Yeah, post-shaving alopecia is a thing, especially in double coated breeds. (Which is part of the reason you’re supposed to avoid shaving them.)

Move over spherical cow, circular cat is my new best friend

I told myself I wouldn’t read unrelated papers at work, but here we are. :P Yeah, as expected, the actual paper is way more informative about the structural properties, and about the limitations. (Difficulty fabricating larger samples without voids, said voids resulting in much lower strengths and much less plasticity, uncertain tensile strength, etc.) Fascinatingly though, (at least to me, not having known the details about DNA based metamaterials :P) the details of the properties should be tunable by way of changing the DNA lattice structure. Which makes it a two-part engineering problem, figuring out how to manufacture it at scale, and determining optimal lattice structures for different applications. Definitely exciting, and will be big once we figure these things out.

But that’s not really what I was talking about. While I get that this is an article geared to laymen/the general public, I do think we should be holding science communication to a higher standard. What was discovered is exciting, but we don’t know how it can be used yet, or if it will ever be practical to do so. Overview is fine, I’d just like some more qualifiers and less speculation. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like some more care would do a lot to improve overall scientific literacy and trust in the scientific community. /shurg

Always a little annoyed at articles like this; “strength” doesn’t tell me anything. If this is 5x more resistant than steel to deformation, but then shatters catastrophically, that limits its use cases substantially. Likewise, compressive, tensile and shear strength are all different properties, only one of which is referenced at all. Still very cool, and I look forward to seeing how it develops and learning more details about its capabilities (when I have more time I’ll read the paper), but vague terminology like this has a bad habit of making stuff sound way more revolutionary than it actually is. /shurg

My big thing is to avoid hard numbers wherever possible. EG, you’ve got a big spooky encounter with complicated abilities, passive/lair effects, etc etc; it’s health pool is whatever the plot demands. :P Realize you underestimated the raw dps of your players? Bump that health up until it has a chance to show off what it can do and feel like a threat. Realize this thing will just murder the hell out of them? Tune it down until they only need 1-2 good hits to bring it down before they’re out. Similar with saving throws, bonuses to hit, ac, etc. I usually don’t commit to anything until at least a round or two has passed. Much easier to balance the interplay of complicated features and abilities after you’ve seen what they can do, and there’s no reason you can’t do that on the fly, assuming your players trust you to want them to have the best experience possible.

IIRC, there is a bit more complexity than that to the Pirahã understanding of numeracy. Relative quantity is something they’re just fine at understanding, (with words for single/less, plural/more and same) it’s abstraction of quantities to tokenized values where they struggle. Which, I suppose, also interestingly lines up with the study results; the initial training period resulted in nodes associated with quantity, but those nodes were separate/unrelated to numeracy systems that developed with additional training.

TBH, my first campaign struggled largely because I tried too hard to make a sandbox. There was a little intro adventure, set up some lore and conflict, then I told them they could go wherever. They decide to travel to a nearby town thay mysteriously cut contact with the village they saved. Oh, there’s a cult and supernatural plague here? Cool, lets dip and wander to the active battlefield to the west, run into an imperial patrol and get drafted into the army. The enemy army is made up of strangely changed soldiers that refuse to stay dead. Spooky. Lets desert and go back to the first village, and investigate the strangely coordinated goblins that had them under threat. >> This all happened over the course of about five sessions. Their ability to run into, and then immediately drop, plot threads was unparalleled. :P

I do something similar to Sprint, basically, you can move at double your speed for a round (so 4x total, dashing) but have to roll a Con save or take a level of Exhaustion. Each time you use this ability without resting, the DC goes up by 5. (Starts at 10.) Which feels about right, IMO. Lets a max-level Monk/Barbarian match (or exceed, with certain feats/races/subclasses) Usain Bolt for speed, but only for a short duration, even if they have a superhuman constitution.

Damn. Motherboard is probably my most immediate need, my current one just barely fits my GPU, getting the RAM in around it was a struggle, and I had to scrap the wifi card I wanted. (Yeah, yeah, wired is better, but it’s not convenient for me RN. :P)