Random Thread

[zompist]

Not much, but it looks like a neutrino masses something under 1000 quectograms.

After pointing out Nature's exponents error, I of course made one of my own. Should be 1/1000. A neutrino is less than a millionth of an electron mass.

[foxcatdog]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8wt59nnmaE
wholesome

[alice]

We don't have a "sad things" thread, so this will have to go here: R.I.P. Christine McVie.

[Ryusenshi]

U.S. government project
X is a real societal problem. The government feels pressure from voters to do something about problem X. They find a bazillion dollars and appoint a department to solve this problem.

Five years later: the project somehow cost three bazillion dollars, but did absolutely not help in actually solving X.

French government project
X is a real societal problem. The government feels pressure from voters to do something about problem X. They appoint a committee with a budget of 50 000€ to solve this problem.

Five years later: the committee, being made of people with a full-time job and no time dedicated to the project, has managed to meet ten times in total. Their conclusion is that with a budget so low, they can't even hire a single person to work full-time on problem X, so the entire thing is pointless. (Surprised Pikachu face) The government secretly cans the whole thing. Problem X is unsolved.

[Ares Land]

Painful, but true!

[hwhatting]

The German version is a compromise between the two approaches - appoint a committee that costs millions of Euros in consultant fees and achieves nothing

[Man in Space]

There is a Zeeb Rd. in Lower Peninsula Michigan. I have just discovered this, because it’s on my itinerary to travel down it a bit this evening. (I’m up here to retrieve a musical instrument.)

[Moose-tache]

U.S. government project

Close, but not quite. This is how it actually works.

Say there is a large land crab loose in a residential area. Every few days a small child wanders close enough to be caught in its pincers and is seriously injured. Sitting next to the dangerous crab are two large and sturdy rubber bands, roughly the size and shape of the cross-section of the pincers of the menacing crab.

Very soon the media, community leaders, federal authorities, state authorities, municipal authorities, the local black church, Girls Scouts den #947, and the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees, all recognize that the large crab-claw-sized rubber bands need to go on the claws of the large threatening crab. Kamala Harris's husband, who calls himself the "second gentleman" I am not even making that up, tweets a picture of himself banding a lobster and gets called out for cultural appropriation. John Oliver does a segment about children with claw marks on their bodies. Someone makes one of those three-color Che Guevara posters, but with a banded crab claw. This goes on for a truly ridiculous amount of time.

Eventually, the inexplicably pro-crab-violence party, which I haven't mentioned because there's no time, discredits itself over something unrelated, and a collection of people find themselves in power who have actually promised to find a way to put the rubber bands on the perilously pinchy crab. A team of people in hard hats who are otherwise dressed like accountants is dispatched to stand around and stare at the crab, measuring the distance to the bands, taking turns picking up and putting down the bands, and doing feasibility tests on a papier-mache model crab. This goes on until the public is distracted by Kanye West being racist, or in the event that Kanye West is dead the plan moves on to phase two.

At this point, the government has no choice but to actually put the safety bands on the unsafe crab. The pile of wounded children is starting to obscure sight lines from local condominia. The treasury amasses a budget of $500 billion dollars to provide for a series of tax cuts in the crab-band-installing industry. This fails, as this industry does not exist. Next, government employees pick up the rubber bands and carry them around the world at great expense, trying to find an enterprise that is willing to install them on the crab. A new budget of $1.5 trillion is raised, given out in direct payments to major businesses in both seafood and organic polymers industries, all of which immediately disappears and is never heard from again. Upon close inspection, most businesses just turn out to have been crabs the whole time.

Insane crack pots suggest the government use its resources to directly place the rubber bands on the alarming crab, and are ignored for the dangerously unstable individuals they are. The last country that allowed the government to directly apply rubber bands to a crab was an abysmal failure, in that its population of lethal crabs was too low. It is imperative that the United States not fall into the same trap. The federal government continues to try to find a private enterprise that can be bribed into installing the bands, but each business simply takes the money and spends it on more crabs. At this point the John Oliver segments are about the social problems caused by the government spending all its money on "crab solutions," instead of addressing real problems, like Kanye's latest Tweet.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

You are amusing sometimes.

