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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Not nitpicking your numbers at all (mainly cause im too lazy to go hunting down the original sources), but a big problem that science media gets completely wrong is how they report risk percentages. They conflate changes in absolute risk with relative risk constantly, and it really hurts messaging.

    For example, a few years back, the WHO released a report on consumption of processed meat and how it relates to colorectal cancer risk. Even their own press release, which should be perfect, says “each 50 g portion eaten daily increases the risk by 18%”. That is really misleading if you dont know they are talking about a relative risk. The average person will interpret this as new risk %= baseline risk % + 18%.

    The absolute lifetime risk of colorectal cancer is ~4%, so daily consumption of processed meat should bump it to ~4.7% (well, technically lower since the 4% includes processed meat consumers). Giving the before/after percentages helps communicate the risks way better. Even better is a risk curve showing how the risk changes as consumption increases (obviously that relies on the data being available).

    Its also better to be able to contextualize so you can make well informed decisions across your life, e.g., it’s dumb to deprive yourself a joy that increases lifetime cancer risk by 0.5% while ignoring other facets of your life that increase cancer by a much larger margin.








  • One thing to keep in mind is getting a blender well suited to whatever task you do the most. It mostly makes a difference in the style of blade and shape of the jar. Some brands will sell multiple styles that interface with one base, which might be the best way to go if you have the space for it.

    The reason it’s important is that blending a paste like peanut butter or mole is going to put a completely different demand on the system than turning tomato soup smooth, which is different that crushing ice. Some designs also work really well for large quantities, but not as well for smaller quantities.

    I have an old Oster that kinda sucks, so I keep using it, and it will keep using it until it no longer works, and I can’t fix it. If I were to buy one, it would be a vitamix 5200.

    Personally, I dont like ninja (or the other half of their business, shark) cause their whole business is making knockoffs, which makes me suspect of their quality. Their blenders seem to often have the giant stack of blades, which is good for shredding up a smoothie, but it’s not well suited to some other tasks.

    Personally, I like SeriousEats for reviews and comparisons of kitchen implements.







  • Brand isnt really the important thing, materials and construction are.

    Brands like carhartt, Duluth, etc. make durable workwear, but a lot of people want clothes with the aesthetic of workwear, but in stretchy, soft fabric and slimmer fits, and those brands will accommodate that.

    Duluth firehose pants, for example, are really durable. DuluthFlex firehose pants, though, look the same, but include 3% spandex. That means that the heavy duty cotton canvas is actually just held together by spandex, which wears out easily.

    Whatever brand you get, just make sure they are 100% cotton, or maybe cotton/nylon blend. Something like wrangler 13mwz might fit the bill for you.

    These pants don’t have to be pricy, either. If you are shopping somewhere like rural king, tractor supply, etc, you can find pants like that for $20.



  • Copy and pasting a relevant comment of mine from a while back. I crunched these numbers for a random county that made the math easy, but it’s similar to any rural area.

    https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/23cpr/appendixa.cfm

    Roads have an unbelievable cost when you really start to put the numbers together. A lane mile of a new interstate on rolling terrain costs 6.2 million in 2025 $. Keep in mind that is only a lane mile, so for 2 lanes in each direction, it’s $25 million per mile. Multiply that by the 49k miles of interstate, and you have a (super rough) estimate cost of 1.2 trillion to construct it today. Even resurfacing those roads is ~1/10 the cost, which is still a lot of money.

    Ignoring interstates and looking at really run of the mill arterial is still staggering.

    Picking a random square farming county, McPherson county, KS is an easy example. It is 30 miles by 30 miles, with a paved arterial every mile (ignoring towns). Thats 3600 lane miles. At $3.6 million per lane mile, that’s ~$13 billion to costruct the roads in a county with a population of 30,000, or $432,000 per person.


  • Usually, on land that is intended to be preserved, they don’t want random people hacking away at vegetation, so they will have rules about it. If a park ranger or someone like that sees you cutting down trees or whatever, you are probably going to get yelled at or fined or something.

    It’s also highly dependent on species and location. Some invasive species will basically multiply if you try to tear them out, either resprouting vegetatively, or through seed spread. Species like tree-of-heaven or paulonia also become huge trees, so they probably don’t want you cutting those down.

    Some places like Oahu are basically 95% invasive species, so if you remove that, you have nothing left. Oahu is basically all guava and mesquite trees, and without that, the soil washes away, and there’s no hope of recovery, so invasive management needs to be done in consultation with experts.



  • The problem is that French food in the Anglosphere has literally been the fancy food since 1066. That’s why English has 2 words for every meat: the germanic peasant word and the french nobleman’s culinary word (cow-beef, chicken-poultry, deer-venison, sheep-mutton, swine-pork, etc).

    Being the default “fancy” food is going to do damage to any cuisine as the purpose becomes more about fanciness than tasting good or being what people from the place actually eat.

    For another example, look at American Italian food. In a lot of small towns, Italian restaurants are the de facto fancy restaurant . It’s basically made it so that Italian restaurants in much of the US are either way too expensive and fancy or they’ve gone the opposite route and just overcharge for really basic pasta with sauce (olive garden).


  • If you don’t like truffle oil, you probably just don’t like truffle, and that’s fine. Like the other commenter said, it’s literally just the same compound that’s been synthesized.

    2,4-Dithiapentane

    Real truffles obviously have some other flavoring compounds in there, but like vanilla vs vanilin, you’d probably have a hard time distinguishing between them in a dish in a blind taste test.

    I have eaten shaved truffles, and even that’s really a gamble. The problem is that they aren’t really good until they are “ripe”, but once you dig them up, i don’t think they ripen any more. There’s also a big counterfeit problem since many species look similar. I’ve had good truffles, and I’ve had truffles that literally just taste like nothing.