Fondots @ Fondots @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Not any kind of scientist, but an adventurous home cook

I'd really like the USDA/FDA/etc. (maybe not under the current administration) to publish sort of a food safety handbook full of tables and charts for stuff like canning, curing meats, cooking temps, etc. targeted to people like me.

I've recently been experimenting with curing meats, I've done bacon, Montreal style smoked meat, corned beef, Canadian bacon, and kielbasa.

And holy fuck, is it hard to find good, solid, well-sourced information about how to do that safely.

And I know that information is out there somewhere, because people aren't dropping dead left and right of listeria, botulism, nitrate poisoning, etc. because they ate some grocery store bacon.

I just want some official reference I can look at to tell me that for a given weight of meat, a dry cure should be between X and Y percent salt, and between A and B percent of Prague powder #1, and that it needs to cure for Z days per inch of thickness, and if it's a wet brine then it should be C gallons of water and...

When I go looking for that information either I find a bunch of people on BBQ forums who seem to be pulling numbers out of their ass, random recipe sites and cooking blogs that for all I know may be AI slop, or I find some USDA document written in legalese that will say something like 7lbs of sodium nitrite in a 100 gallon pickle solution for 100lbs of meat, which is far bigger than anything I'll ever work with, and also doesn't scale directly to the ingredients I have readily available because I'm not starting with pure sodium nitrite but Prague powder which is only 6.25% sodium nitrite.

All 3 of them, but no one's home

He's got a few other stupid tattoos. He's got some more words tattooed above the stoplight in sort of a fancy script, but I can't really make them out because he's always wearing a hat. Some knuckle tattoos I can't make out because in all his pictures he's either holding a 40 of old English or flipping off the camera (or both) so his hands are always contorted weirdly, a few words that he probably thought sounded tough, some symbols I don't recognize, and a crucifix on one arm and a devil holding a cross on the other that might be actually kind of well-done but I don't have a great eye for tattoos.

He's a shrimpy white guy with a patchy beard, who grew up in what passes for the ghetto in an otherwise pretty nice suburban area (not to sell it short, it is a pretty shitty town, once in a while it manages to crack some "Top X Most Dangerous Cities in state/country" sort of article, but compared to the "bad neighborhoods" in pretty much any major city it's nothing)

I could go on for quite a while about him and the rest of that branch of the family, and all the dumb bullshit they've done even though I've never met most of them, their reputation far precedes them. All through grade school the prevailing advice from my parents was "if anyone asks if you know/are related to any other [our last name]s, just say 'no'" and that's always served me well.

None of his profiles seem to have been updated in about 10 years, so with any luck he's locked up somewhere, or maybe dead. Or maybe he had just enough sense to stop broadcasting his dumbassery out onto the open internet.

I have a distant relative with a traffic light tattooed in the middle of his forehead, just a black rectangle with red, yellow, and green circles.

And on either side he has some graffiti style writing that I'm pretty sure says "con man"

I became aware of him because we share a fairly uncommon last name, and one day police came to my house grasping at straws looking for this guy because he had been breaking into cars, so the basically went to the first person with the same last name they could find to see if we knew where he was.

It was the first time I'd heard of him, we're not at all close with the extended family. Eventually I looked him up and found his social media with those stupid tattoos.

The stick also has the advantage of being easier to drop than the finglonger in case whatever you happen to be poking decides it wants to grab hold and pull you down

I don't know what actual products are out there, but there are other time signals that could potentially be used, for example GPS.

Off the top of my head I don't think I've seen a gps-synced clock, let alone one with a pendulum, but I've also never really looked for one either. It certainly feels like a product that probably exists somewhere to me, I'm sure there's someone out there who would appreciate a clock that can automatically detect the timezone, whether the region your in observes daylight savings time, etc.

Plot twist: Trump thinks "recognizing a Palestinian state" means "Annexing Palestine as the 51st state"

Bonus points if some major shenanigans go down and Simpsons did it again, and we end up with Saudi Israelia

That's true for mechanical clock movements, but I think OP is looking for a quartz movement that includes a simulated pendulum for aesthetic purposes, which isn't particularly uncommon, unless your circles include a lot of antique enthusiasts, people who inherited an old grandfather clock, or people who just really dig mechanical clocks (and I won't knock that, I certainly think they're neat) odds that a lot of clocks you've seen with a pendulum are that type, powered by a AA battery and stuffed into a fancy wooden case

I did the philly ride a few years back, I assume others are largely similar

I did go with a couple friends, that was mostly nice for having someone to hang out with during the pre-ride activities

For the actual ride itself, we tried to stay more-or-less together, but often found ourselves drifting apart in the crowd. Mostly you're just kind of focused on riding and enjoying the vibes, waving to crowds, trying not to crash into the rest of your fellow bikers as you ride in a probably slower and more crowded pack than you ever have before.

Also, depending on how big and weird your circle of friends is, you might be surprised at how many people are potentially open to trying things like this out. It's not a majority by a longshot, but I've gotten a lot more bites than I would have thought just kind of mentioning it to friends and asking if they might want to go.

