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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I think a major one is to try to avoid trusting in unfounded precision.

    If you want to make lemonade like a chemist, you don’t just weigh out some lemon juice and add it to water and sugar. You measure sugar and citric acid content of the batch of lemon juice, then calculate how much water will dilute it to the right pH, and how much sugar will bring it to your desired osmolarity. In reality, no one is going to do that unless they run a business and need a completely repeatable. If you get lazy and just weigh out the same mass of stuff with a new batch of lemon juice, you could be way off. Better to just make it and taste it then adjust. Fruits, vegetables, and meats are not consistent products, so you can’t treat them as such.

    If i were to be writing recipes for cooking, I would have fruits/vegetables/meats/eggs listed by quantity, not mass (e.g., 1 onion, 1 egg), but i would include a rough mass to account for regional variations in size (maybe your carrots are twice the size of mine). Spices i would not give amounts for because they are always to taste. At most, I would give ratios (e.g. 50% thyme, 25% oregano). Lots of people have old, preground spices, so they will need to use much more than someone using whole spices freshly ground. I think salt could be given as a percentage of total mass of other ingredients, but desired salinity is a wide range, so i would have to aim low and let people adjust upward.

    Baking is a little different, and I really like cookbooks that use bakers percentages, however, they don’t work well for ingredients like egg that I would want to use in discrete increments. For anything with flour, I would specify brand and/or protein level. A European trying to follow an American bread recipe will likely end up disappointed because European flour usually has lower protein (growing conditions are different), which will result in different outcomes.

    I will say in defense of teaspoons, most home cooks have scales that have a 1 gram resolution, though accuracy is questionable if you are only measuring a few grams or less. Teaspoons (and their smaller fractions) are going to be more accurate for those ingredients. Personally, I just have a second, smaller scale with greater resolution.


  • Seconding the national center for home food preservation document.

    One thing that I like experimenting with that i have to search for every time is the time/temperature curves for pasteurization of different foods. Every “knows” you are supposed to cook chicken (and most “prepared foods”) to 165 °F according to the FDA/USDA. What most people don’t know is that that temperature is what your food needs to hit for 1 second to have the proper reduction of bacteria (e.g., 7-log for chicken, which is a really high bar). You get the same reduction with 15 seconds at 160 °F or an hour at a little over 135 °F. You can easily do that with a sous vide bath.

    It’s really cool for people who are immunocomprimised or pregnant because you can cook a steak to medium rare, but hold temp for a couple hours, and it’s just as safe as if you cooked it to way hotter and ruined the meat. You can also do runny egg yolks.

    Here’s the first link that came up when I looked for it, but I’m sure you could find the actual government publication.

    https://blog.thermoworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/RTE_Poultry_Tables.pdf









  • the book you HAVE to read to understand why Americans from the flyover states like Trump and why they would vote for him.

    It sorta does that, but indirectly, I guess? To me, it was all about what’s not in the book. It was marketed as being written from the perspective of “omniscient narrator explaining why those people are the way they are”, but really it’s more “unreliable narrator explains his worldview”.

    I read it probably around the same time as you, and it really just made me angry more than anything because basically the whole thesis is “poor people are poor because they are dumb”.

    The fact that Purdue pharma made a pill that they claimed would last for 12 hours, when it was more like half that, so people had to either take them way more frequently (or take way bigger doses at 12 hours), and then proceeded to sell them to towns in Appalachia by the hundreds per capita is never mentioned.

    There’s a whole bunch of structural problems that he just breezes by that he probably should recognize (cause I do think he’s probably intelligent), but your average person from the region may not. Basically, it’s just propaganda.



  • For better or worse, I think the importance of the resume has gone down a little bit over the past few years. There are so many people blasting resumes to 1000 places with LLM generated cover letters that the only resumes that make it to the people with hiring power are through referrals.

    To actually answer your question, though, I think a link to a personal website (or LinkedIn if you use it) is nice to give more space to elaborate on work you’ve done, especially of there are things that are better explained by photos.

    For many positions, especially if you have a “foreign sounding” name, it’s good to specify if you are a citizen/permanent resident/etc. Companies may or may not be able to sponsor visas, and many positions, depending on the type of work, can only be done by citizens or permanent residents.

    It is good to brag about yourself, but definitely avoid making your resume too wordy or long. Even people with really impressive careers will have a 1 page resume because people reviewing them need to be able to see the highlights immediately.

    If you have a list of skills, it might make sense to try and be really explicit about how skilled you are with each thing. It’s going to be dependent on the job, but for example, if you were listing JMP and R on there, but you spent years on R and only did a class project once with JMP, the company might want to know that. You could put “R (expert)” and “JMP (familiar)” or something like that.

    Obviously, you need a job to eat and pay rent, but if someone hires you specifically to do something you are only slightly competent at, it’s really a lose-lose.