Years ago, I was in boy scouts (in the US)

For those not familiar with the scouting program, one of the main philosophies is “boys teaching boys” so in a well-run troop, the older, more experienced, and higher-ranking scouts are responsible for actually running the troop. The adult leaders hand down some general guidelines- we need to be ready to do X at Y time, but actually getting the scouts to do that falls to those older scouts.

At the top of the youth hierarchy, is the “staff” patrol, the most senior members of the troop. At its head is the Senior Patrol Leader, and under him there would be various other positions- quartermaster, scribe, one or more Assistant Senior Patrol leaders, etc.

In this story, I was a member of the staff patrol, I believe at the time I was quartermaster, or maybe one of the ASPLs, so I wasn’t normally the one running the show, and truth be told I tended to avoid the leadership responsibilities when possible, and I wasn’t exactly the most by-the-book, type-a, over-achieving model scout, but I was generally well-liked and respected by the younger members of the troop, I knew my stuff, and I was happy to share my knowledge.

On this particular camping trip, most of the staff patrol were unable to attend. I believe it was just my friend Dan and myself. Dan is very much the type-a, overachieving type, and, on paper, much more of a model scout, he may even have already earned his eagle by that point, while I was still chilling at star or life rank. So nominally he was the one in-charge for this trip.

And I was happy to leave him to it. I took my back seat and let him run the show, and I just helped facilitate in the background. And he did a fine job of it, his organizational skills were put to good use throughout the day.

Dan is exactly the type of person you want schmoozing with businessmen and politicians and such, I won’t say that he lacks people skills. But he’s not necessarily the kind of guy you want to hang around a campfire with and drink a couple beers. There’s a time and place for both skill sets, and sometimes when the task at hand is wrangling a bunch of 11-17 year olds who have been let loose in the woods with pocket knives and taught how to build a fire, it’s the second kind of skill you need.

So towards the end of the day, when the task at hand was basically “get all of these asshole kids to settle down and start getting ready for bed” Dan was kind of at a loss. He enjoyed being the one in charge and didn’t particularly want my help, so I sat my ass down and started reading my book, while he tried to herd cats.

And slowly the younger kids began to gravitate towards me. They asked what I was reading, what it was about, and I told them. They hung around, some read their own books, others busied themselves with other quiet tasks, I think a game of magic or two sprung up around me. More kids drifted over, and they’d ask what I was reading, lather, rinse, repeat.

It frankly made it pretty hard for me to read my book, I could only get a couple paragraphs in at a time before someone interrupted me.

So at some point, I decided what I’d do was I’d start reading aloud to them and have a little story time. I wasn’t very far into the book, so I started over from the beginning. I gave them a quick run-down of some of the important things from the first book in the series, and I began reading.

And before too long, all of the younger scouts were gathered around me, listening to me read.

Mission accomplished. I got them all settled down, and I got to read my book.

Dan was kind of amazed at how he had spent about 20 minutes trying to get them all to calm the fuck down, and I did it in like 5 minutes by just reading to them.

That book was The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the 2nd book of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy 5-part “Trilogy”

So that’s my recommendation. I figure if it works on a bunch of teens and tweens, it will probably work on a dog as well.

I guess you could start with the first book, but there’s something that feels appropriately Douglas-Adamsian to me about starting from the middle and reading to your dog.

“Stop trying to make fetch happen”

Everyone has their own verbal idiosyncrasies- local dialects, accents, words and phrases you picked up somewhere that have a nice ring to them, in-jokes with your friends and family, etc.

You’ll come by them organically, no need to force it.

Inevitably, when you try to force them, at best people just won’t notice, or more likely they will notice and think you’re a weirdo, or a pretentious asshole, and at worse they might actually have a hard time understanding you which kind of defeats the purpose of speaking in the first place.

Seek out new experiences, acquire knowledge at every opportunity, meet people, go places, do things. Without even trying your speech will acquire plenty of interesting character and you won’t have to expend any effort to do so.

Birkeland–Eyde, yes, but that’s even more inefficient than the Haber process.

Ostwald is something else though, that’s basically the next step after the Haber process to turn the ammonia into nitric acid.

I’m sure there is a relatively simple way to get from liquid nitrogen to nitrogen compounds

These days we do have the means to do it, though I don’t know how achievable they are to the home-gamer

But historically this was actually a huge chemistry problem

I’m not a chemist, so I gotta gloss over some stuff I don’t fully understand

But nitrogen tends to form bonds with itself and makes an N₂ molecule. That’s what the nitrogen in the air is, that’s what liquid nitrogen is.