[FlamyobatRudki]

U.S. government project

Close, but not quite. This is how it actually works.

Say there is a large land crab loose in a residential area. Every few days a small child wanders close enough to be caught in its pincers and is seriously injured. Sitting next to the dangerous crab are two large and sturdy rubber bands, roughly the size and shape of the cross-section of the pincers of the menacing crab.

Very soon the media, community leaders, federal authorities, state authorities, municipal authorities, the local black church, Girls Scouts den #947, and the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees, all recognize that the large crab-claw-sized rubber bands need to go on the claws of the large threatening crab. Kamala Harris's husband, who calls himself the "second gentleman" I am not even making that up, tweets a picture of himself banding a lobster and gets called out for cultural appropriation. John Oliver does a segment about children with claw marks on their bodies. Someone makes one of those three-color Che Guevara posters, but with a banded crab claw. This goes on for a truly ridiculous amount of time.

Eventually, the inexplicably pro-crab-violence party, which I haven't mentioned because there's no time, discredits itself over something unrelated, and a collection of people find themselves in power who have actually promised to find a way to put the rubber bands on the perilously pinchy crab. A team of people in hard hats who are otherwise dressed like accountants is dispatched to stand around and stare at the crab, measuring the distance to the bands, taking turns picking up and putting down the bands, and doing feasibility tests on a papier-mache model crab. This goes on until the public is distracted by Kanye West being racist, or in the event that Kanye West is dead the plan moves on to phase two.

At this point, the government has no choice but to actually put the safety bands on the unsafe crab. The pile of wounded children is starting to obscure sight lines from local condominia. The treasury amasses a budget of $500 billion dollars to provide for a series of tax cuts in the crab-band-installing industry. This fails, as this industry does not exist. Next, government employees pick up the rubber bands and carry them around the world at great expense, trying to find an enterprise that is willing to install them on the crab. A new budget of $1.5 trillion is raised, given out in direct payments to major businesses in both seafood and organic polymers industries, all of which immediately disappears and is never heard from again. Upon close inspection, most businesses just turn out to have been crabs the whole time.

Insane crack pots suggest the government use its resources to directly place the rubber bands on the alarming crab, and are ignored for the dangerously unstable individuals they are. The last country that allowed the government to directly apply rubber bands to a crab was an abysmal failure, in that its population of lethal crabs was too low. It is imperative that the United States not fall into the same trap. The federal government continues to try to find a private enterprise that can be bribed into installing the bands, but each business simply takes the money and spends it on more crabs. At this point the John Oliver segments are about the social problems caused by the government spending all its money on "crab solutions," instead of addressing real problems, like Kanye's latest Tweet.

locally it's the same with the following amendments you also have endless people who continue to justify all of the ineptitude and claim that crabs pinching people is good actually and then the government scape goats some unpopular minority for being the real reason for the problem of all of the injuries caused by pinchy crabs mean while the crabs get tax relief, and the crabs are given welfare in-spite of earning billions and not paying taxes.
The government sues the UN over human rights existing, and 4 trillion dollars on promoting the crab claw enlargements, because pinchy crabs are necessary for the economy[this money of course all disappears]
also the proviolent crab party manages to stay in power for over 40 years in-spite of being discredited repeatedly.

[Raphael]

Why is the traditional food of most of Europe (except for some of the southernmost countries) so bland by the standards of much of the rest of the world?

[keenir]

Why is the traditional food of most of Europe (except for some of the southernmost countries) so bland by the standards of much of the rest of the world?

We notice less of the uniqueness and exoticness of the food we eat the most regularly.

[rotting bones]

Why is the traditional food of most of Europe (except for some of the southernmost countries) so bland by the standards of much of the rest of the world?

If plants add spice to prevent predators from feeding on them, maybe this strategy was less worth it in colder climates?

I also suspect that more Germanic-majority regions were "tribal" and had fewer pretensions to high culture until relatively recently. I've had very little sleep the last few days, so who knows.

