There are 3 naturally occuring types of carbon, called isotopes, ¹²C, ¹³C, and ¹⁴C. These are all basically the same except for the number of neutrons in the nucleus of the atom. Living things can use all 3 types to build sugars and proteins and all those other organic molecules needed for life. Animals get it from the food they eat, plants get it from the air. These 3 isotopes all exist in nature in a pretty consistent ratio

¹⁴C, however, is unstable (radioactive) and over time decays into more stable elements.

But it also is constantly getting replenished from cosmic rays interacting with other gases in the atmosphere to in the atmosphere, so as long as something is alive the ratio of carbon 14 in that plant or animal to the other types of carbon stays pretty consistent.

But once it dies, it’s not taking any new carbon in, so what was there when it died is all it’s ever going to have until it decomposes away entirely or gets eaten by scavengers or whatever. The ¹²C and ¹³C are basically going to stay put, while the ¹⁴C slowly decays.

So to date something you just need to look at the ratio of the different types of carbon and you can figure out how old it is.

Let’s say ¹⁴C has a half life (the time it takes for half of it to decay) of 1 year (its actually something like 5 or 6 thousand years but this makes the math easy with smaller, easier to digest numbers)

And let’s say the ratio is 1:1, ¹²C+¹³C to ¹⁴C (again, it’s more like 1% carbon 14 IRL)

So after a year, half of the ¹⁴C will be gone, and the ratio will be 2:1

After another year half of that remaining ¹⁴C will be gone and it’ll be a 4:1 ratio, another year and it’s 8:1, etc.

This of course has limitations. After a long enough time basically all of the carbon 14 will be gone and you can’t really date things that way anymore. I think the limit is something like 50,000 years.

It’s also only really useful for plants, animals, and stuff made from them (leather, textiles, the straw in mud brick buildings, food, etc.)

So not really useful for dating rocks from a few billion years ago like we would need to date remnants of Theia.

There’s also a few things that can cause more ¹⁴C to form than normal, humans caused one with our nuclear testing, there was another event around the 8th century that we’ve discovered from measuring the carbon 14 in tree rings from that time that we think may have been caused by a supernova sending more cosmic rays our way than usual. So those events also need to be accounted for.

But there’s other similar techniques using elements with longer half lives that we can use to date older or inorganic materials.

For example uranium-lead dating. When the mineral Zircon forms, it tends to include uranium but exclude lead. But over time uranium decays into lead, so if you have a sample of zircon, you can measure how much lead is in it and figure out how long ago it must have formed because that lead must have once been uranium that has decayed at a steady pace over the centuries.

So we can use methods like that to determine when certain rocks formed.

We know pretty well what the earth and moon are made of (X% silica, Y% Iron, Z% aluminum, etc. with certain amounts of different isotopes) so if we were to find some deposit of minerals that deviates a lot from what you’d find elsewhere on earth or the moon, it’s pretty safe to say that that material might have originated elsewhere, like on theia.

I think you seriously underestimate the value of a propane grill

No. There’s not much that you can do on one that you can’t theoretically do on your stove or in your oven

But if you’re doing something that’s likely to smoke up, you can do that without filling your house with smoke, and sometimes a grill is exactly what’s needed for ripping hot direct heat, not everyones stove or oven can replicate those conditions well.

There’s less cleanup, usually you’re cooking things right on the grill, no pots and pans to deal with later, just utensils, plates, and the grill itself which often doesn’t need much more than a quick scrub or sometimes you can even get away with just burning it off.

Using your stove or oven can sometimes noticeably heat up your house, and in the summer that’s something most people are trying to avoid.

If you’re having an outdoor event, you can stay outside where the party is instead of hanging around away from everyone in the kitchen. You’re opening the door less to bring out food as it’s ready so you’re keeping the cool air inside and the bugs outside.

And frankly, not everything really benefits much from charcoal. If you just want to grill up some hot dogs you’re not gonna notice a ton of difference between charcoal and propane.

