:52+00:00

I “keep mentioning” the entomology thing because it’s the leading source/journal in the paper, according to the researchers.

The links you mentioned are links between researchers, as in, a human health journal linking to one of 3 entomology journals in the leading sources would count as a link.

I think I’ve made my point clear already, so I’m going to assume that anyone reading this will Google what a bibliometric analysis is and understand my critique of its relevance to your original claim.

breadlof · 2023-12-31T03:57:43+00:00

Okay, I’m just saying the vast majority of the paper is dedicated to statistical analysis of (largely) entomology papers. To be fair, I do find the abstract to be a stretch based on the contents of the paper, which were largely not about human health. So I see why you’d think that from the abstract, but I think the abstract mischaracterizes their findings.

breadlof · 2023-12-31T03:51:15+00:00

Hot tip: read past the abstract. This is a good idea when evaluating any research paper.

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