Annoying Questions I'd Like Answered...

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Mar 20, 2015 4:51 pm

Ok, so here's an interesting puzzle.

There's a new app called Magic which works sort of like a concierge service, just on a much broader scale. You send them a message saying you need [whatever] and they get that for you, whatever it is.

I actually really enjoy that sort of thing, so I applied, and they're interested in interviewing me. The only problem is that they're in Mountain View and I'm in Sacramento. I can get down there for the interview Saturday, but if I make it through that, I'll go into a six-week training period (which is paid).

So... I need to figure out the logistics of taking job training two hours away from my city for six weeks on an unknown amount of pay. Anyone know of anything would help me do this?

edit- other than getting some more information, obviously. Even people who say "call me anytime" are probably not going to be happy about being called at 2am.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Mar 20, 2015 10:58 pm

So, I decided to just go for it, and figure shit out if it comes to it. Air BnB will probably be the route I go, as there are a few reasonable places near the building, but I'm worrying about that after the interview.

The next question, though, is how to dress for an interview at a tech startup. Any pointers?

Eikre · Post by **Eikre** » Fri Mar 20, 2015 11:53 pm

Well, first of all, do I remember correctly that you were transitioning MtF, or was that someone else? Where are you on that? I can talk cogently about male dress on male-assigned body but I don't know if we're working with that assumption.

A suit and tie should be the expectation, being the least common denominator of respect and willingness to assume professional conduct, but there's a noted culture, among Silicon Valley startup shitheads, which rejects that dress code. It's the attire of privileged east-coast Ivy League WASPS, you see. They know that the world is much better if people can be themselves, as long as "themselves" means "west-coast white or asian Berkly grads." And those people wear chinos and polo shirts, instead. Revolutionary.

Anyway, I digress. I would start by trying on a pair of brown oxfords, blue trousers, a faintly patterned white shirt, and a brown coat in an academic style, and seeing how you look and feel in that.

Well, actually, I would stick to my guns and just wear a more fashion-forward suit, in which I would be, factually, sexy enough to surmount any of their prejudices, but I have no idea what you look like or what you have to work with so I'm starting with what I think is the easiest basis for refinement.

Eikre · Post by **Eikre** » Sat Mar 21, 2015 12:00 am

Actually come to think of it, you're not going to be developing with the people, you're going to be subordinate customer-service labor. A fresh-faced prep kid would be fine for that. Do the suit.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sat Mar 21, 2015 12:44 am

If you're going to be working front line customer service definitely risk being a tad over dressed rather than under dressed. It's a bit of a crapshoot when dealing with young businesses, but most employers who've been around the block a time or two have learned to accept that their front line employees need to conform to what the general public will want from them rather than to what standard the founder wishes was acceptable but isn't. For example, my cousin's a very successful funeral director, and while he's got a shit ton of tattoos he understands why his business would suffer if any of them were visible while wearing a suit.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Mar 21, 2015 1:16 am

I'm working towards transitioning, but it's a long ways off. I'm in a traditionally (fat) male body, just with long hair.

The job is basically tech-y concierge service. People text an app "I need [x]," where "[x]" can be anything from a sandwich to 50,000 gallons of lube, or even "a tiger in San Francisco"* so long as it's legal. My job would be to figure out how to get whatever they wanted and arrange it for them.

So it's custserv, sort of, but behind a screen. I googled the question, and found that "startup casual" is a thing, and it's pretty much what you'd expect (lots of jeans and casual tops and stuff), so I'm thinking a buttoned up Dockers work shirt and cargoes, all clean, and I'll at least try to put my hair in a "man-bun" because christ it's long.

*this was actually a thing on the application- "Say a customer wanted 'a tiger in San Francisco,' how would you get that for them, do the research and explain your process and your solution, and write out a hypothetical transcript."

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Mon Mar 23, 2015 2:24 pm

Why is the comic sans font so reviled?

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Mon Mar 23, 2015 2:54 pm

Shrapnel wrote:Why is the comic sans font so reviled?

http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/why-you-hate-comic-sans/

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Mon Mar 23, 2015 3:45 pm

Hm. Very educationalizing.