And all of that does of course apply to charcoal as well, but what gas brings to the table is convenience. Turn a couple knobs, press a button, and your grill is ready to go in a couple minutes. No waiting for the charcoal to get going, no needing to add more later on if you’re doing a long cook (and if you do manage to kill your propane tank, if you’ve got a spare, it takes all of 30 seconds to swap it out for a fresh one) and once you’re done cooking, just turn the knobs the other way and the fire is out and the grill will cool off pretty quickly. No need to worry about your still burning coals that might keep going for another couple hours because you misjudged how much you needed. And it’s less fiddly, want it hotter? Just turn up the gas. Cooler? Turn it down. You get basically instant feedback about how hot your grill is, unlike with charcoal where you may need to spend some time fucking around with the vents to get the right airflow.

If I can, and I have time, I prefer charcoal, but I will always have at least a small propane grill around as well, because it’s pretty hard to beat that convenience when you just want to quickly grill up a couple things for a weeknight dinner and be done with it.

I work in 911 dispatch. Of all of the dumb shit I get calls about, these are hardly the things that are holding up our queue.

It happens, if there’s, for example, a bad accident on a highway during rush hour, we very well might get 100 people calling about it.

But those calls take like 10 seconds to handle.

Caller: Hi, I’m on I69 and…

Me: are you calling about the accident near mile 420 westbound?

Caller: yes I am

Me: Police have already been dispatched. We’re you involved in the accident or did you see it happen?

Caller: no, I was just driving past, I just wanted to make sure someone had called

Me: thank you for checking in, have a nice day click

End of call.

And sometimes, we do need/want more information about an accident (for example,) and we need to see if we can get that from the caller. “Can you tell if anyone is hurt” so we can send an ambulance if we need to. “Are they blocking traffic?” Because that ups the urgency a bit because it might cause more accidents. “Can you tell if everyone was out of the car?” Because the previous callers were saying it was on fire but couldn’t tell if they got out. Etc.

And I don’t like the idea of an AI making the call for me whether more questions need to be asked or not, and sometimes the situation changes and we need to know and I feel like a lot of people wouldn’t stay on the line for us to figure out if that’s the case if they get an AI telling them that we’re already aware.

–

Pretty much the one thing I’d like to see automated, and it really doesn’t need to be AI powered, is calling back hang-ups. We do actually waste a lot of time calling back people who butt-dialed us, and I do feel like an automated call-back with a message like “This is an automated call from 911, we just received a hang up call from this number, please do not hang up, police may have already been dispatched to the location provided by your phone. If you dialed by mistake, please press 1 now and we will disregard your call. If you do need police, fire, or medical assistance, press 2 or stay on the line and your call will be answered by our next available call-taker, si hablas Espanol, pulsa 3…”

I work in 911 dispatch

A neighboring county to the one I work for briefly used an AI on their non-emergency lines (which are also mostly handled through their 911 center but go further back in the queue) just to route calls to the appropriate station or dispatcher.

It had one job, it had to understand the name of the town you were saying and transfer your call to whoever was responsible for that town. It wasn’t gathering any other info, it wasn’t dispatching police/fire/EMS, it wasn’t providing medical instructions or any of the other things you would expect

And it could not do that. When I had to transfer a caller to it, almost without fail I would say the name of the town they were calling for a couple times, being misunderstood every time, until the cranker would ask me “would you like to speak to a dispatcher?” And I’d say “yes” because that’s all I really wanted in the first place. Luckily it at least could understand “yes”

And I’m a reasonably clearly-spoken person who’s transferring calls with a level head. I’m not someone with a strong accent on top of a speech impediment, who’s drunk off my ass, and talking a mile a minute because they’re worked up over some emergency. The same can’t be said for all of my callers.

It lasted maybe a month before they got rid of it.

Now it could be that neighboring county really cheaped out on their AI assistant, and maybe there’s others out there that could do better, but every time I’ve been forced to use any kind of voice recognition , AI or not, that’s pretty much been my experience.

–

I also once had a call come in from one of our stations. They were asking for a call from another of our police departments regarding an incident that occurred at a store in that town that was related to a case they were working on.

There was a problem though, that store doesn’t have a location in that town. It does have locations in a couple nearby towns though, and we get that kind of confusion a lot because mailing addresses can be a little different than the actual municipality and sometimes people just casually lump a couple towns together, so I asked if they had the address for the store to make sure I was getting them in touch with the right department.

They gave me an address, complete with a town name, that is about 3 hours away from here.