And unfortunately for us (for chemistry purposes) that molecule is very stable, it doesn’t like to react with much, for most practical purposes it can basically be considered inert.

However, nitrogen is of course part of a whole lot of other chemicals as well, very important chemicals that plants and animals need. You probably heard about the nitrogen cycle in middle or high school science class at one point, and how nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil can convert atmospheric nitrogen into stuff that plants can use, and then animals eat the plants, and their waste also contains nitrogen compounds that can feed plants, etc.

But for us to do that through chemical processes isn’t easy. We can’t just pour some liquid nitrogen into a beaker and mix in some other stuff and it reacts to make ammonia or whatever other nitrogen compound you desire.

Until around 100 years ago, we basically couldn’t turn atmospheric nitrogen into anything else, at least not at any kind of scale and not in any commercially viable way. Which was a huge problem as the world’s population was growing and growing enough food to feed everyone was hard without being able to make synthetic fertilizers. The US actually has a law saying that they’re allowed to just claim uninhabited islands that are covered in bird shit because that guano was rich in ammonia and other nitrogen compounds and so immensely valuable as a fertilizer.

Then along comes Fritz Haber, who comes up with the Haber process to turn atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. This was a huge deal and he won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for it. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that if you’ve eaten pretty much anything grown on a farm you owe it to the Haber process.

And it’s still a huge deal to this day, the haber process is responsible for around 2% of the world’s energy consumption, and about the same amount of our greenhouse gas emissions.

If you’ve got a quick and easy way to turn pure nitrogen into something else, there’s probably another Nobel Prize waiting for you.

I do a movie night once a year and every year we do a different theme. Sometimes it’s a pretty normal and straightforward theme, the first year or two I did it was Robert Rodriguez movies (this party is nominally a Cinco de Mayo part) but we quickly ran out of those, so we pick a random theme every year

One year the theme ended up being "movies that got a better “remake’” (we watched the worse versions)

I believe that theme was 2023, it’s been a wild fucking 2 years so I can’t remember all of the movies we watched, we usually manage to squeeze in about 3

But I remember David Lynch’s dune was on the list, as was the Super Mario Bros movie. None of us had actually seen the new Mario movie, so we just kind of took it on faith that it had to be better.

If I had a point to this story, I’ve long since forgotten what it was, but I’ve typed it out and I’m gonna post it.

Doubt anyone’s going to see it at this point but figured I’d write out some of my other thoughts now

When I talk about going back to square one and defining what a firearm even is, I mean that quite literally. Muzzleloaders aren’t considered firearms, and no they’re not likely to be used in a mass shooting, but they’ll still kill someone just as dead as a modern firearm. There’s stupid loopholes about antique guns that may function in much the same way as a modern firearm.

They’re fucking guns.

And with an eye to the future, it may be worth building in a little future with other weapons technologies that may come into play that should be regulated similarly. There are high powered air rifles today that are comparable in stopping power to some firearms, shouldn’t they be regulated in a similar manner? Or what if advances in battery technology and such make coil/rail guns viable as man-portable or even concealable weapons?

We also classify things in really stupid ways. Take a look at some of the weird shit around short barrel shotguns/rifles and “any other weapons” where you can have 2 basically identical weapons that are classified differently just due to a quirk of how they were manufactured. An AR-15 with a short barrel is a no-no unless you’re willing to jump through some extra hoops, but you can build an AR-15 “pistol” and slap a -not-a-stock “wrist brace” on it.

And machine guns are a no-no, but bump stocks, binary triggers, forced-reset triggers, etc. that get you basically the same effect are a-ok. Not to mention that absurdity we had for a few years where shoelaces of a certain length were technically classified as a machine gun.

I basically want to create 4 categories

Hunting arms- single shot or manually operated rifles and shotguns with barrel length 16" and greater, rimfire rifles, muzzleloaders, and certain larger handguns. Low rate of fire, not easily concealable.

Concealed carry weapons- handguns.

Other firearms- short barrels rifles/shotguns, semi-auto shotguns and centerfire rifles

Machine guns, destructive devices, etc. we’re moving bump stocks, binary triggers, forced reset triggers, etc. into this category.

