realChem

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

The strong law of small numbers strikes again!

[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago

why would I want to use it?

You wouldn't, but that's fine with Match Group: JP Morgan[^1] are loving this new monetization strategy. If they think they can get more money out of their users they will, the experience and usefulness of their app be damned. Very similar to aggressively monetized mobile games, but extra icky since they're monetizing human relationships.

[^1]: I'm sure other investment firms are pleased as well, but JP Morgan was the firm mentioned in the article

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Did the fix end up working in the end, or did restoring everything from backups mean that the fix didn't work out either? (I don't use Jerboa or any other lemmy apps, so mainly just curious.)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Always nice to see studies of these things! I feel like there's a lot of olive oil lore out there, it's cool to see that some of that lore checks out scientifically.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Glad you found it useful! When I started writing it nobody else had answered and by the time I posted it a bunch of other people had replied (that's what I get for walking away while writing it).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

(I'm going to write with confidence, but I'm not an expert, just grew up around chefs. Please feel free and welcome to fact check me.)

Yeah, EVOO is made by cold-pressing the olives, and regular olive oil by hot pressing. Cold pressing releases less oil and also several tasty compounds that come along for the ride. Hot pressing releases more oil but also other compounds that don't taste as nice, so generally regular olive oil will then be refined, removing most of the compounds that give it flavor. If you compare, you'll find that real EVOO[^1] tastes distinctly olive-y, and regular olive oil has very little flavor at all.

When it comes to cooking, traditional advice is not to cook with EVOO because it's got a low-ish smoke point[^2], whereas regular olive oil (which has been refined) will have a higher smoke point. EVOO's smoke point isn't actually that low, but I generally avoid high temp cooking with it anyway in favor of things like avocado oil (my personal go-to), peanut oil, or vegetable oil which are very tolerant of high temperatures. You absolutely can cook with EVOO though if you only want to keep one kind of oil around the house or something.

To clarify: heating up EVOO and cooking with it is fine as long as you don't smoke it. It won't make it any less extra-virgin or anything: to get those less good-tasting things into your oil, you need to heat up the olives themselves.

So are you wasting money if you do cook with it? Maybe.

Do you want what you're cooking to taste like olive oil? If you do, cook with it! Real[^1] EVOO has a distinct taste that won't go away when heated (unless you smoke it). It's great for making stuff like olive oil cake! If you don't care or don't want that flavor in whatever you're cooking, then yeah it's probably a waste of money. There are many less expensive oils that will work well and have neutral flavors or different flavors that you might prefer, including regular olive oil.

[^1]: All of this is avoiding the issue of regular olive oil being passed off as EVOO when it actually isn't. If you want something interesting to read about this evening, try researching olive oil fraud.

[^2]: In case you don't know, smoke point is the temperature where an oil starts to burn, which tastes bad, isn't very healthy, and will probably set off your smoke alarm.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I heard about it before release... albeit I heard from a friend that I play XIV with, so that's certainly a selection bias.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

That was a fun watch, thanks! Now what about TotK... 🤔

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

In FFXIV, I’m in the post-Shadowbringers DLC content. I’ve taken a bit of a break from the MSQ to get the Nier-themed alliance raids

Are you me? I'm just a bit into the post-ShB patches, and I just finished unlocking all three Nier raids. They're really fun (although I agree: challenging). If you happen to be on Crystal DC and want to party up for some raids or something, lmk!

Think I might try a healer class next, just not sure which one

As someone who is very much a non-healer main, I quite like Sage. My first healer to 90 was actually Scholar, but a lot of that had to do with the fact that I was really into Summoner for a while: when I'm going to heal I usually hop on Sage.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I've put a few hours in and I agree, it's just a fun little game that slowly pushes you bit by bit into slightly more challenging stuff. I really like how well the game meshes the diving and sushi restaurant aspects, too. (Plus, I'm a scuba diver -- still pretty new to it -- and I'm a bit on the larger side, so it's a nice bit of representation.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood! It's a really good visual-novel-style game, but with the added element that you craft your own tarot-style divination deck and then draw cards from it during some conversations, and which cards you draw influence what kinds of readings you can give for people. It is established early on that since you were a kid your readings have never been wrong, and fittingly the game warns you early and repeatedly that your answers will affect your fate, dramatically. Well, no kidding! When I was playing yesterday I had a choice that I'd made hours earlier come back and bite me in the ass, hard. Almost made me want to quit and start over, but I've decided to see this play-through through and if by the end I still feel like I need to fix my mistakes I'll maybe play it a second time.

tl;dr if you like beautiful pixel art, enigmatic beings from outside of space and time, witches, tarot, and/or choices that actually matter in your games, do give this one a go! I'm not done with it yet but I'd already love to chat with someone else who's played it!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yesterday was very productive and then I got to spend the evening gaming with friends, so that was nice! Today I have jury duty, and potentially for most of the rest of the week... It's fine, but my fingers are still crossed that I end up getting dismissed and can go back to my sorely neglected research tasks!

 

Not what I initially expected this article to be about, but I do love this kind of cross-cutting research that takes ideas from one field and applies them to a seemingly entirely different field. (Also makes me wish I'd been able to take a topology class at some point.)

 

Alternate title: how my PhD project is currently going

 

Hey folks! Here's a pinned post where you can ask science questions!

