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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • We would need to expand the cropland growing food for humans, yes. But there is a lot of cropland currently growing types of corn and hay that we as humans can’t eat, just so we can feed animals and get a less than 20% return on calories from the ‘food’ we get when we eat animal muscle and organs.

    Which is why our total crop land use would go down if we didn’t eat animals: we need less space to grow calories and nutrients for us that we do to feed the animals we eat. So much gets wasted with the current process that it is unsustainable, and we need to start shifting this now to avoid running into severe land and water deficiencies with the changing climate.






  • I do have the family plan actually, I forgot about that!

    And I do occasionally. Certain live albums and more niche stuff can be hard to find, and one hit wonders can be tricky depending on the genre and time the song is from. The song I’m Blue by Eiffel 65 is only available in a longer club mix and not the radio edit, for example.

    I will say that, in my experience, it has a slightly larger selection than Spotify for classic stuff and different versions of the same song (covers, remakes, remixes, etc). For example, my husband was very excited that they had the whole readout of How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Boris Karloff (in two parts, but still) because they used to play it on certain radio stations every year around Christmas. On Spotify I was only ever able to find the same version of the song from several different albums of Christmas mixes.




  • Interesting. I have not had any issues using their engine even with the issue with Bing’s API, but you are correct that they use Bing’s index. Given that there are only four indexes to choose from, that isn’t too surprising.

    I actually switched to them when I saw that DuckDuckGo was about to start providing ‘AI assisted results’. I wanted to ensure I was using an engine that actually respected my privacy and didn’t harvest my data for slop.

    Anecdotally, I can confirm that the results I get from SwissCows are very different and usually better than the ones I got from DDG. So I wonder how much of Bing’s API they use.



  • This is correct, and it isn’t just associated with acids. It’s because of an effect called ‘freezing point depression’, which is the same reason salt lowers the freezing point of water while raising its boiling point.

    There are a few explanations as to why this happens, with the easiest being this: if you add something that can’t freeze to something that can, then the whole thing will need to lose more energy to allow the whole mass to solidify because the un-freezing stuff physically interferes with the attempts of the freezing stuff to bind together.

    However, there is also the additional aspect of vapor pressure, which comes into play when adding things that can freeze to another thing that also freezes, but at a different temperature. I don’t really understand that at all, so I will pull from the Wikipedia article on it:

    The freezing point is the temperature at which the liquid solvent and solid solvent are at equilibrium, so that their vapor pressures are equal. When a non-volatile solute is added to a volatile liquid solvent, the solution vapour pressure will be lower than that of the pure solvent. As a result, the solid will reach equilibrium with the solution at a lower temperature than with the pure solvent. This explanation in terms of vapor pressure is equivalent to the argument based on chemical potential, since the chemical potential of a vapor is logarithmically related to pressure. All of the colligative properties result from a lowering of the chemical potential of the solvent in the presence of a solute. This lowering is an entropy effect. The greater randomness of the solution (as compared to the pure solvent) acts in opposition to freezing, so that a lower temperature must be reached, over a broader range, before equilibrium between the liquid solution and solid solution phases is achieved. Melting point determinations are commonly exploited in organic chemistry to aid in identifying substances and to ascertain their purity.

    So, TL;DR is that chemistry is weird, things react weird at the molecular level because of energy states, and that is what allows us to make ice cream!