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Thursday was pretty much a repeat of Wednesday, except that I didn't go shopping and I didn't cook. I had some kind of nasty cold or other immune ruckus brewing, as the lymph nodes or something right at the top of my neck at the back of my head were pretty swollen. They seem to be getting better now, but I had some echinacea tea just for the heck of it.
I've had some interesting conversations with a programmer who frequently comes by with questions, which lead me to consider how I know what I know, so that I can get them into the habit of answering their own questions so that they don't have to interrupt me. This benefits them in two ways, since they're not much less shy than I am.
And I find that one important thing about how I know what I know is that I know how computer programs know what they know, or more accurately, how the people who wrote the programs knew what they knew. For instance, I have learned quite well how the debugger behaves when it has no information (and how to chivvy it along anyway), and how it behaves when it has wrong information (very annoying until I realized that I should stop believing what it said) and how it behaves when we've deliberately withheld even more information than gets withheld in the ordinary course of things (extremely annoying but mercifully predictable.) In the back of my head I have an elusive, almost indescribable something that tells me what the program is likely to know and how much it'll be able to figure out, and whether it will get it right. Even when you're dealing with a computer program it's pretty handy to have a theory of mind.
Regarding "what earthly difference the lack of saturation makes", solarbird informs me:
At the lowest level, flexibility of cellular membranes. Cellular membranes are made of polar fatty molecules. The higher percentage of these are saturated, the more tightly they fit together, and the less flexible the membrane is.I might have figured out that fats get absorbed whole by the digestive system and incorporated into cell structures if I'd been paying more attention to Wikipedia. I had already heard elsewhere that some proteins are absorbed whole as well, which may explain some dietary problems like my dairy sensitivity. As time goes on, it seems I'll have to unlearn all of my high school biology. Certainly half of what they taught us about taxonomy has fallen by the wayside already.
Via another correspondent, I've come across 2 videos that are passing interesting:
Food Fight - See how many of the players and events you can recognize. It's been a busy 70 years.
Strangest Gunfight Ever - I don't know about ever; Blaze Glory gives this one pretty good competition; but not in nearly so short a time.
