Salamander

  • 376 Posts
  • 844 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: December 19th, 2021

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  • It depends. In my experience: in an academic laboratory I have been able to use common sense.

    For example, gloves go on when working with strong acids/bases. The statement:

    gloves apparently only give researchers a false sense of security that can dull the sense of touch and prevent you from recognizing chemical exposure

    Does not apply as much when you are working with such corrosive agents, because you really should never be in a position where spilling 4 M HCl into your hands would go unnoticed.

    When working with large quantitites of oils, even if non-hazardous, gloves go on and they will probably get oil in them.

    When working with cell cultures, the goal is often to not contaminate the cultures. Some people prefer to wash their hands thoroughly and not use gloves, and they have been working at it for many years and they seem to do just fine. It’s a risk mitigation strategy - if the cultures have antibiotics and fungicides, risk is already not too high.

    In an industry setting it is different. Companies often comply with specific standards and health and safety regulations. While the individual can use common sense, the people in charge of ascertaining compliance (sometimes ‘EHS’, Environment, health and safety personnel) aren’t necessarily chemists themselves, nor should they need to be aware of the identity of the transparent liquid in the flask that you are holding. So, generic rules are often set in place not only because of their practical utility but also to simplify enforcement. In some cases external auditors can come in (announced or not) and verify compliance - this, again is much simpler when the rule is ‘lab coat behind yellow line, gloves always on when touching a container with a liquid’ than having to interview each person to understand what they were touching without gloves and to understand their philosophy of why they chose to do so.









  • I do have a wall with similar boxes. From the image, I am not sure if they are the same size. I just measured one of my small drawers and it is 14 cm x 5.5 cm x 5 cm. Since I have many different tiny components, I quickly ran out of space when I tried to give each component its own drawer.

    But I think that I might be able to do a better job with these if I take everything out and start organizing again. I set the rules for how to place things before I started buying SMD components, and many of the through-hole components I can combine without problem. An improvement would be if I can find something like this but with many more and much smaller boxes.





  • For mander.xyz it has been bot scrapers. That time that you are mentioning it was scraping via the onion front end that I am hosting for easier access over Tor. Yesterday an army of bots scraping via Alibaba cloud servers made the server unusable for a few minutes. The instance would receive a bunch of requests from the same IP range (47.79.0.0/16), and denying that full IP range fixed the problem.

    Some instances implement anti-bot measures. For example, https://sopuli.xyz/ makes use of Anubis. I think that instances behind Cloudfare get some protection too. I am considering using Anubis for mander.xyz, but for now I have just been dealing with this manually as it does not happen too often.







  • I would take a portable CD player, place a CD with Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up on it playing backwards, hook up solar panels, remove the ability to shut it on/off, and set it up a circuit that will:

    • As the device solar charges, keep it off until some voltage threshold is exceeded
    • Once the voltage is high enough, start a random timer (8 - 100 hours), so that it is not immediately obvious that the sun activated the device
    • When the timer ends, turn the music on on repeat mode
    • Sometimes turn the music off at random, and then turn it on again at random after a long delay, so that in some cases you can have turn ‘ON’ events without the device being exposed to the sun
    • When the voltage drops below a low threshold, turn the device off until it is charged again

  • I speak spanish natively and at during uni I would hang out with a group of Brazillian friends. I would speak a mixture of portuguese and spanish with them.

    The mom of one of these friends made a Brazilian dish for us (Feijoada) and asked me how it was as it was the first time I tried it. I answered that the dish as ‘exquisito’, which in Spanish means delicious (similar ‘exquisite’). She seemed somewhat disappointed and upset by my response so I probed a little and found out that ‘esquisito’ in Portuguese actually means ‘weird’. She thought I was calling her dish weird tasting. I found quickly enough to clarify, but I did feel bad about making her fell that way… She was very excited about sharing her cooking and she thought I called it weird.