Also worth noting that AI was used by the researchers. It’s not mentioned in the article, but I guess AI helped sort out which sounds might be a name.

That would make sense. In Europe I got an IV just for blood samples. They could have been anticipating the possibility that I would need pain killers later, but seemed like it would have made more sense to use a normal needle and only do the IV if it came to the point of needing meds.

If you read the whole thread, I would not have to spell this out. These are preservatives (source):

• honey
• salt
• garlic
• sugar
• ginger
• sage
• rosemary
• sage
• mustard
• mustard seed
• cumin
• black pepper
• turmeric
• cinnamon
• cardamom
• cloves
• vinegar
• citric acid
• lemon/lime juice

They generally work by killing/repelling/deterring microbes that to a notable extent happen to be of the unwanted variety. Before yesterday, I thought salt worked similarly to the others on that list. Yesterday I learnt that salt is uniquely functions as a preservative due to a different mechanism (a drying effect).

Your logic is nonsense. To claim that because substance X does not kill /everything/, it cannot serve as a preservative – this is broken logic that you brought to the thread. Nothing on that list of food preservatives kills or deters every microbe - not even every harmful microbe. Of course they selectively mitigate /some of/ “the bad bacteria” (but note it’s a bit straw mannish for you to use the article “the” in your phrasing imply /all/ unwanted microbes). Most preservatives mitigate enough unwanted microbes without unacceptable overkill to beneficial microbes to justify use as a preservative. They are selected as preservatives for this reason. Foods that fail to significantly select against unwanted microbes (i.e. most foods) don’t get tagged as a preservative. How are you not grasping this?

You also have noteworthy bad assumption: that evolution does not happen outside of the ocean. The claim that because life started in the ocean, the ocean is therefore suitable for everything – this is bogus. Try putting a freshwater fish in the ocean. If a complex organism can evolve to become intolerant to the environment of its ancestors, why wouldn’t microbes also evolve to develop intolerances?

Indeed, that’s a good point. I wonder how many people don’t know that. I used to think “nothing will survive 250°F in my pressure cooker” and was tempted to cook some questionable pork. But yeah, would have been dangerous because chemical toxins from bacteria output would “survive” (persist) in 250°F. So after some quick research, I tossed it.

Though I might be surprised if 24hrs is enough time for brine to not only accumulate bacteria in high numbers but also allow enough time for bacteria toxins to be produced. How fast does that happen? I would have thought a day is too short (I don’t think I ever let more than a day pass between boils).

Actually that logic is broken IMO. A food preservative need not make life impossible for all organisms. E.g. hops (and consequential acidity) preserves beer to some extent by making life hard for some unwanted organisms. But hops do not kill everything (of course, because you intend to drink the beer). Beer can still spoil despite the hops.

But as I said in my correction, salt works as a preservative through a drying effect, which I did not previously realize (TIL).

I could always transfer it to glass or plastic to protect the pot but I guess laziness was the original motivator. Salt is cheap enough that I’ll probably just toss it going forward.

Yeah, indeed I just realized from an article I linked that salt only works as a preservative by drying out food. So salt water is indeed useless.

i get 403 forbidden w/that link. And archive.org chokes on it too for some reason. Does your source counter this source?

(edit) ah, I see the problem. Salt only works as a preservative by drying out food.

I can’t imagine it’s particularly food safe to leave your starchy pasta water out for a few days and then reuse it.

I haven’t tested a few days of non-use. It’s usually if I happen to make pasta two days in a row, and (more rare) three days in a row (where it still boils daily).

Well it’s not actually clear to me whether the soft water is to protect the dishwasher, or to make cleaning more effective. Soft water dissolves soap better which makes it more effective in cleaning. It also means I can use powdered detergent (which is cheaper than liquid detergent, but in hard water powder doesn’t perform as well). Soft water has the down side that it’s actually /more prone/ to corrosion than hard water (at least according to youtube plumbers). So I’m tempted to conclude the built-in water softener is just for cleaning effectiveness.

