Today I Learned

Recently submitted a dozen+ legit FOIA requests to a list of specific small and medium sized Trump-friendly jurisdictions around the USA. Both with governments and law enforcement. Many in places you wouldn't think to look. But I'm a nosy motherfucker.

Most of the submission processes are (essentially) open borders, lol. With few barriers to entry. Which means you should try doing the same thing.

The biggest hurdle is knowing what to say in the original request message. But that is ultimately trivial.

Along these lines, here are three resources I have used to effectively investigate the names and events I submitted FOIA requests for:

1. The Stevens Method (This resource is a Substack, which I know isn't a popular platform here. But Chaz Stevens isn't a typical publisher. This is where youll find most of your examples and shortcuts for FOIA requests.)
2. u/ChurchOMarsChaz
3. Little Sis

I submitted high-leverage FOIA requests (for specific public figures, domestic terrorist attacks, Flock camera query logs, right-wing terrorist organizations and others entities/subjects you would recognize) that I will release everything related to once responses are received.

But beforehand I did my own research into publicly available information so I knew exactly where to strike first. This is a game of cat and mouse unfortunately. Meow.

I learned about where certain people grew-up and live today. I mapped political contributions and connections. I scraped websites, databases and social media profiles. I used automation to help expedite the process.

The goal here is to become as super-hot-precise in records requests as possible.

I want the public to know everything. Get dat milk and honey bro.

Also, if my home is raided during this ramp-up effort, this post can be used as a reference for how unbelievably dangerous the United States has become for average citizens. FAFO.

JF: My next-door neighbor at the time was a guy named Paul Fox, who produced R.E.M., 10,000 Maniacs, Jakob Dylan, Björk, and Phish. And the guys from Phish were huge Trekkers, and they used to come to his house to rehearse. Actually, I think they may have rehearsed in my guest house! This was up in Lookout Mountain, in L.A. But they got wind that I played trombone, and they didn’t know I wasn’t that good, but they asked me to the studio, so I came out to the studio to play trombone on Hoist. I played some music; I didn’t do it so well, but all of the outtakes from my trombone playing became a song called “Riker’s Mailbox,” because at the time, my mailbox vaguely looked like a cow, with black and white spots, only this one had been beaten up many times by cars running into it and people running by and smacking it. So my outtakes were named after the mutilated cow mailbox that was the identification of the front of our house, the Hoist album went platinum, and, as a result, I am the proud keeper of a platinum record. So there you go.

A farming manual written by the Roman writer Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella in the 1st century CE is a window into the roles of the female manager.

An upper-class landowner himself, Columella lists the responsibilities of farm managers, who were probably enslaved. The male manager was termed the vilicus, and the female manager the vilica, terms derived from their roles at the "villa."

But many historians reading this text have been sidetracked by a false lead: Columella begins his section on the vilica with a long quote from the Greek philosopher Xenophon, who wrote in Athens more than four centuries earlier.

The "natural" role of women, according to Xenophon, was to work indoors. Therefore, in his discussion, the ideal upper-class married woman is depicted staying inside her townhouse to supervise the domestic work of enslaved people.

The Greek writer is not discussing farm workers. In fact, Columella says four times that these ideas are not his own but those of Xenophon, writing long ago.

Columella lists a completely different set of responsibilities for the vilica on a Roman farm: most importantly, the making of wine and olive oil, which were highly valuable commodities—the backbone of landowners' profits.

In his description of the vilica's duties, Columella includes extracting juice from grapes during the harvest; adding flavorings and preservatives such as salt, wormwood, fennel or boiled grape juice; and overseeing successful fermentation into wine.

According to Columella, the vilica also managed the processing of other farm products to make them long-lasting and profitable, such as turning inedible olives into olive oil for sale.

While the world drowns in plastic, researchers are on the hunt for practical materials that are lightweight, tough, and biodegradable.  In recent years, scientists have increasingly turned to the natural world for inspiration – with a whole lot of research focusing on the impressive features of spider silk.

It's considered invasive in Indian and Pacific Ocean islands, and is native to the United States. Much to my surprise, there's no mention of Australia!

Be safe out there 💀🗡️🐌

I saw this article at BoingBoing, and had to look it up.

From Wikipedia:

The Aroma of Tacoma, also known as the Tacoma Aroma, is a putrid and unpleasant odor associated with Tacoma, Washington, United States.[1] The smell has been described as similar to the odor of rotten eggs.[2] The odor is not noticeable throughout the city, but is rather concentrated in the Tacoma tideflats and is frequently smelled by motorists traveling that section of Interstate 5.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicolored-spined_porcupine

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/49317483

So i'm doing a bit of reading about the basics of nuclear fission these days, just to understand what's actually happening there.

Here are some interesting things that i think that i learned so far:³

• nuclear engineering is all about the neutron economy. If you had an easily-available cheap source of neutrons, we wouldn't need big nuclear power plants because energy could be easily generated by hitting Hydrogen-1 (protium) with neutrons to make H-2 (deuterium) out of it. According to this diagram, this releases around 2 MeV of energy per collision (resulting nucleus has 2 nucleons), which is a lot of energy.

• the problem is that we don't have a cheap source of neutrons, and that's about where the whole trouble with nuclear energy begins. we're smashing U-235 specifically because it's fissile and can sustain a chain reaction: It emits more neutrons per collision than it absorbs, so we get a net gain of neutrons out of it.

• the sun sources its neutrons from weak interaction between protons and electrons¹. Basically this fuses a proton and an electron together to make a neutron. This is the rate-limiting factor in the sun's fusion and determines the sun's lifetime before it burns through its fuel. The average time for a particle to undergo weak interaction is about 10¹⁰ years in the sun's interior which is about the sun's lifetime. If the sun had more neutrons, it would burn faster.²

[1]: well, sorta. this is kinda simplified and more precisely described in the proton-proton chain which is the same thing but with extra frills.

[2]: Also note that while the weak interaction is the rate-limiting factor of the fusion process, it barely releases any energy. Almost all of the energy is released due to the strong interaction which glues protons and neutrons together really tightly and that way releases a lot of energy.

[3]: if you know better, please do correct me.

In economics, hedonic regression, also sometimes called hedonic demand theory, is a revealed preference method for estimating demand or value of a characteristic of a differentiated good. It decomposes the item being researched into its constituent characteristics and obtains estimates of the contributory value for each. This requires that the composite good (the item being researched and valued) can be reduced to its constituent parts and that those resulting parts are in some way valued by the market. Hedonic models are most commonly estimated using regression analysis, although some more generalized models such as sales adjustment grids are special cases which do not.