Diameter of pots is big, too. You get way more evaporation with a wider pot.

Ounces suck because they are used as a weight and a volume, and I can’t never be sure which one a particular recipe is using.

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

Why would you want anything by volume? Mass is so much easier. 50 ml of honey is way more annoying to get into a recipe than dumping it right into whatever container the rest of the ingredients are in while it’s sat on a scale.

1st thing to do is to figure out what you need to power. Solar panels are way cheaper than charging and storage. Try to decide how much on-demand power during the dark part of the day you really need. If you can do most of what you need during the sunny part of the day, you can directly power stuff with no need for batteries. It may be that for your use case, you are better off buying 4 times as many solar panels, but no batteries.

Batteries account for 80-90% of total costs and energy invested in an off-grid solar system

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/12/how-to-build-a-small-solar-power-system/

Yeah, i would definitely look at LIFEPO4. People just have the name recognition of “lithium” so they don’t really understand the differences between that and lithium ion, and so from what I saw last time I checked, the price was not really different, even though LIFEPO4 lasts longer and is safer.

I go right out of the hot tap cause it’s better than letting it go down the drain when I wait for the shower to heat up.

A little paintbrush is perfect for doing this. Some people like using a spray bottle, but ive found it doesn’t knock them off as reliably

My front loading clothes washer. It frequently doesn’t drain right. If you create a fault tree on what causes that, you can have:

• Faulty water level sensor
• Clogged water level sensor hose
• Clogged filter
• Clog around the heating element
• Broken check valve
• Faulty pump
• Clog between drum and liner
• Faulty control board

The pump can clearly be heard running when the water levels are too high, so I know the sensor, sensor hose, controls, check valve, and pump are all functioning. Sometimes, the pump runs for way longer than you’d think necessary, with only a small trickle of water coming out little bit by bit. This indicates to me that there is a clog upstream from the pump. Multiple times, I have squeezed myself back behind the washer to take the back off and access the filter (which should be accessible from the front). I’ve found no clog there. Ive taken out the heating element to check for clogs around it, and found nothing there. Ive shown a bright light from inside the drum to highlight any potential clogs between it and the drum, and seen nothing there. Despite all of that, the problem remains, and when I manually spin the drum with nothing inside, I can hear what sounds like stuff moving around inside.

I assume it must be ghosts or something at this point.

I have a camp stove that I got for really cheap because someone returned it because the igniter didn’t work. The spark gap was too high, so all I had to do was poke the wire over a little, and it works perfectly now.

For me, the “power burner” is so weak it can’t bring a pot of water to boil or properly saute anything. Everything online says that it must be because the gas outlets are dirty, but they are spotless.

The cost of a TV is subsidized by advertisements and deals with different apps for prominent placement.

Yes, timing is important. If it’s faster, that means the puck offered less resistance, which means pressure was lower (and the inverse if it’s slower).

“Fast” shots are often perceived as too sour, while “slow” shots are often perceived as too bitter.

From wikipedia:

Figures compiled in a 2007 report by National Geographic[70] point to modest results for corn ethanol produced in the US: one unit of fossil-fuel energy is required to create 1.3 energy units from the resulting ethanol

Add on top of that the environmental impact and opportunity cost of the land use, and corn based ethanol becomes a non-viable solution.

Yeah, I dont think we’ll ever be in a place where we don’t want to be producing some combustible fuel. We can electrify a whole lot of things, but it’s hard to beat the energy density of stuff you can burn.

To summarize for anyone not reading the article:

German balcony solar panels are connected directly to their home power through a smart inverter that will kill power if the grid power goes down, so lines don’t stay live when you’d think they are dead. Those devices are designed for the voltage and frequency of the German grid, and can’t be used in America. Companies won’t makes devices if they aren’t legal to use, but one state has legalized it, so hopefully we get there soon.

The other issue is that a circuit breaker essentially monitors the amount of current going into your home’s circuit from the grid as a way of preventing your wires from being overloaded. Since the micro inverter is on the other side of the circuit breaker, you could overload the circuit without tripping the breaker, and that is why they are limited to 800 W.

I found this good review article based on a study commissioned by the Canadian government.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408444.2023.2295338

It seems like potential IQ effects are still difficult to distinguish as a dose response, so they weren’t able to come up with a point of departure. It doesn’t help that in a lot of studies comparing “high” and “low” fluoridation effects on IQ, the “low” is still higher than the WHO recommended level of 1.5 mg/L, and the US recommended level of 0.75.

I think the optimal level is likely going to vary by municipality based on the quality of dental care and the use of fluoridated toothpaste (that everyone overuses), and consumption of high fluoride beverages like tea. I guess my main takeaway is that people need to read their local water quality report, and do what they will with that information

I think it depends on the type of tourist attraction. In places like beach towns, “locals” are usually people who happened to have enough money to buy a vacation house, and decided to make it permanent. Or think of ski towns where the cost of living is so expensive that everyone who actually works there commutes in from another hour away or lives in their car or a jam packed seasonal rental. Basically anywhere that tourism is the only industry, a lot of decent people will be priced out.

Seriously, it’s been a while since I’ve been to a Walmart, but I bet there’s plenty of decent options even there. Everywhere has Ghirardelli, at least