The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by lorax:

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The World Carrot Museum questions the story of orange carrots being developed by the Dutch. The standard orange carrot may have been popularized by the Dutch a few hundred years ago, but apparently it had already existed.

Xopher @290, quantum mechanics was a long time ago and we covered nuclear physics only briefly, but here's what I can tell you:

The strong nuclear force falls off extremely rapidly with distance, so generally speaking nuclei can only get so big before they become very unstable. This is why the high transuranic elements have very short half-lives.

That said, there are good theoretical reasons to expect an "island of stability" where the actual as opposed to approximate workings of the strong nuclear force create more tightly bound nuclei. (The analogy to "filled electron shells" is usually invoked here.) Even among known elements you can see this; there are relatively stable isotopes of uranium and neptunium, for instance, while francium (with a lower atomic mass) has no isotopes with a half-life longer than a few minutes. Estimates vary by many orders of magnitude as to what half-lives in this island of stability could actually be, but from what I can tell based on some cursory searches most estimates are in the realm of minutes or hours -- so they're much more stable than the milliseconds that would be expected without this island, but not "stable" in the usual sense of the word. However some theorists have suggested that half-lives for elements in this island could be measured in thousands or millions of years. I'm not remotely qualified to evaluate those claims.

In the case of your crackpot, though, it's unclear how he expects these to be (a) naturally occurring and (b) not deadly poison -- for many heavy elements, if you ingest them the poison will kill you long before the radiation.

elise @572:

That "something" would be "umami".

Recognizing umami as a taste, and what provides it, is really helpful in good vegetarian cooking, especially when stocks are involved. (Carnivores can get away with not knowing about it to a greater extent because meat is loaded with umami.) I tend to add a tiny bit of miso paste to a veggie stock when I'm substituting it for chicken stock(maybe a quarter teaspoon for a cup of stock) to give an umami boost. As with salt, you shouldn't be able to taste the miso as miso, just the flavor boost it provides.

Earl @577, you're the one who brought in the word "merely". The SR-71 is an extremely good airplane, and the Shimadzu HyperVision HPV-2 is an extremely good camera. But you'd get very strange looks if you insisted "no, no, the SR-71 isn't an airplane", and that's what you're getting here.

If it makes you more willing to accept the term, I can point out that astronomers routinely call anything that makes an image, as opposed to a spectrum, a "camera". The new Wide Field Camera 3, for instance. This isn't just terminology used to explain things to people outside the field; it's actually what they're called.

Pendrift @130

I don't like wearing make-up, or dress shoes, or dresses, but I willingly collaborate in that oppression and dress that way when I go and meet certain clients because, in my field, it adheres to prevailing standards of professional attire, meaning that clients are more likely to trust me, give me projects, and allow me to make a living, than if I went to see them in my favorite jeans, tshirt and sandals.

That seems like a bit of a false dichotomy, though. What about professional dress that's not quite so gendered -- a nice suit, for instance? I am very fortunate that I've never faced the choice between being forced to present my gender in a way I'm not comfortable with (I'm cisgendered female, but I don't own a skirt or dress and can't remember the last time I wore one, or makeup) and unemployment, because I'm not sure which I'd choose.

Bridget @15, the angel counter-protesters (as you may know, but just for other people reading this thread) date back to the trial of Matthew Shepard's murderers. Good to see that technique is still being used.

dcb@15, I don't know about New York, but Los Angeles and other California cities have the Thomas Guide books -- spiral-bound books, a little larger than a standard sheet of paper, with detailed maps (every street is shown) of the entire metro area. It looks like these may be the same sort of thing, and they're an absolute lifesaver -- they'd be a bit bulky for carrying around for cycling but nobody can get around without a car here anyway.

Jim @79

If we're talking about some of the very "fundamentalist" people a deck of cards is equally suspicious.

Well, in that case, a Bible should arouse no suspicion, nor would having some verses highlighted, and it seems they'd be just as good as lines of poetry for the "first letter of each word" password-generation scheme. (Using part of the text as a one-time pad would also be possible of course, and telling your friends that the Bible Study text for this week is such-and-such should again be innocuous, though if the administration were at all technologically savvy they'd certainly figure this scheme out pretty quickly.)

