Major or minor things that puzzle you

[dvferyance]

That the Packers have been favored in every game this year. Even the game at Denver where they have only one once in their history.

[SSOWorld]

<video stuck in your anus>

story of my day today.

Most people who are constipated don't give a shit.

[kphoger]

When I'm driving, and I look in my sideview mirror, and I see another car turning onto the road behind me, I have to really think about it to know which direction it turned from.  I think this is because I intuitively know that things in mirrors are backward:  if I see something in my mirror coming from the left, then I immediately think that maybe it's actually coming from the right.

[bugo]

Government agencies should operate as much like a private business as possible

So the government should exist to generate profit? That's generally the purpose of businesses. Government services cost money, they don't generate it.

[vdeane]

How is it safe to wash dishes in a boil water advisory but not to drink the water?  Wouldn't any bacteria and the like in the water used to rinse soap off dishes be left on the dish and then ingested the next time the dish is used?

[1995hoo]

How is it safe to wash dishes in a boil water advisory but not to drink the water?  Wouldn't any bacteria and the like in the water used to rinse soap off dishes be left on the dish and then ingested the next time the dish is used?

I've never thought about that, but the simplest solution would probably be to boil a large amount of water that you would then use as rinse water after it cools enough to use. Conceptually similar, I guess, to using the "two-bucket method" for washing your car so that you don't dip the dirty wash mitt back in the soapy wash water.

[Max Rockatansky]

How is it safe to wash dishes in a boil water advisory but not to drink the water?  Wouldn't any bacteria and the like in the water used to rinse soap off dishes be left on the dish and then ingested the next time the dish is used?

I've never thought about that, but the simplest solution would probably be to boil a large amount of water that you would then use as rinse water after it cools enough to use. Conceptually similar, I guess, to using the "two-bucket method" for washing your car so that you don't dip the dirty wash mitt back in the soapy wash water.

The soap generally is enough to kill anything on the dishes that would make you sick.  The tap water down in the family houses in Jalisco isn't the greatest, hence why we don't drink it.  We hand wash all the dishes from the tap though and never have gotten sick.

Come to think of it, I can't recall ever having stomach issues while down in Mexico.   

[kphoger]

How is it safe to wash dishes in a boil water advisory but not to drink the water?  Wouldn't any bacteria and the like in the water used to rinse soap off dishes be left on the dish and then ingested the next time the dish is used?

As the saying goes:  the dose makes the poison.  The number of germs in a glass of water is way more than the number of germs left on a plate after rinsing—even without boiling.

The tap water down in the family houses in Jalisco isn't the greatest, hence why we don't drink it.  We hand wash all the dishes from the tap though and never have gotten sick. 

Even though our friends in Mexico have a house that's on the municipal water supply, they live far enough outside of town that they/we don't trust the water enough to drink—especially considering that the water pipes and sewage pipes are laid in the same trench there.  Drinking water always comes out of the Culligan-style jug.  But I have no problem brushing my teeth with water from the tap, because I'm consuming way less of it that way.

Even at the children's home in town, where I personally trust the tap water enough to drink, they put a tiny bit of bleach in the rinse water when washing dishes.

[Dirt Roads]

How is it safe to wash dishes in a boil water advisory but not to drink the water?  Wouldn't any bacteria and the like in the water used to rinse soap off dishes be left on the dish and then ingested the next time the dish is used?

I've never thought about that, but the simplest solution would probably be to boil a large amount of water that you would then use as rinse water after it cools enough to use. Conceptually similar, I guess, to using the "two-bucket method" for washing your car so that you don't dip the dirty wash mitt back in the soapy wash water.

The soap generally is enough to kill anything on the dishes that would make you sick.  The tap water down in the family houses in Jalisco isn't the greatest, hence why we don't drink it.  We hand wash all the dishes from the tap though and never have gotten sick.

Come to think of it, I can't recall ever having stomach issues while down in Mexico. 

Until the recent overuse of antibacterial soaps in the United States, most soaps didn't kill anything.  They were simply surfactants that made stuff quit sticking to the dishes (and quit sticking to the sink, and your hands, etc.)  In other words, you eventually washed the dirt down the drain.  Being from West Virginia, this never bothered me.