---

Here's text-davinci-003's output for "Explain why the traditional food of most of Europe is so bland by the standards of much of the rest of the world:"

The traditional food of most of Europe is generally quite bland by the standards of much of the rest of the world due in part to the colder climates and limited access to ingredients and spices that were only available from other regions. In addition, the European diet was typically based on local ingredients, which often lacked the exotic flavors found in other parts of the world. Additionally, traditional European dishes are often prepared in a simple manner, relying on cooking techniques such as boiling and stewing, rather than more complex ones such as frying or roasting. This further contributes to a lack of strong flavors in the dishes.

Even though the chat function is usually more hesitant to guess when it doesn't know, I strongly suspect this response is worse:

There are a few reasons why the traditional food of most of Europe may be considered bland by the standards of much of the rest of the world. One reason is that European cuisine has historically been influenced by a variety of cultural and environmental factors, such as the availability of certain ingredients and the climate in different regions. For example, the colder climate in many parts of Europe may have limited the availability of spicy ingredients, which are commonly used in cuisines from warmer regions. Additionally, European cuisine has often been influenced by religious dietary restrictions, such as those in the Catholic Church, which may have limited the use of certain flavors and ingredients. Overall, the development of European cuisine has been shaped by a complex set of historical, cultural, and environmental factors, which may have contributed to its perceived blandness compared to cuisines from other parts of the world.

Really? The Catholic Church doesn't put those kinds of restrictions on food to the best of my knowledge. On the other hand, the chat function is much better at poetry than text-davinci-003. Here's chat's output for, "Write a poem about the blandness of European food."

The food of Europe, oh so bland
With flavors that just can't withstand
A taste test against the spicy fare
Of cuisines from lands beyond compare

In every country, in every town
The same dull dishes can be found
No heat, no spice, no flavor bold
Just blandness, served a hundredfold

But still the people of Europe dine
On dishes that lack any design
They eat their food with stoic grace
And never show their boredom on their face

Perhaps it's the cold and dreary weather
That keeps the spice from coming together
Or maybe it's the old tradition
That keeps the flavors in restriction

Whatever the reason may be
The food of Europe remains bland, you see
But still the people eat their fill
And never seem to mind the lack of thrill

So if you're looking for a culinary thrill
You'll have to look beyond Europe's hill
For here, the flavors are dull and tame
And never set your taste buds aflame.

It's like I can now afford to have a bard follow me around and narrate my daily adventures.

BTW, the chat function refuses to guess, but text-davinci-003 is happy to answer, "The longest documented time a human-made object has been in continuous human possession without ever being lost and then later being rediscovered by archaeologists:"

The oldest documented human-made object in continuous human possession without ever being lost is the Ivory Casket of St. Maurus, which has been in continuous possession by the Benedictine Monastery of St. Maurus in Trier, Germany, since it was made in 796 CE.

This is in the region of a good answer and in line with some of my first intuitions on this subject, but I had to ask, "Is the Codex Vaticanus older than the Ivory Casket of St. Maurus?"

No, the Codex Vaticanus is not older than the Ivory Casket of St. Maurus. The Ivory Casket is believed to have been made in the 8th century, while the Codex Vaticanus is believed to have been written in the 4th century.

Yeah, this thing is definitely an imperfect heuristic function. Besides, Wikipedia says something like 1200 for the Ivory Casket of St. Maurus: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... _MRR76.jpg To see just how manic the Playground can be, here's the output for, "Design an ornithopter:"

The ornithopter should have a curved wing design with a lightweight carbon-fiber frame. It should be powered by a large electric motor and have two sets of wings - one set to provide lift, and the other set to provide thrust. The wings should be adjustable to allow for efficient flight in a variety of situations. It should also have a tail stabilizer and a system of servos and gyroscopes to provide stability and maneuverability. The ornithopter should be equipped with a camera and sensors to provide real-time data for the pilot and for research purposes. Finally, it should have an aerodynamic shape to reduce drag and improve efficiency.

Not bad at all.

This thing can write code too, as well as generate documentation from given code: https://beta.openai.com/playground/p/de ... avinci-002 I've read testimonials about programmers being impressed by its ability to write and reason about code. This is in line with my expectations given the existence of GitHub Copilot. I wasn't so impressed with its ability to generate documentation. The documentation generator in code-davinci-002 is so far behind that they are apparently not charging anything from your $18 free credit when you sign up to use ChatGPT.

