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

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)

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:The Mystery of the Soggy Shipment (Score 1) 131

It's adding to the cloud cover, which will reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the earth, which will cause temperatures to drop, which will plunge us into the next ice age. Then us humans will need to start burning fossil fuels again to drag us out of the ice age, just like we did last time.

Comment Re:"Demons and monsters"? (Score 0) 75

So, essentially, this thing was trained on a steady diet of pro-life propaganda and death metal album covers. What a combination.

Nah. It probably found instances of modern women talking about how their abortion allowed them to secure wealth and a nice career for themselves, and then correlated that with ancient practices of sacrificing children before demon-gods for wealth, power, and a good harvest, and then generated the image.

I wonder if the most influential data sources can be extracted from the system. I'll have to ask later.
Anyway, I recall that research has shown that if you limit AI to giving answers that only confirm with a particular worldview, the quality and accuracy of results goes down dramatically.

Comment Re:No thanks. (Score 1) 21

I've been using duolingo for a bit because I work on a demolition crew, and apparently I've been designated liaison with the hispanic construction workers we occasionally work with. I've pretty much reached the limit of progress with duolingo, and really just need to hang out with some native spanish speakers for a bit. Luckily one of my wife's friends is moving back to town, and her Mexican husband is all on-board with hanging out with a bottle of tequila and making fun of me in spanish :)

Comment Re:$10 billion (Score 3, Informative) 190

Brightline is a privately owned company. I think they actually intend for this to be a profitable venture- and hence a profitable investment- based on their experience in Florida. So 'We' who might use that money elsewhere is whoever they find as investors or lenders in this project, not any government.
One would have to do some research to be sure whether or not public funding is involved, but I haven't seen any in the linked article.

Comment Re:potential profit lost vs. cost (Score 1) 273

Lost revenue can indeed be loss. They don't pay cash for those buildings. If the revenue is reduced, they still need to pay the bank their monthly notes. To simplify, if you buy a car and have a $100 monthly note, but you drive for Uber and make $200 month, your revenue covers your costs. If you stop driving for Uber, that $100 becomes a loss.

Comment Is it really a fixing anything? (Score 1) 201

That doesn't mean we should sit on our thumbs and do nothing about small things that are easy to fix.

Make sure you're actually fixing things. A 'single use' plastic bag is 5 or 6 grams of plastic and is incredibly easy to make. Reusable bags take dozens or hundreds the amount of resources to produce, and must be periodically washed, increasing the environment footprint even further.

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