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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • It is and it isn’t

    Certain things absolutely need to be standardized

    But in other cases it can just kind of bog things down.

    I remember one training thing we had to do to keep our certifications up to date, part of it had to do with fire dispatch.

    And at the beginning of that, our instructor basically said “Almost nothing in this course is at all relevant to us. But it’s a national standard and we have to teach this to you”

    It had a lot to do with wildland firefighting and some other specific situations that have nothing to do with how things operate in our area or with the kinds of situations we deal with.

    It was interesting, I learned some fun facts, but I haven’t yet had any reason to use any of the knowledge I picked up from that training.

    And that time could have probably been better spent doing something else.


  • Funnily enough, I actually work in an agency that’s very close to Philly and deal with my counterparts in the city fairly regularly.

    I don’t get (or want) to listen to a whole lot of PPD radio chatter, we have plenty in our own county to keep us busy, so I don’t know for certain if they’re actually still using 10-codes or any other similar system or not. I can’t think of any time I’ve heard a Philly officer or dispatcher use one with me, but it’s certainly possible that they’re still in use there internally.

    Also even though we’re using plain language, there’s still some weird miscommunication that happens.

    I remember one time needing to advise Philly of a report of gunshots we received that might have been relevant to them, it was near their border.

    So I called over to their dispatch and advised them that “we received a report of shots fired in the area of…”

    Which kind of sent their dispatcher into a bit of a tizzy because in Philly dispatch lingo “shots fire” basically means an officer has fired their gun, but to us it’s just any report of gunshots (which, more often than not, means fireworks or something that the caller mistook for gunshots)


  • Just as an aside, most police codes aren’t really standardized across different agencies.

    There’s a handful of 10-codes that are pretty much universal, like “10-4”

    67 isn’t one of those codes. A lot of departments do use it for a report of a death

    But it’s also commonly used to advise of an important incoming message

    And other agencies may have other uses for it

    And other agencies use other systems besides 10 codes, I believe some departments in CA have been known to use penal code numbers

    But so because of that, there’s been a big movement in emergency service to use plain language over codes for the last decade or two, mostly since Katrina since different agencies using different codes lead to a lot of miscommunication there.

    I work in 911 dispatch, at my agency and pretty much everywhere around me it’s all plain language. One or two 10-codes linger around, more as informal slang than anything that gets official use. 10-4 sometimes gets used, but that’s practically just part of the English language now.

    10-96 also kind of lingers around in my agency, which in the set of 10-codes they used before I started was for a subject with mental health issues. We’re not really supposed to use it but no one has really come up with a better shorthand for it so it still pops up from time to time, mostly from our officers.


  • I think (and hope) people are downvoting you just because of the content of the article and not really paying attention to where it was posted.

    It’s maybe not the absolute best fit for this community, I’m not sure that it’s quite crazy enough to be an onion article, although in all honesty that line has become so blurry with how crazy the real world is these days that I can’t even say for certain whether the authors intended for this to be a genuine defense of this ridiculous project or some incredible tongue-in-cheek mockery of it.

    And to be clear, this project and any defense of it is insane, I get what you were going for sharing it here (or at least I hope I do)




  • This feels like a wonderful gift, this video needs to be projected behind every speaker at the next round of protests, with an accompanying message flashing at the bottom saying “Trump posted this himself” à la South Park’s “this what scientologists actually believe”

    It’s him literally labeling himself as a king, complete with a crown

    Shitting all over America.

    What possible angle could you look at this from and say "yes, that is a mature, mentally stable person who should be in charge of anything?

    And since most of the media is kind of dropping the ball on this, we need to be sharing this around as something like “Trump posts AI-slop video of himself as a king shitting on America” instead of the bullshit headlines I’m seeing about it.



  • I’m no expert on animal color vision, but different animals absolutely see color differently, some have markedly worse color vision than humans, others are even better

    And of course we can’t really know for certain how different animals perceive color since we can’t actually see the world through their eyes as it gets processed through their brain, though we can make some pretty educated guesses.

    AFAIK, most mammals except for some primates (like humans) and a few other exceptions, have dichromatic vision (have only 2 kinds of cone cells in their eyes instead of 3 like we do) so there’s gonna be some “gaps” in their color vision, and one of the common configurations is similar to red-green colorblindness in humans and would make orange look very similar or indistinguishable from green but the specifics do vary from one species to another.

    Other types of animals like many fish, birds, and reptiles actually have 4 types of cones and so can see parts of the spectrum we can’t (though it doesn’t necessarily mean they can or can’t see the same colors we do and then some, where we have receptors for red, blue, and green light, they might have for example, red, blue, blue-green, and green, giving them essentially the same range of color vision we do but with extra sensitivity to the blue/green part of the spectrum)

    And then of course you have animals like mantis shrimp with 12 or 16 types of receptors.


  • When I took my state’s required hunter safety course, one of the instructors was an older dude with grey hair and a ponytail who wouldn’t look out of place at a Dead & Company concert.