[hwhatting]

In general, the farther North you go, the less spicy ingredients are available, and the less important the germ-killing properties of spices become. Non-European traditional food from Northerly regions that I have tasted, like Kazakh or Mongolian, is also rather bland (or rather uses a very limite range of spices, mostly salt and pepper, like most Northern European cooking). When more exotic spices became known in Europe, they were expensive and mostly used for prestige cooking, or for special occasions (that is why e.g. German Christmas bakery uses more spices than usual). In Germany, people started to get used to more spicy food mostly only after around the 1950s, when people started to go on Southern holidays in masses and when guest workers arrived, opening ethnic restaurants.

[Moose-tache]

I think for most people, almost every meal before about 1800 was:
a) slurry of local starches
b) hopes and dreams
It's not like everyone in India was eating rogan josh and dosa and chutney on a regular basis. The really good stuff was consumed much more by elites. There is a European version of that. It's called "French food." Elites from Scotland to Russia hired French chefs to make them buttery sauces, crusty risen bread, and creamy-flaky pastries. And honestly that stuff, when done right, holds up pretty well against the cuisines of other cultures.

The main cultural difference is that modern Indians bring a lunch box to work full of amazing delicious things, while their European counterparts aren't going to work every day with beef Wellington and coq-au-vin. But I think that has more to do with recent developments (i.e. when Europeans want fancy food, they just eat someone else's), and less to do with the quality of flavors of traditional cuisines.

[Ares Land]

Why is the traditional food of most of Europe (except for some of the southernmost countries) so bland by the standards of much of the rest of the world?

Coincidentally, I've been looking at medieval cooking at recipes since we talked about medieval cookbooks the other days. It wasn't bland at all!

The recipes I've seen use a lot of cumin, verjuice, ginger and saffron. The trade in ginger must have been something (gardening sites suggest you can grow it if you're lucky, but I don't think it thrives in temperate climates) but the other spices do grow here (for verjuice you just need unripe grapes -- of which they grew a lot in the Middle Ages.)

The real question is why we quit using spices so much (this seems to have happened before modern sanitation, and I have yet to find a really good explanation)

Really? The Catholic Church doesn't put those kinds of restrictions on food to the best of my knowledge. On the other hand, the chat function is much better at poetry than text-davinci-003. Here's chat's output for, "Write a poem about the blandness of European food."

Catholicism distinguishes between lean days and fat (or meat days). The restrictions are pretty loose now (I'm not a Catholic, but I don't think there's much more to it these days than eating fish on Fridays, especially on Good Fridays) but they used to be a lot stricter. At times it went up to 200 lean days a year, IIRC.

Medieval cuisine was deeply influenced by these restrictions. What really stands out is the number and variety of fish recipes (including marine mammals if you could get them); more subtly there are recipes for almond milk, and many mentions of it: it was used as a substitute on lean days.

This seems to prove Marvin Harris' points once again: from an environmental perspective restricting meat makes a lot of sense. (And we're in fact moving in that direction once again; cafeterias are doing vegan days now for instance)

I think for most people, almost every meal before about 1800 was:
a) slurry of local starches
b) hopes and dreams

It depends a lot on the time and place. I've read Montaillou -- a really in-depth study of a mountain village in southern France ca 1300.
From a material standpoint, the peasant were living quite well and people were far from starving. They did eat meat, though of course less than we do. (Life did suck, but that was due to the low-level constant religious war in the area.) The author mentions that looking at the same place, the picture would have been a lot bleaker, with a series of bad years followed by the Black Death.

[Linguoboy]

The real question is why we quit using spices so much (this seems to have happened before modern sanitation, and I have yet to find a really good explanation)

At what point did spices become generally available to the middle class? There seems to be a general tendency in modern societies which works like this:

1. Item X is so prohibitively expensive that it's a luxury item for the moneyed elite.
2. This association gives it cachet.
3. Through a combination of increased availability and increased income[*], item X becomes affordable for middle-class people with money to burn and they acquire it to possess the cachet associated with it.
4. The elite begin to associate item X with the middle class; as a consequence it loses its cachet for them.
5. Middle-class people begin to notice this and go out of their way to avoid association with item X. Eventually, it becomes associated with plebs.

