I believe that TV and radio news use this stock market headline generator today.
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A Comic Strip Tour Of The Wild World Of Pandemic Modeling | FiveThirtyEight
So much is still unknown about this pandemic. Both the website (https://fivethirtyeight.com/) and the artist (https://www.smbc-comics.com/) are worth following.
This comic talks about why it is very hard to have an accurate model. And why all models should be distrusted to some degree.
Cadbury Creme Eggs: A glimpse of how they are made
I visited the Cadbury factory in Birmingham, England a number of years ago. The tour didn’t take us onto the actual factory floor so we didn’t get to see how they made the creme eggs like the video. But they did have a very nice demonstration setup where they show all the different processes. And, of course, give samples.
There was a History Of Chocolate that took itself way too seriously. The sense was the true human civilization didn’t actually start until the first people discovered the chocolate bean. And that Europe wasn’t truly civilized until the chocolate bean was introduced there. I just enjoyed the samples along the way.
In the demo setup, we got to see how they “enrobe” a candy bar so that it is completely covered with chocolate with no marks. It involved floating the filling piece (chilled, of course) through a curtain of chocolate and onto a chilled conveyor belt. Mmmm, “curtain of chocolate”. And there were more samples.
They also had several women demonstrating how they made dipped chocolates before they had fancy conveyor belts, floating candy bars, and curtains of chocolate. They had these long, bent forks with tiny tines and would dip the filling pieces into a pot of melted chocolate, flip it around a bit, and then set it on a cooled plate. The chocolate would be just runny enough to flow over the tine marks. The samples were good at this station.
Truth to be told, they had so many samples that I was turning them down by the end of the tour.
I did learn, however, that Cadbury Flake is one of the most awesome candy bars available. Unfortunately, we didn’t see how they make that one either. Rumor has it, Flake bars do not melt. I consider it a rumor because, while I have yet to personally experience one melting, I haven’t tried nearly enough to call it a fact. More research needed.
Chocolate Creme Egg
Half the sugar in Coke can
Sweet Sweet Indulgence
Fake Meat: White Castle Review
I am very interested in all the work going on in the “fake meat” area. Impossible and Beyond are both running full speed with the newest generation of vegetarian meats. To be clear, I am not a vegetarian. I love meat and do not intend to give it up. But I really hope that they succeed.
I believe that having a few more meals without meat is not a bad thing. Many others have written long and thoughtfully about the evils of meat and the benefits of a meatless diet. I don’t buy all of it. But it probably is better for me to eat less meat. And probably better for the planet as well.
So the first of my Fake Meat reviews is here: the White Castle Impossible Slider. And, for the record, I am a White Castle fan.
First Try: Lunch time. A White Castle near the state capital. I ordered two Impossible Sliders and a regular slider for comparison.
The box was a bit wider, implying that the burger would be bigger than the regular slider. It was wider, but primarily because of the bun. The Impossible patty appeared to be the same thickness as the regular slider patty. The menu says it comes with Gouda cheese, but the yellow/orange slice looked and tasted like the normal White Castle cheese. But then I never get a cheeseburger, so I can’t say for sure.
The first thing I noticed was that the bun was hard and cold. One of the beautiful things about a White Castle slider is the warm soft bun that segues into the burger. I intend to go back and try again to see if the cold hard bun is by design or a mixup. I hope that the bun was to be heated on the grill like a regular slider, but somehow wasn’t. The order took extra long, so maybe there was a problem?
The Impossible burger was dry, mainly due to the bun and the very unfortunate fact that I didn’t ask for ketchup and mustard on it. In the excitement of trying the Impossible, I forgot to specify it. Sigh. Another reason to try again.
Even with the bun and lack of ketchup and mustard, the burgers had the same taste. I will definitely order it again.
Second Try: White Castle near work. Again, I ordered two Impossible and two regular sliders. Remembered the ketchup, mustard, and pickle on all four. I learned that they cook them on a separate griddle so it never touches the meat. That isn’t necessary for me, but I understand why, as a business, they would make that decision. The bun problem from the First Try wasn’t as apparent, mainly because the regular slider buns were not hot and moist either. I noticed a little more taste difference between the Impossible and regular. Not being a chef like my sister, I can’t put useful words to the difference. The texture seemed very similar.
So two tries at two separate White Castles. They were good enough that I will continue to order them. Side Note: The impossible burger is about twice as expensive. But we should pay more for healthier food that is better for the planet, right?
Katherine Johnson, NASA Mathematician Featured in ‘Hidden Figures,’ Dies at 101 – The New York Times
They asked Katherine Johnson for the moon, and she gave it to them.