Aside from not needing to adjust the time, is there any particular reason it needs to be WiFi enabled?

Because that kind of feels like an overly complicated solution to a problem that was solved decades ago with "atomic" clock movements.

Which aren't actually atomic in any way on their own, but contain an antenna to pick up the signal from an NIST atomic clock to set the time (and I believe other countries and regions have their own equivalent if you're not in the US)

As far as finding a pendulum movement, I don't really know what is out there, but it may be another avenue for you to look into.

My thoughts are that episode 8 (and 9) is a collection of really cool scenes and ideas, they just don't quite add up to a good movie or part of a trilogy.

I think you can take almost any part of those movies and flesh them out into a really cool standalone movie, TV show, comic, novel, etc.

Casino heists are a tried and true formula. Not breaking any new ground there but that's something that can make for a fun movie. Han Solo or a similar sort of character could work well for that, gambling is kind of his thing after all.

The whole "military industrial complex selling arms to both sides" thing could work well in a grittier project like Andor where you're dealing with all kinds of morally grey stuff. Or again, with a Solo movie since Han is from Corellia where those rich assholes are building battleships and such and directly shitting on the little guys.

Broom Kid- I think we've all been clamoring to see more of the non-jedi/non-sith aligned force users.

Rey's training, feeling the pull of the dark side, the force dyad thing between her and Kylo, etc. had a lot of really cool moments, and they just didn't spend enough time going into any of that.

Maz felt kind of like a shoehorned-in plot device, but I think there could be a really cool sort of anthology series in there about her past, her customers, etc.

The crait battle was cool, kind of a rehash of Hoth, but also not. Luke's force projection facing down the whole first order from across the galaxy was pretty neat.

Onto RoS

Again, cool force dyad shit.

The Knights of Ren got done dirty, we probably should have had a whole movie of them.

Palpatine clone- look, cloning is an established technology in the universe, one of the first bits of star wars lore that got dropped on us back in '77 is that they had whole damned clone wars. Of-fucking-course Sheev would have a backup or two. The old EU had some Palpatine clone arcs (maybe not their best moments, but at least they executed better than "somehow Palpatine returned")

Running around the galaxy searching for wayfinders, or holocrons or sith daggers, whatever the MacGuffin du jour is- that's basically every star wars video game ever.

Killing Chewie and erasing Threepio's memory, there were some good opportunities for some real emotional gut punches there, they just couldn't commit to them.

Exogol could have been cool, kind of wish that they came up with something cooler than a fleet of star destroyers with big cannons strapped to them, but there's potentially a lot you could do a whole weird sith cult working in secret to do...??? I feel like maybe exactly what they're doing is maybe better left up to the imagination than outright stated.

Not that there aren't a lot of really crazy Catholics out there, but the real core of MAGA lunatics is evangelical protestants

There's a whole lot of different sects and philosophies in that category, but you can pretty much trace them all back to someone who basically said "fuck the Pope" and went off to start their own church.

So needless to say a lot of them aren't too keen on any pope at all.

Probably the best thing I ever did to get random people to talk to me was growing a big curly handlebar moustache, now complimented with a long bushy beard.

My fashion choices also tend to make me stand out a bit- brightly colored Hawaiian shirts in the warmer months (I have one with pictures of the dog breed I have on it, that gets a lot of people approaching me,) occasionally a kilt (people love to ask about the kilt) interesting sunglasses, hats (used to wear a bowler occasionally, I'm less of a fan of it these days, panama hat in the summer, etc.)

Clothing and style choices are a little tricky. There's kind of a fine line between wearing something interesting that makes people want to talk to you and coming across as a fedora-wearing neckbeard who's trying too hard. Those choices have to look good on you, you have to like them and give off a bit of confidence while wearing them, and it has to be something that will catch the attention of the kind of person you want to attract.

And most importantly, you need to be able to carry a conversation from there. That's the hard part.

Having some story or a joke at the ready is a pretty good crutch to kind of get yourself over that last part. For example my go-to when people come up to me to compliment my beard/moustache is to joke that "I grew it myself" which is usually good for a chuckle, and then the ice is broken, and you can kind of try to steer the conversation from there.

I've had a lot of fun conversations with strangers and made a few friends along the way. I never personally had much luck turning that into a romantic relationship, but that was also never something I actively pursued much in general, I just kind of let things go from there and through friends who I met that way I eventually met my wife.

I'd be pretty hard-pressed to name any of my friends who graduated "on time"

I'm well into my 30s now, a couple of my friends are still working on degrees or just graduated.

Changing majors, bullshit scheduling nonsense, life

Shit, there was a whole fucking pandemic that fucked up a year or two of your high school years, it's pretty damn amazing that anyone your age is graduating even roughly on-time as far as I'm concerned.

Maybe it'll throw a bit of a monkey wrench into your social life because you gotta skip out on a couple things because you have class. That's life as an adult, we all got scheduling conflicts all the time.

