somebodynew

Most craft stores carry a glass etchant like Armor Etch [0] as an over the counter product. The MSDS [1] indicates that it's an aqueous solution containing ammonium bifluoride, which exists in equilibrium with hydrofluoric acid.

[0] https://www.michaels.com/product/armour-etch-glass-etching-c... [1] https://www.jacksonsart.com/media/pdf/armour_etch_sds.pdf

This article is about arsenic minerals acting like a sponge that holds and concentrates gold from the surrounding environment that it comes in contact with. It isn't creating new atoms of gold.

Gold can be created through an unrelated process of nuclear transmutation, but it's impractically expensive [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#G...

This reminds me of one of my favorite court cases, a rare application of the 3rd amendment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engblom_v._Carey

A prison tried to break a strike of workers who lived in prison dorms by replacing them with members of the National Guard, until a court ruled that this constituted illegally quartering soldiers in their homes.

Amphetamine (Dexedrine) is schedule II, not schedule I. Doctors cannot generally prescribe schedule I substances like LSD. Pseudoephedrine is a substituted amphetamine so referring to it as "an OTC amphetamine" is technically reasonable although potentially misleading.

A US federal court held that typeface designs cannot be copyrighted in Eltra Corp. v. Ringer in 1978. Federal regulations made this explicit in 37 CFR 202.1(e) in 1992. The government's explanation here [1] makes it explicit that typefaces are not subject to copyright protection, while fonts can be copyrighted as computer software.

[1] https://cdn.loc.gov/copyright/history/mls/ML-393.pdf

Hydrogen sulfide is a severe example: it initially smells strongly of rotten eggs but quickly damages the nose until it is undetectable and further exposure can be lethal. For most other chemicals, smells only fade to the background during prolonged lab work through mundane desensitization.

I enjoy using the CSS named colors for web design because it provides a limited set of options to choose from. It's easier to decide on the best choice from a limited set of options than it is to find the global maximum in the entire RGB space.

I'll also forever have a fondness for "cornflower blue" because it was the default fill color when you created a new C# Xbox 360 game using Microsoft XNA.

I understand your frustration with the current state of psychiatry, but I think that you may be reading too much of it into my comment. I had no intention of shifting any blame from the wholly inappropriate combination of prescribed drugs or the psychiatrist to the patient, and I used very deliberate wording to intentionally avoid making any reference whatsoever to the gender of the patient. The point of my post was to highlight that this case appeared to be a manic episode which could be triggered by almost any antidepressant, not a rare and unique adverse effect that could only be caused by pramipexole or dopamine agonists.

I meant "stimulant" in the context of traditional dopamine reuptake inhibitors and releasing agents like amphetamine and ritalin which are almost incomparable to less controlled or uncontrolled compounds like modafinil, ephedrine, and caffeine. Even a high dose of caffeine will not produce effects anything like amphetamine. The mechanism of action between amphetamine and caffeine are fundamentally different rather than being a matter of strength. It's unfortunate and misleading that the word stimulant is used for both categories.

In general, it would be difficult to tell with an incomplete patient history whether a psychiatrist prescribing pramipexole for depression was making an irresponsible shot in the dark, or a calculated attempt to address something like treatment-resistant anhedonic depression after a few first lines, an MAOI, and referrals to an endocrinologist and a sleep study failed. That being said, I cannot think of any reasonable scenario that leads to simultaneously prescribing pramipexole and mood stabilizers. Perhaps it's too idealistic of me to hope that the pharmacist filling all three of those (plus two controlled substances...) would have called and asked for an explanation.

I omitted the Xanax entirely from my previous post because the polypharmacy here is such a mess, but I agree that it probably factors into disinhibition. I don't personally attribute much relevance to modafinil in this instance; while the wakefulness effects are often described mechanistically through dopamine, I have never seen anyone experience any traditional stimulant or dopamine agonist effects from modafinil.

My only experience with pramipexole and cabergoline are for low dose off-label use in persistent sexual dysfunction after the discontinuation of SSRI medication. The biggest difference I have seen between them is a much higher rate of discontinuation due to side effects (extreme tiredness) for pramipexole.

The article describes its first subject as having been diagnosed with simply "depression", but describes their medication regime as including lithium and lamotrigine which in combination is strongly suggestive of treatment for bipolar depression in particular. Given that the described behavior sounds very much like a manic episode, the article should have explained this connection before attempting to focus the blame on pramipexole.

Most antidepressants, even SSRIs, are medically recognized as potentially triggering mania in bipolar patients. While compulsive gambling and hypersexuality are associated with dopamine agonists, I think it may be misleading for the article to focus so heavily on a possible manic episode without discussing bipolar disorder at all and while implying that this was a unique effect of dopamine agonists.

This is not obvious to the average person outside of the industry. For example, most people would expect that text typed into a form field without clicking submit is private and has not been sent to anyone. It is obvious to a software developer that secretly sending the text back to a server while the user types is easy to implement, but posting an agent to read over someone's shoulder while they write a draft which they may choose not to send at all does not become morally acceptable just because modern technology has made this more practical than hiring a PI to watch through someone's house window from a public street.

