What is your niche knowledge?

I'm a professional fire/sideshow performer and certified freak. I know a lot about things that are weird, morbid, or dangerous. I also have a split tongue and love to show it off. I'm fun at parties :)

Ask me anything I guess?

I also have a split tongue and love to show it off. I’m fun at parties :)
Is this your way of flirting?
- I have a partner so not really? If anything it made dating harder because people are scared of it and I was always upfront about it. Other freaks love it however, as do dentists lol
How dangerous are these fire shows for the performers?
- Incredibly, but good fire performers are insured professionals for a reason. In addition to the obvious dangers of burns and fire spreading, fire eaters and breathers risk chemical pneumonia. Sword swallowers risk permeated stomachs.
Who certifies freaks and what does the certificate entitle you to?
- That was a joke, there's no certification. But I'm part of the longest running permanent sideshow in the US and have a forked tongue
Name checks out
I’ve always wanted a split tongue. Does it make a difference when it comes to eating ass/lickin clits/penii?
- Hard to say since I've had it since 2017. It still functions the same as a regular tongue but has additional features so make of that what you will. Fwiw I'm a gay woman.

Acoustic propagation. I design large format PA systems and as a result need to know both how to make sound and stop sound at a large scale. It is entirely possible and actually relatively easy to be super precise with where sound goes or doesn’t go. The problem is cost.

Noticed you haven't been getting any feedback on this. That's probably a good thing right? ;)
How do I subscribe to acoustic propagation facts?
- Just say it out loud. He'll find you.
- Just message me, you’ll get some!
  So a lot of people are aware of active noise cancellation that you find in headphones nowadays, that works in large scale as well. The first time that type of technology was used was in the greatful dead’s wall of sound. The problem is it’s expensive to do large scale.

A really painful type of coordinate transformation I once had to develop to try and shed some insight on Hawking radiation near black holes.

Unfortunately the results were fucking ugly and I gave up trying to understand them, largely due to the fact that except under very specific circumstances they're basically impossible to calculate (you get something similar to divide by zero errors).

Nice case:

Not nice case:

There was a ton more related stuff I could have spent a PhD working on, but life didn't really allow it (and frankly I'm okay with that, I'm actually doing enjoyable stuff for the first time in my life instead of fighting my brain).

Are you a post-doc now? If so, congrats! If you dont mind me asking, what exactly was your research about (not a physics/mathy person so ELI5 would be appreciated)
- Nah, I never even started a PhD mostly due to financial circumstances. But I've since realised I kinda hated academia because of untreated ADHD lol. I may go back to it one day after I've got treatment sorted but I really doubt it, I found my passion in music instead.
  I'll try and ELI5 haha. Think of a black hole like a battery, stuff falls in to charge it and then it discharges by tickling empty space into creating particles. The problem is that the particles it creates seem to be random, which means it acts like a big delete button for the stuff that fell inside. Due to quantum stuff, this shouldn't be possible, so some process could exist to encode the information about the original stuff onto the particles that leave the black hole. Importantly this doesn't actually mean the particles that leave have to be the same as what fell in, you just need to able to look at them and then reconstruct it. Kinda like if you scrambled a book in a way which makes it look random, but is actually a secret code that still has the whole story contained inside.
  My research was to look for that information being written on the particles leaving the black hole, basically by comparing how space and time outside the black hole changes over time and seeing what it does to the tickling.

Compared to people around me I seem to know a lot about fashion history, textiles and clothing in general.

Hot tip, like literally a hot tip, if you're having trouble being miserable in the hot weather this summer, try wearing 100% cotton, loose fitting clothes that cover your skin. 100% Linen or a linen/rayon blend is even better but pricey. Wear a hat. Polyester, acrylic, spandex, microfiber, they're all plastics that not only insulate you but don't absorb your sweat. That "moisture wicking technology" athletic clothing is always going on about is total bullshit. Wear a linen shirt in the sun with a breeze and marvel at the magic of evaporative cooling. Covering your skin with a hat and sleeves not only helps prevent sunburn, but is also your own portable shade. You know how much cooler it is in the shade, right?

You might look at pictures of old timey people all dressed in big dresses and long sleeve shirts and waistcoats in the old west and think "wow they must have been so uncomfortable!" but I bet you they were more comfortable than you in your polyester. Just ask a reenactor!

Imagine a Venn Diagram with three circles:

Ships and their electronics
Linux servers
Industrial robotics

I'm in the middle where all of those intersect. Pays well.

