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[Pabappa]

Snow at midday in May with bright sunshine all around me. Wow. Im impressed. Very windy too. I havent seen anything quite like this before, not even when I lived in northern Vermont, which is cold even by comparison to southern Maine. They also got midday snow yesterday as far south as Ohio.

I do believe that its a coincidence, but I found out that NOAA is taking air samples even so to see if, at least locally, CO2 concentration has decreased enough to explain the surprisingly cold weather over the eastern United States lately. Apparently not all CO2 rises immediately to the upper layers of the atmosphere ... sometimes it sticks around for a while near its site of emission.

[Kuchigakatai]

Meanwhile, here I'm concerned that we'll have yet another summer full of forest fires in BC. It has hardly rained at all for several weeks now. Today in the suburb of Vancouver where I am we have a heat of 27 degrees Celsius, and tomorrow is going to be the same. Supposedly we're finally going to get a bunch of rain next week from Tuesday onward though.

[chris_notts]

Meanwhile, here I'm concerned that we'll have yet another summer full of forest fires in BC. It has hardly rained at all for several weeks now. Today in the suburb of Vancouver where I am we have a heat of 27 degrees Celsius, and tomorrow is going to be the same. Supposedly we're finally going to get a bunch of rain next week from Tuesday onward though.

Here in middle England we had an fairly mild and incredibly wet winter, followed by a spring that's been warmer and much drier than normal. I doubt we'll have forest fires near me, but I've already had to water some plants, and normally the weather takes care of that for me until around June/July time.

The weather here increasingly reminds me of my holidays in France as a child, and less like the miserable English weather of old. I'm not sure whether that's my own personal mental bias though, or whether the weather really has shifted north by around 0.5 Englands in the last thirty years or so.

[chris_notts]

https://e360.yale.edu/features/redrawin ... e-shifting

Here's some fun climate speed facts:

• The "Wheat belt" moving towards the poles at 160 miles / decade
• The permafrost line has moved 80 miles north in 50 years
• Plant hardiness zones are moving north in the U.S. at 13 miles per decade
• The tropics are getting bigger at 30 miles per decade

So those examples gives a range of 13 - 160 miles / decade, depending on what aspect of the climate we're measuring. 0.5 Englands in 30 years would be ~100 miles/decade, which is at the high end of these examples but not out by orders of magnitude.

Also:

https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/science-upd ... rate-north

The JRC study shows that agro-climate zones have moved northwards over the past 40 years due to climate change. This migration is particularly evident in Eastern Europe, where the agro-climate zones have migrated northwards by 100 km every ten years.

That suggests that the fastest speed in Europe for agricultural zone movement is ~60 miles / decade, and it's happening in the east not in the UK.

[Ryusenshi]

https://aeon.co/essays/why-repetition-c ... into-music

An interesting article about how music is intrinsically linked to repetition. I particularly urge you to listen to the two sound clips, they're quite striking.

[Pabappa]

It didnt work on me at all, but I can see how it might work. When I find a new song I like I often play it over and over dozens of times, and since the song itself is typically four or five verses long, thats quite a lot of repetition.

re, the wheat belt .... it seems that precipitation is far more variable than temperature, even though temperature changes are the trigger for precipitation changes. thats why Australia is changing so quickly and some other areas are changing much more slowly.

[Qwynegold]

Today it snowed here for at least four hours. Yet this winter we didn't have a winter according to the meteorological definition. Last year it was about 30°C at about this date.

[malloc]

I am way overdue for filling out the census and tried tonight. However it's asking for a number from something I didn't receive in the mail since I moved to my current address right after the census things were sent out. I know leaving the census unfilled causes huge practical problems, but will ignoring it get me in legal trouble?

[alynnidalar]

They'll just send a census taker around in person.

[Pabappa]

You have a milder form of what I have ..... intrusive thoughts..... And like me you need help.

This is the only answer that works. Let me know if you have any questions.

[cedh]

I just came across an AI that invents new English words and writes dictionary definitions for them.

noun.
biofabrication
the manufacture of human clothes and other products using natural materials
"the manufacture of clothes is among the main activities that have allowed us to develop standards in the field of biofabrication"

noun.
dysgamma
a genetic defect that results in abnormally low serotonin levels
"a child diagnosed with dysgamma"

verb.
friddle
abruptly fail to live up to what has been stated
"the group friddled around its budget numbers"

adjective.
reculpatory
(of a discovery or account) showing the truth or truthfulness of something
"a videotape documenting the reculpatory evidence"

[malloc]

If you piled up enough viruses for the naked eye to see, what would the resulting pile look like, in color and texture and so forth? Imagine if you will a petri dish full of covid or something.

[Ryusenshi]

https://what-if.xkcd.com/80/ suggests "something in between pus and meat slurry".

[malloc]

I would have guessed something like protein powder since most viruses are basically microscopic clusters of protein molecules (albeit hollow with nucleic acids inside).

[zompist]

https://what-if.xkcd.com/80/ suggests "something in between pus and meat slurry".