I feel like a lot of the petit-bourgeois sensibility I grew up around was about not being like "those people". I remember vividly an anecdote from when we were allowed to choose the paint colours for our own rooms as children. My brother chose a really bold shade of blue for his bedroom and when my grandmother saw it, she said, "It looks like how those Black people have their homes."

Strong paint colours, of course, used to be a province of the elite because dyestuffs were expensive in pre-industrial countries. After that changed, bright colours started to become associated with vulgarity (at least among American WASPs and those who take their cues from them) and those with money began to embrace sleek minimalism in muted shades. I wonder if a similar sort of thing couldn't have happened with spices as well. "Oh, poor people have spices now? Well, let's stop using them so much and start talking shit about how they're being used to mask the poor quality of the ingredients they can afford."

[*] And--in some cases--repeal of sumptuary laws or taxes.

[rotting bones]

hwhatting: Turns out the presence of capsaicin is not good for plants facing a shortage of water: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2012 ... g%20damage.

Moose-tache: I'm talking specifically about spices, not flavors. My point about high culture had to do with the French elites in Northern Europe.

My understanding is that Mesoamericans put chilis in everything. Although everything I can say about non-elite medieval Indian cooking is a pure guess, I'd be surprised if poor people couldn't afford any black pepper in medieval India. India was rather wealthy by world standards at the time before all the forced cotton and opium farming. In general, poor people sometimes try to emulate the rich when they can afford it, and Indian farmers habitually sample their goods. IIRC pepper was one of the few medicines that Buddhist monks were allowed to carry. I'd be surprised if all of it came from wealthy donors.

Also, Paul Cockshott explains that the Enlightenment image of starving peasants makes no sense under a materialist Marxist analysis. The common land hadn't even been privatized yet. Now, you will find mainstream historians and economists who try to argue against "Marxism" by pointing out that peasants lived better than depicted in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Those people understand nothing about Marxism and imagine it to be some kind of eternally wrong boogeyman.

Ares Land: Did you have to cut back on spices on lean days?

While I agree that peasants weren't starving, spices were a luxury item in medieval Europe. Are those popular recipes or dishes from the high table? In medieval times, rich people put spice in their food just to demonstrate that they could afford it. For example, since sugar was considered a spice back then, they used to cook meat with sugar. It's possible the spices that tasted the best came from abroad, and were more expensive. As those spices became common, people cut back on locally available varieties.

Linguoboy: Did the Victorian elites become stuck up mainly because they hated black people, or because they were trying to demonstrate Protestant virtue (which they no doubt imagined Papists and blacks to be lacking)? Maybe the bland dishes were yet another extension of Protestant asceticism.

[keenir]

Moose-tache: I'm talking specifically about spices, not flavors.

Theres a difference?

My point about high culture had to do with the French elites in Northern Europe.

Then could you please explain what you mean by "high culture" so we don't think you're referring to the cooks that everyone wants?

IIRC pepper was one of the few medicines that Buddhist monks were allowed to carry. I'd be surprised if all of it came from wealthy donors.

Why not? You get extra points for giving to monks, in regeneration terms.

Ares Land: Did you have to cut back on spices on lean days?

Hm? Did you find/have a recipe for spices on brocoli or yams?

Linguoboy: Did the Victorian elites become stuck up mainly because they hated black people, or because they were trying to demonstrate Protestant virtue

Not sure it has to be an either-or.

Maybe the bland dishes were yet another extension of Protestant asceticism.

If that was true, wouldn't they lionize the famished and monoculturally agricultural Irish?

[Travis B.]

One thing to note is that the disappearance of long pepper from European diets and the rise of the chile pepper is because long pepper was very expensive, having to be imported to Europe while chile peppers taste very similar (hence the common name in English and many European languages!) but are much easier and cheaper to grow just about anywhere. (It should also be noted that long pepper is still used in Indian cooking, going by the name pippali.)