I asked them why they were asking for the town they did when that address is clearly nowhere near here, and they answered that they asked Google’s AI where that address was and it told them that it was in that other town in our county.

And I’m not sure which is worse- that the AI was that far off on what should be a pretty simple query (“where is [town]?” Obviously [town] isn’t in [town] it’s in [totally different town] /s) or the fact that the human working the desk at that police station didn’t even bother to question that blatantly wrong answer.

So anyway, I really don’t like AI having anything to do with my job, it’s just bad at it.

My wife and I have kind of turned into eclipse chasers, we did TN in 2016, Montreal 2024, and in a couple days we’re off to Iceland for another.

We always plan on not doing much the day of the eclipse, figuring that traffic and such would be a nightmare, and leave ourselves a couple days on either side of the eclipse to hopefully avoid even more traffic.

I don’t remember exactly what days we did for TN, but I remember on our way home a couple days later we still hit what seemed like a weird amount of traffic for the area we were in.

Day of the 2017 eclipse we really lucked out. We stayed at a little campground a little bit outside of Nashville, and about 10 minutes away from there we found some sort of wildlife conservation area. It was gated and I’m not totally clear if it was really supposed open to the public, but as luck would have it just as we were pulling up to the gate some sort of conservation officer/ranger/game warden type guy also pulled up there. We asked if we were allowed in, he asked what we were gonna do and we said we basically just planned to set up a couple camp chairs and a camera on a tripod and look and watch the eclipse and he gave us the go-ahead, so we had a big open field to ourselves.

For Montreal, we took the train up from NYC, and the AirBnB we booked had a really nice rooftop deck, so we just posted up there.

We’ll see where we end up in Reykjavik, fingers crossed the weather cooperates.

Yeah, autocorrect was doing me dirty there

I don’t know how available they are in the UK, but I’m a big fan of Danner boots. Most, if not all of their styles are available in wide, a lot of them are recraftable so the sole, shank, heel counter, and liner can be replaced either by sending them back to Danner or by a competent local cobbler. They have a lot of options and I’m pretty sure at least one of them is somewhat similar to a classic timberland.

I have a pair of Danner lights with some hard miles on them hiking and close to daily wear. I got about 4 years out of them before it was time for a resole and the uppers are still in pretty good shape, and I expect to get at least another 4 years out of them.

IMO, no shoe is truly BIFL if you wear them regularly, especially anything that’s going to get put to serious use and abuse. Keeping them clean, the leather conditioned, letting them dry and rotating your footwear will go a long way towards extending their usable lifespan, and getting quality recraftable boots, while a bigger upfront cost, will save you money in the long run.

I wasn’t part of the trials, but I was probably one of the first hundred or so people in my county vaccinated. I work in our 911 dispatch center and they were able to secure the vaccine for us and other essential first responder type roles, and I remember a lot of my doctor friends were still trying to figure out where they could get the vaccine at the time.

I worked nights at the time, went to the vaccine clinic after my shift. I remember they made us sit around for like 20 minutes to make sure we didn’t have any kind of immediate adverse reaction, no one did and I went home and went to bed. I woke up feeling fine, then a couple hours later I had some fatigue and chills and I ended up crashing early. Woke up feeling fine, and the only side effect from subsequent doses was that my arm was sore for a few days.

I figure if I worked a normal day shift schedule, and still got the vaccine in the morning the side effects probably would have hit me about when I was going to sleep anyway and I would have slept through them.

Most bite valves I’ve had are pretty much universal, the tubing is usually about the same size from one brand to another so you pretty much just need to jam the barb fitting in. If it seems like it’s a little loose you could probably throw a hose clamps on it if you were really intent on not buying a new hose.

At the other end of the hose the fitting to connect it to the bladder may be another story, that definitely changes from brand to brand and over time as they roll out new models, so getting a new one to fit may be impossible.

I’m not really a jewelry-wearer, and certainly not an expensive jewelry wearer

That said, I think it’s kind of fun. If I were the kind of person to wear jewelry, I might consider this. I’m a pretty hands-on, DIYer type of guy, I find myself fucking around with hose clamps pretty often, and hell, I might even say I have a bit of affection for them, I’ve solved a lot of problems with them.

That price seems steep to me, but I feel that way about most jewelry. I don’t know what material it’s made out of or how big it is, maybe that’s a fair price for how much silver or whatever is in it, maybe it’s horribly inflated.

