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Submission + - Candy Corn Is Made of Bug Secretions (archive.is)

Submitted by know-nothing cunt
know-nothing cunt writes: The Atlantic reports:

Here's a tip if you ever want to ruin a Halloween party. Seek out the most squeamish-seeming adult or child you can find in the act of consuming candy corn. Then tell them they just filled their mouth with bug secretions. If this fact alarms you — or if you’re an inveterate hater of candy corn and thus think that you have been spared — I regret to inform you that by eating many classic Halloween candies, you are, to some extent, eating bugs. More precisely, you are eating a bug by-product that is in many cases listed on the package as "confectioner’s glaze." This glaze is used on jelly beans, Milk Duds, Junior Mints, Whoppers, Lemonheads, and Sugar Babies, to name a few.

Submission + - How Much Do Optics Improve Shooting Performance? (army.mil)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Iron sights force your eye to line up three things at different distances—a rear notch, a front post, and the target—while your eye can only truly focus on one. A red dot sight collapses that into a single aiming point using a neat optical trick: an LED sits at the focus of a curved, partially mirrored lens, a collimator, which reflects its light back as parallel rays. To the eye, parallel rays read as coming from infinity, so the dot appears projected onto the target plane and stays put as your head shifts, rather than drifting the way a reticle at a different depth would. That is what “parallax-free” means here. The catch is that it is only perfectly parallax-free at infinity; at closer range, a small residual error remains, roughly equal to the diameter of the collimating optics.

That optical simplification is why red-dot sights are often described as fast-acquisition sights: the target and aiming point sit on nearly the same optical plane, so the shooter can keep attention on the field of view rather than switching focus among three reference points. They are used in civilian target shooting, hunting, police work, and military applications, and non-magnified designs also avoid the eye-relief constraints of a conventional telescopic sight. [1]

The U.S. Army makes a broader case that optics are one part of a system: “Soldier + Weapon + Ammo + Optic + Training.” Its Dual Path Strategy document argues that optical sights can improve target-acquisition speed and first-round hit probability, but it also emphasizes zeroing, training, backup iron sights, and the fact that environmental conditions and shooter skill still matter. [2]

A retailer article on sight selection applies a similar idea to civilian shooting, arguing that sight choice affects accuracy, target acquisition, and adaptability, and that shooters should budget for an optic alongside the firearm itself. [3]

So how much of the improvement is the optic itself, and how much is simply better training with a simpler sight picture? For close-range practical shooting, red dots seem compelling; for precision at distance, magnification introduces a different set of tradeoffs. Where have you found optics to be a clear upgrade—and where are iron sights still good enough?

Comment Re:Missing the important pledge (Score 1) 80

NPR's Planet Money looked at a grocery store in Norway. They had a reporter sitting in the store's HQ, and they had received a secret shopper report that a particular product (can of mushrooms in water) was 0.20 Kroner less at a competitor. The reporter watched the price get updated in the chain's central database, then ran down to the store that was below the HQ and saw the shelf tag change about 9 minutes later.

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/06/1197958433/dynamic-pricing-grocery-supermarkets

That particular store has a policy of not increasing prices while the store was open, they could only lower them.

Stores will have to set good policies and follow them. Stores open 24/7 will probably have to have set times to raise prices.

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