Otherwise, it's never gonna matter. You'll have a degree, that's the only "important" thing about graduating. Unless you're looking to get into some highly-specialized, super-competitive field, no one gives a shit how long it took you to graduate, how your gpa stacked up against the rest of your class, etc. It's like the old joke "What do you call the person who graduated at the bottom of their class in medical school? You call them 'Doctor.'"

As far as this particular incident goes, I'm kind of inclined to wave it off as "kids can be assholes"

That said, regardless of what sides of the conflict you support on this, I really have to question what the hell was going through these kids' parents' minds when they signed the permission slips for this trip.

"You want me to send my 13 year old to a country that is actively engaged in an armed conflict within/along its borders? Where missile attacks are a fairly regular occurrence? Etc. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea."

Even when tensions weren't quite so high, the idea of Israeli tourism always just sounded like a bad idea to me, because even when things are relatively good, every other news story out of the country is the kind of shit that should scare everyone the fuck away.

When I was that age, I had a hard time convincing my parents to let me go on a trip with my boy scout troop to Canada

Not really any questions, just some stories to share, and a hearty props to you man, I work in 911 dispatch, delivering babies is a hell of a thing. It's one of the rare happy calls we get but in it's own way it's just as crazy and stressful as anything else I handle. If I had the choice I'd gladly hop on a call with a shooting victim over another childbirth.

I've only gotten "credit" (they give us a stock pin and if the parents want to they'll bring them in for a photo op) for one delivery which was fairly straightforward, except that they had a doula on another line giving competing instructions, so I basically had to say something along the lines of "look, my instructions say X, if you want to listen to your doula I can't stop you, but I have to give these instructions, so I'm going to proceed as if you're doing X"

There were a few that I didn't get credit for. My favorite the call basically went "OH MY GOD THE BABY'S COMING THE BABYS COMING OH...it fell on its head" (baby was fine) that's one of the only times I really wished I could have been on-location with an emergency just to see what the hell was going on there.

Another time everything the lady was telling me was pointing to very imminent delivery, I was practically expecting the baby to shoot out of her at mach 2, but she was adamant that she wasn't having a baby there and despite my best efforts otherwise she held it in at least long enough to be transported, whether the baby was delivered enroute to the hospital or not I can't really say.

I've also had a good handful where EMS showed up just in time to steal credit from me. I swear sometimes they stand outside the door and wait to knock until I've done 99% of it for them.

I have at least one coworker who's delivered a baby on the side of a highway.

I'm just glad that childbirth calls are relatively few and far between. I think our center's record for a single dispatcher is currently around 8 babies, and that's spread over probably at least 10 or 15 years on the job.

The Shanty Swing Band

One drunken night in a tiki bar, a bunch of my friends cooked up this idea for a band that was entirely too crazy to ever work, especially with our musical and organizational skills.

The idea was for it to be sort of a folk-metal/jazz fusion thing that played sea shanties.

I feel like it's also worth mentioning that this idea came about well before COVID when sea shanties had a little moment.

I think by the time we all sobered up the next day we realized it wasn't going to work, but we sure as hell left the bar that night thinking we were onto something.

Part of the concept also involved a "gun player" who would fire off some blanks from a flintlock pistol, sort of like a budget-friendly 1812 overture because something something pirates.

Regardless of the actual feasibility of this project, I still really dig the name.

There's a small (and best of all free) museum in Philly called the Science History Institute.

Until a couple years ago, it went by the Chemical Heritage Foundation

Which I personally thought was a much cooler name.

Officially the name change was to reflect that their focus includes more than just chemistry,

But I have a sneaking suspicion that a big part of the reason for the change was that the old name just kind of creeped people out, and I'll admit it had a bit of a mad scientist ring to it.

Anyway, cool little museum for anyone who finds themselves in Philly, do recommend.

I think this is going to depend a lot on where in the world you are.

I'm from the mid Atlantic/northeast US, and was raised catholic, overall I wouldn't say that around me there was ever a separate "Catholic dating culture" it was just catholics dating other people who may or may not have also been Catholic. Not any more problematic than the rest of the general dating pool in any particular way

In other parts of the country or world I suspect that may be different

Ketchup has kind of an interesting history

The term ketchup/catsup (or various other spellings) first appeared in about the 1600s, but tomato ketchup didn't really catch on until about 200-300 years later. Before then it was used to refer to a variety of different sauces/condiments. Mushroom ketchup was a fairly popular one, some were based on fish sauces (you could maybe make an argument that Worcestershire sauce is a type of ketchup) etc.

The general consensus is that it was sort of the result Europeans attempting to recreate various Asian sauces without really knowing what was in them or having access to the right ingredients (for example trying to make something like soy sauce without soy beans)

Honestly, in that case it's not even an inventory thing, just plan on ordering a couple days earlier and go for the longer slower shipping method so it ends up arriving on the same day. You don't have to warehouse it any longer than if you ordered it later with faster shipping, and you save a decent chunk of cash.