Plinth

and i didnt get blinded. so clearly lab safety isnt real and you should always risk it cus taking risks is awesome #gambling

Don't TASTE anything in a chemistry lab.

Don't SMELL anything in a biology lab.

Don't TOUCH anything in a medical lab.

and, most importantly,

The problem was that photography at that point had relatively insensitive emulsions on the plates and he had to come up with a way to get crisp photos. This involved some chemistry plus a lot of "cheating". He took the photos on a very sunny day, set up a white background to reflect more light, used light colored sand on the track.

James Burke covered this pretty well in Connections in the episode "Countdown", which is worth watching in its entirety. Here's the section on Muybridge:

This is a given.

If the last digit is divisible by 2 (a.k.a. even), then so is the whole number.

If the sum of the digits is divisible by 3, then so is the whole number. The recursivity of this means that if the sum has multiple digits, you can add them up again until you get a single digit and see if it's 3, 6, or 9.

Like the rule for 2, but check if the last two digits are divisible by 4.

If it ends in 5 or 0.

If the rules for both 2 and 3 apply.

No shortcut. Alas.

Like the rules for 2 and 4, but check if the last three digits are divisible by 8. (Yes, this pattern keeps going for 16, 32, etc.)

Like the rule for 3, but the sum of the digits (or the sum of the sum of the digits, etc.) must be 9.

For example, 294

29 4

4×2=8

29-8=21

21 is divisible by 7

Second example, 1946

194 6

6×2=12

194-12=182

182 is still large, so let do it again

18 2

2×2=4

18-4=14

Flash forward 8 years when I was taking a number theory class and at one point I was having trouble keeping focus on the Chinese Remainder Theorem and I started thinking about the 9 rule where you sum the digits and see if that is divisible by 9.

Guess what? This is an artifact of numbers in base 10. It turns out that the same rule applies in base n for the number n-1.

For 7, first convert the number to base 8. Sum the digits in base 8 and if the number is a multiple of 7, then the original number is divisible by 7.

70 in base 8 is 106. Sum the digits -> 7, divisible by 7.

62 in base 8 is 76. Sum the digits -> 15, sum the digits -> 6 - not divisible by 7.

When I was in college, I attended a talk given by Andy Moorer from Lucasfilm. He's best known for the THX sound, but he's done a lot more. His talk was about how every sound in movies is dubbed in and is exaggerated in order to get your attention. So may cars have squeaky brakes and squeal their tires (especially on dirt roads). The sound of someone getting punched in the nose is a composite of several sounds:

a whoosh for the fist moving quickly (microphone in a vacuum cleaner hose)

a short slap for the initial impact (a small caliber pistol shot)

a crunch for the nose breaking (a melon dropped from a second story window hitting pavement)

a series of thumps for the body hitting the ground (a box of boxing gloves dumped on the ground)

He claimed that if it wasn't for Hollywood making westerns that had lots of fits fights, the fruit-growing region of California would have gone under because of all the melons Hollywood studios were buying to drop out of windows. I suspect this is apochryphal.

Star Wars has a number of interesting sounds. For the land speeder, they recorded cars driving by on the freeway with the microphone in a long pipe. I have personally tried this and it is true. People walking in snow on Hoth was someone making their fingers walk in a tub of flour.

Andy talked about the time he saw someone on a Foley stage throwing squid at a wall.

He also talked about recording ordinance for Apocalypse Now. They "knew a guy" who had a lot of firearms and ammunition from the Vietnam war. So they went out into the middle of nowhere and recorded them firing it. Unfortunately, 15 year old ammunition isn't always reliable. They shot an RPG which misfired, ricocheted off the sound van and it went directly in front of the recording engineer, who was standing with the recording deck around his neck and a microphone in each hand. As it went by, the engineer said, "shheeeeeeeiiiit" while he was turning his head to track the RPG which ended up un the recording panning from one ear to the other. Moorer claimed it's in the movie.

Unbeknownst to many, cartooning is one of the most dangerous jobs out there.

Forget wading in sewage, or repelling off a mountain, or welding a bridge pillar underwater: try spending one day with us down in the cold, dark, joke mines... Watch us wrestle with filthy punchlines. Wash our hands from the soot and grime we've collected by tireless hours of drawing.

Dry our tears when we've given up all hope of ever seeing the sky again!

But we're happy to do it. We'd do anything for a joke.

Here's why - Costco sells rotisserie chickens as a loss leader. They're $5 which is substantially less than the cost of the chicken itself, however, with some care and planning that chicken can be used to make 3 to 4 meals that will feed 3 people. Here are things I do with one chicken:

pull the meat and separate light from dark. Put the skin and the carcass and put into an instant pot with leftover wilty vegetables, bay leaf, and peppercorns and make chicken broth.

Use 1/2 the light meat for a protein in a salad

Use the other half of the light meat in either a stir fry or in filling for crepes or enchiladas. There usually enough leftovers to make at least one or two lunches.