Here's a quick rundown of what this post is and isn't:

  • This is a place where you can ask science-related questions!
  • This is a place to provide science-based answers to others' questions!
  • This isn't reddit's askscience community. By this I mean we don't have the resources (or, really, desire) to vet users' credentials, and you shouldn't expect that whoever is answering your question is necessarily an expert. That said, this community does have a large share of professional scientists and engineers, and I'm hoping that those folks will be interested in sharing their expertise when they can.
  • This isn't a place to ask for medical advice – since we can't vet qualifications these kinds of questions won't be allowed here in the interest of preventing harm, and I'll remove any comments that ask personal medical questions. If you have a question about medicine that's not asking for advice, that is fine and allowed.
  • This isn't the only place on this community where you're allowed to ask questions! If you have a question related to another post, ask in the comments there. If you have a question not related to another post, I'd like it if you tried asking here first (to help this thread gain some traction), but you're also free to ask in a separate post if you'd prefer (or both).

I'm going to post this inaugural thread with no set expiration date. I'm currently thinking a new thread maybe every 2–4 weeks, but I'd like to see what the volume of comments here ends up being like before deciding for sure.

 

So it turns out if you set a language on your post, anyone who hasn't explicitly picked any languages in their profile can't see it. So I'm gonna repost this with no language selected and see if we get a little more feedback this time.

There were a couple of Q&A posts here ~~yesterday~~ the other day that got some pretty good engagement, and I was wondering if folks would be interested in a weekly/biweekly pinned Q&A post?

I don't think it makes sense at this point to do anything like reddit's /r/AskScience does in terms of organizing themed panels or vetting people's credentials, nor is that something that's really supported by lemmy as a platform at the moment. It seems, though, that we do have a fair number of users around who are working scientists and engineers in a pretty wide variety of fields.

So: if a pinned Q&A post existed, would you ask questions? Likewise, would you contribute answers? If you wouldn't use it, I'd love to know that too! Do you think it would be better to leave things as they are and just ask questions in post form? Let me know here in the comments, and also of course feel free to raise any additional thoughts or concerns you might have. If it seems like enough folks are interested I can set up a thread to try the idea out.

 

A lot of science communication in the media can be, to say it gently, not the best. Important things get left out, conclusions are often misrepresented or extrapolated to things that they really don't say, and methods are often left out completely.

I want to find some more sources for good science communication that people have generally found to be both accurate and well written for folks outside the field (since if all we wanted was accuracy, we'd just read the primary literature).

I've always personally been a fan of Quanta. They occasionally write about topics I'm well versed in (materials / crystallography) and I find that on those topics they're very accurate, so I assume that's also true about the articles they write in other fields. I also think that the folks writing for them do a good job at the communication aspect, e.g. being willing to cover the basics a bit before jumping into the new science.

What about you all? Do you have a favorite or a go-to for high quality science writing?

 

I assume a fair number of folk around this community have been aware of the labor negotiations going on at UPS right now, and the potential strike next month. This video from More Perfect Union that came out today is sharing the stories of a couple of part-time workers (the workers whose exploitation is at the center of the current negotiations).

 

Here's the relevant paper (which does not appear to be open access, unfortunately): Polygonal tessellations as predictive models of molecular monolayers

 

There were a couple of Q/A posts here yesterday that got some pretty good engagement, and I was wondering if folks would be interested in a weekly pinned Q/A post?

I don't think it makes sense at this point to do anything like reddit's /r/AskScience does in terms of organizing themed panels or vetting people's credentials, nor is that something that's really supported by lemmy as a platform at the moment. It seems, though, that we do have a fair number of users around who are working scientists and engineers in a pretty wide variety of fields.

So: if a pinned Q/A post existed, would you ask questions? Likewise, would you contribute answers? Do you think it would be better to leave things as they are and just ask questions in post form? Let me know here in the comments, and also of course feel free to raise any additional thoughts or concerns you might have. If it seems like enough folks are interested I can set up a thread this week to try the idea out.

Edit: Okay, based on upvotes it looks like only about 3% of monthly /c/science users are interested enough in this to click the arrow, so I'm gonna leave it be for now (although it might be worth a revisit in the future). I think @[email protected] makes a good point about the possibility of a self-sustaining cycle, but the Q/A posts that prompted me to ask about this have actually gotten much more engagement than this pinned post did. Perhaps it's because a lot of people are engaging with /c/science via their own feeds and not visiting the community directly? But either way it seems like, for now at least, individual question posts would probably get more engagement.

 

A very thought-provoking video about Gell-Mann amnesia, its compliment (which she calls Mann-Gell amnesia, which I think is a fun name), and science communication

Also the beginning of the video is framed around reddit, which I think is interesting to bring up in the context of lemmy/beehaw, building a new community, and the choices we make about how we communicate with each other online

 

This paper describes an amazingly deep principle underlying a lot of physics. The paper might be a little tricky if you're not familiar with group theory, but it's got some pretty good illustrations that help a lot.

The one-line takeaway is:

It is only the absence of some symmetry elements, which is obligatory. It is this property – dissymmetry – which makes phenomena

Essentially, if you can find a broken symmetry in some effect, you know that you'll also find that broken symmetry in (the superposition of) it's causes. You can't necessarily say anything about the set of symmetries of the causes, but you can about their dissymmetries.

The reason I love this paper so much is because it's part of a line of mathematical thinking about science that eventually lead to Emmy Noether's famous theorem, where she was able to prove that wherever we find a conserved quantity (e.g. energy, momentum, etc) it is due to an underlying continuous symmetry in the system. (This isn't the same thing as this paper is discussing, but her result uses this same application of ideas from group theory to physics.)

Note: This paper should be available as part of an open archive but sometimes it's hard for me to tell, since I have institutional access; lmk if you can't access the paper

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