Oh, look, that thunderstorm they've been promising for almost two weeks may be trying to make an appearance.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TIL that some languages apparently have words inherently differentiating one's status as a citizen or resident of...

TIL that some languages apparently have words inherently differentiating one's status as a citizen or resident of the entity versus a member of a particular ethnic or cultural group? I don't quite grasp the whole thing, although I heard the point being made. What's interesting to me is a) that there is such a thing, which seems very revealing of something about a culture that would need such concepts built into the language, and b) that there seem to be people who think it's inaccurate to interpret the word choice as meaningful. Firstly, since languages have all sorts of concepts built into them, many very specific to their primary culture of use, it seems reasonable that such a thing could exist. Not that I would have thought of it before, since I'm not from a culture where that sort of subtlety functions. Secondly, if that is, indeed, the subtlety of the word choices, where one essentially and inherently includes people, and the other excludes, then I'd kind o...
Read more

Took this canning class tonight because I was hoping to learn more about technical and scientificky stuff with...

Took this canning class tonight because I was hoping to learn more about technical and scientificky stuff with canning. I unendeared myself to the instructor early on after they said that you had to use a sugar syrup to can peaches because it stopped botulism (multiple people wanted to know if you could just use water). Upon which I enquired as to the mechanism whereby it prevented the release of botulinum toxin from the spores? I mean, I actually would have liked an answer to that question because there seems to be some serious debate as to whether or not sugar is really performing any preservative function whatsoever in various foodstuffs of the long stored kind. Needless to say, I got a rather snappish and uninformative answer back. I've found a little info by looking things up, like 38% sucrose or 22% glucose solutions inhibit growth of the spores in a lab setting. Nobody sits there and tries to calculate out an actual percent refined sugar solution, though, when they make a si...
Read more