Hot Snot is useful enough to keep a big electro from slopping about, or slicing the glue stick up & putting it inside large heatshrink as a substitute for self adhesive tubing (works a treat!).
Most other things are better done with silicone sealant, or perhaps, epoxy.
Surprisingly, hot snot works exceptionally well to braze polypropylene; a plastic that is notorious to glue otherwise. The hot snot kinda melts the polypropylene, so if you use just the right amount (experiment!), the polypropylene-hotsnot-polypropylene joint is very, very strong.
I heard of this when I was doing a cross belting for a chair seat, and found that a couple of screws to a metal frame are really not enough, and the chairs I was using as a model used lots of staples to wood instead, and was stumped on how to do this. (Making a loop, using hot snot to glue/braze the surfaces together for an inch or two, works well. I do suspect the hot snot glue stick does need to be a chemically compatible thermoplastic, though. I dunno if there are sticks that won't work, or if all widely used ones are compatible. I use the ones locally available for dirt cheap.)
I have long held a pet peeve against the misuse of the word random, especially in professional contexts, but also everywhere else.
[...]
My examples were not stellar and (as some noticed) were intended to communicate a contrast from my experiences/beliefs and some “common” and “popular”; and sometimes professional uses of the word. I have not changed at all how much this peeves me, but by now, I suppose, I should not be surprised or expect otherwise, yet I still am and still do.
While I kinda-sorta disagree (but I'm not a mathematician, just a dirty computational physicist and software developer), I know
exactly how that feels.
In my youth, I spent a year as an all-around IT support and sysadmin person for a department in an Arts and Design university. One day, I got my hands on a public "crib sheet" from the art department, describing terms like "volume", "gravity", and so on. At the time, I had already an uni physics background, so the utter silliness and
wrongness of these was just unreal to me. I found it hilarious, it was so unreal. As time passed, and I found out that most of the students and basically all of the professors insisted that theirs was the correct interpretation of the terms (and should be accepted even by physicists, because after all, these are the correct terms), it became sad and annoying to the extreme. Because I was young, male, and without an university art background, my counterarguments were completely ignored. After all, they were lecturers and professors in a leading university, so they were by default correct.
At the time, I still had my old skills intact to deal with that sort of stuff, so I shrugged and simply began to define the terms my own way when I perceived it likely the parties in the discussion might disagree or be unaware of the definition. That worked very well in my later studies and onwards in my life. But, as I grew older, even after over two decades, those definitions and their idiocy still bugs me. Why did they just take an established term, and redefine it (so wrong!), instead of developing a new one?
Thing is, and this creeps into psychology and such squishy stuff I don't like much, by redefining the words people use you can manipulate the way they think. When humans develop their language skills, they use the complex association of terms to automatically build those definitions; but such auto-definitions are very fuzzy in reality even if the person feels they know exactly what a term means. By defining a term exactly, especially a term that has vaguely similar auto-definitions already,
teaching a subject becomes much easier. (This too is something most teachers do not realize, and simply do it because it works.) The downside is that almost all teachers only consider the subject at hand, and not at all the other uses of that term, which causes all sorts of misunderstandings down the line.
As to art education, one of my pet peeves there was how the color theory was taught to the students. Additive and subtractive color models were approached through how the effects were observed, and none of the physical attributes were described, possibly because the teachers had basically no physics understanding. Understanding that human color perception is based on two different mechanisms: rod and cone cells, former providing low-light colorless information, and latter being sensitive to three sets of wavelengths (depending on the cone cell length,
short, medium, and long); and their opponent processing in the brain. Common problems in this combined process includes red-green color blindness for example. An hour on this subject would explain exactly why natural light and specific-spectrum light like cheap fluorescent lights produce such completely different color perception in artwork; and also how additive and subtractive color models are the two sides of the exact same topic.
I don't know if the situation has gone better or worse in the last two decades, but I hope for the better; I dislike the idea of artists and art teachers believing light and color are magic that nobody understands. You know, like magnets.
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