However, when I worked in Southeast Asia every other American that I worked with refused to eat the local food provided by the airport authority in their headquarters building.  Those meals were wonderful and sometimes elegant.  Someone in the firm eventually asked me why I was eating that stuff.  So I asked them the obvious question.  The answer was that they wouldn't eat the food since there was no hot water in the building.  (I didn't question the fact that they were sometimes eating restaurant cuisine in buildings that had no running water).

[Rothman]

Eh. regular soap does kill stuff.

[kphoger]

Eh. regular soap does kill stuff.

Yes, but regular soap does a relatively small amount of damage to germs.  It will rupture the membranes a little bit, but not nearly the amount of damage as antibacterial soap.  The main fight that regular soap puts up is as described by |Dirt Roads|.

[Rothman]

Eh. regular soap does kill stuff.

Yes, but regular soap does a relatively small amount of damage to germs.  It will rupture the membranes a little bit, but not nearly the amount of damage as antibacterial soap.  The main fight that regular soap puts up is as described by |Dirt Roads|.

Rupturing membranes of germs does enough damage.

[kphoger]

Rupturing membranes of germs does enough damage.

Yes.  My point is that most germs survive more or less unscathed with regular soap.  Some die, true, but most don't.  They just get washed down the drain.

[Rothman]

Rupturing membranes of germs does enough damage.

Yes.  My point is that most germs survive more or less unscathed with regular soap.  Some die, true, but most don't.  They just get washed down the drain.

Yeah, but better down the drain than inside my body. 

[mgk920]

Over-use of 'antibacterial' anything results in - resistant bacteria. 'Resistant Staph A (and others) WILL result in the end of modern medicine.  NOT a good thing.

Ditto all of the Karens wailing about food allergies with their kids, etc.

Mike

[kphoger]

How a computer works.  Telling me "it's all zeroes and ones" does nothing at all to help me understand it.  Like, who tells it what the zeroes and ones mean?

[Rothman]

Over-use of 'antibacterial' anything results in - resistant bacteria. 'Resistant Staph A (and others) WILL result in the end of modern medicine.  NOT a good thing.

Mike

I thought that was temperature-tolerant ophiocordyceps unilateralis.

[roadman65]

Life lol!  I was often forced to feel wrong when I did wrong, but now most people do wrong, but feel right or unashamed.

What really puzzles me is that when I was younger in school, I was teased about doing many things that people do now.  I was made to feel like that I was the only one doing wrong and my wrongs were about my mental health and isolated issues that the other people don't do.  Yet nowadays people who have good mental health are doing those things that I got harassed and bullied for as a kid.

[kphoger]

Life lol!  I was often forced to feel wrong when I did wrong, but now most people do wrong, but feel right or unashamed.

What really puzzles me is that when I was younger in school, I was teased about doing many things that people do now.  I was made to feel like that I was the only one doing wrong and my wrongs were about my mental health and isolated issues that the other people don't do.  Yet nowadays people who have good mental health are doing those things that I got harassed and bullied for as a kid.

Part of it is that our society has swung far enough into moral relativism that nobody calls anything "right" or "wrong" anymore.  But part of it is that, back then, people expected too much conformity in stuff that really doesn't matter.

When I was in junior high, boys wouldn't be caught dead wearing a yellow or purple tee-shirt (unless it was a K-state shirt, I suppose).  It was too girly.  Nowadays, big brawny football players can get away with wearing a pink shirt, and nobody questions their manhood.  When I was a kid, all of us nerds wished we were more like the popular kids.  Nowadays, it's a lot more acceptable to be a bit of a nerd.  I don't know what particular "mental health and isolated issues" type stuff you have in mind, but I suspect people have just become a lot more willing to accept them as somewhat normal rather than unacceptably weird.

[Max Rockatansky]

I used to catch shit about having a computer in the house in the 1980s from older kids.  Kind of was the cycle for the older kids to try to pick on the younger ones and key on anything that made them nominally different.  FWIW it was my dad's work computer and the knowledge got out there because he did a sales presentation to the school board once.  Being a "computer nerd" wasn't exactly a label early grade school me wanted (even though I wasn't one).

