What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something!

Feel free to give recs or dicuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

I've been noticing a social effect lately and I'm curious about others' takes on this. I'm calling it "specialty fatigue" because I've noticed mostly in specialty communities. I differentiate between this, elitism, FAQ annoyance because there seems to be a more complex cause at work.

To put it in general terms, specialty fatigue is caused by the overexposure to others' work in a given area of expertise. Whereas elitism is more of an ego driven personality traits, and FAQ frustration arises from repeatedly answering the same basic questions, this fatigue seems to be caused by seeing too many things that don't live up to standards (often arbitrary personal standards, but sometimes can be industry standards). In others words, people notice their industry getting flooded with novices getting away with crap they'd never tolerate. It can be disheartening and disillusioning. Most often, it results in the community of specialists becoming overly critical of things that didn't originally bother them. People who were once helpful and encouraging become raging internet monsters.

I see this happen a lot because I'm a bit of a jack of all trades, master of none, and largely autodidactic. I don't have very many strong opinions on how things should be done because I've learned to constantly question the efficacy of norms, and try to establish a system that just works best to achieve the results I care about. Despite that, I'm still interested in finding out how others go about doing things, or even just listen to the sort of stuff they care about. What factors do specialists find worthwhile in determining quality? How feasible is it for me to achieve those results?

Quite often, specialty communities are so corrupted by overexposure that many members of the community start acting as gatekeepers. "If you can't afford decent equipment, don't even bother." And they'll criticize anything that could remotely be interpreted as a newb question or point of view, frequently to the point of acute toxicity where just about any discussion becomes unfeasible.

I'm a propenent of openly sharing knowledge. But the offshoot of increased introductory material is that there will be a corresponding increase in novice level production. I can see why people might be bothered by that (personally, I'm not), but it blows me away that anyone would be surprised by that. That's exactly how it seems sometimes, though. Almost as if people just wanted to show off how much they know without anyone else using that knowledge for anything productive.

This seems like the social deflection point between "old school" methods of passing down specialty knowledge (apprenticing, higher education, family businesses) to "new school" methods (look it up online and just try it out). With the removal of a mentor figure from the equation, there is less of a filter for what's quality and what's crap. Add social media into the equation and there seems like there's a constant influx of garbage into every industry out there. But for specialty communities, it definitely has an "end of the world as we know it" kinda feel because it seems like the entire specialty is getting flooded with subpar work that is a threat to their livelyhoods.

Has anyone else noticed this sort of thing? Do you have a specialty? If so, what trends have you noticed within that field regarding apparent willingness to share information? Have you ever dropped a hobby because people seemed to take it too seriously? How do you personally feel about the balance between open sharing of information vs keeping secrets (for example, a technique a process from which you derive a substantial portion of income)?

Edit: Fixed a typo. Can and can't are a bit different. Oops.

On reddit I post the occasional AAR (after action report) for Victoria 2 on the ParadoxPlaza sub. I was just wondering if there was any interest in me posting those here as well, since vic2 is a little obscure and it's entirely possible I'm the only player here out of our active users.

Good morning!

I was listening to the CBC radio on my way to work and there was a very interesting discussion about how people choose to interpret the results of DNA tests. I did a quick search and unfortunately couldn't find the radio broadcast on CBCs site.

Points mentioned (from my memory):

• People don't look at the results of a DNA test and go "this is who I am", instead they use it to cherry-pick who they want to be
• Statically, "white" people tend to identify with a more "exotic" finding in their test
• Example used included a person that chose to identify with who they thought they would pass as; results showed Native and Celtic blood, and person went with Native because he didn't believe they physically passed for Celtic

The cultural appropriation part:

• When non-minorities, who have generally not been raised or have much interaction with the minority they are now choosing to identify with, they can skew, more specifically flatten stats. For example, for a person who's always identified as caucasian to start checking off boxes for a minority, they are potentially 1) disregarding the consequences there are to race (discrimination), and 2) pumping up the stats for minority representation.

As a visible minority myself, I just find it in poor taste. I would love to think people who find a little bit of Asian blood will go and try to discovery more of what it is to be Asian, but I would definitely roll my eyes, if you just come up to me and say "I'm 1/64th like you".

So thoughts? Has anyone done a DNA test and how did it go?

during the 90s and early 00s we had an overwhelmingly south american supply of tv soaps, their themes most commonly center around money, intrigue, poor vs rich and the evil characters are cartoonishly evil and good characters are the pariahs of pariahs. Today we have Korean​ tv soaps where the theme mostly center on romcom and incredibly lighthearted and often humourous compared to the south american ones. the evil guys are not truly evil, their just the enemy because of the circumstance and the goog characters are not pariahs. my country is the Philippines by the way.

Someone recently asked me to replace the battery in their old iPod, and I found myself wondering what I should do with the old battery. It still works, but has less capacity than when it was new. So I looked around my workshop and found some of these surface mount LEDs and decided to test the limits of my soldering skills and make a flashlight out of them.

These LEDs are very hard to solder, since they're surface-mount and the pads are on the bottom of the LED. They were never meant to be soldered by hand, but rather placed by machine onto a specific amount of solder paste, which is then baked in a fancy oven at very specific temperatures for very specific times. To solder these by hand, you need to create a liquid puddle of solder and sorta float the LED on top, while being careful to not short the pads which are very close together as well as not overheating the LED. The temperature the plastic melts at seems to be only a few degrees higher than the solder melts at.

I wired up 5 of the LEDs in parallel, each with its own 6.8ohm resistor wired in series with the LED. This should limit the current to 150mA per LED. I hot glued this in place, as well as a lithium battery charging circuit I got off ebay for a dollar. Here's one such listing.

I slapped on a pushbutton, and Bob's your uncle! It worked first try!

Here's a blurry picture of the finished product. I'm pretty proud of how it came out, considering how tiny and fiddly the soldering was. And, I think I'll actually get some use out of it too. The battery ought to last at least an hour of runtime, and the thing is seriously bright.

Anyone here into electronics as a hobby?

Edit: Better-ish pic: https://i.imgur.com/Kxqy1jg.jpg

^{No potatoes were harmed in the making of this photo.}