Normally I love Munroe, but this bit seems pulled out of his ass. (Er, sorry for the mental image.) Pus is a collection of dead white blood cells, bacteria, and other cells. Meat slurry is made of meat cells. He doesn't give any reason at all to suppose that a collection of viruses look like cells of any kind, nor to say what color it is.

Not that I have any better idea. But we can presumably rule out anything with a visible structure— like mold— because the mass of viruses has nothing to create one. It would be homogenous, though I don't know if it would act more like a liquid or a powder.

You can extract DNA and you get "a stringy white mass" (picture included in the link). But viruses have a capsid covering and that probably makes a big difference.

[Pabappa]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyY6gt7qRxE?t=22m39s

i like video game music and Ive been listening to the Earthworm Jim soundtrack since 1996 when I first got the game. I believed for a long time that it was a Plsytation game because I used to play the CD in my Playstation as I lcked any other kind of standalone CD player. (Ive never been a fan of playing CD's in a PC since it seems to me it might wear out the drive.) But my CD has been physically damaged for a long time, and I have skips in one of my favorite audio tracks.

So I found it on YouTube. it turns out the only person Ive found who has the same version of the track as me also has skips in his audio, and Im guessing his CD was physically damaged too and he ripped it from the CD. So Im going to try to mix the two clips and eliminate all the errors. this might be more difficult than it sounds, because i have to make sure the volumes are the same, and reorient each track when a skip occurs, but it's going to be worth it for me because i really like this track.

_____________________________

From wikipedia:

Whistled speech may be very central and highly valued in a culture. Shouting is very rare in Sochiapam Chinantec. Men in that culture are subject to being fined if they do not handle whistle-speech well enough to perform certain town jobs.

Seems a bit harsh, no?

[Tropylium]

I've heard that the reason some people don't like tea/coffee is because they're particularly sensitive to tannins. I've wondered if this is why I dislike coffee and black tea so strongly, but on the other hand, I don't mind dark chocolate, which also has lots of tannins.

Trying to steep your tea in slightly less hot water might help. You get proportionally less tannins or similar bitter compounds into the drink this way. It's usually considered a worse problem for green tea — I used to think green tea available in normal grocery stores is of terrible quality before I started taking the steeping instructions saying "90°" or similar seriously — but the same principle should work for black tea too just fine, especially if it's the more roasted flavors you're not a fan of.

[Kuchigakatai]

I've heard that the reason some people don't like tea/coffee is because they're particularly sensitive to tannins. I've wondered if this is why I dislike coffee and black tea so strongly, but on the other hand, I don't mind dark chocolate, which also has lots of tannins.

Fun, maybe that applies to me, considering how much I hate all three of tea, coffee and dark chocolate... Like Linguoboy, I think coffee smells amazing, but when I try it it doesn't taste much better than motor oil.

I grew up hating eating vegetables until when I was 16 or so when my aunt gave me tomato slices as a snack that tasted very strongly, served with so much salt and lemon juice they'd immediately make my eyes drop tears. I loved it, and would eat that nearly every day at the time. And so I found I loved vegetables as long as they were salty and strongly-flavoured enough. Now I happily eat whole bowls of lettuce, radish and carrots as long as there's enough Mexican salsa and beans (well-fried or not) in there, ideally with a little chimichurri thrown in (parsley olive oil salad). Or, relatedly, bowls of nothing but tabouli (no beans), maybe with some Iranian yoghurt on the side.

Hm, I generally only get a burning sensation from alcohol if it's pretty strong alcohol - usually distilled stuff, though I once got it from one particular beer that I was told was the strongest one of all the beers brewed in Germany.

Yeah, I'm like "What kind of cheap hooch are y'all drinking that's burning your insides every time?"

I am extremely unused to alcohol (I only drink about one glass per year; I just don't enjoy it much), and I've only ever tried soft alcohol. Typically I have beer or wine at a restaurant. Not the cheapest hooch, but nothing stellar either. The burning sensation is very noticeable, and is nothing like orange juice or lemonade at all.

[doctor shark]

Normally I love Munroe, but this bit seems pulled out of his ass. (Er, sorry for the mental image.) Pus is a collection of dead white blood cells, bacteria, and other cells. Meat slurry is made of meat cells. He doesn't give any reason at all to suppose that a collection of viruses look like cells of any kind, nor to say what color it is.

Not that I have any better idea. But we can presumably rule out anything with a visible structure— like mold— because the mass of viruses has nothing to create one. It would be homogenous, though I don't know if it would act more like a liquid or a powder.

Notably, you can form crystalline structures with aggregates of viruses: tobacco mosaic virus, for example, is known to form liquid crystalline phases at appropriate concentrations when in suspension. But I'd imagine what you'd get is more of a crystalline lattice if the packing is close enough, probably more a powder than anything, with the ultimate shape determined by how closely-packed the viruses particles can be. (See: colloidal crystal.)

You probably wouldn't get a liquid, though, unless the virus had some sort of flagella or other apparatus for motility.

[Linguoboy]

I'm so bloody thick that I only just now figured out that the Tom Robinson song "Can't Keep Away" is about cottaging.