For the first 3 categories, the main difference is going to be in the types of training required, as well as the required insurance rates. I think it’s also fair to be allowed to purchase hunting arms at 18, and bump the other categories up to 21. *

For the 4th category, we’re keeping things largely the same as the current NFA regulations, but we’re fixing some of the wonky definitions, and increasing the cost of the tax stamp, because the $200 it was set at in the '30s really hasn’t kept up with inflation.

We’re also going to make most gun accessories subject to the same sorts of background checks and such. And we’re moving silencers into this category.

We’re unifying gun laws across the country. No more wonky patchwork of different states having their own laws. If it’s legal, it’s legal across the whole country, if it’s illegal, it’s illegal everywhere.

I hate the term, but we’re closing the “gun show loophole” (which really has nothing to do with gun shows) all transfers must go through the process. We’re also expanding the locations you can do them at, not just FFL dealers anymore, police stations, and some details would need to be figured out for security reasons, but maybe some places like DMVs, post offices, courthouses, etc. and we’re getting rid of any fees. No excuses to not do things properly.

We’re beefing up the background checks, getting all states on the same page with what does and does not disqualify someone from owning a gun, red flag laws, probably disqualifying people with DUIs (if I don’t trust you with a car I certainly don’t trust you with a gun)

And we’re delisting marijuana so that if you like to smoke up once in a while you’re able to keep your guns.

*Along with the changes in ages, we’re also making some changes to police and military. If you can’t legally purchase and carry a handgun or rifle as a civilian, you don’t get to carry them in your line of work either. You’re exempt from the draft until 21, you can enlist at 18 but only serve in non-combat roles until 21, and if you do enlist before age 21, you will receive education and training equivalent to that many years of college or vocational training. Police academy will become a 4 year program equivalent to a bachelors degree. Also off-duty officers do not get any special exemptions in their eligibility to carry firearms, and their duty weapon stays locked up at the station when off the clock. There’s a whole lot more I have to say about police reform too, but that’s an entirely different rant.

Firearms must be stored in a properly-rated safe that is either firmly attached to the structure of your home - studs, floor joist, concrete, brick, or other masonry walls, etc. or that is heavy enough that it can’t be easily moved by 2 guys with a hand truck. No leaving them in your car, unsecured in your garage,in the night stand, etc. when you’re not able to directly oversee them. We’re not going to be doing in-home inspections on this, but if it’s somehow found that you’re storing them improperly, like if someone is able to steal them because they weren’t properly secured, then you lose your right to own guns.

If you lose your firearm (I work in 911 dispatch, the amount of calls I’ve had for guns found in bathrooms, movie theaters, etc. that someone left behind is pretty worrying) or have a negligent discharge (that isn’t the result of a manufacturing defect,) you lose your right to own guns.

We’re making some major changes to stand your ground laws and castle doctrine, I don’t have a problem with castle doctrine as a general concept, but a lot of states’ implementations leave a lot to be desired. When your outside of your home, I think the focus should be more on duty-to-retreat (again, I work in 911 dispatch, I don’t think a night goes by that I don’t have a dozen calls that could have been solved without police intervention if my caller just fucking walked away but instead escalated into some sort of fight)

No, we are not arming teachers. Full stop.

I’m probably missing some things here, and there’s a lot of details I’m glossing over a bit because this comment is already too long, but hopefully this kind of paints a general picture of where my head is at.

It’s not, and that would be addressed in the stuff I didn’t feel like writing last night (and still don’t)

And I don’t feel like writing it because there’s a lot to it, to just barely scratch the surface, my ideal gun control reform would be part of major overhauls to basically all aspects of government and we’d have things like universal healthcare (which would cover the psych eval,) government funded childcare (so that you can do something with your kids while you jump through the hoops,) free and expanded public transportation (so that you can get to the courthouse or wherever you need to,) expanded workers rights (so that you would have PTO to use to go do all of that,) expanded hours for government offices (so that people hopefully don’t even need to use that PTO, I know it my county to get a concealed carry permit you have to be able to get to those courthouse during certain hours on certain days, the courthouse isn’t conveniently located and the hours suck, most people probably have to take a day off of work and get up early to do it, that’s bullshit) and we’d be getting rid of most fees for government services or at least making them scale to income.

And of course, were funding this by massive taxes on the wealthy.

Basically we’re putting a hell of a lot of hoops in the way, but we’re paving the way to those hoops so that anyone who wants to has a fair shot at being allowed to attempt to jump through them.

US

Our gun laws are a patchwork of really dumb state and federal laws and regulations that often don’t make much sense and there is little consistency. I think we pretty much need to go back to square one with basic shit like defining what constitutes a “firearm” and go from there.

