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Cake day: November 10th, 2023

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  • 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.








  • 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.




  • deo@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldGods
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    2 months ago

    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.


  • Correct. Initially, Newton didn’t have indigo in his list for the visible spectrum, but he wanted seven colors instead of six because it matched up with the number of notes in music (and because he liked the number). So at some point there was discussion of removing indigo entirely because it’s kinda just a shade between blue and violet that the human eye just isn’t as good at distinguishing compared to the other colors. But the neat thing is that what people back in Newton’s time called blue and indigo is more akin to what we today call cyan and blue (they know this by looking at his labeled drawings of the light scattered by prisims). Now the spectral colors are: red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and violet.


  • 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.)


  • ok, so yeah. The only time i’ve ever had a sleep paralysis experience was when i went to bed with a nicotine patch on. I “woke up” (but not really) to some random blonde lady creepy-smiling while standing over me in my bed. I tired to scream and push her away, but i was totally frozen and couldn’t do anything. After a couple of seconds, though, I woke up for real and she obviously wasn’t there at all. The strangest part is that when i did wake up, it didn’t really feel like I had. It felt like i was awake the whole time and she just disappeared at exactly the same time i regained motor control. It was absolutely terrifying.


  • 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!