The link in the archive is broken, because the way it was scraped mangled the URL (basically concatenated the correct DOI five times). New Constraints on DMS and DMDS in the Atmosphere of K2-18 b from JWST MIRI is the link, yo.

More observations are needed to increase the robustness of the findings and resolve the degeneracy between DMS and DMDS.

Yup. These two overlap, though most of I know about organic sulphur can be boiled down to "I'd be marginally more willing to tolerate them than organoselenium."

As to the rest of the article, I honestly had no idea that - beyond its oxides - sulphur is some potent marker of life.

Gf got sick after a horrible week at work, we're playing scrabble. It's 21:0. Thanks to an occasional good word, she still believes I'm letting her win, since nobody could possibly suck this hard at putting letters together. Little does she know, my hand is almost always a straight consonant cluster so bad even speaking Polish isn't helping. At least she's feeling better.

I'm starting engineering school next academic year, electronics and telecommunication. Not for degree but because learning this stuff on my own is fucking arduous sieving of folklore. Kinda like learning how to weld (here, at least) when you either: a) apprentice under some old fuck whose first (and likely last) order is 'swipe the floor that hasn't been touched since the last apprentice two decades ago', b) have welding-able friends teach you, c) overpay for a year-long course that's 80% theory despite job being 95% doing, d) go for an engineering degree for a programme with compulsory freshman class that potentially opens your 'hours book' (officially recognised time spent working as a welder/trainee, important for various reasons), EDIT: e) try not to kill yourself figuring it out with a book/yt/whatever.

Gonna laugh my ass off all the way to "hell no!" if they'll make me take intro math and physics classes, though.

cat snow moose cloudy? Something Musk-loudy? I strained both of my lateral thinking neurons long enough to give up without shame.

Reading Hippocrates (find a Loeb here, it starts at L147), mostly in English because the Greek in it sharply fluctuates between I could read this whole paragraph unadapted after three months of study and dafuq even is this, epic optative?! You gotta love the fact that an author from 5th century BCE opens with an overview of 'ancient medicine' and goes all "it's difficult, meandering, and with lotsa unknowns, and those countless generations wouldn't bother with it if human suffering wasn't a constant" as justification for discipline's perseverance.

I'm working through a couple of books on circuit theory, keep finding words and phrases that I want to call gatekeeping jargon because EEs never use those in the wild. Then again, maybe it's so low-level for them it'd be a bit like chemist specifying they mean moles and not some other thing.

Normal books-wise, I'm revisiting Ghost Wars and Charlie Wilson's War because they're a) easily the most casual reads from kb's list, b) goldmine for non-fantasy RPG ideas. I also got a great translation of some of Lovecraft's collected stories, and I impulse-bought it for footnotes alone.

Kicking bad fanfics and Yudkowsky, and being euphonic about it? How stars aligned me a free evening, thanks for posting this. I almost knee-jerk badged it out of loathing, both for him and his untold legions[0] of condescending, "you don't like Him because you don't understand logic or epistemology on a high school level, so read this overlong drivel and learn how to think, mr Devac, PhD" cryptobro fanboys.

[0] - Here defined as N=17, which Youdkowsky would assume statistically significant if rationally aligned with his cognitive unbiases.

I'm not new to the game, but recently began to find deeper levels of appreciation of the character creation system in Traveller. It's not like D&D or any other RPG (that I know of/didn't steal it wholesale), where you decide "I want to be X" and then play as X with whatever class/gear/stats/skills/feats of your choice. No. Here you start wanting to become something, assign attributes and skills learned from your homeworld... and then life happens.

You start wanting to become a space frontier doctor like Julian Bashir, life happens, and you're playing an '80s vision of a netrunner - with chip sockets behind high-collared hobojacket and cyberdecks and communicating with excerpts from Gibson - that's been in and out of prison for the last 40 years.

You start without much of an idea for life, enlist in the navy, life happens, you earn a field commission and live as some larger-than-life overdecorated mix of James Bond and Horatio Hornblower, hitting Admiral before turning 40.

You are born into wealth and nobility, spend 20 years of your adult life as a blasé socialite with one of those administration 'jobs' the rich save for their spare heirs, life puts on its asskicking boots, and without other options you become a middling novelist more famous than Coca-Cola with contacts rivalling the FBI.

There's three more people with equally subverted ideas for their character's life, ones above need the least explanation ("what's a Bwap?"). It was awesome to sit and make those characters together, weaving a common story. More games should offer something like that, but I'm afraid it's too much work for most designers and too not-what-I-want-waaaah! for most players. Still, it'd be bitchin' to have it in Call of Cthulhu as a better background generator than GM's default "so you all know this professor/are related to that so-and-so to inherit X."

It's honestly embarrassing for me because I spend time organizing then they just don't show up.

It's embarassing, but you certainly aren't the one to feel embarassed by that situation.

It's horrible. You wait for them to hint it's a joke, laugh or crack a smile, but it never comes. Then it dawns on you, they're serious.

Certainly not my first encounter, just never had an actual professor say this kind of bullshit. You can kinda get how they could be right wing or antisemitic or be otherwise mundane dumb. Having someone correct your reasoning on the fly with foreshadowing words like "do you have any idea how much energy it takes to move something so massive?" only to wipe their ass with it to talk about assassinating a ship with an iceberg requires mental disjunction I hope to never understand.

