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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • When the UK switched to using plastic for the denominations of money that come as notes (£5, £10, £20, £50), people who use cocaine found that the new, plastic notes had a tendency to cut or scratch their nose. Because the £5 notes were the first ones to be switched to plastic, and they have Winston Churchill on them, apparently this phenomenon was termed “being Winstoned”. E.g. “careful with that, you don’t want to be Winstoned”.

    I have no other point to make, I just think that this is hilarious.






  • This is not the kind of person that the meme is poking at, but my late best friend was one of the best people I have known, and I talk shit about him all the time. It feels like being honest about his depth and complexity is a part of how I honour him; I’m firmly of the belief that if you have to lie about something in order to love it, then your love is shallow and false.





  • They may not have been the ones who first thought of it, but the first people to publish research that shows that taping 4 air filters together with a fan works decently compared to other, non-DIY filters (where “worked decently” means does a good enough job that it’s worth doing if you want a filter but can’t/won’t buy or build a more complex filtering system, even if it isn’t as good as “proper” filtering systems)

    (Tangent: I’m reminded of the “Cox-Zucker machine”, a random maths thing that Cox and Zucker made together because when Cox and Zucker met at university, they realised that their names, when combined in the traditional, alphabetical order, sounded “delightfully obscene”. )


  • I don’t typically experience imposter syndrome.

    However, it is my understanding that the majority of people I know seem to experience imposter syndrome (likely influenced by the fact that my social circle is mostly academics)

    Thus I seem to be the odd one out in this respect, paradoxically causing me to feel like an imposter for not experiencing imposter syndrome.

    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


  • Doesn’t it only work if you then return to a lower altitude? I wonder how long the benefits last for.

    Now that I think about it, I don’t actually know how this even works. Well I know what I’m going to go read about next.

    Edit: My findings:

    • At high altitude, cardiac output (the overall rate of blood pumped by the heart) increases, largely due to increased heart rate. This increased heart rate reduces as one acclimatises to high altitude (though I’m unsure of if it returns to baseline. It appears to be complex, and at least somewhat differing person by person. These individual differences may explain why some people experience health problems at high altitude, beyond the initial ill feelings caused from first arriving somewhere that’s high altitude)

    • The stroke volume (volume of blood pumped by each beat of the heart) is lower at high altitudes. This does improve as one acclimatises, but not entirely. This seems to be affected by blood pressure stuff, such as reduced plasma volume at high altitude. It seems to be complex enough that we don’t fully understand how the various regulatory stuff works.

    • Most of the acclimatisation occurs by increasing the number of red blood cells in the blood. The hormone erythropoietin, which usually exists at a low level in non-hypoxic conditions, stimulates the production of new red blood cells. At high altitude, the level of erythropoietin in the blood rises to around 1000 times its baseline level. Increased production of red blood cells happens for a few weeks, by which point, there is enough to make up for lower oxygen levels at high altitude.

    • When returning to low altitude, it appears that the changes back to the baseline happen over a similar timeline.

    Tangential fun fact: a red blood cell has a lifetime of around 4 months. A single red blood cell travels around 400 miles before it is old enough to be recycled by the body.







  • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.nettoMemes@lemmy.mlData security
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    30 days ago

    Only a couple. I can imagine that “the user is not the enemy” may be a difficult sentiment for some people with heavily user-facing roles. I’m curious what federated service you’re interfacing with this from. I imagine that’s why you didn’t see the votes on your comment. I am posting this via Lemmy