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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • deo@beehaw.orgtoMemes@sopuli.xyz13 Months
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    1 year ago

    But you’d be resting on the extra day, too (if you want, I for one will be partying). So you’d never go more than seven days without rest.

    If that still doesn’t fly, I suggest we combine the extra day and the previous day into a mega-day that is 48 hrs long. Then everyone except programmers will be happy (we’re never happy with datetime conventions anyway, so what’s one more if-else statement between friends).



  • deo@beehaw.orgtoMemes@sopuli.xyz13 Months
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    1 year ago

    What exactly would be so troublesome with having a “special day” outside of the usual week/month cycle? You can still go worship on whatever day of the week applicable to your faith. Just make the last day of the year its own thing. We can call it “New Years Eve” and party together.


  • I shall tell you the story of FrankenPod. One iPod had a broken hard drive; one had a tear in the connector to the screen. I managed to reassemble a funtioning iPod from the pieces of each. Eventually, though, it became too onorous to find the old-style iPod charging cables, so I had to move on. But I do miss FrankenPod.








  • There’s a light next to where i used to live that, like you suggested, used the flashing to indicate when right turns were allowed. I liked it especially since there was a lot of pedestrian traffic during the day but basically none at night (and was thus able to handle the different needs of the road depending on time of day), and it was a really intuitive way to let drivers know what the pedestrian signals were doing. Best part was it was for a right-turn-only lane, and had flashing-yellow (no green at all) to remind you to check for pedestrians and bikes.





  • Except it doesn’t hold up in the elements all that well, though (at least in a form that is still usable, the plastic is still there, just in little pieces and/or without the desired structural integrity). Plastics degrade when exposed to sunlight and oxygen (photo-oxidation). Combine that with mechanical action of waves, and now you have a bunch of little plastic bits floating in the ocean that are even harder to clean up (but easier for the bacteria to eat!). A glass or metal bottle will hold up much better than a plastic one, over a long enough time period.

    But they even break down when exposed to temperature cycling and mechanical stress over long periods of time. I’m sure you’ve also noticed old plastic food containers, get harder and harder to clean and start getting cloudy: that’s the plastic breaking down and micro-fissures appearing on the surface, thanks to repeated exposure to dishwashers, freezers, and still-hot leftovers. Once again, a glass dish is gonna hold up much better.

    They have to use special additives for plastics intended for long-term outdoor use (the additives are like sunscreen for plastic, they absorb the UV so that the plastic doesn’t) to combat these reaction pathways. And I’d bet money that if plastic-eating bacteria end up becoming a problem, there will be additives we can use to discourage them for appropriate applications.

    But you’ll notice that in the case of plastic in landfills, there’s no UV light from the sun, basically no oxygen, and any mechanical stress or temperature cycling isn’t enough for fast breakdown of the plastic polymers. These conditions are also very different from, say, your kitchen counter or hospital storage rooms. If the plastic-eating bacteria prefers the landfill habitat (or literally cannot thrive in any other environment – which is not an uncommon phenomenon; in the article, they mention difficulties culturing bacteria for study in a lab environment), then we have a perfect tool for breaking down landfill plastics that won’t impact in the slightest the plastics things we want to keep. Similarly, the kind of bacteria that could be useful for ridding us of fishing lines and nets floating around in the ocean would most likely not be well suited for non-aquatic environments.