Creeping thyme is quite nice Stays soft and low Not as aggressive as mint though, so you might have to make space vs just letting the mint go

Of the rest of herbs I grow (basil, rosemary, parsley, cilantro, chives/winter onions, oregano) the oregano isn't too woody or tall. It gets a bit leggy, though it could just be fallen over and accepting of is new life. Also a lot oregano varieties to work with. Nice hot oregano

Unclear how it would directly complete with other plants.

Depending on the type, it may get about 2 to 3 feet tall and develop woody stems. Our contained patch (pavement on 2 sides and the house foundation on the other 2) frequently gets overgrown/bushy by July. Does get little white flowers and attracts all the bees. But I'd dislike having a yard made of the stuff. Woody stem portions get pokey on bare feet, and I'm not sure it'd stay dense enough to keep the other tall plants down.

It does and doesn't. The outer layer of the durian, yeah that's gone. Dense biomass presents a unique scenario though. Where steel is homogeneous, and conducts heat very well, cells are "hollow" and contain a lot of carbon. Water vaporizes. Proteins vaporize. Carbon burns off. Slightly deeper: water vaporizes. But there's no oxygen here. The burning biomass outside is consuming it and dumping carbon dioxide as it goes. What happens when carbon heats without oxygen? It purifies. Down to pure carbon. 3,630C to melt it away. What's more, it's not solid carbon. All that water and protein is long gone, but now it's empty space. Insulation. It's impressive how much biomass blocks heat.

Time matters. Long enough, the outer layers start to burn away. Oxygen moves deeper, carbon burns, not melts. That layer burns off. Oxygen moves deeper. You didn't need 3000C. But you need time and air flow. If you're trying to see who between a mass of steel or an equal biomass gives up first, the steel will fail every time.

Is there not one? Seems like I, a person, can't just publicly use a song for my own gains if an artist really wanted to stop me. A politician, also a person (albeit a wealthy one) is still targetable by the artist right.

Like sure, rich asshole just gets a slap on the wrist fine and it gives their lawyers more more to do. But there is a law about this right?

Production operator with IBS pooped on the floor in a clean room. Kinda ick, and they had to call the spill team to clean up the hazard, but not really the employees fault and no one is really upset. Later, IBS employee is elsewhere, more poop is found on the floor. No one comes forward. No one is identified. Management puts out a "Please use the bathrooms" email and calls it a day.

"Did that guy shit his pants?"

I have a biology degree, but am A: plant focused and B: now a manufacturing engineer, because of you wanna do plant biology in the Midwest it's corn or soy time. And those are boring. So only marginally more applicable.

You're pretty spot on. The vast range of skin biomes directly impacts what sorts of organisms can live there. Even between a human arm, armpit, nose, and intestines you'll have different organisms making up the majority of the biome, and potentially even organisms unique to that biome.

Changes to the region or loss of competitors in other connected biomes can allow normally less dominant organisms to gain a foothold. Absolutely how one gets a yest infection. You can even just KILL EVERYTHING and still different organisms might colonize the area faster, resulting in a difference that's noticeable even at our comparably massive scale.

I didn't particularly know what organisms prefer the fur, feather, or scale coated regions of animals, but they very much would have the same type of dynamic populations.

Ballpark guess, given how there's a Salmonella risk associated with reptiles, I'd assume they have some biome that allows Salmonella to survive, if not directly thrive. Similarly with some varieties of Armadillo carrying leprosy.

As the person below mentioned, they very much had access to copper. We find quite a lot of copper artworks. We find surprisingly few copper tools. This makes sense. Pure copper kinda blows for tool making. Stone is harder and easier to get. And the problem lies with the purity. Other civilizations had to accidentally discover early metalworking and eventually stumbled upon bronze, being more durable than anything else at the time. North America, up near the great lakes actually has fairly pure raw copper deposits on the surface. A theory is that it led to the native people finding a "new" type of rock, but other than being distinct looking, it proved to be kinda useless.

That's partly because they fail to market it well. Meat alternatives never taste the same. Trying to replace beef or pork or chicken will always fail to entice people that already enjoy meat.

It's better described as a new meat with new recipe/cooking requirements. You wouldn't complain about how much the assumed pork ribs didn't taste right if I told you they were beef ribs. You'd agree, because you wouldn't expect them to taste the same.

Having toured a few dairy plants in Missouri while job hunting a few years back, the pasteurization is doing some really heavy lifting. Very concerned about hormones in milk. But not so much about open vat homogenizers in excessively damp rooms or cleaning the road grime out of the hoses on trailer trucks bringing the milk in. Give it quick 48hr incubation on TSA and call it good. "Milk expires too fast to bother with any other testing" Wild the F in FDA is apparently the least fucks given part. "Post in notes in the room where they're milling stainless steel down for stethoscope bodies?! Those could be uncontrolled documents!"

As a manufacturing engineer, I'm mostly in an office when I'm not actively dicking about on the production floor or talking with my production operators. Most of my desk time is

1. Answering questions from people who aren't me about my manufacturing lines: specifications, output, inputs, could I do experiment XYZ if they sent me info. Subject Matter Expert is the term the company uses. Debatable if it's accurate, but it's the expectation.
2. Answering stupid questions for people who could absolutely open an app or walk and look in person but would rather be handed the info.
3. Collaboration with other employees: be it Quality as to what hoops I need to jump through to do something, providing process data relevant to a manufacturing defect they were alerted to, pestering other engineers to see if they've done anything like what I'm up to because it's a good shortcut, or trying to work out how to use a system I'm unfamiliar with.
4. Tracking output metrics: Management loves the same numbers tracked 5 different ways and having them reported to them constantly.
5. Meeting prep: either making a slideshow, crunching data to present, updating a project tracker (see above), or reading all the relevant emails associated with the meeting because earlier I super just skimmed them for anything I was required to do urgently. 7: Tinkering on things at my desk: familiarizing myself with new equipment/parts, testing an idea out of scraps/easily sourced parts before I ask our Tool and Die team to draw up a design for something sturdier/more expensive, or rooting through boxes for things I inherited relevant to that manufacturing line when I was assigned to it.
6. Messaging folks on teams: lunch plans, thoughts on recent events, or even just sending memes, gifs, ASCII middle fingers to people I like. General screwing around.

