• 8 Posts
  • 198 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 10th, 2023

help-circle

  • Getting a cat to come to you is easy, you give it food and pets, and then stay calm when it’s eating/enjoying.

    Repeat until you’ve built trust, a sick or hurt cat will typically take longer to trust. Count on several days of repeating this without hitches (no sudden loud noise while you’re doing it, etc).

    Sometimes cats are desperate and everything turns up in a magical, calm way without bloodshed. But more commonly the next part is trickier, the cat will resist you picking it up (especially if hurt) or shutting it in.

    Trick here is to be decisive and clear in your body language. Prepare a cat carry box with hard sides, feel free to prepare it with some textile smelling of you, be mindful that it will almost certainly be pissed on. Also bring a towel.

    You will have to, in a calm manner, put the folded towel over the cat, and with it lift the cat into the carry. The towel is to trap legs so you won’t be scratched, and if you manage to have it snugly around the cat, there’s also a way to calm cats by gently pressing them down.

    If you are unsure, slow, nervous, or hesitate in your movement, the cat will bolt. If you’re too fast, loud, or big in movements, it will as well. Relax and do it in a deliberate motion.

    If you release the cat from the carry, it will take considerable time to rebuild trust. Consider either going with it to the vet at once, or let it out in a quiet spare room with food, water, and litter box, and giving it a day or three to get accustomed to the room before letting it explore the rest of the place.

    Don’t get scratched by the cat, they can have some pretty nasty stuff on the paws, and some transmittable pathogens if anything draws blood or gets in your face/eyes.

    Good luck!


  • Cats do pant, but also run hotter and enjoy higher temperatures than humans (24-26 °C depending on race).

    Also, cats have lots of ways to release heat, cats can arrange their fur to release more heat (or burr it to trap more), they lay on cool ground, they can lick themselves for evaporative cooling, and of course seek shade when it gets hot.

    We had a hot summer with temperatures of over 30 °C indoors and I got worried my European shorthair would overheat, got them a gel pad that wicks away heat when laid upon, but they thought it was ridiculous and just laid on the concrete floor in the shade whenever too hot and was super comfy and lazy.









  • Modern nuclear plants take about 1 Mt of fuel per ton of waste, and energy production is about 70-90% effective. Modern systems also dispose about 80-90 % of spent fuel at decay times that leave only a percent of radiation every 20 years.

    Nuclear is however indeed a dead end, with current exponentially increasing energy needs we probably only have 150 years of Uranium before we need to figure out an alternative. At current energy levels, we have about 550 years.

    150 years of very low pollution, stable energy is however a better, cleaner, cheaper and safer energy source than fossil oil has been throughout human history, and safer than current wind, solar and hydroelectric power.



  • With the new tech, that is mostly true, the 70s tech is like the first of any tech: unwieldy, hard to control and very inefficient in both production and retirement.

    Compare the first x-ray machine to a modern PET-scanner. The former caused cancer in fetuses and caused radiation poisoning through walls, the latter is a clean cellular resolution scanner that can be serviced and recycled as well as most anything.


  • A conceivable way could be to disrupt the nuclear force of the target atoms, maybe like an anti-Pion/Gluon ray that self-propagates the reaction through the released energy.

    (As we might remember, splitting the atom yields a bunch of energy, and uncontrolled such reactions go Hiroshima)

    It might be controlled by sub-particle lensing, probably some kind of magnetic field, to be active at a specific distance.

    For the reaction to be contained, either there’s a radially limiting component (air is not particle dense enough to propagate the reaction, or atoms not energy dense enough) or it’s a cascade triggered by the beam which stops when the beam stops (or the reaction gets too far away from it)

    As I believe Pions and Gluons are their own anti-particles, I don’t know how we would go about doing this, but hey, that’s for Science!™ to solve.



  • Board games have been nearly ruined by kickstarter.

    Instead of buying a well reviewed and recommended game from a store, you have to back a hyped up sales pitch, and then wait 4 months for delivery, if the producers don’t just bail with your money or go “oops, we couldn’t finish what we promised, and we already spent all your money…”.

    And if you don’t back it to later read the reviews, the game is out of print and still waiting for the first wave of deliveries, meaning a second print is still at least a year off.

    Also, the ratings are heavily skewed by people rating on the hype or early/review copies, meaning the rankings are heavily amazonified.

    EtA: Also games are heavily bloated with social media candy: heavy and fragile minis, box stands, blingy crap periferals (branded dice holding toucan) and still needing organisers, player aids and mods from third parties who’ve gotten review copies to make said supplements…

    Oh, and the stretch goal extras (get another 150 vanity minis/3D printed scoring tokens) for only $150 and an 18 month wait!



  • Precisely, so the Federation may be anarchist, even though the member races aren’t.

    With what we know about how the Federation interacts with other races and planets, real world logic would indicate that the humans could be (and live) the model that the Federation is built upon.

    All this is conjecture ofc, and is probably as much an exercise in understanding post-scarcity anarchism as possible Star Trek lore :p