Regarding marriage and relationships

I saw a reddit thread many years ago before I met my wife asking for advice from long-time couples.

I was single at the time, and was pretty comfortable with that, not that I wasn’t interested in being in a relationship, but it wasn’t a priority for me and I never had much luck picking up girls.

Most of it was the usual stuff about communication, and sharing housework, respect, and all of that.

But the one that stood out to me was

“Don’t forget to date your wife”

A good many years later, I managed to stumble my way bass-ackwards into dating my now-wife. A few years later we were married.

And for a lot of couples, dating kind of slows down at that point. One or both of them stop putting in effort, and they just kind of stagnate and drift apart.

That’s far from the only reason relationships fail of course, but I think that’s a bigger part in a lot of cases than many people think.

So I always keep my ear to the ground for cool events, restaurants, shows, places to go, things to do, etc. and make sure that there’s always something coming up on the horizon for us to look forward to. Sometimes it’s a simple dinner at a restaurant we’ve been to countless times, sometimes it’s a big elaborate day out where we get dressed up, find our way to a couple different nice bars and restaurants, walk around a museum, see a show or to an orchestra performance, etc.

I try to have at least one thing planned a month, not always successfully, but more often than not, and we sometimes squeeze in another little spontaneous date night or two here and there. Most of the time we’re out doing something fun as a couple at least once a week.

I liked how the DM started things off on one campaign I played in

We agreed that we’d be an already established party so we could pretty much jump right into things and not have to do a whole “I’m putting together a team” thing the first session.

We had our characters mostly ready beforehand and gave the DM a brief overview of them. It was loosely set in the forgotten realms, so we were already pretty familiar with the setting, but if it was a home brewed setting all we probably would have really needed was a brief primer of the major factions and locations. Most of us weren’t tied to any major factions, or our ties were pretty loose.

For our session zero, he basically had us figure out how we knew the characters to the left and right of us while he pulled each of us off one by one to run through a quick little backstory roleplay to give us a couple personal plot hooks we could latch onto

For example, I was playing a fighter with a soldier background, I remember the guy next to me was playing a barbarian, so we decided that sometime in the past his tribe had tried to invade my city, hijinks ensued, and we had ended up stranded somewhere together and bonded, missed out on most of that war, and became friends.

And when the DM pulled me back, we ran a quick scenario from another conflict I’d been involved in against cultists of some kind where I’d been captured during the final battle, the enemy had attempted to turn me into some sort of living statue servant, but the spell was interrupted, leaving me with a stone fist. I was rescued, managed to be present when the big bad was defeated, and was counted as sort of a minor hero of that war.

Unfortunately that stone fist kind of ruined my plans of retiring quietly to be a farmer or something (hard to do farm tasks one-handed) so I turned to being an adventurer to make ends meet. Recruited my old barbarian buddy who brought another of his friends on-board etc.

And once we all had our backgrounds and how we know each other sorted out, we hopped into things.

I ended up being kind of a central part of what brought us into town at the start of the campaign- my old commanding officer was getting a promotion and had sent me an invite to the ceremony. Of course it didn’t go off without a hitch and the ceremony was interrupted by an assassination attempt, and evidence pointed to it being tied to the cult we thought was defeated in that previous conflict, but there were some other things dropped that tied into some of the other players’ backstories as well, and off we went.

I think that did a very good job of making us feel like we were part of the world and not just some murder hobos dropped into it to run rampant. We all had history with each other and in the setting, and it wasn’t just words on paper that no one else was really going to read, it gave us a chance to actually act out a bit of that backstory and sort of collaboratively figured out our place in the world before the campaign started.

They do sell a version of it here, but it can be pretty hard to track down, it’s definitely not available in my state (PA) But I’ve seen it in a couple stores in other states.

I think bison grass isn’t allowed to be imported to the US, so they use something else that’s pretty close in flavor. For a while I think they were branding it as “Zu” but that may have changed.

