Missouri is a pretty red place, so hit a blue island (KC, Columbia, or STL) and hit up the big university. Haunt some of the less flashy bars for anyone that seems chill. If you’re lucky, or it’s Columbia, there’s already a bar for it. Arch and Column in Columbia has a pride flag flying out front. Ask those folks, as I’m sure anything here in Missouri is pretty discreet. As a straight white man, I’ve never heard of anything, but it’s probably the point.

Typing while making dinner. I did not watch them.

They’re not wrong. What might take thousands of years to select for better qualities can be done in a generation with modern analysis and precision gene edits. What one might even NEED to tweak isn’t clear without significant upfront research. That same effort could be applied anywhere (usually corn, wheat, and rice as they’re modern staples) to try to squeeze more out (personally, that’s a diminishing returns situation but that’s not my life anymore, who knows)

That doesn’t include resource leeches like Monsanto’s efforts and greater corruption away from the goal of ever better crops.

Last I heard (it’s admittedly been about a decade) there was work on a vitamin A fortified rice, Golden Rice, being worked on.

We COULD choose to bring alternative species into the modern era of agriculture. We do not (not mentioning the failures of capitalistic logic behind the current choices) choose to as we’ve become pretty focused on our current crops. Land dedicated to production already exists. The infrastructure to process the harvest already exists.

Also worth noting. Teosinte was a grass seed prior to domestication and it’s classification as Maize. It is a threatened species. Rapid alterations to any existing species to create a more viable food product may devastate existing species in the wild, especially as a common growing range encroaches on wild species. Modified cattails might be a good source of calories to feed the growing world, but the wetlands they inhabit are already facing pressures from human expansion. To be fair: most human populations end up altering wetlands. This is not a new problem.

The very biodiversity and density wetlands are know for tend to make for easy pickings. But, they also support diseases and pests that plague society. As we develop better food sources we depend less on that richness, we only see the landscape as something else to solve.

So humans have historically eaten a lot of plants. No doubt ground nuts, cattails, etc were eaten by someone. Starvation is bad time.

As we’ve moved forward into modernity, the “most suitable” options were selected out of the others as farming is quite a lot of work. Most productive/easiest to grow win out in the end.

The issue with many of options we don’t traditionally eat comes down to life cycles of the plants, effort to prepare for consumption, or unreliable quality.

As an example in North America, acorns are edible. The native people here before European colonization very much ate them. But: Oaks take years to mature, maybe 1 in 10 actually taste ok (the rest being bitter), are a bastard to harvest from the tree, and don’t typically bare all at once (Just generally throughout a season) What this boils down to is, a nice addition to a harvest if you know what trees yield good acorns, and happen to be nearby to catch them when they start dropping before wildlife eats them all. By the time North America sees large static human populations requiring a large, stable supply of food, humans had found other options (Squash, Beans, Maize; things that became mainstream domesticated crops due to their being easier to farm) Ultimately, all crops started as wild strains, and human selection began bending them towards being more useful. Wild Almonds have about the same chance to not be toxic (even domesticated ones have some cyanide) but because they were selected for early (thought to be done accidentally as early agriculture develops), by the time humans need larger scale agriculture, they’re “conveniently” ready to go.

Capitalism has little to do with it early on, but later efforts around improvement (hybridization and later genetics work) are certainly driven by profit motives just as much as a desire to produce more food.

Tldr: they’re definitely edible. But since we didn’t really attempt to domesticate them (because of timing or general human nature to make our lives less difficult), they kinda suck compared to more mainstream crops. Capitalism increases this divide as we apply modern understandings of selective breeding and genetics to the naturally occuring modifications humans were already driving.

Non-Plant based caffeine is a thing. You can chemically derive it in massive quantities, making it cheaper than extraction. I’ve read that synthetic caffeine tends to be absorbed quicker than naturally extracted caffeine, and is supposedly why some brands bother using both: longevity. Fast upfront hit from the synthetic, then a later hit from the natural. Not something I’ve ever truly looked into though. For the most part I just drink coffee, so it’s never really been pertinent.

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Having toured a few dairy plants in Missouri while job hunting a few years back, the pasteurization is doing some really heavy lifting. Very concerned about hormones in milk. But not so much about open vat homogenizers in excessively damp rooms or cleaning the road grime out of the hoses on trailer trucks bringing the milk in. Give it quick 48hr incubation on TSA and call it good. “Milk expires too fast to bother with any other testing” Wild the F in FDA is apparently the least fucks given part. “Post in notes in the room where they’re milling stainless steel down for stethoscope bodies?! Those could be uncontrolled documents!”

So I can’t help with exact physics too much or exact electrical. Just a manufacturing engineer with too many hobbies.

At a basic level, you’ll want to decide what you’re making. While similar, the specifics will decide what you need exactly. A coilgun or mass driver uses electromagnetic coils in a series, 1 -> 2 -> 3 ect. Each coil is powered one after the other, with sufficient uptime and delay before the next to pull a ferrous carrier or projectile forward. Moments before it reaches the powered coil, that coil should shut down, moving the field further and continuing the acceleration. Note, as you accelerate the payload you will see a shorter uptime and delay at subsequent coils.

