A vampire walks into a bar. The bartender asks if he’d like some blood. “Just hot water, please,” the vampire responds. The bartender raise an eyebrow, but goes to get the hot water. When he places the mug in front of the vampire, he says, “I thought you were a vampire. Why order hot water?” The vampire pulls a tampon out of his bag and says, “I’m having tea.”
You’re welcome.
One time, i triggered some sort of shoplifting detection when I put my credit card up in my purse after paying. I guess the camera thought I did it in a sketchy way?
I need more of this, please.
Leggo my prego?
Huh, I guess I’d never really looked into the chemistry behind the distinction (which is strange because i am a chemist that loves food), but Maillard reactions involve the proteins, while caramelization involves the sugars. Though both are examples of nonenzymatic browning.
The good news is that the wiki page for caramelization says that either acidic or basic conditions speed up the caramelization processes, so i think we’re good to go in either front!
Heating a solution of aqueous bicarbonate will release carbon dioxide, too. But since we have delicious onions and stuff in there too, let’s walk through my thought process: Baking powder is baking soda + weak acid + cornstarch (to prevent premature reaction). Since the speed-up for the Maillard reaction works by deprotonating amino groups to make them more nucleophilic, the acid-base reaction that releases CO2 when using baking powder will still occur with just baking soda + food (ie: the protiens in the food are acting as the acid). You’re probably right that using baking powder would produce more CO2, or at least produce it faster, but reducing carcinogenic side products for Maillard reactions via CO2 is a low-priority concern for me anyway. Just a fun curiousity that occured to me when reading the wiki page!
Sorry if my carbon dioxide subscripts don’t work. I don’t think my client supports all the fancy markdown, but i tried my best.
Oh shit. That is so cool! I knew lye was used in making pretzels, but i didn’t know it was to get the Maillard browning to happen faster. The wiki page says that one way to reduce the formation of acrylamide, a carcinogen, is by adding carbon dioxide, which is actually released when baking soda is dissolved in water will be released during cooking (edit: see reply chain below for discussion on this point)… IDK for sure if it’s enough to really help, but I’m gonna just roll with it and say it is because delicious food is delicious.
Yup. There’s also an even older Sumerian myth of very similar content: Enlil (ancient mesopotamian god of air, earth, and storms) thought humans were too noisy and decided to destroy them all with a great flood; I guess he really needed some sleep. Luckily, Enki (god of water, knowledge, and creation) told one guy, probably a priest, Ziusudra, to build a boat big enough for his family and a breeding pair of every animal.
Sounds pretty familar, right? Couple of names changed compared to the one in Gilgamesh. And, other than having two gods in the story instead of one, it’s almost exactly the same as Noah and the Ark (of course, there is some compelling evidence that the old testament god in the bible was originally multiple older gods that over time got “absorbed” into one God, hence why he has so many different personalities depending on which story you are reading).
The peoples telling these stories lived relatively close together geographically, and the timing lines up with a period of glacial retreat, meaning flooding was more common due to ice melt, rising sea levels, and and changing weather patterns. Though it’s hard to say if they’re all talking about the same flood or simply using similar stories and motifs to talk about different floods. I tend to think it was just a flood-happy time in the region, and if an entire village ends up underwater i’d say it sure feels like “the whole world” flooded, especially if other peoples you come into contact with have similar stories of their own.
Doesn’t have your address on it though.
Makes sense to me, but there’s still the whole microplastics issue… But honestly, at this point, anything we can do to keep fossil fuels in the ground is a win in my book. I’d love to see us go down that path for plastic needs that are both necessary and supremely difficult to replace with other materials (like medical and laboratory applications), and stop using plasitic entirely for everything else.
a lot less. we’re talking ~2 microns (ie: 2 micrometers or 0.002mm). For context, the width of an “average” human hair ranges from 18 to 180 microns (there’s a lot of variability due to age, ethnicity, and lifestyle).
If you want to see for yourself, you can dissolve the aluminum to leave just the lining (scrub any paint off the outside of the can first). You can use a solution with pH either lower than 3 or higher than 12.5. For context, draino is about 12 on the pH scale, and coca-cola is about 2.5, but the closer you are to neutral, the longer it will take (so while you could theoretically use the soda inside the can, that will take quite a while). There are sulfuric acid drain cleaners that get down into the 1 to 2 pH range (though note that pH is a log scale, so that’s on the order of 10 to 100 times more acidic than the cola and will fuck your shit up if you aren’t careful).
For whatever you choose to use, be sure to look up safe handling and disposal recommendations before attempting, or simply watch this youtube video instead!
In the books, they all could tell something was up with Frodo and refused to let him go alone. In fact, Sam was actually dropping plenty of eaves, dispite his claims to the contrary in the movies, and they puzzled it all out before Frodo even left Bag End. (Fatty Bolger, another co-conspirator who did not make a movie appearance, decided to stay behind to keep up appearances so that the mission stayed a secret as long as possible. He bought them precious time when the Nazgûl were in pursuit, and later played a role in the resistance against Saruman prior to the Scouring of the Shire.)
Thanks for expanding on the finer points! With inheritance, they also reset the cost-basis when the owner dies, which means that all the capital gains accumulated over the time that the deceased had ownership is never taxed. Like, if I bought stock for $10, die when it’s worth $100, my sister inherits it, and then sells it for $110 a while later, she only pays capital gains on $10 – not $100.
I don’t think people fully realize how dramatically our tax code rewards capital, at the expense of labor, not just in the broad-strokes (like the tax rate for capital gains vs the rates for income tax brakets) but also in these little details that are easy to overlook. So thanks for the discussion!
I think dividends in a tax-exempt accounts, like a traditional IRA, are only not taxed if you reinvest the dividend or just leave it in your brokerage account. If you move money from your IRA account to, say, your checking account, that’s when you pay taxes (and there are generally fees for moving money out of tax exempt accounts without meeting certain conditions, like being of retirement age).
No, but i absolutely want you to remind me.
yeah, mycotoxins (ie: toxic byproducts from fungi/mold decomposing your food stuffs) don’t always get broken down during cooking. So, while cooking according to standard food safety specs may have killed the mold, their shit is still everywhere ready to fuck your shit up.
Not to mention that you have to survive an infection before it matters that you immune system learned to detect the infectious agent. Yes, the first inoculation techniques were literally just minor exposure to the infectious agent (eg: grinding smallpox scabs and blowing the resulting powder up the nose – wtf). While it technically worked, the mortality rate was still pretty damn high, just not quite as high as ya know getting smallpox the normal way, and thus really only used when a serious outbreak was occuring. We’ve gotten so much better at making vaccination safer and more effective, because we now know so much more about what is actually occuring biologically and know to use attenuated virus or just the benign protein coat alone to achieve results. Why would you ever want to go back to scab-snorting (or toilet licking, apparently, lol)?
I have always used an ad blocker in the browser, but i recently jumped on the DNS blocking train and it’s like a whole new kind of awesome on my phone in particular.
I got my mom a robot vacuum for Mother’s Day. She named it Rosie.
femtomanagement
Me too, the shape is just so perfect for so many things. I bought some recently at the Vietnamese market nearby. They have fancy little roses surrounded by a filigree pattern printed on them and say “English” on the handle in some Victorian-looking cursive font lmao. I love them.