I have a lot of thoughts on this and I’m not going to write them all out here right now, because it would get really lengthy and I just don’t feel like it right now (if there’s interest in hearing what this random internet stranger has to say I may write it up later)

But in general I think that people should be able to own guns, but I also think that there should be a lot of hoops to jump through to get them, background checks, proficiency tests, education , training, insurance, psychological evaluations, storage requirements, etc.

Sounds like you did pretty much the same bit of googling I did, because I also ended up there and ctrl-f’d “Taliban” and only found the one result

For anyone who doesn’t go down the rabbit hole themselves, that result is “Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP)” or the “Pakistani Taliban”

Which is a group that mostly seems to be active in Pakistan (duh) and in Afghanistan near the border. TTP pledges allegiance to the Afghan Taliban, but the Afghan Taliban, at least publicly rejects that allegiance (though you can certainly make some arguments that they’re probably in cahoots, just keeping things off-the-books)

Interestingly enough, the US doesn’t seem to regard the Taliban (at least not the main branch that’s currently running Afghanistan) as a terrorist organization.

When you said that I thought they might, I was actually pretty sure it was the case, but on looking into it that doesn’t seem like they do, at least not officially.

Some other countries do, and there are a couple other Taliban splinter groups and such that do make the cut.

And of course, the entire history of Afghanistan since the Cold war can probably be of best summed up as “an absolute fucking mess” full of different factions, shifting allegiances, and all of that geopolitical nonsense, but you can make a pretty compelling argument that the US sort of put the Taliban in charge there in the first place. The us backed the Mujahideen against Russia back in the day, and while they’re not exactly the same organization, there was a whole lot of overlap between former members of the Mujahideen and the people who formed the Taliban. So from one angle slapping the terrorist label on them would be kind of like admitting “we backed the terrorists”

You know, I’ve read your comment a couple times, and I can’t quite wrap my head around what you’re trying to say, I can kind of parse it in a few different ways, and none of them quite seem like they’re really a direct response to what I said either agreeing with me or disagreeing.

It’s certainly possible that I’ve got a case of the dumb tonight, but would you mind rephrasing and expanding on your thoughts a little bit?

I’m admittedly a little better read on the subject than most Americans

Off the top of my head, I’d probably be able to rattle off Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Krakow, and Treblinka off the top of my head.

Small side rant, my mom’s side of the family is Polish. Most of my mom’s grandparents (my great grandparents) were off-the-boat from Poland, I know at least one of them never became a US citizen. We have some family still in Poland, we’re not exactly in regular contact but we know more or less how to track each other down when we want to.

Years ago, well-before I was born, my mom’s family went to visit those relatives. There is honestly probably enough material from that trip (and from when a relative from Poland was able to visit the US back then) to write a pretty decent short book, or at least a couple solid blog posts. Lots of interesting comparisons between the state of things in the US and Poland during the Cold War to be made.

One of the things they did was visit Auschwitz. Seeing that was something that definitely shaped my mom’s worldview from there on out. To her credit, my mom already had her head screwed on pretty straight before that when it came to racial tolerance and such.

She would occasionally tell us little bits about it when we were growing up, not like she purposely sat us down and gave us a Holocaust talk or anything, it was just something that came up occasionally when appropriate

I don’t know if this was ever an intentional choice by her, but she never really said who built and ran the camps, who was sent there, why, etc. she pretty much just left it at they were places that existed, and that people did various kinds of horrible things to other people there.

As far as I knew, it was all Polish people (not unlike myself) doing horrible things to other Poles, for reasons I couldn’t really wrap my head around. It wasn’t until we started learning about WWII and the Holocaust in school that the details of who and my started falling into place.

But by that point, I think the key message about people being capable of immense cruelty towards other people had really been firmly planted in my mind. The fact that one side or the other are Jews, Poles, Germans, LGBT people, Romani, black, white, Hispanic, Christian, Muslim, Palestinian, Hutu, Tutsi, Armenian , Uyghur, etc. isn’t really important compared to the idea that this is something that people like me could do to other people who are also just like me, and I need to be vigilant to make sure that doesn’t happen.

It’s not something I’ve personally played around with so I can’t really comment on the technical details, but AFAIK the main way of transmitting video over ham radio is basically the same as over the air TV. If you wanted to do a deeper dive into that, look up Amateur Television (ATV)

There’s also various methods of sending digital data over ham- D-STAR, APRS, etc. I don’t know that any of them are particularly well-suited to sending video, but they’re things that exist and I’m sure some dedicated ham has figured out a way to do it somewhere.

