I once knew a person whose cat, when she was on the toilet, would come in and climb into her pants and chill there, like “Yep we besties, I’m glad I can hang out with you during this pooping time.”

She didn’t hate it, but she definitely didn’t love it either.

I used to have a really smart hamster. But something… happened… to him.

Oh, it’s for the baby. Okay, got it, carry on then.

He took the humans out of one side of modern war. Obviously. So now it’s 50% done, now we just need to take away the villagers he was bombing, and there’ll be no more death and destruction anymore. That’s a huge progress.

The thinking was that, because he had negotiated an end the Vietnam War which he had been busily escalating for several years, he and the lead Vietnamese negotiator both deserved to share the prize. The war hadn’t ended, or anything, they’d just signed an agreement (which both sides more or less ignored.)

Every single person at the time thought it was the stupidest thing they’d ever heard. Even the New York Times could see that something was amiss; with their usual bold commitment to justice even when it contradicts the whims of American empire, they declared that it was “at the very least, premature.” Le Duc Tho, the Vietnamese man who he was meant to share the prize with, angrily declined his half of the prize. Kissinger almost declined the prize… not because even he could see that is was an absurd joke, but because he was offended that they were going to give it to Le Duc Tho also. You know… peace-man logic.

When Kissinger entered the conference room, nobody spoke to him. Sensing the hostile mood, Kissinger speaking in French said: “It was not my fault about the bombing”. Before Kissinger could say any more, Thọ exploded in rage, saying in French: “Under the pretext of interrupted negotiations, you resumed the bombing of North Vietnam, just at the moment when I reached home. You have ‘greeted’ my arrival in a very courteous manner! Your action, I can say, is flagrant and gross! You and no one else strained the honor of the United States”. Thọ shouted at Kissinger for over an hour, and despite Kissinger’s requests not to speak so loudly because the reporters outside the room could hear what he was saying, he did not relent. Thọ concluded: “For more than ten years, America has used violence to beat down the Vietnamese people-napalm, B-52s. But you don’t draw any lessons from your failures. You continue the same policy. Ngu xuẩn! Ngu xuẩn! Ngu xuẩn!” When Kissinger asked what ngu xuẩn meant in Vietnamese, the translator refused to translate, as ngu xuẩn (in Chữ Nôm: 愚蠢) roughly means that a person is grossly stupid.[43]

When Kissinger was finally able to speak, he argued that it was Thọ, who by being unreasonable, had forced Nixon to order the Christmas bombings, a claim that led Thọ to snap in fury.

They weren’t great friends. Of course, in the end, Kissinger decided that he owed it to himself to collect his prize, although he didn’t come in person because he probably would have been protested (and maybe arrested, I don’t remember the timeline.)

No, you’re a shortcoming assumption.

Oh, you’re completely right. IDK how I thought it was different, but yes, what I said was completely wrong.

Microwaves penetrate a certain distance into the material and then turn into heat. Heat conduction from the outside doesn’t. I don’t know exactly what the average of that distance is and how it compares to the size of a hamster, but I would bet that it’s pretty competitive with the thickness of the hamster.

Your whole argument here makes no sense at all. Having the ambient temperature set to the perfect defrosting value would work better than heating the skin of the frozen meat in cycles of full on / full off, if the microwaves were getting stopped right at the skin and then the heat had to conduct in from there.

Platypus already linked to a paper which references it: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1363505/pdf/jphysiol01379-0153.pdf

Which brings us to just one of those bizarre US things, “artificial flavor” versus “natural flavor” is totally arbitrary and random. It’s based on which molecule, not what the source is, so you can have “natural flavors” that came from a massive stainless steel tank and will kill you if you touch them in pure form without the proper protective gear, or “artificial flavors” that come from squeezing beaver ass glands.

Edit: Every word of this post is wrong. Literally every one. I think I read a book decades ago that told me this, maybe I remembered it wrong, but anyway according to the internet of today it’s different and I’m a big dummy.

In use in Ireland until the 1980s, apparently. TIL.

“Hey while you’re giving birth anyway, I’m just gonna use this hand-cranked kitchen appliance thing to saw your pelvis apart. Please try to relax.”

HOW IS THAT BETTER

Modern ones do have hotspots and cold spots because of resonance and design tradeoffs, but I don’t think that was a problem for the hamster application. IDK, maybe they were structured a little more small and special-purpose, but regardless it was just penetrating radiation basically all throughout the hamster which is better than heating it from the outside in and having the heat having to conduct its way through the frozen tissue.

Basically the same reason you can defrost meat in the microwave, but you can’t throw it in the oven to defrost more quickly without also cooking the edges.

The first microwave ovens created were being used to gently re-warm frozen live hamsters, because when they tried to reheat the hamsters with conventional cooking methods, they heated unevenly and burned at the edges, which isn’t good for the hamsters.

The UK enacted age verification, the instance said fuck that. So, more or less, the UK’s fault.

https://www.torproject.org/download/

Probably a good idea for things other than Lemmy, too, the way that things are going.

motivates a lot of shitty behavior

Indeed

You are pretty much completely correct, though. It is (or should be) only mildly infuriating.

It’s not just trolling and drama though. I just don’t feel like ceding the narrative space to whoever can pull off the most clever ruse. Like, the truth is important. I know hoping for the internet to be reasonable and trusted is hopeless, but it just bugs me to see people deliberately spinning up this (very effective) total alternate reality about something that matters, on purpose, and having other people buy into it. To this very slight extent, I’m infuriated by it.

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. “It’s just one simple job,” they said…

Because Americans are louder and tend not to confine their activities to the country-specific forums