#639

(Those of us with experience avoid the right lane on it as much as possible. Better yet, we try to avoid the Psasdena entirely.)

Well, those of us living in Pasadena do find it useful. But the right lane is certain death, and we never exit onto surface streets, or enter from them -- get on at the beginning, and only get off onto another freeway. (Or vice-versa). None of these 90-degree exits with a stop sign, or on-ramps with a stop sign at the bottom, no merge lane, and a blind curve so you can't even see the traffic you're merging into.

@123

The "1-10 of about $N" counts that search engines give aren't always reliable, and this appears to be a particularly dramatic case; you'll notice that down at the bottom of the search results for "registers a blimp" there's only a "2", not further numbers, and that in fact there are only 15 results that show up.

PJ Evans @718, "black salt" is indeed essential for some Indian food (especially various chaats). (And yeah, there are definitely sulfur compounds in there, it smells like hard-boiled eggs.) It should not be confused with the incredibly expensive non-Indian "black lava salt" which contains charcoal.

Dave Bell @12:

wikispooge.

(I may just have invented that word.)

It appears that you have.

Yahoo gives a single hit for "wikispooge", your post, while Google gives three false hits (two including the string /wiki/spooge, and one for "wikisplooge". (From which we learn only that Yahoo has crawled Making Light more recently than Google, and has somewhat less-aggressive near-match algorithms.)

#19

NYC is actually full of vaguely plausible crossbreed cuisines, not just tony "fusion" food but crazy vernacular combinations.

I think anywhere with large enough and mixed enough immigrant communities will produce interesting culinary crossbreeds like that; my favorite in LA is the Korean BBQ taco truck. (And to go one step farther on the cultural-mixture axis, someone I know recently went to a bar mitzvah catered by said taco truck.)

PJ Evans @27, if you want spice-hot Thai in the LA area, the place to go is Jitlada in Hollywood; about a year ago, without any fuss, they introduced a very authentic and very, very spicy menu of Southern Thai specialties (which, last time I was there, was unobtrusively tucked away on the back page of an otherwise-standard menu.) The soft-shell crab with sator beans was the spiciest thing I've eaten, and that includes some pretty authentic Sichuan food. This was heat that scoffs at rice and laughs off Thai iced tea -- the dish of raw veggies on ice they brought out did a surprisingly good job, however.

Kate @21:

Since my stir-fries are mostly vegetarian, I find what I really need is an umami boost. Either a mushroom sauce (filling the niche of oyster sauce) or a hot bean paste, depending on whim and what else is going in.

K.C. Shaw @97:

"but I noticed after a minute or two that if I looked at the color line as a whole, it was easy to spot my mistakes."

I found the same thing -- it was easier if I sort of squinted a bit to blur the color line into a whole, and looked for discontinuities.

I scored a 4 on the color test, but while that seems to be "pretty good" I have no idea how good it actually is.

abi @33:

"Trickster"?

Earl @142, I do the same thing. It's a logical extension from using square brackets to indicate other minor modifications of the quoted text -- in particular, clarifying a pronoun that in the context of the original was clear but is ambiguous or confusing when quoted.

I don't think that would have satisfied Wyman in this case, however, because his complaint seems to be that the paragraph break was not important enough to be worth noting that it had been changed.

Sarah @53, I've seen some interesting quotes from Iowans who aren't happy with the decision but aren't trying to get it overturned, either -- the attitude is more one of "what will those idiots do next", from people who are used to disagreeing with their government, than of a tantrum from people for whom this is a tremendously important issue. I think that the far right just isn't having as much luck swaying the not-so-far right to care.

Fragano @46:

I'm fascinated by the anti-equal rights crowd. Judicial decision is undemocratic. Legislative statute is undemocratic. What happens the moment a referendum endorses an equal rights statute? The government should repeal the people?

Then, I suspect, they start howling about the "tyranny of the majority", and how they're having their freedom of religion and right-to-discriminate violated by state recognition of relationships they don't approve of, and that -- yes -- the government should protect them from such actions of the people.

That, or they go straight to armed insurrection. I'm really not sure which.

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