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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • In fluent speech, the conjunction (the first “that”) is unstressed, and as a result some speakers reduce the vowel a bit toward schwa. However, if you told those speakers to carefully pronounce each word, I bet they would pronounce the conjunction and the pronoun the exact same same. A more common example of this kind of reduction is the word “to”, which is almost always reduced to /tə/ ([tə] ~ [tʊ] ~ [ɾə] depending on dialect and surrounding words) in everyday speech when unstressed.

    Fun fact, you can reduce just about every unstressed vowel in English to schwa (if it’s not already a schwa) and still be largely understood.




  • In grocery stores in many parts of the US at least, it is extremely hard not to find bread in plastic bags. Even the one of 3 near me that has its own bakery puts the bread in a plastic bag, and then in another bag that is paper with a plastic “window”, and the paper part has a PE wax lining for god knows what reason.




  • Nah, reach is a huge advantage. I’m not sure how rapier fencing differs from regulation sabre/epée/foil, but here’s my 2 cents from that perspective:

    Smaller people are not, as a rule, substantially quicker than larger. If you see any difference in your experience, it’s likely a selection bias (shorter people have to be quicker to compete at the same level). The shorter person must enter the strike range of the taller person before the taller person comes within theirs and must be significantly quicker or more skilled to overcome that dead space. If the taller person can maintain a proper distance, gg. Taller people can also lunge farther, giving a wider active range.

    Targeting is a smaller issue than you make it out to be; footwork and maintaining balance, which reposition the core, are at least as important as leaning to dodge, and advantage the taller person (longer legs = more movement range). If the taller person is coming from above as you say, they can just continue their slash (sabre) downward toward that less mobile core, or squat a bit deeper if the arc won’t reach. If instead you were referring to a poke, they’re either already targeting the torso anyway (foil) or whatever body part is most easily reachable (epée; still often torso, but cheeky wrist/arm strikes can be something of an equalizer here), and anyway they are already striking at a range that the shorter person cannot, making a successful counterattack more difficult.

    Besides reach, a height difference is brutal when it comes to sabre fencing; the shorter person is restricted to targeting arms and torso (can’t reach the head easily), so the taller person can anticipate strikes from fewer angles. The taller person can come from any direction and has gravity on their side for own overhead strikes. Those suck to defend against.











  • I went up to the Lake Champlain area where there was some high altitude cloud cover. Fortunately, it didn’t affect the viewing basically at all. A cool side effect of the clouds/related atmospheric conditions though was that the sun had a 22° halo. I wish that 1) I’d had a camera that could capture it and that 2) I’d had the presence of mind to pay attention to what happened to it in the moments before and after totality.


  • I have this problem with organic chemistry more broadly. On the one hand, I understand that rattling off the IUPAC name of a compound is much less concise and harder to get right than just saying the brand name or chemical name (which, for pharma, is often just as bullshit of a name as the brand name). On the other, you come across names like the Eschenmoser-Claisen rearrangement vs the Johnson-Claisen rearrangement, or the Suzuki vs Stille vs Negishi vs Kumada vs Hiyama/Denmark vs Sonogashira* cross couplings. Each set consists of fundamentally the same reaction with slight variations in the specific reagents. Just saying e.g. “organozinc” instead of “Negishi” would be so much more descriptive. The authors’ names often aren’t even that helpful in an attributive sense. For instance, some of the cross couplings were actually first reported by someone else in that list (though IIRC everyone got at least one), and most of the chemists published work on at least one of the other reactions at some point.

    * Okay fine Sonogashiras are a little different what with the copper co-catalyst, but still, same mech at Pd.



  • Committee members be like “Oh, I definitely read your thesis titled “New Palladium-Catalyzed Reactions for the Manufacture of Pharmaceuticals”. So what is the band gap of thallium antimonide doped with 5% polonium in foot-pounds per mol? Why aren’t you answering? Even my undergrads know this!”