the mellow tigger's musings

It took most of the morning, and it cost about $25 total (bus fare, scan at FedEx in downtown Minneapolis, new usb drive that I forgot to bring from home), but I made a bad scan of my old poster that is definitely showing signs of its age.

See the photo and read my review...

The scanner added some terrible rainbow streak lines in the lower third of the image. :( Plus the damage that time has wrought to the original painting. Plus the unrounded edges in the original work. Not great stuff. Maybe it's better that I didn't rush to submit this earlier in the year for that autism charity event. This isn't suitable for much of anything.

Pictured below is a smaller file I uploaded to Dreamwidth, but the much larger version (51.3MB) is here.

I need to either 1) learn how to use GIMP to fix pictures (seems like lots of effort for little reward, 2) relearn how to make these paintings (more doable and rewarding), or 3) give up on the idea of submitting this thing to the charity event.

I learned this stuff by watching a spray paint can street artist in Austin TX, which places the event in early 1998 or prior. I don't remember what year I made this particular painting, but I'm mostly sure that I was in Minnesota when I did. I made many space scenes while I learned how to do it, all intending to culminate in this image. Once I completed this one, then I stopped painting any more since I fulfilled that effort.

Here's a good example of where my curiosity takes me.

1. It started with a pun on Mastodon, "Murder, She Roti".
2. What is roti? Oh, it's an unleavened bread.
3. What does that leave out? Various leavening agents.
4. Wait, there's a salt-leavened bread? No, that's a bad name, because there's no salt. It used to be stored in hot salt.
5. Wait, there's a bread that rises because of hydrogen instead of carbon dioxide? Yes, that bacterium is Clostridium perfringens.
6. Wait, that bacterium can cause a necrotizing disease, but people put it in their food?! Yes, but cooking destroys the bacteria to safe levels. Apparently. :/
7. If it's "safe", then how does it cause disease? It affects people who are protein deprived, which inhibits their trypsin production, which apparently deprives them of even more protein.
1. Wait, eating sweet potatoes does that too? Apparently so, unless you cook them well.
8. Why is trypsin important in the human body? Because trypsin begins the digestion process of protein molecules in the small intestine.
9. And... wait, what?! "Human trypsin has an optimal operating temperature of about 37 °C."?
1. That's the temperature for people living in the civilized world. For people in the USA, that's exactly 98.6 Fahrenheit.

So, I looked around and eventually found this publication.

Most hydrolyses have been reported at trypsin (EC 3.4.21.4) optimum conditions (pH 7.8 and 37 °C).

So... the obvious questions (and I haven't found any answers yet):

1. Is this molecule why humans evolved a body temperature of 37C/98.6F? If we deviate, then poor nutrition leaves us disadvantaged and subject to evolutionary culling?
2. What does this mean for our falling body temperature?
3. Other animals have different body temperatures (scroll upward to see the chart). Do they rely on some other process to kickstart their protein digestion?
1. I know humans have a weird intestinal digestion process, which is why we can't make use of the vitamin B12-producing bacteria that live in our gut. Other animals, however can use their own internally-hosted bacteria, so we eat their muscles, eggs, and livers to steal their bacteria-produced B12.
4. Are there some animals with the same temperature as humans, and do they have the same small intestine digestive process that we do?

Inquiring minds want to know.

They're wrong.  Social media is not ending.  It's still getting started.  I'm confident that we'll find a way that works helpfully for us.  "The beginning is near."  My first rule of all media platforms: turn off all notifications.

I submitted a suggestion yesterday to dw_suggestions that they add Mastodon service here at their domain.  Why can't a site offer both long-form blogging and microblogging at once?  One account could get you credentials for both forms.  It would certainly simplify the server choice problem on Mastodon, and it would offer free advertising for Dreamwidth every time someone here posted something that got boosted to the fediverse.  It solves the problem of creating unwieldy threads on microblogs with character count limits.  It seems like a good idea to me, but I can't tell from their blog if any moderators are still checking submissions.  The last entry there is from 2018.  :/  And I see you there in 2017, siderea.

If somebody has only 1 service, then I like and appreciate when they post all of their thoughts there.  Doctors have cats, community activists have children, and scientists have gardens.  I think it's good and wholesome to depict all of oneself online.  But if separation is possible (that's what I always hoped the Google Plus circles would someday become), then I think that could also be healthy.  Why not have separate feeds for politics, pandemic, sex, and religion?  Some people just post way too much about single topics (hello, "Moody Monday" tradition), and some separation would help to reduce the firehose that demands attention.  This benefit is a corollary to the technological telepathy that I'm always predicting.

For instance, I was in the habit of using MeWe to post my #WarzoneInMinneapolis hashtag occasionally when I am particularly bothered by local gunfire.  I should probably create a Mastodon account just for that?  Somewhere to shout alone into the aether that I'm stressed, without the intention of actually interacting with anyone.  Just to create the historical record.  Like here with long form blogging, it's easier though not strictly necessary to organize the thoughts in my own head by acknowledging them externally.

I dropped Twitter completely yesterday in the #Musk2Tusk migration, even uninstalling the app from my smartphone and logging out from my web browser.  It was obvious all along that Musk's $8chan plan would destroy Twitter, plenty of people knew this would happen, and it will only get worse.  The "tech bro" blew $44 billion to destroy a platform.  Billionaires should not exist.  I made the last tweet on my main account October 28th and on my SARS-CoV-2 alt November 10th.  This reminds me a lot of abandoning Facebook over a decade ago, and losing Google Plus a few years ago.

I recreated my main and my alt on Mastodon:
I'll post another day about important tricks to using the platform well.  It is obscure, sometimes.  It is not simply a clone of Twitter.  I'll wait until I've learned a few more useful lessons from it.