Does the thickness skin impact it's ability to feel pain?

It doesn't. Burn a slip of paper with a lighter. Now burn an orange. Notice how the the outer layer reacts to the fire?

Your nerve endings also exist in the outer most layer (your mouth vs your deeper flesh)

Are you a mammal? Congratulations, you have TRPV1 receptors in your mucus membranes (avian supremacy ftw). They exist to keep potato brain mammals from eating hot things. These will fuck up your insides. Apparently enough of a problem that mammals needed them. Fun fact: this is enough of a problem that ancestral peppers evolved a means to exploit it and exclude mammals.

But off topic. There's no quantity of flesh that will make your mouth heat proof. Turns out first degree burns still hurt like fuck.

Non-Plant based caffeine is a thing. You can chemically derive it in massive quantities, making it cheaper than extraction. I've read that synthetic caffeine tends to be absorbed quicker than naturally extracted caffeine, and is supposedly why some brands bother using both: longevity. Fast upfront hit from the synthetic, then a later hit from the natural. Not something I've ever truly looked into though. For the most part I just drink coffee, so it's never really been pertinent.

Depends on where and what kind of place. There's a Taqueria near me run by a handful of older hispanic ladies and if it's slow and you ask about/try the less mainstream stuff they'll keep bringing out the random bits they're working on to see what you think. "You liked the hot red sauce? Try this green one we make. Did you like the cow tongue tacos? We made fresh chorizo today, try it." (I learned real chorizo uses cow salivary glands. Or they were enjoying freaking people out with that story. Either way, tasty)

Our plant manager likes to use it to summarize meetings (Copilot). It in fact does not summarize to a bullet point list in any useful way. Breakes the notes into a headers for each topic then bullet points The header is a brief summary. The bullet points? The exact same summary but now broken by sentences as individual points. Truly stunning work. Even better with a "Please review the meeting transcript yourself as AI might not be 100% accurate" disclaimer.

Truely worthless.

That being said, I've a few vision systems using an "AI" to recognize product that doesn't meet the pre taught pattern. It's very good at this

So I can't help with exact physics too much or exact electrical. Just a manufacturing engineer with too many hobbies.

At a basic level, you'll want to decide what you're making. While similar, the specifics will decide what you need exactly. A coilgun or mass driver uses electromagnetic coils in a series, 1 -> 2 -> 3 ect. Each coil is powered one after the other, with sufficient uptime and delay before the next to pull a ferrous carrier or projectile forward. Moments before it reaches the powered coil, that coil should shut down, moving the field further and continuing the acceleration. Note, as you accelerate the payload you will see a shorter uptime and delay at subsequent coils.

Of note: How you're moving the payload is important. If you're using a carrier, you will need to either account for its separation from the payload (consider a sabot in a shotgun shell, though many other designs likely exist) or its deceleration before the end of the line to avoid its self destructive impact. A carrier less payload needs some means of moving along with minimal friction, and must be ferrous so that the induced fields will interact with it. Most I've seen made used a non conductive tube polished smooth inside with each coil wound around the tube itself. Electronics on the outside, launching a steel ball bearing. Easily procured capacitors from cameras set up to each coil and confirmed to pop off in series. Either a LONG tube, or potentially hazardous electrical charges. Please consult a real electrician or engineer before using higher power inputs.

It's certainly been done quite often, but doing anything particularly impressive will be a bit of a feat without significant input.

A rail gun is actually far easier to make, if even less impressive without massive power inputs (potentially millions of amps to achieve the theoretical velocities a railgun is associated with) and precision manufacturing. Instead of creating a coil, a neat bit of physics is abused. Functionally, your design will resemble an elongated H, with the bottom legs extending as long as you'd like. Power source wires to the tops of each leg. The center portion serves to bridge the rails and complete the circuit and will also need to move up and down them freely. What this creates is a magnetic field between the center bridge and the power inputs on top. This field will propel the center down the rails. Every bit of rail behind the connection will generate a magnetic field as it does so. No need to time coils.

Sled is a must, as the center must contact the rails the whole time. The more magnetically reactive you can get the sled/payload, the easier acceleration becomes. Adding magnets to the sled isn't uncommon.

As with the coil gun, getting anything impressive becomes quite a feat. A demonstration of what's happening is fairly easy.

We've done childrens demonstrations as part of the company outreach like this. A magnet and paperclips will suffice. I would suggest a railgun and you start there, as the demonstration is easily found online and scale up from there. Uni project, not Naval bombardment being your goal.

I cannot stress enough. Please consult with someone knowledgeable in electronics if you start moving into higher power inputs. A demo model mishap with 9V is a tingle. Running 120V gets serious very quickly.

Zooming in, there's people and stairs in that photo. Helps quite a bit with scale

Yes?

For manufacturing I've taken to using spelled out numbers when quantities and names both use numbers. Four 4s rather than 4 4s. Makes it harder for someone to speed through an email and get the completey wrong information.