eigenrobot Profile picture
May 22, 2023 21 tweets 7 min read Read on X
gentlemen its time for some wet chemistry

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heres our patient, one lovely little blueberry bush

the red leaves indicate an iron deficiency caused by insufficiently acidic soil

we're gonna try to bring down the pH with a high molar citric acid buffer Image
wait is it necessary to use the conjugate base here? like sodium citrate instead of sodium hydroxide?

hmmmmm

well fuck
no thats nonsense i shouldnt have read anything. ok anyway let's begin

citric acid is 258.06 g/mol

i have 340.2g so if i dump this stuff in a liter of water i get a 1.3 molar solution

should be good to dissolve

my root watering thing is 56oz

tbh im gonna just eyeball it Image
step one add acid
step two. make sure its working with a Scientific test
interestingly looks like its sub-2 pH

well

we wanna bring it up a bit i think, i dont wanna fuck up the roots which prefer pH between 4.0 and 5.5 Image
lye is REALLY nasty stuff and i will not be tasting this solution

im also gonna mix it with heavy chemical gloves on and with baking soda on hand

you like

like in the movie
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first try got ph near 14

ok now to slowly add it to the acid until ph up around 4 Image
all right

took more lye than id expected, a Lot more lye

and there were some oopsies along the way

but at last its time to attend to our patient!
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well hopefully i didnt kill the plant

one thing i wish id done was wait 20m to add it so that the solution cooled off

adding a strong base to a weak acid is pretty exothermic and the water was fairly warm although hopefully thermal mass wasnt much relative to the soil
going forward i think it makes more sense to just mix some citric acid up at a lower concentration and just water using that

seems less risky and much easier regardless

anyway this concludes DIY soil chemistry. cheers all Image
well its not dead but its not better either

ill test a soil sample later to see whether it took in the short term Image
regardless i also ordered a big bag of citric acid to dissolve and use in regular waterings

i want to get the pH of the entire bed down to provide a nice environment for the blueberry roots

also sick plant is in the ground where the concrete thing was :/

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@liviadrusilla90 interesting point about the breakdown though. hmmm. hmmmmmmmmmmm

guess ill look into the other options, thank you :)
extremely good point that the citrate is going to biodegrade quickly and so isnt a good long-term solution

I'd seen the biodegredation as a positive but realistically . . . maybe not so much

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took a soil sample near the base of the blueberry where i poured the acid, and another from a few feet away where i put some sulfur a few weeks ago

blueberry base soil was ~pH 5 and the other stuff looked around pH6

so plausibly I dropped local pH by a full point
pH 5 is low enough for iron uptake to resume in the blueberry but given that it's temporary and given that the plant is already low on iron, going to go back and add (1) more iron fertilizer to increase availability and (2) more sulfur to maintain and drive longer term changes
ok so check this out

before in quoted tweet

lets see our lovely fellow today

NOT BAD NOT BAD AT ALL

remember this thread the next time someone tells you you cant solve problems by mixing household chemicals with half-remembered decades old knowledge


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More from @eigenrobot

Jun 27
they hate how little it takes for us to be happy
the women all want to kill her

it's beautiful Image
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i think maybe the term of art for this is "pickme"? idk

shes minmaxxing and shamelessly trading off homosocial status for heterosexual appeal

my theory is that women who are mad about this arent wrong to be but the specific reason for their anger is that shes a gender traitor
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Jun 27
realistically there's no way to stop people from tacitly or explicitly allocating taxes and benefits on the basis of race and large portions of the country have interests in this happening or ideological commitments to doing so

this is just our life now
supreme court rulings arent gonna change anything, no one gives a shit about the law on principle and its easy to obfuscate discrimination to taste

any direct government enforcement will i expect inevitably be straightforwardly politically motivated
the norms to which new immigrants are assimilating and young natives inculcated are immensely ethnically charged without any public and common ideal of transcending race for an american identity, an identity which frankly doesnt even exist anymore
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Jun 10
as long as we're sending insane ideas to @JDVance

does the federal government have to enforce laws everywhere or can it announce it won't?

because one funny thing the administration could do would be to deprioritize the enforcement of most federal laws in sanctuary states
>“congrats, california, you're now libertarian af. no OSHA, no IRS audits, no EPA. enjoy.”

it’d be legally coherent and politically thermonuclear. which means someone will definitely try it. Image
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alternatively trump could target blue states by actually enforcing marijuana law which would be very funny too
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Jun 4
hmmm sure ok i'll bite

the rheinweisenlager don't seem that bad tbh

i havent looked at the wikipedia page and wont, just going to attach some commentary and notes on context
the rheinweisenlager were a bunch of concentration camps in the original sense where surrendered wehrmacht soldiers were held for several months in 1945

the camps were run by the US, apparently, and that's important
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less so in the east, where they were more inclined to fight to the death against the red army
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Jun 3
my only yarvin story is that we met in a temporary teahouse and he spent an hour watching my kid while moon and i took a break, and he sent us off with advice on early reading for her

it's a small thing but it was a welcome kindness for us, bare acquaintances
i'm also happy to say @selentelechia is making great progress
@selentelechia anyway these hit jobs are incredibly tiresome
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"travel" is fake

no one except lord myles has "adventures" when they travel

you are staying at a hotel, paying large sums of money to have a far worse experience than you could have in your own home and a far softer experience than you could have by spending a weekend in jail
"i love to Travel" why have you failed to establish your home as a place of serenity and joy, to the extent that you feel psychically uncomfortable there and strive to get away from your life whenever you can, viewing it as the highest good?

you are not well
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