It’s that point on the orbit again: Talk like a physicist day. In case you need to brush up on your vocabulary, you can refer to my original post and its follow-up.
It’s getting much harder to come up with new examples, which means in physics-talk I’m approaching a local maximum in entropy.
Brooklyn Dem Felix Ortiz wants to ban use of salt in New York restaurants
“No owner or operator of a restaurant in this state shall use salt in any form in the preparation of any food,” the bill reads.
Now, I know I’ve tried to make the case that food preparation, as practiced by most people, is not science, this does not change the fact that what happens in the preparation of food is actual chemistry. And that if you change the ingredients, you change the food. Note that “no salt” is not the same as “no sodium.” Potassium chloride is still a salt, it’s just not table salt. And the bill says “salt in any form.”
I understand the intent is probably to eliminate the excess salt in some foods, but the choice of adding salt, or not, to a food after it has been prepared is not the same as eliminating it during the preparation. In bread, for example, it plays a chemical role”
By mixing with salt, wheat flour produced gluten from gliadin and glutenin whose elastic property is characteristic in bread and noodles.
and it has more roles, too, other than taste. (Hmmm, there’s a salt manufacturer’s association. Of course there is.)
Add to this the fact there is salt already present in many foods. Can you add eggs to a recipe without running afoul of the law? Cheese has salt in it, too. Remember, it’s “salt in any form.” What a stupid proposal.
Four Bronx buddies facing year in jail after ‘hitting’ off-duty transit cop – with a snowball!
I don’t want any long-lost friends from grade school deciding to have me arrested for hitting them with a snowball.
Lindsay Lohan wants $100M over E-Trade ad
Lohan’s lawyer, Stephanie Ovadia, said the actress has the same single-name recognition as Oprah or Madonna.
…
“They used the name Lindsay,” Ovadia said. “They’re using her name as a parody of her life. Why didn’t they use the name Susan? This is a subliminal message. Everybody’s talking about it and saying it’s Lindsay Lohan.”
Yeah, right. I’m barely aware of who Lindsay Lohan is, and I’m more than happy to testify that I did not think of her when I saw the commercial. I didn’t associate her with the commercial until now; besides, they said ‘milkaholic,’ not ‘attention whore.’
A really funny thing is that because I’m a geek, and since Lindsay/Lindsey is a fairly common name, I actually checked a baby-name database (requires java to be enabled) and Lindsay and Lindsey are much more popular names than Susan these days and have been for a while now. As far as single-name recognition goes, Oprah doesn’t crack the top 1000 and Madonna never got used on more than a few dozen babies a year and dropped off the radar by the ’70s. i.e. those are recognized single names because the people a) have unusual names and are b) actually quite famous
(As an aside, especially to Johnny Cash fans, if you check the stats for the names, you can restrict them to one gender or the other. There actually have been boys named Sue.)
The Nobel prize for Food Science
It must be cartoonsday.
Chad is having trouble with rodents chewing on the wiring in his car. It’s a problem in labs, too, where something will occasionally chew through some data cable (which was not as serious as when they chewed into the bag of M&M’s left on the lab bench, but try convincing the boss of that). I noticed one comment that was similar to my thought: float the data lines at a kiloVolt. That’ll larn them varmints.
Ooh, a government conspiracy that involves some of my colleagues.
The time of the winter solstice on 12/21/2012 has been changed from 11:11 to 11:12. Something sinister is obviously afoot.
Given that the Naval Observatory is probably the most precise observatory in the world I find this highly unusual. A minutes change is huge! What’s going on here?
Best guess? It’s a precision issue. The time is specified to the minute, which means you have to decide to round or not. If the calculated time was 11:11:29 and changed to 11:11:30 — a mere second longer — in a recalculation (which might happen depending on, say, how many leap seconds had been added since you did the previous calculation, or other factors), you would display it as 11:12.
The prospect of fantasy geopolitics.
Has the GDP grown? Angola and Bhutan’s astonishing growth in the 2008 season are stories that fantasy geopolitics players will not soon forget.
Inflationary measures and exchange rates are also factored in, making Iceland a bad bet to hold this past year due to its economic meltdown. And if you had Zimbabwe in your active lineup in January, when its government unveiled the 100 trillion dollar bill, you would have probably considered going back to losing at fantasy football.
Ironic Sans: Forensic Reconstruction of Famous Skulls of Fiction
I recently saw an amazing example of forensic reconstruction. A skull had been found, but police were unable to figure out the person’s identity. So a forensic artist examined the skull and created an illustration of what the person may have looked like while alive. When the person was finally identified, photos of the person looked strikingly similar to the artist’s rendition.
This got me thinking: What would a forensic reconstructionist make of some famous skulls of fiction? There are characters in film, television, and video games who we’ve only ever seen as talking skulls. Surely they couldn’t have grown to adult size without once being flesh and blood, right? So what did they look like?