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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • As a Canadian, I say this with the utmost sincerity: if you’re thinking of moving here because you’re a leftist, don’t. Canada is about to take a huge swing to the right in next year’s election. People are extremely sick of Trudeau and his refusal to withdraw from the upcoming election (he’s been in power for 9 years) will take his party down with him.


  • Tomatoes are about 95% water, 1% fibre, and 4% other carbs (sugars and starches). Even with no added sugar, any tomato sauce is basically all carbs and sugar (if you ignore the water).

    Even though we think of tomatoes as a vegetable they’re actually a fruit. Eating a whole bunch of tomato sauce is not much different from eating a bunch of pureed strawberries. Tomatoes just don’t taste as sweet as the strawberries because because they’re more acidic.



  • Here’s the thing: if you change the thickness of the layer then the colour will change along with it, but the material is otherwise the same. This occurs because the layers produce a phenomenon known as thin film interference. So it’s not the material of the coating layer that produces the colour, it’s the interaction between two layers.

    Anyway, you can see all of the colours of a light’s spectrum through a prism but you wouldn’t say the prism itself is any of those colours. It’s transparent and refractive. That’s all we have here with the glasses: refraction and reflection, with interference of certain wavelengths due to the exact thickness of the layers.




  • Empathy isn’t a feeling that happens to you, it’s a skill you practice.

    Everyone knows about common human emotions. What you don’t know about a stranger is when they have those emotions and when they don’t. What most people think they’re doing when they say they’re being empathetic is engaging in projection. They’re imagining themselves in that situation and assuming the other person is feeling the same way they are.

    Do I even have to tell you how often that’s wrong? Many, many people think another person is angry when they are angry and they project their anger onto the other person. It totally baffles them!



  • There are degrees of empathy! It’s a skill! A poker player may have enough empathy with you to be able to predict what you’re going to do based on the cards and the stakes. But they don’t know how you’ll react to a new pair of wool socks for Christmas from your aunt, the way your mom might.

    To know how a person will respond to a situation is to know something about that person. That is empathy. But many people can be in a marriage for decades without ever learning how their partner responds to every situation. In many cases this leads to divorce.

    Now, in that light you should see why I find it absurd when people claim to have empathy for everyone in the world. That’s like claiming to have Counselor Troi’s Betazoid powers. No one knows every person on earth, never mind knowing them as well as their own sister.

    To take one person as an example: Vladimir Putin. Intelligence agencies, military commanders, world leaders, analysts, and journalists everywhere spend enormous amounts of effort trying to understand how Putin thinks because human lives are on the line. Yet many of these people failed to predict some of the major actions he has undertaken because they don’t really understand how he feels, nor how many Russians feel. That is a huge failure of empathy brought about by a lack of experience and cultural understanding.







  • This video is very long and entertaining and there’s a lot of evidence of the effort he put into it. The one real criticism I have is that it seems like he didn’t do a lot of research on what foods work well with freeze drying, preferring to do his own experiments and getting gnarly results on basically everything that isn’t already a well-known freeze dried product.

    Personally I think one of the most useful things to freeze dry would be fresh, home grown herbs. Another big one is homemade soups and stocks.

    As for the usefulness of freeze dried food? The big one he missed is camping and hiking. Frozen foods just aren’t going to cut it when you’re away from electricity for a week or more. You need lightweight non perishable food and for that nothing beats freeze dried. Just need to get some water from a lake or river!