[kphoger]

So, can banks no longer order pennies?  I think this may be true.  If that's the case, then, as soon as any given bank runs out of pennies from the vault, they're left with only what customer turn in.  And, if that's the case, then stores can no longer order pennies from the bank either.

[Rothman]

So, can banks no longer order pennies?  I think this may be true.  If that's the case, then, as soon as any given bank runs out of pennies from the vault, they're left with only what customer turn in.  And, if that's the case, then stores can no longer order pennies from the bank either.

Is this the penny thread?

[Scott5114]

How a computer works.  Telling me "it's all zeroes and ones" does nothing at all to help me understand it.  Like, who tells it what the zeroes and ones mean?

Well, binary is just a base-two number system, which can be converted to common decimal (base-10) numbers:

BIN 00 = DEC 00
BIN 001 = DEC 01
BIN 010 = DEC 02
BIN 011 = DEC 03
BIN 100 = DEC 04
BIN 101 = DEC 05

...and so on. This is just math that has nothing inherently to do with computers. You can convert any number; my calculator tells me DEC 5114 = BIN 1001111111010. (At one point the Windows calculator would let you convert between these in Advanced mode; I don't know if it still allows this.)

What the computers actually do with those numbers depends on the exact processor architecture you have (these days you probably have x86_64 in your computer and ARM in your phone), but generally every instruction sent to the processor contains a numeric data value and a numeric value called an "op code". The op codes mean something like "add this number", "subtract this number", "store this number". The exact set of op codes and which numbers means what varies based on processor architecture, which is why you can't run Windows on a Nintendo 64 or something like that.

It is possible to write a computer program using nothing but op codes. Nobody does this anymore because it sucks. If you use English keywords that correspond one-for-one to op codes, and have a program that translates one to the other, this is called "assembly language". Very few people still do this (and when they do it's mostly just a flex). Any other programming language at some point gets run through a converter which automatically translates the code a programmer has written into op codes. This allows the programmer to focus on higher-level logic, rather than tediously working through the program one op code at a time. (It also means they can run the same program on multiple types of processor, since they can just run the same source code through different translators to get the correct op codes for whichever processor.) This means that only a small fraction of programmers can even tell you what op codes their processor has and what they mean. It's just not important unless you're building processors or something that has to be written in assembly (like one of the translation programs).

If you need to store a text character, it's still stored as a number, and ASCII codes (well, these days, Unicode, but you know ASCII code already) say which numbers mean which characters. ASCII codes are usually expressed in decimal for human convenience, but they're stored as binary like everything else.

Each digit (0 or 1) is called a bit. Eight bits equals a byte. I assume you know what a byte is.

Obviously it's a lot more complicated than that in practice, but that's the basics.

[kphoger]

generally every instruction sent to the processor contains a numeric data value and a numeric value called an "op code". The op codes mean something like "add this number", "subtract this number", "store this number" ... that's the basics.

No, because it still doesn't help me understand how the computer knows what to do with the op code.  How does it know that a particular op code means "add this number"?  There's something fundamental that still baffles me.  At some point, the computer still has to know what to do.

[Scott5114]

generally every instruction sent to the processor contains a numeric data value and a numeric value called an "op code". The op codes mean something like "add this number", "subtract this number", "store this number" ... that's the basics.

No, because it still doesn't help me understand how the computer knows what to do with the op code.  How does it know that a particular op code means "add this number"?  There's something fundamental that still baffles me.  At some point, the computer still has to know what to do.

The logic is baked into the processor chip with logic gates. Like all Wikipedia articles on science stuff this takes a lot of words to say not a whole lot, but if you scroll down to the section with the red and green tables you should get the idea.

As an example, one type of logic gate is called an AND gate, which has two input pins and one output pin. If both the input pins are powered up (1), it powers up the output pin (1). If either of the input pins are off (0), the output pin is also off (0).

The video game Minecraft has all seven types of logic gates as part of its in-game "redstone" system. As a result, players can simulate any type of computer within Minecraft. I've seen a video where someone has used redstone to entirely replicate the logic of the Game Boy Advance, allowing them to play Pokémon from within Minecraft.