Finished my phD in History, and now I'm basically a NEET for the time being. How's everyone going? Haven't active;y used this site for a while, and it's cool to see the same familiar faces are still here. So, I'd like to ask everyone: on what subjects do you consider yourself most knowledgeable in, and is there anything about it that you think is the most interesting to know?
Congratulations, comrade! I am an expert at keeping personal details to myself.
Hey, welcome back comrade, congrats on the pHD!
A grab bag of things I'm knowledgeable about and a couple fun tidbits about them:
Growing marijuana:
- cannabis plants are annuals, so they die after they flower
- they're either autoflowering varieties (start producing buds after a set period of time) or photoperiod (start producing buds once they start getting over a certain amount of uninterrupted darkness per day, simulating autumn)
- they can be male or female - female plants produce flowers (buds) while male plants produce pollen
- they can also trans their genders - female plants can naturally start growing pollen sacs, usually in response to stress, and will attempt to self-pollinate
- female plants can be induced to develop pollen sacs by applying colloidal silver to the nodes where the reproductive organs (buds/pollen sacs) grow - this is often done for breeding purposes and the pollen from a female plant produces feminized seeds (guaranteed to be female) which is desirable because female plants are the only ones that get you high
- speaking of getting high, the actual structure on the plant that contains psychoactive compounds are the little hair-like structures that grow on the buds and the surrounding leaves, these are called trichomes
- trichomes are used to determine when the plant should be harvested — they start clear, then become cloudy (peak THCA concentration) and then turn amber (increasing CBDA concentration). You want to harvest when they're a mix of cloudy and amber, though the ratio is a personal preference (more amber gives a more couchlocky high)
I can also talk your ear off about software infrastructure, database replication, queer readings of Taylor Swift songs, ADHD, lesbian representation in television over the last few decades, composting, and cooking, but my adderall just kicked in so I'm gonna not preemptively do that or I'll be here all day lol
I remember hearing about autoperiod and photoperiod varieties in biology, but it was the sort of knowledge that my brain sort of just locked away until you mentioned it and I sort of just went 'huh, yeah that is a thing'.
Oh yeah I definitely retained way more about plant biology from growing cannabis than I ever did over the course of the whole ass biology degree I did lol, it's way neater when it's hands-on!
:comfy-cool: gonna waste my time on video games for a bit while I think on how to continue with my life bc atm I have no fucking clue what to do with this pos degree lmao
You should absolutely. I'm in a physics phd program myself, and boy, everyone I know is either deeply dissatisfied with it or about to enter the military-industrial complex.
I'm edumacateded in chemistry and know stuff about metals. A chunk of a transition metal like gold is kinda one big molecule of metal. The atoms are all linked. It's why metals fuse when there's nothing between them. Industries call it contact welding.
I think that's neat.
Didn't even know that was a thing. Honestly, metallurgy is probably one of the most underrated areas of advancement in human history - I was impressed to the importance of it when learning about how crucial metallurgy is to the production of quality warships.
Yep, two clean polished pieces of metal, suck out all the air, put the pieces together and you now have one chunk of metal. The atoms don't know they're supposed to be separate.
It's also neat how some civilizations got away with poor iron deposits, like the Aztecs or Japanese. The Aztecs used glass and obsidian instead. Japan developed a bunch of folding methods and shoving in whatever other metals they could find, like silver and nickel.
Oh yeah, I remember reading about the metal folding in my Grandfather's kids books as I was unfortunately born and raised in Japan. Never really grasped how that was supposed to help until much later, though.
Could you possibly recommend any books on the history of metallurgy or a broad outline on the subject? Something not super advanced?
I mostly know about the chemistry, not really the history. If that's still your thing then Chemistry of the Elements by N. N. Greenwood and A. Earnshaw is very good and broad, not too advanced. The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean is fun pop science stuff that gets into broad histories of elemental metals.
is Hoover a yay or nay for his definitive English translation to De re metallica
I've only read parts of that and I know there's controversy on it, but not enough to say if anything's wrong with it.
Congrats! PhD student in condensed matter physics/electrochemistry here! Loads of high-surface-area carbon materials (e.g. activated charcoal, supercapacitor electrodes) are made using toxic chemicals to increase their surface area, but there's plenty of non-toxic and waste biological matter (e.g. pine needles) which when carbonised do this themselves. Using pine needles as an example, under heating and carbonisation of carbohydrate structures etc. within the leaves, really useful minerals (e.g. magnesium) present within them both react with the carbon lattice to create disorder and intercalate between the graphitic layers which teases them apart. These "mineral porogens" are then washed out, leaving behind micro- and nanopores.
There are soooo many ways of working with nature to create very intricate and deliberately engineered microstructures with really basic equipment - I did this with nothing but a hot plate, tube furnace, and mortar & pestle! Warmed pine needles on a hot plate made the lab smell DIVINE.