Fuck Russia, fuck the Taliban

That said, all the other countries that haven’t recognized them just have their head in the sand.

Whether you like them or not, they’re the ones in power there and despite being a bunch of bumbling, backwards, violent, religious fanatics, they’ve actually done a better job of holding onto that power than anyone else has over the last half century.

Pretending they’re not is really just denying reality.

I dabble in ham radio stuff, you can (and many people do) send data, video, etc. using ham radio equipment. It’s a bit more specialized than just sending voice or Morse code, but it’s absolutely doable.

Not amateur radio, but back in about the 80s there were even a couple countries that experimented with distributing computer programs over regular FM radio. They’d play some electronic buzzing noises that you’d record to a tape then to run it as a program. I know the BBC did it, and I believe Finland also had a radio station doing it for a bit.

In a world where the internet as we know it never came together, I could definitely imagine those sorts of technologies evolving into something that still looks a hell of a lot like the internet.

I’m way out of my element, and I don’t feel like doing the math right now, but I think it may be worth considering that helium is very light, I think last time I saw it brought up someone said that 1g of helium is like 5 or 6 liters at standard temperature/pressure. Not a huge quantity by any means, but significantly more than you’d probably imagine picturing a gram of water or whatever. I have no idea what kinds of amounts, pressures, etc. are needed for helium to be used in any of the applications we want it for, but I suspect it’s a lot more than that.

Also as far as mining goes, except for the fact that it’s on the moon, it seems like harvesting regolith is probably a fairly straightforward operation, it’s just moon dust, the stuff that’s covering pretty much the entire surface a few meters deep. Seems like all that’s really needed would be some space bulldozers and dump trucks (though of course I’m sure there’s a whole lot more challenges that I’m not thinking of)

To say nothing about whatever is needed to process the regolith, I wouldn’t even know where to begin with that.

But helium also isn’t the only thing we’d be looking to harvest from regolith. Let’s say it takes us 50 years to harvest enough helium for whatever we need it for (no idea if that estimate is over, under, or about right) over those 50 years we’d also be harvesting all of the iron and silicon and whatever else we need to build out the infrastructure to use the helium.

And of course the cost/benefit analysis can be all over the place depending on if you’re thinking about this as some sort of capitalist profit-seeking venture or if it’s more of a “for the good of all mankind” or “scientific research for its own sake” kind of thing.

Lot of things to consider. I’m not saying that mining the moon necessarily makes sense, I also don’t know if it doesn’t there’s a lot of factors at play.

I’m also pretty sure that somewhere in OoT someone says that bomb flowers are the raw material for bombs

I have a friend who used to work in a pet food warehouse. They had some massive blast doors and fire suppression systems

Sounds like overkill for a bunch of dog and cat food, but when you think about it food is absolutely packed full of energy, caloric content is kind of the main point of food. Most of it is dry kibble, so it’s not like you can count it having a hgligh moisture content to keep it from watching fire, and I can absolutely imagine a situation there where the right conditions might exist for a dust explosion like you hear about in grain silos and such.

I would assume that fireworks warehouses probably have about 1000X the fire safety measures than dog food does. Maybe I’m giving the powers that be too much credit though, because it does seem like every year I hear about some fireworks warehouse or factory somewhere blowing up.

My guess, and I’m just kind of spitballing here, is that it fermented

Lollipops are basically just sugar and sugar is hygroscopic - it readily pulls moisture from the air. Eventually if it’s humid enough it could pull enough moisture from the air and start dissolving, so the goo is basically sugar-water

There’s a lot of natural yeast and bacteria and such all around you in the air and on just about every surface you could imagine, some was in the jar and found the sugar and started doing it’s thing fermenting the sugars

Fermentation takes sugars and turns them into alcohol and carbon dioxide (bit of a simplification)

Carbon dioxide is a gas, so there’s the bubbling, and the whistling noise was probably gas escaping from the jar as the pressure built up too high for the seal on the container to handle. The bubbling may have also picked up a bit when the gas started escaping too because under pressure some of it probably dissolved into the sugar goo, like it does into a can of soda, then when you crack the can open the pressure drops and the gas comes out of solution and bubbles.

And of course hand sanitizer is alcohol, so there’s the smell.

Personally I would like a revolution resembling Ukraine

You want the US to be invaded by invaded by an even bigger piece of shit country for us to have to fend off?