Yes, on the rare occasion I cook meat. Too unpracticed otherwise. I originally got one because I’m colorblind and was scared of undercooking red meat and tired of eating leather. As a bonus, I used it to get the temperature right when I got into fancier teas and inadvertently trained myself to judge the temperature of water pouring into my mug by the sound it makes within a couple °C, which is kinda neat. Now, if I could figure out how to do something similar so I stop overcooking food, that’d be grand…

Apparently this particular catalyst is pitched as an H2 evolution catalyst by oxidizing alcohols… can anyone with access to the article tell me where that energy comes from (thermo- or electrocatalytic)? IIRC alcohol dehydrogenation is endothermic by like 15-20 kcal/mol. A 1->2 reaction has an entropy change of ~30 eu, so quick math and dirty looks from p-chemists gives an operating temperature somewhere around 300 °C. That’s quite a bit better than conventional crackers but still requires significant thermal encouragement…

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Shit title and lead from MIT news but interesting work from Yogi (original article). Short technical summary based on the abstract: electrochemical measurements suggest that, in the production of vinyl acetate monomer (VAM), the solid palladium catalyst corrodes slightly, and the corrosion product is what combines ethylene and acetic acid to form VAM while simultaneously redepositing onto the surface.

I’ll need to go back and read the Science article properly once I can get access, but that’s not going to stop me from giving my 2¢ on a shaky foundation. One thing that is unclear to me is exactly what form the corroded palladium acetate takes, and whether it truly leaves the bulk Pd surface. It seems unlikely to me that the Pd(OAc)2 would become properly “homogeneous” in the conventional sense, especially since VAM production is usually gas-phase (though that might just be my lack of familiarity with systems in these temperature regimes). I suppose there could be some kind of extremely thin interface region like you see around an electrode in electrochemistry (after all, this is Yogi’s group). Fast reduction might prevent the corroded Pd from being carried away by the gas stream, but I certainly wouldn’t call Pd in that region “homogeneous” (though it might be “molecular”). On the other hand, if the Pd(OAc)2 doesn’t really leave the surface, then I would say that framing by even the study’s authors is overblown; hetcats gain and lose surface ligands all the time.

Arsenic is a classic murder poison. It’s been known since anciemt times, though possibly unsuited to your onset requirement. Acute poisoning by ingestion is generally within a few hours, but if your character sustains lower doses over time, you could probably draw out the timeline to whatever you wanted. It would be obvious that the character is unwell during this time, but the symptoms aren’t super specific and could be confused with e.g. food poisoning.

Or just invent a mushroom like others said. The toxins are diverse enough that I doubt anyone would be too upset if you tuned it exactly to your timeline and desired symptoms.

Cyanide poisoning is famously pretty fast though…

$6.49 from Giant near Philly today, and somehow still sold out. Severe inventory issues…

Related: spicy foods. I used to be basically intolerant of it but now hate eating non-spicy versions of foods I’ve grown accustomed to. Spicy peppers and hot chili powder have become a crutch for my otherwise mediocre cooking skills.

Hot take: calories are the more intuitive energy unit. “How much energy it takes to heat 1 mL aka 1 g water 1°C” is more relatable than “how much energy it takes to move a 1 kg mass 1 m while accelerating that mass at 1 m/s/s”.

kcal = Cal is silly though

Side note: I know that the heating water thing is problematic because it depends on T, P, and purity (yay thermo), which is why these days cal is defines in terms of J. That does not change my opinion.

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.

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.

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