:party-parrot-science:
There should be no reason that I can't replicate that with a frying pan right? I'm assuming also that the needles are washed out with distilled water or something chemically inert like that.
Yep! I carbonised samples between 600 and 1200 C, well within the temperature range of a gas stove, and aye distilled water would be fine! I used ultrapure but that's just because you get these things literally on tap in labs
I read an interesting paper a while back that used glycerol and a microwave to do something similar with pollen grains. Replicating that experiment was interesting - turns out glycerol can get hot.
i work in the instrument building side of astro, so i really want to bully you for being a chemist, but i can't. that's super cool actually.
Wow another doctor in our midst, wonder if there's something about communism that appeals to academics 🤔. Congrats! I'm a chem undergrad so I think it's safe to say I know very little about that subject. I do know an absurb amount about modification to nerf guns and custom nerf blasters.
I've always liked foam dart blasters ever since I was a little kid, and being a very bored kid in middle and high school (in a subrub with nothing to do) gave me a lot of free time to track down and learn a lot of the esoteric engineering information related to the hobby. I'm happy to field questions about it, if you're interested.
Well I barely know anything about firearms and modification of those to start with, so I'd like to know what even is achievable with modification to foam dart blasters, because all I can think of at the moment is strapping a holographic sight onto one and I'm pretty confident there's more to it than that.
It's closer to airsoft than firearms and the nerf community generally likes to stay distanced from both of those communities. There are a range of aesthetic modifications people do, but those are more art than any kind of science. Most modifications are either increases in velocity or increases in firing rate. It is fairly trivial to make a dart blaster shoot around 200 fps or ~10 darts per second. Those numbers can go a LOT higher however, but the actual limits tend to depend of the type of game you are attending. The class of game is dependent on the fps cap for that meeting. Super stock limits at about 120 fps (these are the most common type and are oriented so people with unmodified blasters can play without issue), ultrastock limits at about 180 fps, and nic matches (nerf internet community) can have variable caps anywhere from 150 to as high as you want (the practical limit is around 700 fps or so, these games usually start to impose minimum engagement ranges). How do you mod a blaster to do this stuff? Electronic blasters will often replace flywheel motors (the part that flings the dart) with custom nerf motors and use custom flywheels to increase velocity and velocity consistency. Spring-ers will use better air seals, springs, and other mechanics to increase the amount of force placed on the dart. Anymore the hobby has pretty much gotten rid of the need for nerf (and hasbro) to produce innovative designs. Many blasters now are 3d printed, which allows for significantly improved efficiency and ergonomics. Some examples are Captian Slug's Caliburn and the FDL. This video shows a decent selection of the kinds of nerf blasters that the community makes.
Some of the things that make nerf unique to real steel, airsoft, and paintball are the creativity and anti-"operator" attitudes of the community. People generally recognize that they are playing with toys and treat it as such - they will create fun blasters with unique designs and novel mechanisms, purely for the fun and comedy that can come from them. The hobby also has a pretty strong aversion to any associations with real weapons. Many nerfers do shoot real guns on the side but they keep those hobbies separate because it creates a more inviting and fun community for everyone.
It's interesting to me that those two 3d-printed ones adhere pretty closely (as far as I can tell) to the standard nerf gun aesthetic. I'd think that part of the freedom of 3d printing would be breaking away from that. Have something super smooth or crystalline or something.
It's more practical than anything else. 3d printing has some pretty important limits that have to be taken into account with design. Both of those do have wildly different variations, but the base components are kept simple.
Sociology. Marx was right, the social sciences are just as firm and factual as the material sciences and should be considered material sciences in their own right (when done correctly of course). They’re just much too complex to model fully, but smaller principles of social interaction can be operationalized. We have complex enough understandings of social interactions that we can predict emotional outcome to a given set of stimuli (think simple noun verb noun situations like “dog bite man”) just as accurately as a chemist can predict reaction outcomes.
The important take away here though is that we have intuitive knowledge of the science of social interactions but live in the superstructural world rather than the material so our brains are constantly doing mathematic calculations of social formulae even if we’re not aware of it. Same way your brain knows applied physics to judge where you need to stand to catch a thrown ball even if you yourself are not aware of how to do the math. Super interesting stuff
I used to know beer really well. Back before there were micro brewers everywhere and a billion new hop and yeast strains I could tell you about almost all of them. I still know the history of how and where most types of beer started, the general grain bill, different methods of hopping ect
Have you ever made beer with a gruit instead of hops? It's been on my list of things to try but my first and only attempt at homebrewing didn't go super well.
I haven't yet but I really want to make a sahti this year. I did make a blond where I substituted honey for around 75% of the sugar, that turned out really well.
Never heard of sahti before - looks like fun! Maybe I can try the blond to get back into brewing.
