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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 11th, 2023

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  • That’s one of the fundamental disagreements between Catholics and Protestants.

    A Catholic would argue that veneration of saints isn’t worship, it’s showing respect for someone who exemplified Christian ideals, or died as a martyr. Canonization is basically the religious version of the Medal of Honor.

    A Protestant would argue that the distinction between veneration and worship is arbitrary, and veneration of a saint essentially amounts to idolatry anyway.


  • Its not that they don’t have pitch, per se, it’s that the nature of the sound they produce makes the concept of “pitch” kind of meaningless.

    Except for a pure sine wave, every tone is going to have multiple harmonics over the fundamental which is what actually gives an instrument, even the human voice, its timbre.

    Percussion instruments like cymbals and the snare drum create broad-spectrum noise. There’s essentially so many frequencies that it’s difficult for our brains to nail it down the fundamental pitch. It’s also what helps us hear them over the rest of the ensemble.

    Drums in general produce very short pulses of sound, which also makes it harder for the brain to tell what pitch it is. In harmonic analysis, any very short sound is actually broad-spectrum because it takes a ton of harmonics to produce a single sharp spike with rapid decay.

    I highly recommend downloading a spectrum analyzer app on your phone to get an intuition for this. If you’re on Android, I recommend Spectroid.

    Just run it and watch the screen while you make different sounds, approach various sound sources, play music, or just talk or sing. If you can whistle, that also produces an interesting result. You can actually see the frequency of the power grid in the harmonics produced by electric motors and transformer coils which is personally really fucking cool.





  • It’s a troll toll. It’ll get you a software engineering job with a roman numeral in the title at a company you’ve actually heard of. But if you’re almost done then there’s no reason not to stick with it.

    The early years of my career were quite a slog, having taught myself to program. I started out on freelancing websites, competing with devs from the third world who worked for pennies a day. I lucked into my first salaried job, got hired through my cousin.

    I will say, having some theory knowledge does come in handy occasionally. You might never have to write your own hashtable, but being able to understand the implementation of the structures you’re using helps a lot to make informed decisions about how you organize and access data, especially when you’re trying to optimize for performance or memory usage.

    One piece of unsolicited advice you might have heard before is to not discount the power of networking. The best written cover letter in the world can’t hold a candle to knowing someone who can put in a good word. Make friends with your professors and classmates, you never know who might think to look you up one day when their company is hiring. My old boss still offers me a job occasionally, more than five years later.








  • It definitely tastes different from the bottle than from the fountain.

    I think out of the fountain it’s gonna be a little watered down for a couple of reasons:

    • I can only imagine franchise owners set the fountains to run a little light on syrup to save money
    • the ice is gonna start melting as soon as the soda hits it since it’s not chilled below freezing, and the dissolved syrup will lower the freezing point of water like salt does

    The bottle has also likely been sitting around for a few days to weeks, and more of the carbon dioxide will have converted to carbonic acid, which will affect the taste.

    The recipe may actually be a little different for the fountain syrup vs the bottled stuff for these reasons.

    If you’ve never gotten a fountain drink without ice, it’s worth trying. It goes warm quicker but won’t get watered down. I used to think people who asked for no ice in their drinks were just picky. However, I recently started ordering my drinks that way because I’d sometimes notice a chemical taste as the ice melted and it’d sour my stomach pretty badly. That never happens when I get my drinks without ice.

    I don’t think any of this is unique to Baja Blast though. Pretty much every soda tastes completely different between bottle and fountain, and also with or without ice.