The pharmacist did say that it was to reduce the queasiness since both the antibiotic and the steroid I was prescribed are apparently quite rough on the stomach, so I have to take the pills with food, which I inferred to mean as a meal. Which was fine when I took them with lunch and dinner yesterday since obviously that’s gonna be tons of food to go with it, but then it came to this morning, and I don’t normally eat breakfast. I wasn’t sure if something simple like toast or a granola bar which I would take with the morning dose would be enough food to counteract it, since obviously I didn’t want to spend my morning with a miserable stomach.

What extension is that? Sounds like something I’d want.

I remember Dolly Parton singing about her.

The big question then becomes: “is that behaviour inherent to all systems like this, or just this one?” Like, if you go to the store, buy a basic sprinkler, and then test it and it behaves exactly opposite to how you might expect it to. Or it does something completely unexpected, like phases into another dimension and starts pumping strawberry jam. Your next step shouldn’t be to say “Oh, weird, I guess that’s that.” You’d start knocking down variables. Is it the same with every sprinkler or just this one? Does the amount of suction applied affect it? If I replace the water with something else does the outcome change?"

If you’re doing research like this, you’re kind of expected to do the same sort of elaboration even if the result of a basic experiment conforms precisely to your hypothesis, because the question isn’t if any given sprinkler setup behaves in this way, it’s about whether this is a universal phenomenon across all similar setups. Because there’s an xkcd for everything, it’s this.

I think it’s also fair to say that “too cold” is generally more livable than “too hot”. It’s quite a bit easier to generate and conserve heat than to ward it off, and even a planet that is so cold that its atmosphere has precipitated into snow could theoretically be survivable with habitat domes or the like, much like a proposed moon base. “Too hot,” on the other hand, can potentially be hot enough to melt basically anything we send there, which is why there’s a lot more focus on colonizing Mars right now than Venus.

FR It ain’t like anyone’s gonna be popping by for a visit. Landed nicely on the surface or energetically buried 30m below the surface, the ashes are still on the moon.

I suspect it isn’t that the test can’t be done in the wild, simply that it hasn’t been. There’s some logistical issues to marking, releasing, and observing animals in the wild without being noticed that I expect makes working with captive animals an easier first step.

The real question is if there is something that can exist and “live” in the parts of the universe that are so unusual and beyond our experience, would we even recognize what it is if we saw it?