• 6 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I’ve been completely ignoring typical timetables. Things like lettuce are hard now because it goes from frost to too hot quickly. I grow heartier greens like kale year round, and I’ve had tomatoes producing fruit into November.

    Cold frames have been helpful, as have larger pots for seedlings so I can take them inside for any cold nights while buying a few extra weeks of growth before needing to plant them.


  • I’m going to have to try the alcohol. I’ve also done a spray bottle with biodegradable soap water, which i always have on hand for aphids. I seem to have mostly reduced my slug problem. My main problem now is squirrels.

    Also, the hydroponics and organic no-till is a fun combo. I used to do aquaponics a bit, and I’d like to get back to it. Now I tend to be more permacultury, though I think people in that field tend to embrace more pseudoscience than I’d like. I’d like to find a way to combine the science and productivity of aquaponics with the stability of soil based growing. Basically, I want a pond, lol.



  • I’ve used a few methods with varying success. I think one of the most important pieces is to figure out where the slugs are coming from, because there’s no benefits to a barrier if all the slugs are already inside of it.

    Go out at night, particularly if it’s a humid night with a flashlight. You’ll be able to see their trails (and the slugs themselves) much more easily than during the day. If you can squash all that you see, or drop them in a bucket of soapy water, you can reduce the breeding population over the course of doing it a few times. Learn what the eggs look like, too.

    If you go keep note of what time you go out, you might be able to find the time when slugs are exposed, but not yet feeding on your plants.

    You can make an “electric fence” that runs of a few volts that makes an uncrossable boundary for slugs.

    Some people use crushed eggshells as they apparently don’t like those sharp edges.

    Another method i use is to place scrap boards on top of the soil around my plants. That makes good hiding places for the slugs during the day. Then you can just flip the boards during the day and kill all the slugs.


  • For fitness:

    The absolute “best exercise” for someone to do is whatever they find enjoyable/fun, baring some sports, etc, that are harmful to your joints and/or brain (like American football). Fitness is about long term, sustainable effort. Some strict program that follows all the best science isn’t going to help you in the long term if you don’t stay consistent with it.

    As long as you are either creating forceful muscle exertions or getting your heart rate up (preferably both), and it’s an activity you can stick with, you are good to go.

    It’s similar with diet. Whatever you can consistently do to hit reasonable macros, with a nice bit of fiber and minimal junk, go for it. People might tell you that it’s better to get 100% of your protein from meals rather than having protein shakes, but for a lot of people, going without that protein shake will just end up with them undershooting their protein needs.







  • At the end of the day, most of what people care about isn’t age, it’s cognitive function (though age itself is important; why care about the America of 2040 if you won’t live to see it).

    Many of these people in power would fight age limits, but they are usually so sure of their abilities, that they may not fight cognitive tests with published results.

    For example, if you give someone a Montreal cognitive assessment, and their reaction to it is:

    Yes, the first few questions are easy, but I’ll bet you couldn’t even answer the last five questions. I’ll bet you couldn’t, they get very hard, the last five questions

    And those last 5 questions are:

    What month are we in? What year are we in? What day of the week is it? Where are you right now? What city are you in?

    You might think that person shouldn’t be in charge of the country.

    Oops.








  • All the concern about this dye is based on a 1990 study where they fed rats 0.5%, 1%, or 4% of their diet by mass with the dye. Only the group with 4% of their diet had an effect on thyroid stimulating hormone, and follow on effects on t3 and t4. This increased stimulation of the thyroid is what they hypothesized is responsible for potential tumor growth. That dose is ~5,000-15,000 times higher than a regular diet. Increasing sugar or alcohol or literally anything else in your diet by that amount will have dire consequences.

    Furthermore, the authors mention that a 100x dose human trial had increased TSH, but without changes to t3 or t4. This (and other factors they bring up in the paper) show that humans don’t respond like rats, so these rat studies can’t really be applied to humans. Even a massive overdose wouldn’t have the same potential for causing cancer in human as it does in rats.

    All that said, there’s no benefits to the consumer to have food that’s just more red. Banning red 3 isn’t going to make manufacturers stop dyeing food red, it’s going to make them switch dyes, which might not be able net positive.

    The FDA’s notice even says this:

    two studies that showed cancer in laboratory male rats exposed to high levels of FD&C Red No. 3 due to a rat specific hormonal mechanism. The way that FD&C Red No. 3 causes cancer in male rats does not occur in humans. Relevant exposure levels to FD&C Red No. 3 for humans are typically much lower than those that cause the effects shown in male rats. Studies in other animals and in humans did not show these effects; claims that the use of FD&C Red No. 3 in food and in ingested drugs puts people at risk are not supported by the available scientific information.

    They mention that they are forced to ban it due to a technicality of the law:

    The Delaney Clause, enacted in 1960 as part of the Color Additives Amendment to the FD&C Act, prohibits FDA authorization of a food additive or color additive if it has been found to induce cancer in humans or animals.

    So even if we know for sure that a substance is fine for humans, if there’s any animal that could be given cancer by ingestion of any dose, it legally should be banned.

    For example, if you did a study where you fed dogs chocolate for a year, and they developed liver cancer due to the constant poisoning, you could petition to have chocolate banned as a food edditive.



  • I’m in the midst of planning out some built-ins. When looking for inspiration, it is so annoying how many videos/blog posts, etc, on creating built-ins start with “buy IKEA cabinetry”.

    If you are buying cabinets, you aren’t building cabinets. Yeah, there’s assembly involved, but watching someone buy a cabinet, and then just paint it and put different hardware on it doesn’t help me at all.

    For example, I’m trying to figure out the right way to have the cabinet doors interface with adjacent window trim. I.e, do I cut the trim to fit the cabinet doors, or do I alter the cabinet doors to fit the windows trim.

    The “ikea cabinet” people can’t have these choices cause it’s not possible to alter them since they are built of chipboard.