Haven't made any updates to my old site or "new" blog in over a year until yesterday. Even before then, I hadn't made a post talking about my disabilities and past and how badly it affects my ability to get things done.
This post will explain some of those issues, what I've been up to since last year, and what I might be able to do in the future.
In the first part of this series, I discussed taxonomic terminology such as clades and kingdoms, but didn't go into the actual groups and the lifeforms within them. This article will provide a top-down phylogenetic overview of all lifeforms on Earth, as well as a discussion of how endosymbiosis has provided an alternate path for genetic material and evolution.
The third edition of my monthly pile of science links.
Leap day edition of my monthly science links (aka monthly cleaning out my bookmarks).
Volumetric measurements (using the volume of a container) are inferior to Gravimetric measurements (i.e. weight) in most ways. Weighing is faster (for a given pareto-optimal degree of accuracy), can achieve greater accuracy, and most importantly there will be less dishes to clean up afterwards.
Most irritatingly, "cups" and "spoons" mean different amounts in different countries. Even worse, sometimes three "thirds" of a cup are less than one cup...
[Updated 2020-03-22: Added cup densities for wheat bran and oat bran]
10 minutes cooking time, that is, so to be honest it's about 12-15 minutes total.
An article in last month's Science, "Cooked starchy rhizomes in Africa 170 thousand years ago", provides some archaeological evidence of early humans cooking and eating tuber-like vegetables.
In the interest of filling more blog pages and clearing out lots of bookmarks ("that's interesting, I should post that"), here are some assorted science links I've come across recently, with minimal annotation.
There are several methods of voting which allow voters to rank candidates in order of their preference, rather than just selecting a single desired candidate and then doing a single count (Plurality or "First Past the Post" voting). The system specifically used in Australian elections is "Instant-Runoff Voting" (IRV).
IRV is intended to allow for a variety of political parties of various sizes to flourish (unlike the famously two-party-dominated politics of the USA) as citizens who vote for a minor party as their first preference don't "waste" their vote; if their first preference is too obscure to get in, their vote goes to their second preference, and so on.
However, it is still possible for "vote-splitting" to have a negative effect on minor parties - in some cases, giving a candidate a higher preference can paradoxically cause them to lose, as they can be eliminated earlier.
