well, now i feel dumb. yes, that certainly counts.

Did he ever actually have the ring? I know he tried to take it from Frodo, but i don’t think he succeeded. Unless i’m getting confused since i have watched the movies more recently than i have read the books…

Edit: totally forgot about outside moria. apparently i need to do a re-read AND a re-watch lol.

Leggo my prego?

Wouldn’t that only be correct about 25% of the time?

Commenting here so i can check replies, as i also need recommendations.

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.

Omg. You just made me realize MY backpack is a quarter of a century old. Just out of curiosity, is it a jansport? I wonder if they still “make 'em like they used to” or if they’ve fallen prey to enshittification like everything else…

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!

Did you try calling the clerk’s office? They might have an automated message with info about closures due to the hurricane. And generally if they open to the public at 9, the clerks and other staff will be there earlier, so you can try calling at like 8 or something. When I had jury duty, we were told to show up a full two hours before the court actually “opened” so they could do orientation stuff with us.

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.

if you’re not at relatively normal temperature and pressure, then you won’t have liquid water anyway. and i don’t think the kid was asking about water vapor or one of the various forms of ice.

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!

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).

Yes, but you know how Kubrick was. He made them film on location.

It’s just unnecessarily huge. I’ve never seen so many gas pumps in my life. Or so many toilets. It’s honestly absurd and made me feel existential dread. It’s like everything wrong with America all in one convenient pit stop. I couldn’t even enjoy the wall of jerky. Bathrooms were nice, though.

Sorry, i guess i kinda buried the lede there, lol