A ship, a Linux server, and an industrial robot enter a bar.
- ...and the bartender asks: "Is my geophysical survey data ready yet?"
Have you read how to avoid huge ships?
- Kind of hard in my line of work.
- I want that book! But gods, I'm not paying that.
  For those not in the know, read the reviews.
Sounds like this man is about to hack a Gibson

I know how RuneScape's bot detection works, and currently have an OSRS account that's nearly maxed from nonstop botting over the last 6 months

Edit: I'm so confident (or maybe stupid) I'll even share my progress: https://secure.runescape.com/m=hiscore_oldschool/hiscorepersonal?user1=nk%20best%20k

You should grind everything up to 99 and do like that one person and max them all out one after another at the same time.
Edit: Ah, nevermind, I didn't realize 99 was the max.

I can read UPC, ISBN, and EAN bar codes. Tear the numbers off the bottom, hand me the lines, and I can tell you the numbers you tore off. Also, if you give me any specific date on the Gregorian calendar (on or after October 15, 1582), I can tell you the day of the week it was or will be on.

Finally...way less interesting...but I have a Master's degree in math and have taught elementary, middle school, high school, dual credit, and college math classes.

You've memorised the Doomsday algorithm?
- Indeed.
July 26, 6.000.002.024
- It's a Friday. Because all that matters in any date with a year greater than four digits is the last four digits, and July 26, 2024 is today, and today is a Friday. 😊
  But, if I didn't know July 26, 2024 were a Friday...
  Step 1)
  Starting numbers:
  Century is a multiple of 400: 2
  Century is 100 more than multiple of 400: 0
  Century is 200 more than multiple of 400: 5
  Century is 300 more than a multiple of 400: 3
  2024 is in the century of the 2000s. 2000 is a perfect multiple of 400, so the starting number there is 2.
  Step 2) 24 is a multiple of 12, specifically 12 x 2. Thus we add 2.
  Step 3) 24 is a perfect multiple of 12 with zero years in excess, so we can add 0.
  Step 4) There are no leap years in the 0 extra years beyond the closest multiple of 24, so we can add another 0.
  Step 5) The Doomsday for July is 7/11. July 26th is 15 days after July 11th. 15 mod 7 is 1, so we add 1.
  Step 6) 2 + 2 + 0 + 0 + 1 = 5
  Step 7)
  0 = Sunday (Noneday)
  1 = Monday (Oneday)
  2 = Tuesday (Twoday)
  3 = Wednesday (Threesday)
  4 = Thursday (Thorsday Foursday)
  5 = Friday (Fiveday)
  6 = Saturday (Sixaday)
  Our total was 5, so the date July 26th, 2024 (or any year with the last four digits 2024) is a Friday.

I've delved way too deep into the fall of the Western Roman Empire. I think I know a lot about Majorian, Stilicho, Aetius and Ricimer. My gf at this point even knows who Honorius is and why he was a bad emperor. Edit: and that he had chicken :)

When I saw the meme "How often do you daily think about the Roman Empire", I knew that it was about me, because the answer is yes :/

I, too, would like to be destroyed by goths
- The joke never gets old ;)
I think it's neat that you're taking an interest in history. You could do worse things with your free time :)
- Thank you! I really appreciate it. I think so too, especially because learning history provides one with a better understanding and contextualization of current events. I'm still wondering why exactly I picked the Roman Empire, but I also think that's a pretty nice topic to delve into :)
  Once again, thanks for your comment - it really matters to me!

I am a steadicam operator and have been making power cables for cameras. I get calls from around the USA and the world from people trying to troubleshoot their electrical systems on their Steadicam and cinema cameras.

If you need an expert on the long-discontinued Motorola 96002 digital signal processor, I'm your guy! I wrote an entire graphical operating system in its assembly language and still need to maintain it from time to time, so my skills remain sharp.

thats insane and really cool! what got you interested in that specifically?
- Well we built some instrumentation around it at work back in the 90s and still use it today. It was ahead of its time. It had hardware loops, a hardware call stack, hardware circular buffer addressing, and a DMA controller. In one instruction, you could do 2 FPU operations and a memory move with a DMA transfer going on in the background. It was an insane architecture. And it could handle 3 separate memory spaces, so even though it's a 32-bit chip, you could access well over 4 GB of RAM.
  The best thing about chips of that era though is you could tell ahead of time exactly how long your code will take to execute. Like you just type numbers into a spreadsheet and add up the instruction cycle counts. That kind of analysis is hopeless these days, but it informed the design of the instrument. More recently, we've been looking at RISC-V for a newer generation, but it's harder to predict ahead of time how it will perform?

I can look at a blueprint (top, front, and side views) and imagine the object in 3D. This is probably why I find topo maps easy to read as well.

I didn't know this skill was that niche until pretty recently
I managed a blue print shop for 7 years. I have no idea how your brain can do this. Blows my mind.
- I suspected this was unusual. LOL
Hey me too! Luckily, I went into architecture.
- Nice. Have you meet other Architectures that can do this?
- I do not know of any resources. This isn't something I practiced, it's just something I can do.

