• 6 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • When I buy supermarket eggs, I refrigerate them because they are washed (in the US). When I get unwashed eggs (from a farm or a friend), I still refrigerate them and just wash them prior to use. I don’t have to refrigerate them since they have the cuticle intact, but refrigerating them still makes them stay fresher longer, so if I have the space for them, why would I not?

    That said, the eggs already come in a carton, so I’m not going to transfer them into a separate container in my fridge for no reason.


  • Eggs survive in the wild at ambient temp because when they are laid, a coating basically seals off the egg. Unfortunately, chickens have one hole, and they are messy animals, so there’s often some poop, too. In many countries, this coating is left intact, and technically, you should wash eggs before using them so nothing from the shell ends up inside when you crack it. As Americans, we have bigger houses and bigger fridges, and we love convenience, so we wash our eggs prior to packaging. This means they have to be refrigerated.

    Either approach works, but the important thing is not to leave washed eggs unrefrigerated.


  • I wouldn’t consider these huge issues, but there’s 3 areas where I think the miir design suffers relative to the chemex. The pourover part looks like just a single wall. Obviously the chemex is, too, but according to a quick look on wikipedia, stainless has ~10x the thermal conductivity of borosilicate glass, so your brew chamber is going to cool more quickly. No clue if it would be enough to make a difference in brew temp, though.

    The stainless carafe part sounds good, too, but stainless travel mugs almost always get lots of coffee residue buildup, and it’s a bit of a process to get them properly clean to the point where you don’t smell it. I always end up washing with baking soda and/or citric acid a few times. Glass stays cleaner, and it’s also easier to see how clean it is.

    Lastly, it might just be me, but every once in a while, my scale times out if I’m doing other stuff while making coffee, or I’ll make coffee without a scale. It’s really nice to be able to see visually how much coffee there is in the carafe.



  • Do you primarily use hand tools or power tools? Also, are you looking for a primary work bench, or an assembly bench?

    Hand tool benches, you want them to be really heavy and sturdy since they get loaded in shear a lot by things like planing and sawing. For a hand tool bench, you basically need to decide what you have to work with, and what your work style is like. I like go be able to just clamp stuff to my bench top, so a Nicholson bench is a little annoying for me. Also, think about the space you have available, and whether you are right or left handed. For handtool work, I would prefer a face vice and a tail vice, with plenty of dog holes.

    For power tools, the name of the game is modularity and mobility. Everything should be the same height and on wheels so you can move stuff around to act as infeed/outfeed tables. They don’t need to be as heavy or sturdy, so you can use some space under the bench for more efficient storage. It’s also nice to have a few ways to clamp other tools down.


  • For anyone who’s confused as to how this sorcery could work, it’s due to the chemistry/physics of the battery. As batteries discharge, there is more crystal growth of the electrolyte. Crystals can store mechanical energy like a spring, while the electrolyte in solution absorbs energy. It’s like dropping a water balloon vs dropping a solid rubber ball.





  • Community canneries still exist, but they used to be way more popular. In rural communities where people grow a lot of their own food, people can their own food, but pressure canners take a lot of time for a single batch to come up to pressure, cook, and cool.

    Community canneries have much bigger pressure canners where you could feasibly can everything in one batch. It’s also really enables people sharing surpluses, trading, etc.

    Many hobbies are better shared, too. If you have 20 people sharing a super high quality “item”, they will have a better experience than if each of those people had to buy their own crappy versions.

    Basically, a whole lot of things can be “libraried”.



  • Yeah, reviewing is about making sure the methods are sound and the conclusions are supported by the data. Whether or not the data are correct is largely something that the reviewer cannot determine.

    If a machine spits out a reading of 5.3, but the paper says 6.2, the reviewer can’t catch that. If numbers are too perfect, you might be suspicious of it, but it’s really not your job to go all forensic accountant on the data.



  • No, as much as high school guidance counselors try to tell you different, there’s nothing magical about any STEM degree that will reliably get you a job.

    For most jobs, the “filter” is getting the job itself. Not having a relevant degree might prevent you from getting a job, but having the degree doesn’t mean you will be selected. There are exceptions like getting into medical school really sets you on a pathway where as long as you stick with it, you should end up with a job, bit that’s cause it’s really hard (and expensive) to get into med school, so that part is the “filter”.

    You might hear of a particular skillet being really hot that guarantees you a job, and that does happen, but it is really ephemeral. By the time you get a 4 year degree, the landscape may have changed.

    You can absolutely get a job with a 4 year hard science degree, but you can’t just go to class, get all A’s and step into a job. You need to be connected throughout the process. Also keep in mind what type of job you want to do, and where it is geographically. You might have good job prospects with a geology degree and fossil fuel expertise, but the jobs might be in undesirable locations.


  • The first step, in my opinion, is to find any existing local-ish datasets. I reckon that around you, there could be trees that go back well over 1000 years to use as a reference. You could then try to find the oldest ring of the wood in your house. It’s probably pretty hard to count back before that, but you could try to make estimates based on the circular ark of the grain pattern to determine a trunk diameter.





  • Hyperloops business model is to scoop up funds meant to develop technology to combat climate change. It’s Teslas business model, too. It definitely makes me skeptical right off the bat. It’s just a matter of if the airships are like electric vehicles (oversold climate harm reduction, but likely still a harm reduction), or if they are like hyperloops (complete scams that can be defeated with high school level math).