I think that from now on I will use the Comic Sans font as often as humanly possible solely to piss off graphic designers.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Mon Mar 23, 2015 3:55 pm

Holy shit that was a lot of fucktard. Comic Sans might be a poorly designed font when shit gets anti-aliased, but how many people on earth hate it for that reason?

No. It's reviled because people don't know how to use it. It's an informal font... Like kid scribble. Your boss uses it to show s/he's cool and hip and trying to be chummy. Your parents use it because it shows that they know how to use their computer well enough to change the default font, and hey... This one looks different! It's legible, while evoking hand-written words.

But Comic Sans is not an appropriate font for conveying business. It's not appropriate for letting you know that Aunt Ethyl died. Much like Times New Roman isn't really appropriate for announcing your kidlet's first birthday party. So you end up with a bunch of people overusing the font because they don't really get that it conveys something other than what they intend, while showcasing their technological incompetence for being unable to download something different. Comic Sans has essentially come to represent crimes of social and computer derpitude.

TL;DR: It makes you look like an idiot.

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Mon Mar 23, 2015 4:16 pm

Either way, it's a great tool for inducing rage like using a run-on sentences to give grammar Nazi's heart attacks.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Thu Mar 26, 2015 8:09 pm

Is an adult tyrannosaurus physically capable of jumping?

Are raptors able to climb trees?

Blasted · Post by **Blasted** » Thu Mar 26, 2015 9:52 pm

OgreBattle wrote:Is an adult tyrannosaurus physically capable of jumping?

Are raptors able to climb trees?

Given elephants can't jump due to their weight, I'd be very surprised if any of the tyrannosaur family could without shattering their bones.

I see no reason why a raptor couldn't climb a tree if goats can.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Mar 26, 2015 10:00 pm

Given the rotation of their wrists and overall skeletal structure, yeah, I'd say raptors could probably climb trees.

It's possible the pelvic shape would get it the way, but I don't know.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Fri Mar 27, 2015 8:06 am

What kind of terrain did the t-rex and raptors live in?

Is there a good example of the difference between a plains adopted carnivorous dinosaur biped and a thick jungle adopted one? Like say how a lion and jaguar are built a little different.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Fri Mar 27, 2015 8:39 am

Tyrannosaurids have highly developed springs for legs, and their feet can transmit massive forces from any direction, meaning the reconstructions of T-Rex with thin muscles (at ~5 Tonne) give them no explosive ability to get off the ground, but they would be able to run and change direction at speed after getting wound up and would handle rapid drops much better than sauropods or elephants. Get knocked down and get back up again.

But if an adult T-Rex was 11 Tonne, then no, it absolutely could not jump, nor run, nor fall, but would very quickly get up to it's top walking speed. No one really knows, and the estimates in the middle could go either way. It's probably a lightweight though, allowing it to pick out the young and infirm, wound them, and then wait for the adults to move on, it's just a stronger strategy than scavenging, not that they lived long as adults.

Velociraptor? No, those are not climbing claws, they touch nothing but prey. There's a lot of variously related things totally do a whole lot of tree climbing though, and also gliding and even flying.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Mar 27, 2015 9:17 am

Velociraptor hand

Cat forelimb

Generally speaking, velociraptor claws have the same shape as cat claws, and cats are notorious climbers. Even if velociraptors could not climb using their claws, they had dextrous fingers and there's no reason to believe they could not climb in a more primate-like manner using hand holds such as branches.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Fri Mar 27, 2015 10:49 am

The foot, with the big hooked killing claw with the specialist articulation. Veloceraptor's front claws are cat-like because those can hold prey close for a kick, and their back claws are for running on, because they run on them, and the killing claw is certainly not for anything other than slicing flesh.

Cats don't have a killing claw, because they kill by insertion specialised teeth into the hind brain and upper spine of their prey (or they do if their mother shows them the trick, ours has no idea and just crushes the ribcage).

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tet ... dinosaurs/

That guy says this argument is both really old and also bullshit, because claws on extant animals are all over the place and things are hard to define as climbers or otherwise in the first place, because most things can totally just climb, but often don't.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Mar 27, 2015 4:44 pm

You know that claw cocked back and out of the way, right?

