I understand that water reacts with it too -- that is, the gas that it releases reacts with the water in your eye, so if it reacts somewhere else, that'd be better. I've seen a recommendation to cut it under water. That seems like too much trouble for me, but I at some point in the past, I did start quickly rinsing the onion after the first cut so that there's water on the onion and knife and cutting board, and it does seem to significantly reduce the impact; it's never really been a problem since then.
kagis
https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/59688/why-does-cutting-onions-cause-tears
Propanethial-S-oxide is the major cause of the flavor and aroma of onion. However, it is a volatile compound i.e. vaporizes very quickly.
when propanethial-S-oxide comes in contact with cornea, a small amount of it reacts with water to form sulfuric acid. This sulfuric acid is the cause of itching and irritation in eyes due to onion.
Looking elsewhere, I also see a couple recommendations to chill the onion in a refrigerator prior to cutting it, and several webpages saying that it worked well for them.
https://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/cooking-tips-techniques/how-to-cut-onions-without-crying
I left the onion in the refrigerator for 24 hours and then peeled and chopped it like usual. No tears! No burning! I cut the entire onion without needing to grab a tissue. While I felt a slight irritation in my eyes towards the very end, overall it was painless. I was surprised this method worked so well since onions aren't a produce item that generally need to be refrigerated. However, if it helps prevent blubbering, I'm all for it.
I'm not sure what's going on here. I saw one page that said that it makes the gas coming off the onion cooler, so it drops away from your eyes. Not sure if that's the actual mechanism, and I've never done it myself.
Some people may plan ahead well enough to be able to refrigerate their onions in advance of needing to chop them; I'm not really that organized, myself.
Over the years, I've run into a few things that weren't immediately-obvious to me.
One of the big ones was eating pomegranates by opening them underwater. For those not familiar, pomegranates have a lot of red seeds and white husk between them:
Cutting a pomegranate or even opening a pomegranate tends to burst at least some seeds. The seeds are sticky and stain and tend to spray juice when pierced.
However, if you just cut through the outer hull of the fruit, then open it by hand underwater in a bowl of water, any juice that would have sprayed out is just grabbed by the water. Even better, the (inedible) white husk floats, so it self-separates instead of sticking to everything.
Today, I decided to try eating a watermelon with a spoon. In the past, that's tended to also make things spray, so I tried a grapefruit spoon, one with serrations that runs down the side. And that works great -- the spoon is like a knife, can go more-cleanly through the watermelon than a regular spoon, and still lets you scoop up the watermelon.
Any other neat tips that might be unorthodox or that people might not have tried or know about?
The prophecies say that one day, all vehicles in the region will be parked at the Pawnee County courthouse.
Note, just to be clear, that this is federal legislation, not Oregon state legislation.
WASHINGTON (KTVZ) -- Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley announced Thursday the introduction of new legislation to protect consumers’ privacy from companies who collect and sell Americans’ car data. Currently, he said, there is a troubling trend of collecting, storing, and selling data from Americans’ vehic...
It's not in some counties in Nevada.
But everywhere else in the US, this is a no-no.
Yeah, I have family who say that they're gonna be out for an estimated three days. But, hey, that's doable. They're gonna lose climate control for a few days, lose stuff in a refrigerator or freezer. But it's not too bad.
I'm assuming from the fact that you can post that you still have some form of Internet access going. IIRC cell towers have diesel generator backups that come on automatically. And a lot of folks out there have some kind of emergency inverter generator, cars can provide a small amount of accessory power (maybe 100W or more) and lithium batteries, and small solar panels are more widespread than they were just a few years back. Not enough to do a lot of things, but getting light and communications is a lot easier, even in power outages, than it once was.
Hmm. I haven't been following it, but was Hezbollah really that centralized? It seems like a super-bad idea if you're aiming to fight guerrilla war.
EDIT: This says ~300:
The Israeli army carried out an airstrike on Hezbollah's central command in southern Beirut on Friday, killing its longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, along with approximately 300 people, including other members of the group.
I mean, that's obviously still a really successful strike, but you're talking maybe an order of magnitude fewer people.