    To point out the importance of wearing an orange hat during small game seasons, and also to “be sure of your target and what lies beyond it” he pointed out how much that grey hair and ponytail would look a lot like a squirrel if you only caught a glimpse of it through some brush.

    Not saying that’s exactly what happened here, the kid doesn’t look like he was the grey ponytail type, but the article shook loose that memory in my head.

    EDIT: not that I’m ungrateful, but somehow this is now my highest rated comment on Lemmy, and I’m just curious why this one in particular resonated to well.




  • I think I see a bit of steam escaping from the pan, so I think they tried to weigh it after cooking

    Which makes sense, there’s going to be some weight change after you cook it because of evaporation and such… hence the steam

    Before cooking you couldn’t really call it Jollof Rice, it would just be a big pot of the raw ingredients for Jollof Rice

    And they know the weight of the ingredients going in already, they’re quoted in the article, so that’s just simple addition to figure out.


  • I know that when police in my area need to destroy evidence that’s no longer needed (and can’t just be disposed of in normal waste streams, or sold or what have you) they normally take it to a local garbage incineration plant.

    There was also a steel mill in the area at one point and their furnace was occasionally been put to use for similar purposes (tangential - there was at least one instance I’ve heard of where the US mint used that furnace to dispose of a batch of coins they were testing a new alloy or process or something on)


  • Except for a few obvious spam posts, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of any specific posts or comments I’ve seen that struck me as bots (although to be fair, I’m there may be some bias due to which communities I choose to follow)

    There are, however, plenty of idiots, people who don’t speak fluent English, trolls and other people whose motivations may not be purely good-faith discussion, people who probably have various types of neurodivergence and/or mental health issues

    And I could see some of those categories being very easily mistaken as a bot under a lot of circumstances.



  • The in-universe science behind Cyclops’ optic blasts have been very inconsistent over the years.

    The explanation that I’m personally familiar with is that his eyes themselves are portals to a dimension of pure concussive energy that doesn’t produce heat, and that energy is also conveniently blocked by ruby lenses in his glasses and visor, and also his own body is immune to it.

    Which doesn’t really make any sense from a real world physics perspective, but that’s comic books for you.

    And of course depending on what timeline/reboot/alternate universe you’re dealing with, who’s writing it, and what’s convenient for the plot, any of that can go right out the window, I’ve definitely seen him melt things and start fires with his blasts in some versions.

    I think another explanation that gets used sometimes is that his body absorbs sunlight to power them.


  • 3d printing is not the default fabrication method now that we’re getting good at it. It just shines in certain applications.

    Getting a little theoretical here

    With the current state of the technology, 3d printing lags behind some traditional manufacturing techniques like machining and in terms of speed, cost, quality, available materials, etc. except for some relatively niche cases.

    However, that gap is closing a bit every day, it may or may not ever catch up completely or surpass the old technique in those aspects

    But if it does ever get close, I could very much see 3d printing being a preferred method

    Subtractive manufacturing like machining, by design, creates a lot of waste, all of the chips and off cuts that are removed from the stock are either discarded or require additional energy and/or materials to recycle.

    And things like injection molding require custom molds that wear out over time, and can be expensive to design and manufacture

    And in either case, you’re largely locked into making one thing on an assembly line at a time, and to switch over to a different product you’re probably going to need to switch out a lot of the molds and tooling, recalibrate everything, etc. which can be time consuming.

    With 3d printing, you could theoretically use only the amount of material that’s actually in the finished product (if you design it that it doesn’t require any external supports ) you don’t need any custom tooling or mold, just generic, interchangeable nozzles (for FDM, LCD screens or lasers or whatever the equivalent is for other printing technologies) and you could switch production from one item to another by just hitting print on a different file.

    Again, we’re not there, may never be there, but it’s a cool thing to think about


  • You can go way down the rabbit hole here, you can blame Christian European colonial powers, but you can blame the pre-christian Roman empire for opening that door for Christianity to spread into Europe in the first place, you can blame Jews for being the religion that Christianity spun off of, you can blame various other religions and cultures that eventually morphed into Judaism

    You can do that all the way back to the first organism that evolved that had a hint of sapience if you really want to

    But that would be ridiculous.

    That’s all in the past, and while it’s important to understand how we ended up here, we can’t do a damn thing to change any of that.

    However here and now, we have groups like family watch international actively fanning the flames and funding this crap.

    They’re not the only ones, they’re not all American, but you have your head in the fucking sand if you think America isn’t the biggest piece of this puzzle.


  • It’s not everyone’s thing to be sure, but I started going to a nudist resort largely because of this. I really just wanted a place to go hang out that has a pool that’s not overrun with kids.

    It is technically a family resort, not too many people actually show up with kids, but there’s occasionally a few, and while I don’t particularly want to see naked kids (or honestly most of the adults either, nudists are rarely the kinds of people you’d want to see naked,) the parents are obviously keeping an eye on their kids there and keep them under control.