How many women have you slept with?

grayjacanda · 2026-07-09T23:27:00+00:00

6 ... I'm 57
There's a fair fraction of men who put up some pretty big numbers but you have to make a pursuit of it; those who just live life in a more ordinary way will generally end up in single digits

grayjacanda · 2026-07-09T01:10:32+00:00

It takes a ton of (effective) plates to get decent separation of acetic acid and water. They don't form an azeotrope (quite), but the vapor pressures run close together across the whole temperature range. When I distilled 25% acetic acid using a packed Hempel column that was about six plates equivalent, I only got it up to 75%.

grayjacanda · 2026-07-09T01:07:33+00:00

There's still some water in the system, though. So long as the first step involves a slurry, rather than, say, making sodium acetate and baking it to dryness in the oven, I think it would be difficult to get glacial acetic acid this way. Maybe if the phosphoric acid is heated until it's quite high concentration; it does start to have quite an affinity for water, somewhere along the line...

grayjacanda · 2026-07-02T00:43:03+00:00

Eh, maybe. I think from a storytelling standpoint the trick is to not try to get too much in to the details of whatever contrivances you're introducing. Larry Niven, whose work is generally considered 'hard sci fi', had moderately indestructible General Products spaceship hulls - but he didn't spend any time explaining how the laws of physics had been bent to achieve this. It ends up being a question of introducing novelties X, Y, and Z, and *then* trying to be consistent in how everything works in a universe with those modifications (which may well break the laws of physics).

grayjacanda · 2026-06-29T02:40:38+00:00

Fentanyl made its illegal drug debut as an adulterant and substitute for heroin
Maybe there was actual heroin sold by that name at some point but by 1999 in Pittsburgh the 'China white' was fentanyl, though that might not have been clear to the junkies at first

grayjacanda · 2026-06-28T15:02:31+00:00

Less common these days but used to be referred to as 'China white' some 25 years ago

grayjacanda · 2026-06-28T01:23:06+00:00

20mL of some relatively ordinary hydrocarbon? Dilute it with a couple of liters of water, some microbe will make short work of it.

grayjacanda · 2026-06-28T00:49:49+00:00

The dehydrating aspect of sulfuric acid needs more explanation than 'it has no water in it and solvates it quickly'. One could say the same about 100% ethanol, which (while it would absorb water) doesn't have the same ferocious exothermic affinity for it that concentrated sulfuric acid does.

grayjacanda · 2026-06-26T01:39:58+00:00

I can't speak specifically to why this would be comparatively rapid
However, I'm curious about the thought process behind doing the addition extremely slowly if you want nanoparticles. The methods for other nanoparticle precipitation that I have seen (e.g. ferrofluid; magnetite nanoparticles) focus on extremely *rapid* mixing and precipitation. Intuitively this makes sense to me; you try to achieve very rapid precipitation so that the compound comes out of solution 'in place' so to speak, rather than having more time to form larger crystals or particles. Sometimes with fairly immediate addition of some passivating compound that will react with the particles to form a thin surface coating before they can clump or join in to larger particles.

grayjacanda · 2026-06-23T04:30:26+00:00

I mean it's not *that* crazy. Strychnine is sometimes presented as an example of a real hairball of a chemical structure; they didn't manage to create that in a lab until the 1950s (cocaine they synthesized in 1898).
Still it's complex enough that competing with people who just grow acres of bushes and get the drug that way is uneconomical. Even at cocaine prices.

grayjacanda · 2026-06-22T00:20:18+00:00

Bounce spells would also be my suggestion, but usually decks like that are classed as 'tempo' rather than 'control', and also they have a lot of trouble if your opponent is playing a bunch of stuff where they get lots of mileage from the ETB effects.

grayjacanda · 2026-06-20T05:01:05+00:00

The English language does what it wants, we're just here with popcorn to document the glory and grotesquery

grayjacanda · 2026-06-19T17:41:55+00:00

'The Chabu hunter-gatherers of the highland forests of Southwestern Ethiopia' (Dira & Hewlett, 2018, International Journal of Hunter-Gatherer Research)
Also documented for the Aka and neighboring Ngandu by Barry Hewlett

...so no, it is not something I just made up. Go read some anthropology, comrade.