It’s called Żubrówka, and it’s flavored with bison grass

This will all be a bit of a simplification

Calories are a unit of energy. When were talking about food we’re usually talking about kilocalories, in the US we usually just say Calories (with a capital C) some other countries may list them as “kcal.” It’s the same thing, 1000 calories (with a lower case c) is 1 dietary Calorie/kilocalorie. The calorie is defined as the amount of energy it takes to raise 1ml of water 1 degree Celsius. That might feel like a weird way to think about energy from food, but energy is energy, whether you’re using it to think, move, or just keep your body temperature where it’s supposed to be

The fuels your body uses for most of its energy are sugars. Sugars are a type of carbohydrate (carb,) which are chemicals that are basically just chains of different amounts of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.

We general group these into 3 main types

Simple carbs (mono- and di- saccharides)- basically sugars. Glucose is a sugar and the one your body primarily uses, most other carbs basically get broken down into glucose. Sugars are easy for your body to break down and use almost immediately. Sucrose (table sugar) fructose (from plants) maltose, dextrose, lactose, basically anything you might see on a food label that ends in -ose.

Complex carbs (polysaccharides)- these are things like starches. They’re basically just a bigger molecule that your body needs a little more time to break down into simpler sugars, so you’re not really going to be getting energy from them for a few hours or even the next day. This is why you might hear about athletes “carbo-loading” with something like a big spaghetti dinner the day before a big event, the energy from that dinner will be available to them in time for that event.

Dietary fiber - these are basically just really complex carbs that your body can’t really break down like cellulose (there’s that -ose ending again.) Some other animals can break them down for energy, like cows do some extra fermentation in their guts which is why they have 4-chambered stomachs that lets them break it down, but we can’t. It’s still important to other aspects of digestion for us but we’re not burning it for fuel.

Related to that is the glycemic index, which is basically a measure of how fast your body can process those carbs. Sugars have a high glycemic index and raise your blood sugar rapidly. Complex carbs have a lower glycemic index and raise it more gradually.

It wasn’t part of your question, but I feel like that obviously leads to some discussion about insulin and diabetes. Insulin is a hormone that regulates how fast glucose (which remember is the basic sugar that your body runs on and everything else pretty much gets broken down into) is absorbed from your blood into the rest of your body. People with diabetes don’t produce enough insulin, which means that sugar just kind of builds up in their blood and doesn’t get absorbed by their body, which, putting it mildly, is very bad. Not gonna go into too much detail on that, because it’s outside of the scope of the question, and we’re also dancing around the limits of my own knowledge.

Also a bit off topic but let’s talk about fat. You’ve eaten more calories than you really need to sustain yourself, what does your body do with the excess energy/sugar? Well it will try to convert some of that sugar into fat to store for later use when you’re getting less calories from your diet that you really need. It’s an emergency store of energy. It’s sort of slow and energy intensive for your body to convert fat back into sugars that it can use, so your body really only starts burning those fat reserves when there’s no other source of energy available.

Which brings around to the last thing you asked about - gluten. Gluten is a protein found in some grains, when you knead dough made from flour which contains gluten you basically get all of those gluten proteins to get all tangled up and form a stretchy web which makes the dough nice and stretchy, let’s it trap gas bubbles from yeast fermenting or chemical leaveners like baking soda/baking powder, and gives bread a bit of a chewy texture.

Just like with fat and carbs, your body can break down protein for energy (and it kind of needs other things from proteins, but that’s neither here nor there) and for most people gluten is just fine, not much different than if they were eating meat or beans or other protein-rich foods.

But some people have medical issues that prevent their bodies from processing gluten properly and eating it makes them sick, so they need to avoid it in their diet.

Gluten-free foods aren’t necessarily low-carb (or low-calorie,) something like a potato is basically all carbs, but has no gluten.

But if you’re trying to create a substitute for something that would normally be made with something like wheat flour (which is what most bread and pasta is made from, for example, and has a lot gluten and tons of carbs) one of the obvious ways to do that is by substituting something else for that flour that doesn’t contain gluten, like maybe chickpeas, and most of those substitutes are going to be lower-carb than flour, so most gluten-free substitutes tend to be fairly low carb, which sometimes makes them handy for people who need to reduce how many carbs they’re eating even if they don’t have any real need to avoid gluten.

Under some circumstances, a car may need to brake suddenly, like if a kid or deer or something runs out into the road, the car in front of you suddenly breaks down, a car suddenly swerves into your lane, etc.

And so you need to be allowing enough space between yourself and the car in front of you and paying attention so that you can stop in case that car does suddenly.