I stumbled into an optics development project over a decade ago. Today I develop multiple systems a year and know the math behind it pretty well, although I use the dedicated software. I've also worked on the manufacturing of lenses. I've always been into photography and hope to start a niche camera lens company in the US just like MS optics in Japan.

Good Luck. If you happened to do it, don't hesitate to advertise us me on Lemmy.

I got way too hard into the Minecraft anarchy scene so I've got knowledge that even Minecraft fans find abhorrent.

Setting up bots and automation, using server exploits to hunt for hidden bases, exploiting item duplication glitches, and of course using cheat clients. I've even written a few hacks for a private client my group used to make.

Meanwhile I get blown up by a creeper trying to set up a fence around my cobblestone and dirt house…
- haha yeah, same when I play solo without cheats. but it's better to have a creeper blow a hole in your dirt shack than in your carefully designed redstone contraption!
How do people make computers in Minecraft? Something something redstone stuff?
- Yes you got it ! By combining redstone elements you can make all the basic logic gates. You combine logic gates to make binary adders, multipliers etc... You can store data as inventories, like for example a chest with 5 slots filled won't give the same signal as a chest with 3 slots filled. And finally you have various elements that can light up when powered so you make displays out of that.

I've been learning about air quality consultation as a backup business plan over the past few years. Buying commercial-grade sensors, researching various aspects of air quality, monitoring, and purification techniques. Nothing crazy but feels pretty niche to me.

I've always agreed with that saying "jack of all trades, master of none, but better than master of one" ... but I didn't expect to feel so frustrated that I don't have any fun niche knowledge.

This was a great question, and I've loved reading all the answers!

yea you and me both. Let's sit in the audience and have fun

I’m an expert in consequential greenhouse gas accounting. Which is the sub discipline of GHG accounting that specializes in understanding how policies and decisions impact global GHG emissions.

I don't know how to articulate an answer to this right now, but I wanted to say that this was a great question, OP — there's some really cool answered here

I am terrified of your ineffebale, unspeakably niche eldritch knowledge that is so arcane as to be impossible to articulate in human language. I ask only that you let me and my family live when you rise to power as a Dark Lord. We are good followers.

I once worked for a company that designed "educational" programs that turned out to be little more than glorified corporate propaganda!

Ask me what the appropriate level of cynicism should be when it comes to anything related to "corporate culture."

Go on... ask me.

I'll bite. What is the appropriate level of cynicism when it comes to anything related to "corporate culture"?
- Kill all corporations.

I can read and write using the Standard Galactic Alphabet from the Commander Keen series

For some reason I remember a lot of ANSI terminal escape codes. They were used all the time on DOS machines, and work in a similar way on Unix terminals.

I like the bell one. It's useful to print a few of those at the end of what you expect will be a long program run to get your attention when it's done.
- It's a good idea, although some terminals will pause output when they play the sound. I always disable any sound from my terminal anyway, because computers should be seen and not heard. 😆
Alt + 0232 to 0234 for my French fam.
They don't work on windows terminals?? I only use the color ones but I will be devastated if it turns out they only work in Linux.
- I'm not sure since I haven't really used Windows for 20 years or so. I don't think though, since there are separate CURSES libraries for Windows which don't operate using escape sequences.

Progressive Rock

Oh yeah? Name three of their albums.
That's a pretty low bar, I know, but as I'm more into ProgMetal, I'm unable to name albums that are actually ProgRock. Well, except Rush, maybe.

Reggaeton, and the rise of música urbana from around 2005-2015.

Edit I also enjoy learning about Latin American history.

Though currently on hiatus, I do HEMA (historical european martial arts) so know a thing or two about swords and swordfighting.

What's your weapon of choice?
- The one I'm most familiar with is longsword, as that's what our group trains with predominantly. I also really love one handed sword&buckler - I'm not necessarily good with it but it's super fun.

Maintaining old react apps that don’t use setState…

    
this.state.temp = val;

Meanwhile elm programmers: look what they have to do to mimic a fraction of our powers
You have my full sympathy.
- Thank you. Right now I’m upgrading our 5 year old react version while forking all unmaintained deps … fun

I'm an enthusiast about Mezo American history and Mixtec Pueblo culture pre European contact. In other words I'm an Aztec Fanboy.

I know a lot about Mystery Snails. Used to raise them for sale online.

Would they survive being shipped by snail mail?

I am a beast at movie and tv themes
I'm very good at guessing boardgames from just very few clues (bu i think that part of that skill is that people who ask usually don't ask for the deep knowledge)
I have a triggerable wealth of knowledge about random trivia facts. During some conversations i will just randomly remember something related to the current topic and then spout it. My goto fact when someone asks me to give some random trivia is that alpaccas have a set of razor sharp teeth between their molars that they use mainly to bite off other alpaccas testicles

I'm very good at guessing boardgames from just very few clues (bu i think that part of that skill is that people who ask usually don't ask for the deep knowledge)
Antique collectors stealing from other antique collectors. Go!
- Oh hey i just discovered my lemmy app has notifications.
  Uhm maybe "Hoity Toity" aka "Adel verpflichtet" in my native language and the name Tom Vasel prefers?