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sat Mar 28, 2015 9:48 am

That's what makes it a killing claw. The whole foot structure there, you're basically arguing that cassowaries are climbing birds.

You know about foreshortening too, right? Oh, and now google gives me a bunch of velociraptor feet when I search for cassowary feet. That's fantastic, thanks google, not creepy at all.

I presume it was bird's inability to reestablish grasping claws on the forelimbs and large toothed jaws that prevented our modern ostriches and emus being efficient predators. Because otherwise they match the Oviraptor and Anzu and Veloceraptor and others really closely. A little lighter and longer in the leg bones for higher top speed, helped by the reduced forelimbs and head weights.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 11:34 am

Are there any dinosaurs suspected of being climbing, tree dwelling animals then?

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 7:23 pm

Archaeopteryx isn't considered a dinosaur, I guess, but it is believed to have been a climbing animal. Some paleontologists hypothesize that velociraptors and other small theropods with feathers may have been able to glide short distances or assist jumps with their feathers, but I don't know how much actual support there is for that.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 9:59 pm

Can bones that fused together be 'de-fused' in evolution? Like birds with wings evolving into something that has hands.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 11:22 pm

On bones defusing through evo- no clue. I would think it's possible, but probably unlikely.

'nother question-

So this past winter, the east coast was getting slammed with massive blizzards, while California is gradually drying up like Mars.

A friend and I would frequently comment on how they should just ship us the damned snow (we're in California) so we could refill our reservoirs and they don't flood theirs. Hell, I considered drafting a proposal about just that, but I'm deeply ignorant of many actual factors that would go into such an enterprise.

How practical/feasible would it be for the east coast states that were being slammed with tons of snow to just ship it out to us in tanker cars on the rails? Not just mechanically, but politically?

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Tue Mar 31, 2015 12:44 am

@Prak, the amount of water in rain is titanic. It's genuinely hard to comprehend just how much water falls from the sky on even tiny events, let alone big ones.

As an example, on one hectare, 10 mm of rain is 100*100*0.01 m^3, or 100 tonne (0.4 inches on 2.5 acres, or 1 inch over 1 acre). That's a couple of very big trucks.

One big reservoir in California would be over 0.25 km^3, or over 250 million tonnes. There's 36 that size. It would take over 180 million trucks to fill just them, let alone all the smaller ones with greater total capacity, in water form, after you melt it all, which is obviously nuts in terms of holding onto it as you do that, and also energy concerns if the days aren't warm enough in the places you're piling up snow.

Rail-wise, your tankers hold less each, and while you might get a thousand cars on a train after melting the snow and moving the resulting water (the energy costs there are insane, by the way, but ignoring those), you're still got to get ~250,000 very long trains down a limited number of tracks in a timely fashion, when the tracks are already pretty busy, and there's limited amounts of equipment. You've also got to unload the water up into the typically mountainous reservoirs, which is more equipment and fuel.

Even just the energy, you'd build and run desalination plants cheaper.

Can't be bothered doing more math, but I doubt you could shift more than a day's water supply even dedicating the nation's entire infrastructure to it, instead of shifting food and medical supplies and fuel and everything else you also need to live. There's just so much water in rain, so many people in California, and they tend to use water like it's going to keep on raining.

@Ogrebattle.

Nature has zero examples of de-evolution. It's to do with embryonic development, the previous evolutionary steps have to be terminated early to let the new ones work at all, and then the later developmental steps from before randomly degrade over time because they're no longer expressed for selection.

So old "hand" functions aren't there. Evolutionary change in body structure is about terminating some developmental step (or series of steps) early or late, and adding new steps on the end. It can't usually add new things early, because that normally causes everything later to not trigger at all. Turning a wing into an arm with a hand is incredibly complex with few useful intermediate steps, so it's probably not going to happen.

Like, when birds stop using their wings for flying, the whole thing tends to fuse. The most useful tool to make from a stunted wing is a hard protective sheath for the ribs that can be used for display and threat, so that's what it does. Having a floppy thing without the muscles and tendons needed to stabilise and articulate recovered joints is just not going to be selected, ever. It never works.