Use the dark meat and chicken broth in soup or making chicken pot pie. There is usually enough leftovers to make two lunches.

I am not kidding when I say that the each of those meals is filling and delicious and costs well under $5 a serving.

This is called being frugal where you're not necessarily cheap, you're just not wasting anything.

So the headline is written to either enrage people and make clickbait or to generate "LULZ those poors can't afford things because they're (checks notes) eating".

As a side note, a bag of avocados at Costco is also a loss leader at $0.75 per avocado. Don't believe me? My local grocery store sells avocados at $1.50 each when they're on SALE. It's, frankly, a good deal. Two pieces of bread, one avocado and some pepper or "everything but the bagel" seasoning and you've got a pretty damn good, filling breakfast.

Here is part of a meal I made for my family: coronation chicken - which is a chicken salad made with chicken breast meat, mayo, yogurt, apricot jam, curry, and almonds.

Here is a video about turning a whole chicken into high end chicken broth (he uses the entire chicken, but TBH you can use just the carcass and skin and end up with very good broth):

Even if you use the whole chicken, his recipe will make several quarts of amazing broth that ends up costing way less than grocery store broth. Even with just the carcass and skin, this makes better broth than store bought. And it freezes well. To freeze broth, after it's cooled, you can portion it into silicone muffin pans. When frozen, pop them out into put them into an air tight freezer bag. The silicone is to make it easier to remove and the reason for the using them is that each cavity is usually 1/2 C so you're preportioning. Need 2C of broth? Grab 4 pucks. Also, the puck form factor melts reasonably quickly.

Here is a recipe for savory crepes that use chicken:

With regards to the crepes, if you understand the basics of cooking, this recipe comes down to: crepes filled with chicken and gruyere topped with a mornay sauce. Now a traditional mornay sauce is made with gruyere, which is expensive, but you can substitute so many other cheeses that will work just fine, like cheddar, havarti, jack, or gouda.

If you watch Jean-Pierre's videos, he's doing very traditional French cooking, but he's simplifying a lot of the steps to make things more approachable. What he's omitting are the things that you might do in a restaurant when you have the resources to dedicate to them in prep because you're going to make dozens of servings. At the same time, he injects a bunch of hacks that really smart. For example, if you don't have home made beef stock on hand (which, like the above chicken broth is far, far, better than store bought), he shows how you can make it better by adding tomato paste. He doesn't explain why this works, but its actually really simple: tomatoes are rich in glutamates and store bought beef broth is heavily salted. When you mix the two, the tomato past thickens the broth and gives it more body and the salt in the broth and the glutamates make (tada) monosodium glutamate - instant umami. And no, MSG is not a bad thing in reasonable quantity.

Imagine an alternate universe where we couldn’t make comics and be forced to get a real job! Trains would be crashing, pots would be exploding, and our patient would be flatlining on the operating table while we tested out our latest jokes on the OR staff. By joining our Patreon you enable us to do what we do best: making you laugh week for week, come rain or shine, with our comics. Your support means we don’t have to get a real job, which saves hundreds –nay – thousands of lives each week. Amazing!

Oh, you want to only wear sweats because you don't like the way that other clothing feels? That's fine 95% of the time and I'd rather that you feel comfortable so that's not an issue. Oh, you want a mohawk? It's your hair, go right ahead. Oh, you don't want to wear a jacket even though it's super cold outside? I'll bring the jacket along in case you have a change of heart.

Now because I spent years putting those in place, it's actually easier to say, "we're going to your cousin's wedding and you need to wear a suit" because we gave him agency so many times in the past. A lot of the things that would trigger oppositional defiance also fall into the category of "because I said so" which is what a tired parent who has been bullied would say. If you weren't hit with "because I said so" by your parents, you're more inclined to listen when it matters. If you were hit with "because I said so" often, then you are disinclined to believe your parents because you have been taught that your parents are iron-fisted and arbitrary. In a way this is like "they boy who cried wolf" except that it's "the parents who cried 'because I said so'"

And there are still little parenting things you can do to make it better. For example, I know that my son did not want to wear a suit, so I let him in on a conspiracy that even though you have to wear a suit that you can rebel with your choice of tie. Did he wear a tie with D&D beholders on it? Yup. I wore a tie with stylized Batman heads. Nobody noticed.

tl;dr - if you allow your children an appropriate amount of agency in making choices when the outcome doesn't actually matter, then it's easier to convince them when it does because honestly, those circumstances are pretty rare.

Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:

This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I’ve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, “Um,” from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.

And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We’re just… in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?

She didn’t even have garlic bread in her cart.

I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.

Well, the registers don’t like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she’s not by her pager.

At this point, both myself and the lady are just… dumbfounded. She’s not even mad. I’m not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There’s a bit of laughter, but it’s mostly just… confusion.

I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she’s not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.

“What… did you do?”

“I genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea.”

She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn’t scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.

My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, “I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.”

And that’s when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn’t take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don’t. But I swear to God it happened.