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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Yeah the locker/towel thing would be a habit especially if you don’t actively think about it.

    You may not have a strong daily routine but all humans have habits and it’s precisely because you don’t actively think about them a lot that it’s can be hard to become cognizant of them.

    They also include behavioral preferences such as scratching your chin with your right hand when lost in thought 🤔, calling your girlfriend ‘honey’ frequently, consuming certain foods/beverages more than others, separating the trash, opening up social Media on your smart phone when bored, or taking your jacket with you when you go outside.

    Those are not the same for everyone but everyone has them useless maybe some severe medical condition is present.



  • That’s my point though: to me buying new garments just because they aren’t as white as they used to be is both economically and ecologically wasteful. Ideally you just adjust your sensibilities or else purchase colors, fabrics, patterns less affected by tinging.

    I have to admit though I’m looking at this from my own biased perspective of a single household though. I do basic separation of light, dark and hygienic (anything that needs high temperatures to kill germs) but also spontaneous mixed loads depending on what’s in the laundry bin and what I need soon. If you’re in a big household you can actually do real nice sorting like all the reds together, all the sports wear together, all the rags and towels, etc.





  • I haven’t seen an app that does it really well like some libraries or ontologies do but I’m certainly not well versed with all of them. Back in the day I used Evernote which was at least a start, as you could create arbitrary hierarchies (nest tags within tags).

    So ideally you would want to be able to nest tags like this:

    news.politics.europe.denmark

    of course another person might prefer the hierarchy

    politics.elections.news.denmark

    There’s no strict right or wrong here but often over time some consensus forms. Bonus points if there are equivalency classes, ie “recipe”, “recipes”, “cooking recipe”, and even the Spanish versions “receta” and “recetas” all refer to the same thing.

    By meta tags I mean the ability to describe and classify certain tag groups. For instance “politics”, “cats” and “Hollywood” are content tags while the tags “English”, “Danish” and “French” are language tags. “PDF”, “MP3” and “HTML” are file format tags but “video”, “music” and “text” are content form tags while “2023”, “2004-04-03” are time-line tags

    Meta categories allow you for instance to search for pages that are about the English language, but not necessarily in English and surely not written by people who happen to have the last name ‘English’. Now some systems encode this information inside the string of the tag itself like so: “language = English” or “topic = cats”, but I think the most elegant solution is really to let a tag have categories or tags on its own which describe what it’s used for (thus meta tags).




  • The ¿ and ¡ prepare the reader mentally for what’s coming and let the speaker adapt pronunciation.

    Consider the following 2 sentences in English:

    It’s raining.

    and

    It’s raining?

    Meaning and intonation are different. Luckily our eyes don’t read strictly in one direction like a scanner but instead they skip back and forth a lot (saccades) which means your brain registers the question mark even before you get to pronounce the first word. Still it’s helpful to have an extra signal at the start of the sentence.

    So why no extra dot at the beginning? Because it’s the default case. And since the function of the dot is to separate sentences a single one already does the job. Note how there is also no double period when a sentence ends with an abbreviation or abbr. And in headers it’s often fully omitted because the layout itself signals the separation from what precedes or follows.



  • Do you just sweep with a broom? A good vacuum cleaner is a lot more thorough. And if you mopp right after there’s a better chance to get most of the dust.

    The other question is where the dirt is ultimately coming from. Most notably rom outside via air movement and shoes, but also consider shedded hair and skin from humans & pets, dropped food crumbs, lints from textiles and any hobbies/activities.

    I like to avoid any “dust catcher” objects like carpets or rugs. In the end it’s a tradeoff between how clean you want it to be and how much time you’re willing to invest.


  • Went to a open cast lignite mining operation once. The scales are quite impressive. Once standing at the bottom of the pit vision of the surrounding landscape just fades and you feel a bit like in a wasteland of sorts.

    open cast mine

    I assume many people are familiar with hydrocarbon gas for cooking or heating. Coal can also be converted to liquid or gas fuel form chemically but the process is quite complex and usually not economical.

    Then there’s crude oil. Never been near it but its ubiquitous in its refined forms, just go to a gas station.

    EDIT: the coal typically used for barbecue (charcoal) is made from wood and is different from the stuff mined from the earth. Many people seem to not know this.