@poppastring@dotnet.social2025-09-20 19:35:26
A post from the archive 📫:
Curiosity unbounded
#musings
@jtk@infosec.exchange2025-09-20 02:23:10
@publicvoit@graz.social2025-08-19 09:10:14
@hex@kolektiva.social2025-07-09 12:48:36
Related to understanding firearms, "rifles" and hand guns tend to be rifled. Rifling is grooving that runs in a helical pattern down the barrel. When purchasing a firearm, it's important to check the rifling.
First check that the firearm is unloaded. Empty or remove the magazine, cycle the weapon. Next, check again that it's unloaded by looking both down the barrel and into the magazine. Now, shine a light down the barrel and look down it. In the absence of a light, you may be able to reflect light off your thumbnail.
Rifling should look as though it's drawn on with a sharp pencil, and the barrel should look otherwise completely smooth and clean. If the rifling looks like bumpy mountains, then the owner probably used corrosive ammo and didn't clean it enough. It will probably still shoot, but not at all accurately.
Both the rifling and the pin can be used in forensic analysis to match a bullet to a gun. I don't honestly know how accurate this is because a lot of forensic "science" is just made up stuff that relies on the CSI effect and doesn't actually work as advertised.
However, not all firearms are not all rifled. Shotguns are "smoothbore" firearms, meaning they lack rifling. It is not possible to perform forensic analysis of a smoothbore firearm. It *is* possible to check for powder on the hands of someone who has used a firearm within the last few days, but it's not possible to distinguish between firing inside and outside a range.
I've been gathering all kinds of tidbits like this, partially just out of curiosity and partially because I've been wanting to write a story about a revolutionary group fighting a modern authoritarian society. I'm always happy to learn other bits, if anyone has anything else I could throw in my narrative (whenever I finally get back to writing it).
@mlawton@mstdn.social2025-07-17 13:59:41
I’ve been doing an unholy amount of weeding recently and keep seeing these little spiders fleeing my progress. Many are carrying a tiny white ball and so I looked them up out of curiosity.
Apparently they are “Rabid Wolf Spiders”, which sounds like they themselves got to pick it out and sought something impressively terrifying so that humans would leave them alone. It’s certainly a misnomer since spiders cannot be rabid.
The white ball is an egg sac.
@arXiv_csCL_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-09-16 12:14:57
When Curiosity Signals Danger: Predicting Health Crises Through Online Medication Inquiries
Dvora Goncharok, Arbel Shifman, Alexander Apartsin, Yehudit Aperstein
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11802
@muz4now@mastodon.world2025-07-02 19:34:12
Musician YATTA on going towards the unknown https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/musician-yatta-on-going-towards-…
@hikingdude@mastodon.social2025-09-14 08:05:30
We are not always discovering high mountains - sometimes we also go below earth. 😄
Here we went ~55m below the surface to see what the world below our feet looks like. And yes, the stairs were as steep as they appear on the #photo! The whole walk took us about an hour.
more about it:
@bogo@hapyyr.com2025-09-15 09:25:49
Are you in #Prague ? You must visit my talk entitled:
Disobey: #FOSS tools to fight back!
https://pretalx.linuxdays.cz/linux…
@samir@functional.computer2025-07-17 07:51:55
@… Ah, I know the feeling.
Out of curiosity, does the source matter? My partner is Romanian and deals much better with sheep/goat cheese, or very fresh cheese such as mozzarella.