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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • 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.






  • So I found this website that lists specific heat capacities for various foods, and while it doesn’t list “snacks”, dry foods values seem to range from 0.3 to 1 cal•g-1•K-1 = 0.0003 to 0.001 Cal•g-1•K-1. Assuming no phase change (i.e., melting) and otherwise temperature-invariant heat capacity, the energy required for heating a 100 g snack from freezer temps (-18 °C) to body temp (37 °C) is 1.65 to 5.5 Cal. More realistically, we can compare to eating an ambient-temp (20 °C) snack; that difference is only 1.1 to 3.8 Cal… in either case, the difference is negligible, generally < 1% of the calorie count of the snack itself.




  • I think water is rather rare as a coolant these days. Organics (chemical sense not farming sense) like propylene glycol or some kind of glyme aren’t potentially corrosive to metals if spilled, are harder to grow shit in, have lower volatility, and have a higher thermal limit. Maybe also with a little bit of antifouling agent thrown in. My main gripe with them is that if you do spill them, they don’t evaporate and you’re slipping over the floor for the next few days because you missed a spot.

    But yeah, air cooling ftw




  • ornery_chemist@mander.xyztoMemes@lemmy.mlThe reason
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    1 year ago

    I think rz is linguistically equivalent to a soft r, so in this case rze would be “ре”, not “ж”. In some areas, rz is pronounced closer to the Czech ř. IIRC, ж transliterates to ż (not to be confused with ź, which is a soft z). The Polish Roman alphabet is very regular and well adapted to the language, representing palatalization and other non-Latin sounds as digraphs in a similar way to Italian or English.

    The cyrillicization of Polish was historically done to a limited extent, but carried with it some, shall we say, sociopolitical baggage. There are also some peculiarities to Polish that either don’t exist or have ambiguous transliterations into Cyrillic, such as the Polish nasals ą and ę or ó (historically a long o, but currenly pronouned /u/).



  • Nonono, you don’t understand, flame wars build character! 'Twere the early aughts that made me the healthy and well adjusted person I am today!

    Or at least, that’s what I’d say if what actually happened wasn’t that I became a jaded bastard and if I didn’t think it was just some ploy to drive engagement to let OP feel popular for a moment… in the best case scenario


  • Don’t worry, I was being 100% facetious! After all, γ is generally believed to have been a hard /g/ in Ancient Greek, which is the version of Greek that “graphic” is based on and is CLEARLY the wrong way to say gif :D

    Kinda sorta un-jerking (but not really) for a moment, I don’t think that I’d include the rhotic in your hypothetical pronunciation in NASA and thus would say /neɪ.sə/ over /neɚ.sə/. I also don’t palatalize the U in SCUBA (/sku:.bə/, not /sk^(j)u:bə/), but I suspect that’s just a dialectical difference.

    Edit: I just saw your NZ lemmy instance name and now I understand the vowel choices. Cheers!


  • Well, you see, the g in gif stands for “graphics” which is ultimately from Greek “γραφικός,” and because this is the 21st century, γ in front of a close front vowel is pronounced as neither /g/ nor /d͡ʒ/ but rather /ʝ/, which is pronounced a bit like English’s y, so in its purest rendition gif is really pronounced “yiff”, which doubles as homage to the online communities that OP frequents.