Today I learned +

[overgeeked]

Today I leaned that flour can be highly combustible—even explosive—if it’s in a fine, powdered form, dispersed in the air, and exposed to a spark or flame.

I feel like it would need to be finer than what’s commercially available or we’d all already know about this.

 

[billd91]

From listening to older family talk, when you're on a party line and you hear someone else talking you're actually supposed to cover the receiver with your hand and eavesdrop.

Yeah, that was pretty typical. When my dad was a kid, he went to a one-room school in a rural township where the nearby farms were all on a party line. Everyone overheard the call reporting when his older sister (9 years older) had her first daughter and welcomed him to class by calling him "Uncle Gordy".

 

[Staffan]

I feel like it would need to be finer than what’s commercially available or we’d all already know about this.

Not really. It's just kind of hard to "aerosolize" enough flour since it's a solid powder rather than a liquid. But I believe things like mills, grain silos, and bakeries need some special fire safety protocols to avoid blowing up.

 

[CleverNickName]

I feel like it would need to be finer than what’s commercially available or we’d all already know about this.

Nope, any aerosolized hydrocarbon will explode, even sawdust. There are tons of videos on YouTube of people throwing ordinary all-purpose flour onto an open flame--these demonstrations are usually done outdoors, but you can imagine what would happen if it were inside an enclosed building.

Like @Staffan said, it's hard to aerosolize enough flour to cause an explosion...but two kids having a food fight, throwing handfuls of flour at each other next to a pilot light, will absolutely cause an explosion.

 

[gnarlygninja]

Honestly, that's on those kids for such a poor choice of food fight weapon and location.

 

[overgeeked]

That’s absolutely wild.

 

[Aeson]

We were never on a party line but occasionally, in the old analogue days, we would pick up the phone and immediately hear someone else having a conversation.

Lines would get crossed. What's the term? Bleed through or something like that.

I've had cordless phones that could pick up neighbors conversations. It would only need to be plugged into power not the phone line.

 

[trappedslider]

I've been learning about llms and how they work, token generation and how you can tell them how much context to keep, along with signs that they have "forgotten" small details, and how you can lock in some things so they don't get changed when you have long conversations with them.

• Model size = bookshelf size → bigger bookshelf can hold more books (knowledge).
• Actual reading speed & understanding = how well the librarian trained the model & how fast you can access books → a giant bookshelf is useless if you can’t reach the books quickly.

(yes, i'm aware of the irony in the description above)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Turns out Game Theory solved the optimal human behavior pattern decades ago.

Generous Tit for Tat.

Start cooperative. If you’re betrayed, betray them. If they return to cooperating with you, cooperate with them. Accept that communication and understanding are not perfect so be willing to forgive about 10% of betrayals.

That’s it. Turns out loads of animals follow this same pattern, too.

I remember reading an article about that in Scientific American (or similar) back in the 1990s.

 

[payn]

Today I leaned that flour can be highly combustible—even explosive—if it’s in a fine, powdered form, dispersed in the air, and exposed to a spark or flame

Oh yeah here in Minneapolis they used to have a lot of mills and the nickname was mill city. There is a museum right on the Mississippi of snd old mill that had exploded. The steel girders bent, twisted, even melted from the explosion.