Wow, very jealous. I almost went down the PhD in History route (would have focused on American Empire in the early 20th century and my thesis on Firestone Tires in Liberia) but alas the siren song of Money and Stable Job was too strong. Maybe someday I'll go back... what did you write your thesis on? Would you recommend a PhD program in History from an intellectual standpoint, as obviously the "job prospects" are dire?
It depends is always an unsatisfying answer IMO, so I will try to force myself to take a stance here and say that it was in general too much of a slog to be anything I can in good conscience recommend to anyone. There was a lot of academic grifting, and in general, I preferred authoring journal articles every now and then on specific topics than working on my dissertation, which I wrote on French, Italian, and Soviet cruiser operations during the Second World War.
It's fascinating to me to think of how much humanity has manipulated the living world - even as we are nowhere near close to mastery over nature, we still leave our mark on the biosphere.
It's especially wild to think about it given the timescales involved - the dinosaurs were around for 120 million years; modern humanity has existed for, at best, 1/60th of that time, and modern civilization for 1/50th of that 1/60th.
Let’s talk about means testing and stealth taxation of the poor to ensure they pay their “fare share”
Double entendre intentional
Honoured to talk about anything with girlbosses such as you. Here's to hoping for a Clinton presidency in '24 #stillwithher :hillary:
what subjects do you consider yourself most knowledgeable in
as a great man once said, I don't know shit about fuck.
Since you're a fresh minted history person: can you recommend any leftist/materialist analyses of great power politics? I'd be interested in any time or place in history
I'm afraid a lot of the material I worked with was not specifically leftist, and the fact of the matter is that that sort of thing is outside of my field of expertise. With that big BUT out of the way, Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is the closest I've read to a materialist take on the subject - the book places great emphasis on productive capacity, or the means of production, as the true core of a state's power. The predictions, such as a declining US due to imperial overstretch and excessive military spending and China's rise (this was written during the Deng era) turned out to generally be correct I would say. One minor nitpick I found was that the section on the Second World War indulged a bit on Wehraboo stuff, (something about the Nazi army being higher quality) but this was also the time that Guderian and Halder's bullshit was still prominent in military historiography so :shrug-outta-hecks:. In terms of time frame, the book basically covers from about when the Habsburgs were the hegemonic power of Europe to around the accession of Deng.
Wow, it's so cool he was able to write such an insightful book before Oswald capped his ass
Jokes aside, thank you! I've been asking this place for this same recommendation for months so this is now at the top my reading list
Journalism major, I know enough about newspapers to wish I chose a different major.
What's your opinion on the material that :citations-needed: covers? Is it an accurate depiction of the issues with Western newspapers, or are there some points that you would say they missed?
I am currently about 3/4 (Retail, Office, Factory, Food Service) of my way through what I have refered to as my 'Lived Ethnography of the Midwestern Proletariat'. As the proud holder of an anthropology undergrad I am in no way qualified to do this study but if lived experience counts for anything in anthro anymore, I probably have a better idea of working class culture than any university student does. In doing so, I have learned some basic principles.
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The more masculine the work environment, the more ok it is to be gay with the fellas.
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Wanting to fight someone is always a joke until it is not.
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Your management is always dumb and has very little to actually do, but is generally best when they don't do anything. Despite how poor the general understanding of literacy, history, and mathematics is by the general populace, somehow, undereducated workers are still better at organizing themselves than management, at least until 4.
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Familiarity breeds contempt and no one is more contemptuous towards themselves and their co-workers than the average American.
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Most Americans are both underworked and underpaid, particularly in office jobs (see previous comment on management).
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Factory floors, even non-unionized, still operate entirely on seniority and connections, so you might as well have a union.
I haven't hit food service yet, but I've heard that they are overworked and underpaid, which would be a nice change of pace.
I probably have a better idea of working class culture than any university student does
Very interesting. You could make some good writing on the condition of the working class in the imperial core, sort of, an expansion on those basic principles. If you feel like it of course.
Tbf, David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs is a good starter book for such a topic, but it doesn't really have the hands on thing of how generally underworked you can feel in a factory once you get used to the repetition. Like, you are exhausted at the end of the day, but you look back and realize you didn't actually do a whole hell of a lot. I mean, you made alot of product but the job that you yourself did was such a small facit of the mechanism of production you don't feel like you accomplished anything. Like, due to Marxism, we know that economically speaking, we are alienated from the value of our labor, but that alienation takes an emotional toll as well, sowing discord and contempt for yourself and your fellow worker, which leads to all kinds of mental disorders that society struggles to deal with. In such an environment, the most rational way to deal with it is to isolate yourself from others in order to not have to deal with both their and your own neuroses that have developed because of american industrial capital.
The most common complaints I hear (and find myself making) are about the 'r**ards' further up the line (which is a couple hour long production process) with the management being a close second, but that dynamic can change depending on line size and constitution. That affects the whole cultural output and attitude. Like metal work is culturally different than industrial food prep, despite being incredibly similar processes.
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congrats! what sort of history did you specialise in?
i don't know nearly enough about anything at all to share