Of note: How you’re moving the payload is important. If you’re using a carrier, you will need to either account for its separation from the payload (consider a sabot in a shotgun shell, though many other designs likely exist) or its deceleration before the end of the line to avoid its self destructive impact. A carrier less payload needs some means of moving along with minimal friction, and must be ferrous so that the induced fields will interact with it. Most I’ve seen made used a non conductive tube polished smooth inside with each coil wound around the tube itself. Electronics on the outside, launching a steel ball bearing. Easily procured capacitors from cameras set up to each coil and confirmed to pop off in series. Either a LONG tube, or potentially hazardous electrical charges. Please consult a real electrician or engineer before using higher power inputs.

It’s certainly been done quite often, but doing anything particularly impressive will be a bit of a feat without significant input.

A rail gun is actually far easier to make, if even less impressive without massive power inputs (potentially millions of amps to achieve the theoretical velocities a railgun is associated with) and precision manufacturing. Instead of creating a coil, a neat bit of physics is abused. Functionally, your design will resemble an elongated H, with the bottom legs extending as long as you’d like. Power source wires to the tops of each leg. The center portion serves to bridge the rails and complete the circuit and will also need to move up and down them freely. What this creates is a magnetic field between the center bridge and the power inputs on top. This field will propel the center down the rails. Every bit of rail behind the connection will generate a magnetic field as it does so. No need to time coils.

Sled is a must, as the center must contact the rails the whole time. The more magnetically reactive you can get the sled/payload, the easier acceleration becomes. Adding magnets to the sled isn’t uncommon.

As with the coil gun, getting anything impressive becomes quite a feat. A demonstration of what’s happening is fairly easy.

We’ve done childrens demonstrations as part of the company outreach like this. A magnet and paperclips will suffice. I would suggest a railgun and you start there, as the demonstration is easily found online and scale up from there. Uni project, not Naval bombardment being your goal.

I cannot stress enough. Please consult with someone knowledgeable in electronics if you start moving into higher power inputs. A demo model mishap with 9V is a tingle. Running 120V gets serious very quickly.

Are you trying to build one, interested in the specifics of the electromagnetics, or just looking for a general overview?

Lots of difference between a wiki level overview, the physics involved, or the engineering behind making a theoretical item function in reality.

Depends on where and what kind of place. There’s a Taqueria near me run by a handful of older hispanic ladies and if it’s slow and you ask about/try the less mainstream stuff they’ll keep bringing out the random bits they’re working on to see what you think. “You liked the hot red sauce? Try this green one we make. Did you like the cow tongue tacos? We made fresh chorizo today, try it.” (I learned real chorizo uses cow salivary glands. Or they were enjoying freaking people out with that story. Either way, tasty)

I don’t know enough about copilot as work has made it optional for mostly accessibility related tasks: digging through the mass of extended Microsoft files in teams, outlook, OneDrive to find and summarize topics; record meeting notes, not that they’re overly helpful compared to human taken notes due to a lack of context; and normalizing data, as every power BI report out is formatted as it’s owner saw fit.

Given it’s ability to make ridiculous errors confidently, I don’t suppose it has the memory to be used more like a toddler helper? Small, frequent tasks that are pretty hard to fuck up, once it can reliably do these through repetition and guidance on what’s a passing result, tieing more together?

If you don’t mind me asking, what do you do and kind of AI? Maybe it’s the autism but I find LLMs are bit limited and useless but other use cases aren’t quite as bad Training image recognition into AI is a legitimately great use of it and extremely helpful. Already being used for such cases. Just installed a vision system on a few of my manufacturing lines. A bottling operation detects cap presence, as well as cross threads or un-torqued caps based on how the neck vs cap bottom angle and distance looks as it passes the camera. Checking 10,000 bottles a day as they scroll past would be a mind numbing task for a human. Other line is making fresnel lenses. Operators make the lenses, and are personally checking each lens for defects and power. Using a known background and training the AI to what distortion good lenses should create when presented is showing good progress at screening just as well as my operators. In this case it’s doing what the human eye can’t; determine magnification and defraction visually.

Pushing Little Children With Their Fully Automatics!

Didn’t make this, so only a guess, but the concept of plants “communicating” via mycorrhizae is probably why it’s there.

Since we use our nose to warm incoming cold air, I’m sure cutting the volume per nostril and boosting contact surface makes a significant difference

The simplest is just sewing a strip onto the back at two ends, making a loop for the belt. If you’ve a bigger piece of leather, you can make a wing on each side with a wide hole that the belt can go through. Or the other direction, up, then loop back down and sew or rivet to the bottom.

Hmm Thanks for the info!

What kind/where do you get leather from?

I’ve been using veg tan from Tandy I’ve had better luck with smooth cuts on oil tan or chrome tan, but they’re not quite suitable for boiling

Or maybe it’s too fine an edge? I’ve a retired scalpel and a plethora of blades from my old university job I’ve repurposed.

Most of my stuff has been utilitarian or functional enough it’s not mattered. An nice abrasion/heat resistant shop apron, or renfaire bags

I made a few pieces from scrap to test a book mark and they ended up rough.

What do you use to get such clean edges? Even with a fresh blade, I’m still making 2 or 3 passes on thicker leather (or 1 slow halting pass as I readjust my grip) and end up with rough edges. Burnishing settles them in, but only as long as they aren’t disturbed. Which feels likely on a cosplay piece.

I’ve got a machine running XP and one running 7. Both really only exist due to the software/equipment they’re supporting being abandoned. IT keeps them disconnected from everything else and generally doesn’t like that they exist. Disconnected Lab View licenses are fun though.

Mother in laws parrot would copy the sound of the house phone ringing. Not quite right, but from just far enough away to be heard it was very convincing