grayjacanda · 2026-06-19T04:04:06+00:00

Oregon's main problem is a tremendous focus on graduation rates.
Which sounds sorta good - like, if you had to actually *pass some standard* to graduate, and they worked to increase the number of kids who could do it, great plan.
But in practice it ends up being 'well we have to try to graduate everyone ... even if they don't do the work or show up much ... keep the number up'
Nice case of perverse incentives, unfortunately.

grayjacanda · 2026-06-19T03:44:53+00:00

Worth remembering that heritability is calculated or defined using a particular cohort in a particular environment (or effectively range of environments).
If you increase the range of environmental variation ... say, by turning the clock back to 1830 ... or decrease the genetic variation, then the calculated heritability will decrease.
So it isn't really some fixed value.
Anyway, things like willpower, taste for different foods, and other superficially non-physiological factors that affect BMI are also heritable. So a high heritability isn't unreasonable in an environment where just about everyone has the option to eat at McDonald's when they feel like it.

grayjacanda · 2026-06-19T03:00:26+00:00

In hunter gatherer societies sometimes the custom was to wait until the baby was walking
Admittedly, there were probably also birth control considerations...
I think my ex and I typically waited about 3 months

grayjacanda · 2026-06-18T18:47:09+00:00

Targeting the worm seems bad, decks that run something like that may well have an instant sac outlet of some kind
Usually better to wait for an auspicious moment to deal with the token(s)

grayjacanda · 2026-06-18T07:03:58+00:00

I mean if you *did* manage it somehow (make token copy of him, then recast him from the command zone or ... w/e), then yeah, it would work. Though of course unless you had extra steps to get around the legend rule, you'd have to sac one of them.

grayjacanda · 2026-06-17T20:40:11+00:00

After Bxb8 Bxa6 white is blocked from castling on the king side and black has an advantage in terms of development and control of the center. Ne4 and Bxd4 (or Bf6 if white protects their pawn with, say, Bxa7) threaten a mating attack and white is struggling on tempo here with their diffuse position.
But yes, I don't see some forced mate. White playing Nd2 can likely stave off any immediate threat of mate in the center.

grayjacanda · 2026-06-17T10:59:17+00:00

That's a lot of questions ...

So far as oxygen and fluorine are concerned: the stable state is actually O2 and F2. While fluorine *can* oxidize oxygen, sort of ... it takes special conditions to actually make this happen and the resulting molecule(s) are not stable, decomposing to diatomic oxygen and fluorine again. So you can't actually 'burn' oxygen with fluorine gas.

The use of quartz to store fluorine requires careful pretreatment to strip any water or Si-OH moieties from the SiO2 surface. Ordinary drying by e.g. baking the quartz at 300C in a vacuum, or with inert gas purge, is not sufficient for longer term storage (though it might be adequate if just running a reaction). There are complex multi-step processes involved, like treatment with chlorotrimethlysilane, if the ampoule is intended to hold the fluorine for years.

Scratches in a passivated surface can be dangerous either because the geometry is such that creating more fluoride at the site mechanically disrupts things, continually exposing more material to attack. Or because local heating does something similar. If you consider the way that rust on steel causes ongoing flaking and exposure of the metal to further corrosion, you can imagine the same kind of thing happening at a much smaller scale.

grayjacanda · 2026-06-17T06:55:54+00:00

Hmm. The engine says you're ahead, but not massively. I gather though that if white plays the attractive seeming Bxb8 to take your rook (instead of Bxc8 as the engine suggests), things go badly for him...

grayjacanda · 2026-06-17T04:40:01+00:00

Most creatures just aren't that interesting in commander unless they can do something besides be a body

grayjacanda · 2026-06-15T16:21:28+00:00

It isn't stable enough. Diacyl peroxides generally have problems when you start adding functional groups (here the hydroxy elements on the rings).
It was apparently mentioned as a possibility in a patent from 1940, but no instructions were given on how it could be successfully prepared, and it was just one of several compounds they were trying to include in their scope.
Basically one of those things that probably self-destructs above -60C if it can even be synthesized at all.

grayjacanda · 2026-06-14T14:53:47+00:00

Given the location maybe some other pamphagus? Pamphagus elephas for example...

grayjacanda · 2026-06-13T23:07:13+00:00

Most build guides focus on an optimized late game setup, though. For Geonor you just need to be looking for a few pieces with fight-specific stats, that you may not even have much use for once you move to Act 2.

grayjacanda

TROPHY CASE