I'm able to identify a lot of music from the first beat / note. But only music that I know, which doesn't include a lot of mainstream pop.

official 'very cool post'

so much interesting stuff in here

I have a lot of niche knowledge about specific issues relating to different brands/models of laptops and phones. it's very rare I find an issue I can't diagnose within an hour with prior knowledge. ask me anything I suppose?

oh, also, I happen to know that Ohio is the only state that doesn't share a letter in common with the word mackerel. works for the territories too. doesn't really get more niche than that.

My laptop doesn't work underwater. Is it the brand of charger?
e: Nevermind I pulled it out and it's still not working. Must have been a coincidence unrelated to the water.
- hmm, sounds like a classic PEBKAC error.

I am an expert on disaster response preplanning for hospitals and have basically read every English, German and Italian publication on that matter. Sadly that does not pay well...

I can sense what you deleted from your browser history when you interact with me online.

Yes, in case you were wondering, that upvote opened the channel. From your phone history, I think you have pretty good taste. On the laptop, it's mostly boring work stuff, but clearly your son is using your login for college stuff and some other stuff you don't want to bump into if he forgets to use incognito mode next time. Give him his own login and he'll stop changing your desktop wallpaper.
- Oh. Last night - two hours? What? And quite a bit more varied than usual. Are you trying to show off or something?
I got your upvote, and I think maybe dial down the frequency a bit, and I've got to tell you, I don't think real women like that particular activity as much as you seem to hope they do.
Oh now, that... That is a whole load of very kinky stuff indeed.

I play a mud called Starmourn. I know the archeology system very deeply, including how long it takes for your npc dig site members to dig, what the two stages of digging are, and what a supervisor actually does (...not as much as you'd hope, but more than you'd fear)

I also know designing in the game, but they're are many people in the game that design!

Reading books on natural philosophy. By that I mean, not mathematics of the physics itself, but what do the mathematics actually tell us about the natural world, how to interpret it and think about it, on a more philosophical level. Not a topic I really talk to many people irl on because most people don't even know what the philosophical problems around this topic. I mean, I'd need a whole whiteboard just to walk someone through Bell's theorem to even give them an explanation to why it is interesting in the first place. There is too much of a barrier of entry for casual conversation.

You would think since natural philosophy involves physics that it would not be niche because there are a lot of physicists, but most don't care about the topic either. If you can plug in the numbers and get the right predictions, then surely that's sufficient, right? Who cares about what the mathematics actually means? It's a fair mindset to have, perfectly understandable and valid, but not part of my niche interests, so I just read tons and tons and tons of books and papers regarding a topic which hardly anyone cares. It is very interesting to read like the Einstein-Bohr debates, or Schrodinger for example trying to salvage continuity viewing a loss of continuity as a breakdown in classical notion of causality, or some of the contemporary discussions on the subject such as Carlo Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics or Francois-Igor Pris' contextual realist interpretation. Things like that.

It doesn't even seem to be that popular of a topic among philosophers, because most don't want to take the time to learn the math behind something like Bell's theorem (it's honestly not that hard, just a bit of linear algebra). So as a topic it's pretty niche but I have a weird autistic obsession over it for some reason. Reading books and papers on these debates contributes nothing at all practically beneficial to my life and there isn't a single person I know outside of online contacts who even knows wtf I'm talking about but I still find it fascinating for some reason.

I took several post-grad classes in theology from a college affiliated with a specific denomination.

Sex. I love it as a topic. I miss being a weird young adult that could just talk about it with strangers.

The "gspot" is a slightly rough (rough for a vaginal wall!) spot found in the vagina (towards the pubic area). Its actually a part of a large collection of sensitive nerves that the clit is connected to as well.

That said an even more important piece of information? Everybody is a little different! Ilicitating arousul can be very different for different people and can lead to different climaxes (and not everyone likes to climax the same!). So the best bet is asking, talking, and LISTENING to your partner(s) about what they do and don't like. You can use vibrators, electrodes, tounges, lips, or even just sweet words, but what matters is what you and your partner's preferences and boundairies. There are also all different kinds of sex, kind of the same way you have different kinds of loves. It can a connecting experience, a game, exercise, funny, but it should always have a level of shared trust because its also a vulnerable experience. Porn for example tends to be very performative, because its not about the actors per say its about you and your surrogate the camera. So while there is a lot to learn and study in that art its not generally good place to learn how to bond with a partner or experience tantric climaxes.

I can speak and understand English decently enough. Which is rare