Nick Taylor

@tienelle.bsky.social

394

Posts

Physics, polymers and composites, high-rate mechanics, and what I'll euphemistically call "software carpentry" and not "hideous hacks". Occasional uninspired photography.

Posts Replies Media

Looks as though antihistamines might help avoid covid infection, as well as mitigate the disease. Insert "it's all histamine" meme.

Via @nevadawolf.bsky.social: more evidence that histamine antagonists inhibit SARS-CoV-2 infection and replication and some work on determining the potential mechanism journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

The histamine receptor H1 acts as an alternative receptor for SARS-CoV-2 | mBiojournals.asm.org In addition to human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) can utilize alternative cofactors to facilitate viral entry. In this study, we discov...

I feel personally attacked! Also it's Fira Code.

Bracket Symbols xkcd.com/2954

"A pint's a pound the world around" doesn't work for water outside the US because we use 20 fl. oz. pints, and it doesn't work inside the US because their fl. oz. is wrong and a pint is 473 ml. It *does* work for whisky in the US, and presumably a pint of whisky is what the author had just drunk.

After a lot of frustration I think the main problem was that I'd pinched the tines slightly so all the glitter was piling up in the tip of the nib, blocking it. I pressed on the nib a few times to splay it and now I'm back to my desired "All glitter, all the time" state.

Fountain pen question. I'm using a glitter ink, and about two sentences after I fill it, it dries up hard. I can fix it by pulling the feed and soaking it in water but is there something less invasive I can do instead? TWSBI Swipe, stub nib, piston converter, Diamine Arctic Blast.

Good: delightful shade under the trees in Vigelandsparken. Bad: it turns out I'm allergic to their pollen and about to turn into a wheezing, sneezing mess. Good again: P3 filters vanquish pollen utterly. And that's why I'm wearing my mask outdoors on a sunny day.

Last night's auroras, from sunny 52° north in a streetlit housing estate on a slightly cloudy night. Someone should probably check on our satellites. To the eye these were just faint god-beams with no real colour. Images have been vigorously de-noised with Lightroom's denoisinator.

I guess "people's private PDFs" were one of the last sources of human-generated text to mine, so I'm not surprised this is happening. Furious, but not surprised. Like, how is "exfiltrate data and probe it for insights" distinguishable from malware?

This morning, I opened a PDF to find Adobe Acrobat giving me an AI-generated summary of it. That led to a rabbit hole of finding all the places Acrobat’s AI Assistant has to be turned off. Here they are: www.wordsbywes.ink/a... #LLMs #AmEditing

Turning Off Adobe Acrobat's AI Assistant - Words by Weswww.wordsbywes.ink This morning, I opened a PDF to find Acrobat giving me an AI-generated summary of it. Since I frequently deal with unpublished manuscripts and other confidential documents for clients, I can’t have them processed by generative AI tools (and I don’t want my PDFs being read by LLMs either). So…

@clockworkcanary.bsky.social I finally got to True Master, though I feel like I've made the same ten mistakes each a thousand times. Also Laetum is a bit good!

Kimtech Purple Nitrile gloves proudly claim to be "anti-static tested to protect the wearer and equipment".

Didn't take brain meds today (I'm supposed to be off in my off hours!). @dvschroeder.bsky.social asked a pretty interesting question, which was fine, and then @chessypig.bsky.social attempted human communication. And now I'm stressed enough to bite my own head off. Also f orbitals are banned.

Cleaning warning labels off a now-empty tin so that I can re-use it. "Right, that was easy, just need to wipe off the adhesive residue with some acetone and I'm done." Off comes the adhesive. Off comes the paint covering the next layer of warning labels. This is like Rubbish Archaeology.

Trying to find something to excite fluorescence in my fairly short-lived experiment and the market seems to have nothing between "ten minutes gets you a spectrum" and "this laser can drill through time!".

Someone's auto-censor is really scared of freedom: "The paper of the sketchbook is made of cellulose, acid *, ISO 9706 compliant and * from optical brighteners, which is why it does not yellow and the colours will not fade over time."

Reposted by

Nick Taylor

Reply to

Howard Tayler

Rephrasing: "Long COVID" does not mean "having COVID for a long time." It means the virus disabled you. Yes, that's a thing viruses can do. Don't give this one the chance. I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee.

You can call for actual people to be killed and the Met won't even get out of bed, but come for their cameras and they're on you like paint.

Laurence Fox arrested over Ulez camera damage threatwww.bbc.co.uk The actor is being held at a police station on suspicion of conspiring to commit criminal damage.

Reposted by

Nick Taylor

Reply to

Howard Tayler

Today's test of the EAS is meant to "flash" the BIOS on the microchips for everyone who has been vaccinated, making their chips compatible with the new vaccines. If you can hear the noise from your phone, throw it in a sink full of water, then immediately get vaccinated.

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