I don't know whether Altman or the board is better from a leadership standpoint, but I don't think that it makes sense to rely on boards to avoid existential dangers for humanity. A board runs one company. If that board takes action that is a good move in terms of an existential risk for humanity but disadvantageous to the company, they'll tend to be outcompeted by and replaced by those who do not. Anyone doing that has to be in a position to span multiple companies. I doubt that market regulators in a single market could do it, even -- that's getting into international treaty territory.
The only way in which a board is going to be able to effectively do that is if one company, theirs, effectively has a monopoly on all AI development that could pose a risk.
Has kind of a nice visualization of the flooding and related information.
I'd guess that they mean that they reliably show up in an assortment but aren't many people's favorite.
Wikipedia is under a Creative Commons license.
$100 crude target
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that that probably wasn't a number resulting from a bunch of economists and computers spending a long time crunching numbers to try to produce an optimal target for Saudi Arabia anyway.
I'd probably be a softie here and just pick something obscure that would cause a minimal ripple. There are songs out there that I don't like, but if they get much play, it's because there are people who do like them, and they should be able to listen to their favored music.
For example, if a writer features a gun in a story, there must be a reason for it, such as it being fired some time later in the plot.
I don't know about that. It seemed to have a pretty rapid impact on the phone in that video, and it's not like those are exactly open. And they weren't pressurizing it.
Hydrogen
This says that hydrogen isn't just a problem, just helium:
It seems that MEMS is very sensitive to helium, but only helium. This Link stated that hydrogen does not affect MEMS, which surprised me.
Hmm.
That seems like it'd open a lot of potential abuses.
I wonder what the failure mode of various electronic locks is when they're exposed to helium?
I'd be fine with hissy fits if they were about something real.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Stop_Oil
In April 2022, it was reported that Just Stop Oil's primary source of funding was donations from the US-based Climate Emergency Fund.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aileen_Getty
Aileen Getty is an American heiress and activist. She is a member of the Getty family, the granddaughter of J. Paul Getty. She co-founded the Climate Emergency Fund in 2019.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Paul_Getty
Jean Paul Getty Sr. (/ˈɡɛti/; December 15, 1892 – June 6, 1976) was an American-born British petroleum industrialist who founded the Getty Oil Company in 1942 and was the patriarch of the Getty family.[1] A native of Minneapolis, he was the son of pioneer oilman George Getty. In 1957, Fortune magazine named him the wealthiest living American,[2] while the 1966 Guinness Book of Records declared him the world's wealthiest private citizen, worth an estimated $1.2 billion (approximately $8.6 billion in 2023).[3] At the time of his death, he was worth more than $6 billion (approximately $25 billion in 2023).[4] A book published in 1996 ranked him as the 67th wealthiest American who ever lived (based on his wealth as a percentage of the concurrent gross national product).[5]
So she assuages her guilt for having a huge oil inheritance by donating some of it to encourage other people overseas to go to jail protesting other people doing what her grandfather made his money doing. Great.
He fought to keep his job on First Amendment grounds.
looks dubious
One of the exceptions to "the government cannot restrict your right to speech" is the government acting in a "government-as-employer" role. There, they can act like any other employer, and don't have special constraints just because they're the government. Employers can normally let people go because they think that they're bad for their image, and that's what the article said happened here.
...university leaders said he sullied the school’s reputation and had to go.
https://www.nyclu.org/resources/know-your-rights/speaking-out-public-employee
Different rules apply if you are making these comments in your personal time as a private individual. Generally, your statements about topics that are of general interest to the public, including current events, are protected by the First Amendment. However, a public employer in New York may discipline you if your comments either disrupted its work or have the potential to disrupt its work, including by affecting public perception of your employer if you frequently interact with members of the public in your job.
Now, I suppose you can ask whether the professor publicly releasing porn videos of himself is actually damaging to public perception of the university, but the rationale they used is a legit rationale.
Proposals had been made to change Russia's nuclear doctrine to allow for attacking any non-nuclear state that had the participation or support of a nuclear state, Putin said.