Also aren’t you afraid something will come to live in 2 days in warm salty water

Wasn’t salt the most popular preservative in the days before refrigeration existed? The stuff boils with heavy salt (like ocean water), so starts off semi-sterile due to the boiling. Then I don’t imagine many things looking for a home in brine, which then boils again the next day. This water is saltier than foods that rely on salt for preservation.

Starchy water sitting around is a breading ground for bacteria. Don’t do that.

That water is brine, if you do it right. Salt is a good preservative. I’ve tested it with up to 2 reuses.

Also, dishwashers don’t clean with salt water. They use the salt to reset their internal water softener.

Not sure why you thought I thought dishwashers clean with salt water. The manual’s advice was to mitigate salt grains that did not get into the salt reservoir that would sit on the stainless steel potentially for days.

Ah, I wondered if I needed to explain that, since dishwashers in N.America do not take salt. European dishwashers tend to have built-in water softeners (because it’s somewhat uncommon to have whole house water softeners). So we periodically have to fill a salt reservoir in the dishwasher to feed the water softener.

And email, done right (safe, no spam, secure, private) is one of the hardest things to do. It’s not easy.

It should be easy when ~95% of the traffic is internal, which is the important traffic. Students and profs emailing each other. How often does a school need to collaborate with another? Google has ruined email and if mail to externals is unreliable that’s fine. Hopefully students are not becoming helpless when the need comes to write a snail mail letter.

I would rather not condition students to satisfy corporate hoops imposed on them by surveillance advertisers.

But can you, do you want to explain setting up thunderbird to the median college goer?

Thunderbird is a convenience. Every student should have access to a UNIX or linux lab where they can type “pine” at a shell prompt and get a preconfigured mail client. If they want the extra convenience of using a 3rd party client, just give them the raw generic parameters. They are students – it’s their job to struggle through puzzles.

When I studied compsci, my prof told me ½ of what I learn at the uni will be obsolete by the time I report to work. So his take was to give a strong dose of the kind of knowledge that does not expire: theory and concepts. We learned a language that does not even exist in the real world (PEP5), which was a blend of important constructs from several real assembly languages. He said if you learn PEP5, you will be best adapted to picking up any assembly language. If he were to teach a real assembly language the chances we would encounter it would be slim and we would be alienated by dissimilar other real langs.

The wise move is not to make students dependent on implementation specifics.

On a note on matlab, in addition to industry, there are certain fields in academia, eg neuroscience and many engineer fields, where matlab has been part of their culture for quite some time. My guess is you can make the case for some other proprietary softwares used in university. Changing culture in a field is not an easy thing; but fortunately people in science usually notice these issues and make a choice for themselves.

IIRC, the GNU Octave language is similar enough to MATlab that if someone cannot adapt something must have gone wrong with their instruction, which should not be centered around implementation particulars.

MATlab can only be justified in one niche case: simulink, which GNU Octave does not offer. A prof should have to have simulink as part of the course if they are going to justify spending dept money on MATlab.

I have a postfix server that Google rejects. I was told I need to setup DKIM. Then I was told it’s not just enough to have DKIM configured, but I will be forced to solve Google’s CAPTCHAs before my DKIM is accepted. In the end I opted not to ever send email to google or MS recipients.

Perhaps universities could go as far as setting up DKIM but then refuse to support Google’s special needs (such as CAPTCHA solving). If email from the uni to a google acct bounces, no problem because the sender is at least informed that google refused their RFC-compliant message. But what if Google accepts the msg for delivery then files it as spam? Should the university mail server give the sender a notification that a msg was delivered but likely to a spam folder, I wonder?

When the hard-working little swimmers encounter the thicker vaginal mucus, their path is slowed. So the sperm often join together at their heads, which gives them greater swimming speed (up to 50 percent faster) than if they were to carry on individually.

I wonder why that is. If a group of people were to join together and run, the speed of the group would be capped by the slowest runner. And aerodynamics would be worse.