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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 6th, 2023

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  • Yes, “they” do, for values of “they”.

    You can have a scope with magnification as your “longer range” optic, and use something like a red dot for close-range shooting where the scope would get in the way.

    You can do this by putting a “piggyback” sight on top of your big scope, but that gives you a lot of offset (your “dot” is far above where you shoot), which makes aiming harder. (And attaching a scope to a scope makes for suboptimal stability) The other method is by using an angled adapter, so you just turn the gun sideways a bit, and if you’re using the right stuff, you can just shoot like that with the same sighting and alignment.

    Of course, that’s mostly useful for people who expect to shoot at stuff both 300m and 20m away, which generally means military, sports shooting and people who wish they could do either.

















  • It was probably benzene. Benzene is an amazing cleaning agent, if not for the fact that’s it’s both super volatile and super carcinogenic.

    I’m a chemist by training. During my master’s degree I had an old professor who helped write several national safety regulations, fighting for several rules back in the 80’s when “workplace safety” meant “don’t leap out the window unless there’s a fire”. But he’d also clean lab tables (after hours) with benzene from a giant brown stoppered bottle he kept in his desk drawer, and he had the habit of turning his head sideways when working with volatiles, because you didn’t want any flammable gasses to contact the pipe you were always smoking while in the lab.

    He joked that no amount of benzene was going to outcompete nonstop smoking from age 13, and he only quit when it was banned in the lab. He was the person who always told us that chemists died 10 years younger than everyone else, but not to worry, that was mostly because of his generation was skewing the stats, and we’d be fine.

    He also died two years into retirement, from cancer of the everything.