Proposals had been made to change Russia's nuclear doctrine to allow for attacking any non-nuclear state that had the participation or support of a nuclear state, Putin said.
The mysterious missive was written by P.J. Féret, who conducted an archaeological dig at the same site in northern France in 1825
New threat against Slovak PM who was shot in an assassination attempt in May.
Green Party co-chairs Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour are stepping down. The move could make things even harder for Germany's fractious coalition government.
Green Party co-chairs Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour are stepping down. The move could make things even harder for Germany's fractious coalition government.
Industry minister Adolfo Urso warns of large-scale job losses among carmakers unless Green Deal rules are relaxed
Researchers blast silica with an intense X-ray burst, watch it evaporate.
Russian President Vladimir Putin made a list of countries “showing destructive behavior contrary to Russian spiritual and moral values,” with Greece and Cyprus among them.
Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin approved the publication of Kremlin’s list of the 47 countries. The list does not include European Union members Hungary and Slovakia and NATO member Turkey, according to TASS Russian news agency.
For some years, I just used directory-organized audio files. I used emacs's emms to control the playlist, and had it set up to have mpv play audio files.
Some years back, I used at mpd for a while, but it's really oriented towards accessing audio via metadata, which wasn't really what I wanted to do: that really entails getting correct metadata on all of an audio collection.
Then recently, I ran into beets, which is a utility to do semi-automated metadata cleanup (compute and apply ReplayGain tags, insert metadata using a variety of techniques, etc) en masse and finally got my metadata in a reasonable state, and flipped back to using mpd. I was pretty impressed with beets; it takes some setup, but runs what it can in parallel, doesn't block the process when it needs human guidance on metadata, and can be set to automatically set metadata when its confidence is above certain levels but ask below that.
Mpd is probably especially useful when one has an audio server that one controls remotely with a other devices, though I just use the thing locally. It supports a bunch of frontends; can be controlled from GUI software, from the command line, from TUI clients like ncmpc or ncmpcpp or a few others, from various emacs software packages, can keep running if you bring down your graphical environment. A lot of OSD/"bar"/"dock"/"wharf" software can display MPD information out-of-box; I'm currently using waybar in sway, which can display mpd information.
I'm not always directly at the media-serving machine, and I'm using unison to synchronize my music files to a laptop. New files or removals or whatever will get propagated in either direction. That lets me have a replicated media library accessible for disconnected use.
All of the above stuff is packaged in Debian bookworm; should be available in at least Debian-family distros out-of-box, and probably others.
Anyone else want to describe their favored music-playing setup, stuff that they've found works well for 'em? Maybe give other folks who might be looking for something similar useful ideas?
U.S. officials are anticipating that the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah will increase significantly in the coming days, potentially sparking an all-out war between the two sides.
American officials have long said that both Israel and Hezbollah want to avoid war. But tensions are at an all-time high following Israel’s consecutive attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon this week. The latest analysis inside the Biden administration is that it will be difficult for both sides to de-escalate, according to two senior U.S. officials familiar with the conversations.
The Cabinet is the ‘most right-wing’ in more than a decade.
The ring could be responsible for a prolonged drop in temperatures millions of years ago.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters will not issue an endorsement in the presidential election for the first time since 1996, and for only the second time since 1960.
NASA's most distant spacecraft had a critical thruster problem far from home. Fixing it required a long-distance call to overcome extreme cold and dwindling power.
Rome will also invest half a billion euros in 2024 on development of the Global Combat Air Programme sixth-generation fighter.
Friedrich Merz is in pole position to take over as chancellor at the election in 2025
FRIEDRICH MERZ is doing it, and I’m fine with that.” This brief statement by Markus Söder, the head of Bavaria’s governing Christian Social Union (CSU), was enough to confirm what had long been clear in German political circles: that Mr Merz, leader of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the CSU’s larger sibling, would be the parties’ joint candidate at next year’s federal election. Mr Merz will thus lead the opposition conservatives’ bid to unseat Olaf Scholz, the Social Democratic (SPD) chancellor.