Should they be allowed to record your mouse movements while on their site and sell information about how steady or shaky your hands appear to be to health insurance or car insurance companies?

It's only following people who posted their own photos voluntarily in this particular implementation, but consider the next incremental step for this same approach: a website where you upload a photo of anyone's face and get a map/trail of every public photo/video posted by someone else where that face appears in the background for the last month. Now you're not just finding the subject of a voluntarily portrait in security camera footage from a public place, but finding anywhere that any private person has gone in any populated area where anyone else is taking photos for social media.

How many involuntary social media photo and video backgrounds do you think someone living in NYC or SF is identifiable in every day? I would venture to guess, enough to track a lot of their life. The only thing I see stopping anyone from making this site today is the challenges in scraping large quantities of public data from social media sites. Once you have the data, the rest seems like a solved problem.

Glasses are already de facto over the counter. Virtually every online source of glasses (including large, domestic businesses) will openly sell glasses with requested specifications to anyone without asking for a copy of (or even affirmation of the existence of) any kind of official document.

While the word "prescription" is often still used when the specifications of the glasses are what is really meant, this situation is clearly a stark contrast to the prescription-as-approval practiced for medication. No legitimate domestic company will sell FDA-approved medication without asking for proof that the customer first paid a doctor for a signed document giving them permission to buy it. This step may still be prevalent for contact lenses, but in practice it's not applied to glasses.

Cyanoacrylate works on PLA, but PLA is notably not amenable to solvent welding or smoothing with household supplies compared to the ease with which ABS/ASA (acetone) or PVB (isopropyl alcohol) pieces can be fused together.

It is marginally possible to fuse pieces of PLA together using ethyl acetate (sold to consumers as "acetone-free nail polish remover" or "MEK substitute"), but this is not nearly as accessible, effective, or reliable compared to other plastics.

There is a bit of luck in even having any viable materials that work at the required temperature to choose from.

For example, humanity hasn't been able to find a single appropriate material for a superconductor at room temperature/atmospheric pressure despite significant research, but a civilization living below 100 K has a myriad of options to choose from. Superconductors are high technology to us, but if your planet is cold enough then superconducting niobium wire would be a boring household item like copper wire is for us.

I had the same problem and eventually settled on "medical evaluation" as a mnemonic.

If you don't fill the thermos to the top, we can also add the small temperature impact of Helmholtz resonance from the wind blowing across the lip to make this more complicated. (Now I wonder how loud a sound needs to be to boil water...)

In America there are subcultures devoted to couponing (hunting for discount promotions) and churning (opening many credit card or bank accounts to collect "new account bonuses").

The detector is a Geiger tube. There are more details on the GitHub page [0], including this note:

> Disclaimer: the radioactivity from the bananas doesn't quite make the difference, the background radiation is more than enough to make the generator work and afaik the banana's is not even detectable.

[0] https://github.com/valerionew/Banana-Random-Number-Generator

I've read the first two chapters so far and found it to be interesting and accessible. The style is pleasantly warm compared to a lot of modern writing while maintaining scientific integrity and treating the reader more maturely than average contemporary pop-sci.

I recommend adding a tutorial or explanation. I read the homepage, followed the funnel to "Play as Guest", and this immediately started a game with what was presumably another human. The prompts showed me how to play a card, but I'm not clear how the mechanics work.

I learned to consciously control this after reading about the reflex years ago. The easiest way to "find" the muscle is to swallow slowly and pay attention to the feeling in your ear canals. Most people naturally use these muscles slightly when chewing or swallowing. I can hold it for several seconds before it starts to feel like an exertion. You'll know that you've got it when you can voluntarily hold a quivering/vibrating sensation in the ear along with external sound dampening.

It is not a substitute for earplugs around dangerous sounds and you cannot hold it for hours to block out the sound of an airplane engine. The only time I ever had a practical use for this was when I heard someone leaving a movie theater start to discuss what was obviously about to be a major spoiler with their friend as I was entering. The utility there comes purely from it being socially unacceptable to interrupt a stranger or suddenly cover your ears, while nobody else can see if you're using your tensor tympani.

Most applications recognize either Ctrl+Shift+V or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+V (Cmd+Opt+Shift+V) as "paste without formatting" or "paste as plain text".

You are correct, I was conflating two separate steps of the process. Federal law only requires keeping records and these could technically be done on paper. In practice, more than two thirds of the states participate in a central electronic database called the National Precursor Log Exchange.

It is sold over the counter in most US pharmacies under the Vicks inhaler brand. The active ingredient label conveniently uses a spelling that most people will not recognize which is probably effective in preventing alarm from customers who aren't familiar with the dramatic difference in the effects of the two enantiomers.

The ID check isn't for age verification. Federal law requires IDs to be recorded* to enforce restrictions on the maximum quantity that an individual is permitted to purchase per month.

* Edit: Where the word "recorded" appears, this comment previously said "scanned and submitted to a central database". While most states use a central database, the comment reply below pointed out that this goes beyond the minimum that federal law requires.

Bismuth might be in a decent spot for optimizing price/density/boiling point/safety if the thruster can be made of molybdenum. I'm not sure if there are more delicate components required to withstand the boiling point of the mass source that can't be made of structural metal.