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Cake day: May 7th, 2024

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  • I’m autistic, which results in me deconstructing and analysing jokes instead of laughing (often to the displeasure of the people who think I didn’t find their joke funny – I promise, if I’m taking the time to disassemble your joke that means I found it funny and want to understand why).

    The flipside is that I occasionally crack out carefully engineered bangers, because I understand the importance of a setup, building expectations and putting the brain on one track of thought, then capping it off with the “derailing” of those expectations. The shorter you can get it, the less time the brain has to get off track on its own, diminishing that derailing effect.

    Of course, getting the inspiration and figuring out a way to put that into practice is it’s own unpredictable beast, and some jokes just fall flat despite my effort. Sometimes I misread the room or the audience too. I’m not a particularly talented comedian.

    But at least I’m not a setup without a punchline.



  • A definitional concession to make exponential series work. xn for n ∈ (0, 1) is the nth root of x, which gets ever closer to 1, while x^n for n < 0 equals 1÷ (xn). Between them lies the neutral element with respect to multiplication 1 (neutral meaning that x × 1 = x; a factor of one doesn’t actually change anything). Hence, x0 = 1.

    That rule breaks down for x = 0, obviously. Negative exponents don’t work at all because they’re division by zero, while all exponents > 0 result in 0. Semantically, 00 probably should be undefined, but the neutral element rule does provide a definition. There also isn’t really any reasonable use case where you’d need that to be consistent with anything else.



  • It’s not the goal itself that’s the issue. Protecting kids from harmful content until they’re ready to deal with it is absolutely a worthwhile endeavour.

    But the means to that end often pose a massive security and privacy issue.

    You’re supposed to give all your identifying details to some website and trust them, that they’ll use it only for the legal purpose of verifying that identity and promptly deleting them, rather than selling them to criminals who now have everything they need for identity theft. Hell, just storing them is a risk because we all know how many companies (and people) treat IT security as an afterthought at best and a breach compromising the identification of thousands of people would be a fucking nightmare.

    And what if your kid tries to circumvent it? Now their face is out there on some server, whether or not they succeed. Is that really better?

    The argument is that the onus should be on parents to protect their children and help them find their way safely, rather than compromising everyone else with poorly thought-out and invasive policies.





  • Solid vitamin C is relatively stable, but it decomposes rather quickly when dissolved in water. Factors such as pH, temperature, oxygen, and the presence of catalysts (iron, copper) influence the decomposition process. The lowest rate of oxidation is observed at pH 3, where vitamin C solutions are the most stable. Raising the pH to 5 increases the oxidation rate by a factor of 2.

    https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3510389/

    The study uses particularly clean water (clean enough to be suitable for medical injections) with a pH of ~7.4. At that acidity and a temperature of 20°C (≈70°F), it takes about 95 days for the vitamin C to decay to 10% of its original concentration, or 28 days to reach 50%.

    Normal drinking water has a pH of 6.5-8.5, but also contains a lot of other substances, which might increase the rate of oxidation. Given the potential time between treatment and consumption as well as the fact that people might boil it and increase the rate of decay that way, it’s just not as economical to add ascorbic acid to the water supply if only a small percentage of it will ever reach the consumers.

    Additionally, the exact dosage will be hard to control, leading to a risk of excessive side effects such as kidney stones. People with a specific enzyme deficiency may also suffer anemia as excessive doses.

    Compare that to, say, lemons, whose juice has a pH of ~ 2.4 and renders the vitamin a lot more stable. If you want people to get a good intake of vitamin C, tell them to eat fruits and vegetables, preferably uncooked. The vitamin C dosage you’ll get from that will hardly lead to megadoses, unless you eat such vast amounts that you’d probably get other problems anyway.

    The reason fluoride is added is that it’s quite stable, safe and effective, while also being fairly cheap.