Today I Learned

A kludge or kluge is a workaround or makeshift solution that is clumsy, inelegant, inefficient, difficult to extend, and hard to maintain. Its only benefit is that it rapidly solves an important problem using available resources.

The burrito bowl I got for lunch today was a bit too spicy for me. Afterwards, my nose got very runny. It’s not the first time this happened, so I decided to look it up. Lo and behold, there is a term for this!

ETA: I didn’t choose the thumbnail, it generated automatically. Sorry if it seems irrelevant to the post.

BOK Tower (originally One Williams Center) was constructed in 1976 for The Williams Companies Inc. a petroleum producer in Tulsa, Oklahoma. John Williams, the CEO at the time, liked the look of the recently completed World Trade Center so much that he hired the original architect to build essentially a half-scale version of WTC Tower 1.

The lobby even has marble walls and wall hanginga similar to the old World Trade Center.

William Stephenson contributed in many ways to the war against Hitler. Not the least of his achievements was running an espionage camp in Whitby, Ontario, Canada, where he trained American, Canadian, and British operatives. Retiring in Bermuda, he was visited by Ian Fleming who listened to his stories with great interest. Ian admitted to using some of William's characteristics in the building of James Bond.

I done fucked up. I know some of my drink cups say handwash only, but I thought that was due to their vacuum chambers.

I assumed (wrongly) that these two bottles would be ok. They are clearly not made from whatever Nalgene is made from.

Meanwhile, I have some cheap vacuum wall plastic tumblers from Walmart, going on 15 years now, that I've always tossed in the dishwasher.

Also, I'm getting strong deja vu from my shrinky dink bottles. Have I done this before? Or seen a post on here if the same? I can't recall.

Edit: hello adhd brain, I forgot to provide details. Red 1L Nalgene for scale. The two bottles beside it used to be the same size before yesterday. ☹️

Learned about it from this episode of the Team Human podcast

But what is happening in Hong Kong is they come up with a slogan, which is translated as Do Not Split, which is, we know that some people are willing to be confrontational with riot police.

And when they are, that's going to cost the state in terms of not only resources, but it's going to cost the state in terms of political capital and support. And we know that there are some people who are not willing to do that. And we are going to abide by the protocol of Do Not Split, which means that we're not going to criticize them openly, and they're not going to criticize us openly.

If we're the pacifists, we're not going to have them criticize us for being sort of like, I don't know, limpid or flaccid or not courageous or whatever. And we're not going to criticize them for being more confrontational. And the thing is that the support is also tacit.

It's not like they have to come out and tell the media, oh, we approve of our more sort of confrontational colleagues. They just keep quiet. They just keep quiet.

Understanding that a range of tactics is probably going to be necessary. Nobody really knows what's going to work. But if everybody's pushing back against a particularly violent state, then everybody's really on the same side.

Subsequently TIL chocolate is a salad.

And vice versa

Despite his famous presence on the $20 bill, he is not, in fact, a dead president.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin

Must have been the year of the spiral.

• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_City_(1998_film)

• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzumaki

I want this to be my legacy frfr

This is called parasitosis.

"When ceratioid males go looking for love, they follow a species-specific pheromone to a female, who will often aid their search further by flashing her bioluminescent lure. Once the male finds a suitable mate, he bites into her belly and latches on until his body fuses with hers. Their skin joins together, and so do their blood vessels, which allows the male to take all the nutrients he needs from his host/mate’s blood. The two fish essentially become one.

With his body attached to hers like this, the male doesn’t have to trouble himself with things like seeing or swimming or eating like a normal fish. The body parts he doesn’t need anymore—eyes, fins, and some internal organs—atrophy, degenerate, and wither away, until he’s little more than a lump of flesh hanging from the female, taking food from her and providing sperm whenever she’s ready to spawn."

Presenting something as open, when it is not actually open.

see full def.

https://youtu.be/mMaBVfIedFw?t=1141

In almost every scientific paper that describes proteins you’ll find Duke biochemist Jane Richardson’s handiwork. The images, commonly referred to as “ribbon diagrams,” are basic to the language of protein science. Ranging in likeness from a flapping kite tail to a tight coil of crimped gift ribbon, these carefully etched diagrams invented by Richardson have served for many years as a primary way that scientists can describe what they see in their data.

As the elegance and complexity of proteins became more evident, scientists needed something better than wire models to articulate the subtleties they were identifying, especially in print journals. Several people had published schematic drawings of individual proteins, but each used different conventions and viewpoints. For a major review article comparing folds and details of all the known structures, Jane Richardson needed to develop a good, consistent system. She picked up a pencil and began to try drawing smooth ribbons over the atoms in early, crude computer-graphics printouts. It was promising, but hard to correctly convey the proteins in three dimensions.

“I’m not an artist and I’m not very good at drawing anything else,” she said. “It took a very long time to figure this out, how you can really show the 3D relationships on a 2D page, and also keep them accurate to the experimental atom coordinates.”

Druze people are an ethnic religion, like Judaism. The Druze faith is Abrahamic and monotheistic, dating back about 1000 years. It was initially an offshoot of an offshoot of Islam, but its members are not Muslims. They believe in many prophets, and in reincarnation leading to being united with the Cosmic Mind. They have influences from Christianity. You can't convert, you can only be born into it. There's about a million Druze people in the Middle East, including in Israel. They apparently do well in Israeli society. They are educated. They serve in the military.

Druze in Syria are not doing well, though. They are under attack right now, where things are just generally kind of shit. The Syrian government is trying to hold things together, but Syrian government forces are killing people and attacking religious minorities, including the Druze. The Druze, for their part, refuse to give up their weapons and want to maintain territory for themselves.