Mitochondrion

Oh, I’m sure this’ll end well.

/s

Corpse, Corps, Horse, and Worse

I will keep you, Susy, busy,

Make your head with heat grow dizzy;

Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;

Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.

banger poem

Best I can tell from quick internet searches: Old English: wīfmann/menn (“female person/s”). The w rounded the following vowel giving a wo- pronunciation, which for some reason (umlaut?) stuck for the singular but not the plural. The spelling of the plural changed to match that of the singular in spite of the pronunciation.

* Everything here carries the caveat “in some dialects, …” because English

Nah, reach is a huge advantage. I’m not sure how rapier fencing differs from regulation sabre/epée/foil, but here’s my 2 cents from that perspective:

Smaller people are not, as a rule, substantially quicker than larger. If you see any difference in your experience, it’s likely a selection bias (shorter people have to be quicker to compete at the same level). The shorter person must enter the strike range of the taller person before the taller person comes within theirs and must be significantly quicker or more skilled to overcome that dead space. If the taller person can maintain a proper distance, gg. Taller people can also lunge farther, giving a wider active range.

Targeting is a smaller issue than you make it out to be; footwork and maintaining balance, which reposition the core, are at least as important as leaning to dodge, and advantage the taller person (longer legs = more movement range). If the taller person is coming from above as you say, they can just continue their slash (sabre) downward toward that less mobile core, or squat a bit deeper if the arc won’t reach. If instead you were referring to a poke, they’re either already targeting the torso anyway (foil) or whatever body part is most easily reachable (epée; still often torso, but cheeky wrist/arm strikes can be something of an equalizer here), and anyway they are already striking at a range that the shorter person cannot, making a successful counterattack more difficult.

Besides reach, a height difference is brutal when it comes to sabre fencing; the shorter person is restricted to targeting arms and torso (can’t reach the head easily), so the taller person can anticipate strikes from fewer angles. The taller person can come from any direction and has gravity on their side for own overhead strikes. Those suck to defend against.

Good article, reactive web design notwithstanding (stop. breaking. my. scrolling). I’m not surprised that obtaining the chemicals was that easy, even accounting for the mislabeling and fake products. A lot of these chemicals are pretty simple and have pretty general use cases in the fine chemicals space. Hell, I had occasion to use (2-bromoethyl)benzene, aniline, and propionyl chlorde in school for making random precursors and ligands, albeit separately. I wonder if they are at all harder to procure nowadays because of the fentanyl epidemic.

Edit: checked some of my old work, didn’t actually use (2-bromoethyl)benzene but did make a related compound as an intermediate for ligand synthesis using a very satisfying Appel reaction.

So could we produce a surface tension-free water?

Homie dats a gas. Or supercritical fluid, which actually is indeed used for “washing” (SC CO2 is used to decaffeinate coffee). However, like others said, surface tension /= cleaning ability. Part of what soap does is increase the effective solubility of things that are not normally soluble.

TIL that influenza virions can be stick-shaped.

Not gonna lie, I thought about your comment multiple times today trying to make sense of it, and only just now did I realize what you meant by it.

Yes, like Alan Turing. Ugh.

Ya “an historic”, when the h is clearly pronounced, strikes the wonderful double blow of being both pretentious and wrong as far as I’m concerned. Looking at you, NPR. Go run up an hill, why donchya?

I think cleanse and clean are not quite interchangeable. Cleanse has a gravitas that clean lacks. For example, growing up, I heard a lot of things like “be cleansed of your sins”. “Be cleaned of your sins” makes me vaguely uncomfortable.

Hard agree on business lingo, though.

Homogeneous, meaning having a uniform composition. Hoe-moe-jee-nee-us (or hoe-muh- and/or -jee-nyus; point is, there’s an ee sound before the last syllable). Saying homogenous (huh-mah-jeh-nus) in that sense is not only wrong but also means something else.

I went up to the Lake Champlain area where there was some high altitude cloud cover. Fortunately, it didn’t affect the viewing basically at all. A cool side effect of the clouds/related atmospheric conditions though was that the sun had a 22° halo. I wish that 1) I’d had a camera that could capture it and that 2) I’d had the presence of mind to pay attention to what happened to it in the moments before and after totality.

Mr. fancypants with a garage over there. Meanwhile, ain’t no public chargers for miles around here.

Phonetic transcription using vaguely English conventions 'cause my IPA keyboard broke:

Bezvzglendnih Gzhegoazh Bzhenchish-chickyeveech virrooshiw zeh Sh-chebzheshinna pshess Shimmahnkofsh-chizneh do Psh-chinnih. Ee hoach nyerahz zalehvawa go zhooch, nyepomnih nastempstf znalazu ostatechnye sh-chensh-che vzh-dzh-bleh trahvih.

Notes:, merged ś/sz, ź/ż/rz; tried to keep readings of a, e, and y somewhat similar to the vowels in father, dell, and ick by doubling the following consonants or ending open syllables with h.

Committee members be like “Oh, I definitely read your thesis titled “New Palladium-Catalyzed Reactions for the Manufacture of Pharmaceuticals”. So what is the band gap of thallium antimonide doped with 5% polonium in foot-pounds per mol? Why aren’t you answering? Even my undergrads know this!”

Man I just built a new rig last November and went with nvidia specifically to run some niche scientific computing software that only targets CUDA. It took a bit of effort to get it to play nice, but it at least runs pretty well. Unfortunately, now I’m trying to update to KDE6 and play games and boy howdy are there graphics glitches. I really wish HPC academics would ditch CUDA for GPU acceleration, and maybe ifort + mkl while they’re at it.

The point about stress is interesting. I’ve been playing with pronouncing the phrase, and almost everything tends toward [ɐ] when I speak the syllables one at a time, even the ones I marked with and pronounce as a schwa in normal speech. The notable exceptions are the final schwas in “obstruction” and “onions”, which tend toward [ɪ], and the -nel of “tunnel”, which is something like [nɫ] (vocalic ɫ) ~ [nəɫ].

It helps when most of the vowels are the same and most other letters match their English counterparts lol.

In case you get the urge to learn sooner:

Here are some quick refs for consonants and vowels in English (RP = received pronunciation (a standardized form of English from the UK), GA = General American). Wikipedia pages for specific English dialects (e.g., Australian English) also contain a bunch of word/IPA pairs. Here are audio charts for vowels and consonants.

yup