Wielding little more than a pencil, a slide rule and one of the finest mathematical minds in the country, Mrs. Johnson, who died at 101 on Monday at a retirement home in Newport News, Va., calculated the precise trajectories that would let Apollo 11 land on the moon in 1969 and, after Neil Armstrong’s history-making moonwalk, let it return to Earth.
A single error, she well knew, could have dire consequences for craft and crew. Her impeccable calculations had already helped plot the successful flight of Alan B. Shepard Jr., who became the first American in space when his Mercury spacecraft went aloft in 1961.
The next year, she likewise helped make it possible for John Glenn, in the Mercury vessel Friendship 7, to become the first American to orbit the Earth.
Katherine Johnson, NASA Mathematician Featured in ‘Hidden Figures,’ Dies at 101 – The New York Times
Spring Training starts
The true harbinger of spring is not crocuses or swallows returning to Capistrano, but the sound of the bat on the ball.
Bill Veeck
Word Of The Day: tsundoku
Tsundoku: acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them
Scrolling to The Deep Sea
The above picture is one of the many things to learn at Neal Agarwal’s “The Deep Sea’ website. Scroll down from the surface and you will see creatures down to the very deepest part of the ocean.
More people have been to the Moon than the Hadal Zone (6000m).
https://neal.fun/deap-sea/
Click on the ‘Neal.fun’ in the upper left to see more interesting animation. The space one is also cool.
Where is the Tesla that SpaceX sent into space?
SpaceX launched a car into space on February 6, 2018. Some dismissed as a stupid rich guy thing. I enjoyed it immensely. SpaceX is doing remarkable work, with NASA’s help, in getting the space effort going again. Putting the Tesla Roadster, and a space dummy, on a trajectory towards Mars caught the public’s attention. If it helps build awareness and support for more space travel, that is a worthy effort.
So I was thinking about that launch today and was wondering what ever happened to that car. Of course, the internet came to the rescue.
The site is https://www.whereisroadster.com/ and it is constantly updated with the latest information. This site was put up by some guy, not related at all to Tesla and SpaceX.
It is currently going over 11,000 miles per hour.
I think that is awesome.
The glass matters: A Guinness Story
If you are not a fan of Stout beer, or staring at beer watching bubbles, this post is not for you. Feel free to move along, I won’t mind.
Scoregami: an amusing sport stat
Came across ‘Scorigami’ the other day. It is a ‘Scorigami!’ when a US Football game ends in a score that has never happened before. The web site https://nflscorigami.com/ gives the current state of them. It is fun to wander around a bit. There is also a baseball one at https://scorigami.danaben.net/t.
There have been at least two Scorigamis this season. The Browns beat the Ravens 40-25 and Tampa Bay beat the Rams 55-40.
Class Of 2023 Mindset
This is a list of many things that have been true since the birth of those entering in college this year (thus the ‘Class of 2023’).
This list used to be at the Beloit College website, but they moved it to a different place. The complete list is here: https://www.marist.edu/mindset-list
Here are a few highlights from the list.
Continue reading “Class Of 2023 Mindset”Ford Pinto Wagon – my first car
My folks owned a Ford Pinto wagon that eventually came to me. The story about how I got it and what happened to it are lost to my late teen/early 20s memory gaps. The picture in this post is the closest I could find. I don’t even remember what year the car was or what year I got rid of it.
But that Pinto broke in a way that I very much remember.
Continue reading “Ford Pinto Wagon – my first car”Video: How They Make Aluminum Foil
About 5 minutes long. From a big block of aluminum to 12.7 kilometers of aluminum foil by basically continually squeezing it until it is thin enough. And don’t tear it!
Video by the “How It’s Made” show.
Perspective on the lottery — and even bigger numbers.
Large numbers are interesting. The following quote about a hedgehog sneezing is a good example. The article at the link uses that as a starting point and goes large. Really large. Makes the brain hurt a bit to try and grasp it and doesn’t really serve any useful purpose outside of math research…but it is an interesting read if you can make it through.
A recent Mega Millions lottery had 1-in-175,711,536 odds of winning. To put those chances in perspective, that’s about the number of seconds in six years. So it’s like knowing a hedgehog will sneeze once and only once in the next six years and putting your hard-earned money down on one particular second—say, the 36th second of 2:52am on March 19th, 2017—and only winning if the one sneeze happens exactly at that second.
From 1,000,000 to Graham’s Number — Wait But Why
From a different article about big numbers — but much easier to understand big numbers, a humorous use of Sour-Patch Kids:
And in a night fraught with moments of self-loathing, carefully placing 50 eXtreme Sour Patch Kids on top of another 50 eXtreme Sour Patch Kids, alone at 2am, was the low point. Moving on—
What does A Quadrillion Sour Patch Kids Look Like?
