• 4 Posts
  • 226 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle
  • I guess if, as this person says, the intended use is made clear then presumably so long as the original logs from which the report was generated are retained then there shouldn’t really be an issue. Make your nice, digestible reports that normalise over a workday and give a more grand overview of progress, and if they smell a bit too rosy or you just sometimes need a more granular accounting of time then clients/bosses can request the original raw data from the contractor/employee. Maybe this software itself should include some ability to retain a log of the processing that was done so that the relationship between its generated reports and the source data can be more clearly audited if some kind of a trust issue arises.

    The hope I guess would be that you make it clear that this is a more executive summary style of report that you’ve added as a courtesy because it’s more useful in context and that’s hopefully enough for whoever you’re reporting to but if they want more transparency or detail it’s all there for them too.


  • When tomatoes, olives, capsicum and zucchini are ‘fruit’ then the definition isn’t serving it’s purpose for anyone discussing cooking or eating or procuring those things. It’s a different meaning of the word that’s useful in particularly narrow settings but useless outside of those settings. The only reason people like to repeat the claims of ‘technically a fruit’ for various vegetables, outside of the context of maybe agriculture or scientific research or horticulture is because it’s amusingly counterintuitive and contrarian which is exactly why it should be disregarded.


  • Pineapple remains the only sweet fruit I’ve ventured on a pizza but when you asked this my first guess would have been apple, especially because it pairs so well with pork so I’m surprised that made it to the bad idea category. Did anyone expand on why? I would have thought a pizza with almost any kind of pork but especially thick cut ham would be enhanced by a very sparing quantitiy of thin apple slices. I’d bet even some non-traditional cuts of pork might end up working well, like some thin strips of pork belly.







  • I think it probably still has to be Christmas sandwiches. It’s a whole British style Christmas dinner in a sandwich.

    • Slices of freshly roasted turkey
    • Stuffing
    • Sliced up roasted pork sausages
    • Bacon
    • Baked ham
    • Baby peas
    • Bread sauce
    • Thick, salty, meaty turkey gravy
    • Cranberry sauce

    The key is in stacking it high without it all falling over and then squishing it all down to hold it’s shape. Traditionally for my family it’s the most commercial, crappy supermarket white sliced bread you can find, but I have had it with some pretty yummy sourdough. The bread is important because with all the greasy mushy sauces, it needs a tight crumb structure so you don’t get bits of sauce coming through the hospital Les as you bite. You want something soft because you don’t want to be chewing and tearing hard crusts whilst trying to keep the delicate sandwich all together, but if it’s too soft then it tends to fall apart from all the moisture in the gravy and bread sauce. Sometimes toasting just the inner faces of the bread can work, but it has to be lightly toasted to make sure the bread retains some flexibility during the squish down step.

    We all like the sandwiches even more than the actual Christmas dinner, which is already awesome.


  • Cheapest Logitech mouse I could find in the supermarket about 6-7 years ago.

    As others have said, it might be more to do with my browser choice, browser settings and extensions. That said I remember when I first started seeing these years ago that sometimes it’d think I was a robot and sometimes it wouldn’t and maybe it was a placebo effect, but I felt fairly confident then that me jiggling the mouse really helped. Now it doesn’t matter what I do. My natural movement, a deliberately wonky but still single and continuous movement or a totally artificial mouse wiggle after the clock, I’ll always have to do captchas.





  • If you don’t count Solitaire then I think it’d probably be Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure. I suppose technically it might have been this other game where you’re a rabbit and it somehow involved spelling, but I don’t remember what that was called and it was only on my friend’s family’s computer and it was educational so it doesn’t count. It was on a floppy disk that was actually the floppy kind.





  • I think you’re missing the point of why that phrase became a bit of a joke and is considered unhelpful. It’s not written off because people think mitochondria are unimportant or should be written off, it’s because when you’re a teen learning this stuff and they’re trying to explain how cells work, mitochondria are a particularly strange and complicated thing that’s thrown in to the mix, and it sounds important and complicated but in lieu of any real details there’s the sudden brick wall of this weirdly uncharacteristic phrase that doesn’t really sound like how you’re teacher normally speaks, doesn’t really read like how the rest of the textbook reads and other than some vague allusion to “power” fails quite spectacularly to tell you what mitochondria are.

    Part of what made it maddeningly confusing was that these lessons are getting you thinking about how mechanisms can coalesce to form larger systems, encouraging you interrogate macro scale phenomena down to the smallest scales and see how it all ticks and then suddenly they hit you with this magic “powerhouse”, very poorly explained, and which because of that poor explanation appears somehow irreducibe. You know mitochondria have “power” of some sort but any of their own mechanisms are conspicuously left out of the picture. This is probably for good reason because of the difficulty of making a syllabus that isn’t too deep or broad for the time available and for teenagers to pick up but it’s a very sudden brick wall. HOW do the mitochondria power cells? Do the mitochondria have cells? Do the mitochondria’s cells have mitochondria? How are they transmitting this power to our cells? The way this phrase was used was more reminiscent of a slogan, or an ad campaign and quite unlike much of anything else one remembers from biology class, it felt very… out of context. Even the choice of the word “power house” always felt weird, as it wasn’t for me at least, a word commonly encountered so to use it as an analogy really undermined it’s ability to help you grasp anything as it sought to explain one concept in terms of another only vaguely understood concept. I gathered this was a similar term to “power plant” although other than a popular museum in Sydney I had never heard the term used outside of that goofy phrase and to say mitochondria function similar to a power plant, in that they produce power doesn’t really say much more than, “mitochondria are the energy source of cells” which is similarly meaningless in all but the most basic sense.

    So, don’t blame the mocking meme for dismissing mitochondria, blame the weird ass phrase the meme mocks for completely failing to explain anything about them and relegating them to a single, cryptic, hand waving sentence.



  • I think a big part of why it took off and lives on as a meme in the internet forums sense of the word, was the familiarity of the bizarre and unnatural phrase to the young adults using those forums who remembered it from biology class.

    Certainly that’s how it was for me because before Digg, or Reddit, even before Facebook (though I guess not that long before), I had had that phrase uttered sincerely as part of my education and it was so uncanny and funny to see that this highly specific and distinctive phrase was used rote, word for word, at schools all over the world and was as memorably unhelpful to others as it had been to me. Perhaps the positive feedback loop from this phrase’s new life on the web really has fed in to education in a life imitating art kind of way like you describe, but I can assure you it definitely predated it’s status as a joke, and that’s where that joke came from.