When they assign fault for an accident, it’s usually not 100% one party or the other’s fault. In a case where someone slams on the brakes for legitimately no reason, they’re probably going to be at least partially at fault

But regardless of whether they were or weren’t in the right to stop suddenly, if you were following too closely to stop in time or not paying attention, you’re also at fault because the accident could have been avoided if you had been doing your part.

You can’t control what the cars in front or behind you are doing, but you can control what you are doing, and if there was something you could have reasonably done to avoid the accident but didn’t, you’re going to be at least partially at fault.

I always hear about the importance of shopping around for insurance, and I don’t necessarily do it every single year, but probably about every other year

And everywhere I look my quotes are always about the same, within a few bucks of what I’m already paying.

And I guess if you add it all up over the years a couple of bucks a month difference does eventually add up to something kind of significant.

But having been with my current company/agent for a while and having had to use my insurance a couple times over the years, I don’t mind that so much because I’ve found them pretty easy to work with. They’ve paid out when I needed them to without any drama, and they’ve been willing to cut me when, like when I had some billing snafu that was kind of my fault they were saw that I’d been a customer for a while with otherwise perfect payment history and we’re willing to waive some fees that were otherwise tacked on. And jumping ship to save very little money and not knowing if the new company is going to be as decent to work with just doesn’t seem like a smart move to me.

Still pisses me off to no end that my insurance goes up every year though. My car’s not appreciating in value any, and I’m not getting any younger or more reckless on the road, nor have I reached the age yet where my mental faculties have started to nosedive, and I have a very clean driving history.

Definitely valid. Luckily I think she’s still young enough that pretty much anything with some buttons she can push to make something happen on the screen is going to keep her entertained

And he’s not much of a gamer himself so I figure something is better than nothing

I’d tread carefully and request some elaboration from him on the situation because just based on what he said that could be all over the place, and I’m not too familiar with the culture and laws in South Korea so you’re probably going to want to do some research on their divorce laws and how their culture views divorce.

This could be anything from he’s cheating to to they’re both living totally separate lives, have agreed their marriage is over and just haven’t done the paperwork to make it official for any number of reasons.

Off the top of my head, in no particular order here’s a couple plausible-sounding scenarios, and it’s not meant to be an exhaustive list.

He could be straight-up cheating and lying through his teeth to you.

Maybe he’s even hoping to be caught cheating because he wants to get divorced and his wife doesn’t and he’s trying to goad her into it because it’s in some way advantageous for him if she’s the one who files for it. Maybe it gives him some kind of legal leverage to not be the one filing for it, maybe he just wants to be able to spin it as being her fault so he can claim to their friends or family that he was willing to work on their marriage and she wasn’t.

It could be that they’re totally on the same page, have agreed to see other people, and are staying together on paper because there’s tax incentives for married couples, or wonky inheritance laws at play and by staying “married” it’s easier for them to make sure the other spouse can inherit their assets to help take care of their son if something happens to one of them.

Or maybe they just haven’t had the time or money to money to do the paperwork and just don’t feel like it’s a pressing issue right now.

Maybe they don’t want to saddle their son with dealing with the fallout of a potentially messy divorce until he’s older, either due to legal/financial reasons, or because of some kind of social stigma.

Maybe he’s not even in contact with his wife and they haven’t seen or spoken to each other in years, and it’s just a pain in the ass to track each other down so that papers can be served, or they just really don’t want to have contact with each other and are avoiding it until there’s a real need like if one of them wants to remarry (I’ve known a couple people in similar situations in the US)

Again, I’d say try to push him for more details, it can be a touchy subject for a lot of people and he may not want to air all of his and his wife’s dirty laundry to someone he just met, and that’s understandable, but you also should be allowed to understand what kind of situation you’re getting yourself into. Find out if his wife is aware of it, confirm with her directly if possible. If he won’t let you talk to her to confirm that could be a red flag that he’s cheating, but it could also be that she’s unstable and it’s really better to not talk to her and risk her getting aggressive towards him, you, or their son, so tread carefully. Trust, but verify. There could be a whole novel squeezed in between the lines here that you need to be reading.

I guess I like the plaid tops more than the hooters tank tops, but otherwise it’s just standard chain restaurant food. Nothing too special.