Prefacing this with "old or new, I have no nostalgia for Disney" and "I was never huge on cartoons/anime"... man, I can't believe how much I enjoyed Duck Tales.

We got some visitors at the institute. Mostly positive, but one situation... OK. It's fucking terrifying to see a legit scientist peddling some of the dumbest tiktok conspiracy theories this side of, dunno, are people still laughing at Joe Rogan? One moment we're talking shop, discussing plasmon-plasmon interactions, using chalk to do math on the sidewalk like the meanest mofos this side of the chemistry building, and then BAM "Titanic was a conspiracy to kill some finance regulatory people Idon'tknowmybrainshutsoffattheword'finance'" and I'm standing there, confused about which one of us is having a stroke. This timeline is all sorts of ass.

All the best. Happines for everybody, free of charge, and may no one be left behind.

Such a hilarious thread. And agreed on coffee makers, I don't have one because I was the only one dumb enough to get roped into cleaning the thing. Dunno if having a ridiculous Miele coffee robot could change that, but those I've seen were amazing.

Confidence isn't as much of a problem as the need for tiktok or some other opinions-blaring app that I manage to avoid using with no effort. And while I knew you weren't ridiculing me, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if 'my way' wasn't yet another case of re-discovering something from 80s or 90s like I do seemingly every other week at work.

ON ALCOHOL

Oh, I'm well aware of the differences, can appreciate them even though it's not my thing. Waaay too many people take it too far. I've witnessed discussions on wine that, should you do find-and-replace on a couple key phrases, it'd be every otaku 'dubs vs subs' thread. Whenever my brother is about to breach the ergosphere, I use subtle cues like "oh shush it, Niles!" to reel him in.

For my part, I have a soft spot for gin and one particular beer (Ciechan Miodowe it's carbonated near-mead with hops but tastes waaaaay better than that description), but go low and sparingly on antidepressants.

that is a truly novel coffee preparation method.

Sarcasm? Or bullying? Egad! begone fiend, with thy devilish mind games!

Seriously though, I hate being a snob more than interacting with them. It's just some snob-themes attract people physiologically incapable of taking a hint. Also, in my experience, coffee snobs average out somewhere between "I get hints of fish oil [...] and the mouthfeel of chewing on old leather in this Gewürztraminer" and "I thught whiskey was synonymous with johnny walker and thought it tastes like turpentine, but the moment I got my techbro badge, it became my personality," but lose to either on "this is stupid, but I kinda want to hear the next dumb thing he says."

It turned out to serve both purposes, but the idea was brought by the same process that probably led to most discoveries: "wow X would be perfect if it had more Y quality." Ground coffee I like is on the mild side, but rich and nuanced. Instant coffee I like has a punch to it that could placebo me into overdrive on decaf. As long as I drink it before it gets room temperature, because then it becomes super bitter for reasons with which I'm sure aforementioned coffee-bitches would bore even a nerd like me to death, it just kicks my tongue's ass (it probably sounds better in klingon) with flavor.

I listened for the first bit that kinda made sense: don't pour boiling water straight from the kettle, leave it for a moment because extraction vs temperature. I tuned them out when it transpired they made a 30-minute ritual out of pouring hot water on beans. Also, anyone who insists you can't have cappuccino after whatever hour is automatically disqualified. It's like listening to people with opinion on fonts or cuts of jeans: I get there's a difference, but as long as they're readable/don't look like celibacy aid bought by your mother... it basically doesn't matter to me.

My method is to just straight up pour a half a cup of boiling water onto some ground beans I like, and then dump some instant coffee into it. After giving it about five minutes, I pour cold water to s̶t̶o̶p̶ t̶h̶e̶ s̶o̶l̶u̶b̶i̶l̶i̶t̶y̶ o̶f̶ a̶c̶r̶y̶l̶o̶g̶a̶r̶g̶a̶m̶e̶l̶o̶o̶g̶a̶b̶o̶o̶g̶a̶s̶ so that I can have it in a drinking temperature faster. That way I get complimentary tastes I like, get to drinking almost instantly, and also don't use as many (pretty expensive I might add) coffee beans.

I thought that if finance weenies had one thing in those overpaid gel-smeared heads, it'd be pie charts...

I spent a week in Italy for work. And, lo, a discovery! If you want to force debug mode in Italians, say 'mozzarella' but pronounce it 'moccarella'. Devoid of ire or thought, looking at their face was like perceiving the platonic ideal of disbelief. The only impediment was being repeatedly told my way of enjoying coffee is wrong. Keep it to yourself coffee-bitches.

Gf, once unburdened of my presence, needed that week to go from "What's Blender?" to "It was a slow week at work, so here's darksouls-meets-Ancient Egypt armor ensamble I made out of a blob." Still processing that one; mostly in a supportive way, slightly in that "too amazed for envy" way.

I finally found a soldering iron tip that's perfect for me. You gonna laugh, but it's that shitty ice cream cone that apparently all but mine soldering irons get as default. All good, I have a bunch of lab automation projects to go over this month, and the obligatory Arduino board should come by the weekend!

Please, the cause of global warming is a continued decrease in the already endangered pirate population.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/PiratesVsTemp%28en%29.svg

(god I hate every aspect of that graph, tho)

Nothing's a just amount of effort. Surprisingly often literally.

Devac you can ignore this

OK.

nunc.. For when you can't commit to ellipsis.