Only works if your sexual partner is non exclusive.

Clean jar, water+salt (look up how much), you’re good.

There are known food safety principles in fermentation, and it’s not an “anything goes” kind of practice.

It’s not just about the cleanliness of the jar, especially when you’re putting in vegetables that will carry their own microbes and spores on their surface or in the accompanying soil/dirt.

Most lacto fermented pickle recipes will follow guidelines for keeping things safe and for keeping things tasty (some bad ferments aren’t actually dangerous but just don’t taste as good), and there are a lot of helpful guidelines out there that depend a bit on the vegetable itself (which might have different water content, pH, commonly associated microbes or pathogens).

You don’t need to be able to submit a certified HACCP plan for your process, but for anyone who isn’t already familiar with the risks and best practices should stick with established recipes from reputable sources.

Some people talk about botulism risk, but the reality is that almost no botulism cases come from home pickling, and very few come from home canning. C. botulinum cells and spores don’t like acid and don’t like salt, so most pickling recipes will easily prevent that problem in almost any home environment.

All that is to say: it’s not exactly a high risk activity, but stick with established recipes from reputable sources unless and until you know what you’re doing with pathogenic risks.

Yogurt is interesting because it’s already acidic, and dairy contains proteins, salts, and acids that buffer pH. So the microbes that thrive in that environment are already able to handle more acidic environments generally, and then might not experience as acidic of an environment in the human stomach compared to some other foods.

A lot of probiotic foods don’t actually have more microbes in them, but have certain microbes that tend to be found in human guts. I wonder if there’s some kind of filter effect where only certain types of microbes are more likely to survive the stomach, and therefore our guts tend to consist of microbes that are hardy against those conditions.

Actually I was off by a factor of 1000. That Camry needs to be raised to 7.3 km. Or you need 1000 of them. Or some combination of increased weight and height.

You’re absolutely right.

I don’t know why I thought to use grams instead of kilograms. I knew kg was the base unit for these conversions but just slipped for some reason.

Sorry whoops I was off by a factor of 1000 because I used grams instead of kilograms. The Camry needs to be raised 7.3 km. Or you need 1000 of them in one house.

is it really easier and cheaper to store the energy needed for a home in a chemical battery?

Yes. A 5kwh battery is about 50kg and smaller than a carry-on suitcase. String 6 of them together and you’ve got 30 kWh stored with no moving parts. Anker has that for about $15,000, maybe $30k installed.

How much does a 3-story elevator cost? What about one that can capture the stored potential energy on the way down, and not break down?

Potential energy (in joules) is mass (in g) times height (in meters) times 9.8 m/s^2 .

So in order to store the 30 kWh per day that the typical American house uses, you’d need to convert the 30 kWh into 108,000,000 joules, and divide by 9.8, to determine how you’d want to store that energy. You’d need the height times mass to be about 11 million. So do you take a 1500 kg weight (about the weight of a Toyota Camry) and raise it about 7.3 meters (about 2 stories in a typical residential home)? (this is wrong, it’s only 0.001 as much as the energy needed, see edit below)

And if that’s only one day’s worth of energy, how would you store a month’s worth? Or the 3800kwh (13.68 x 10^9 joules) discussed in the article?

At that point, we’re talking about raising 10 Camrys 93 meters into the air, just for one household. Without accounting for the lost energy and inefficiencies in the charging/discharging cycle.

Chemical energy is way easier to store.

Edit: whoops I was off by using grams instead of kg. It actually needs to be 1000 times the weight or 1000 the height. The two story Camry is around a tablet battery’s worth of storage, not very much at all.

The line has blurred enough for make it difficult to draw a clean line between true practical effects and special effects. Visual effects studios can and do merge real photography with digital rendering or retouching. Over 20 years ago, Andy Serkis had to don a special motion capture suit to play Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies, but the advances since then now allow for more subtle (or less subtle) transformation of characters. The Mandalorian made extensive use of digitally rendered scenes actually projected on set so that the reflections and actor interactions feel more real in a computer-generated environment.

And of course, actual movie editing tricks have always been around, where cuts and multiple takes can create real footage presented in a fictional sequence: a single actor playing twins/doppelgangers by simply filming each side’s lines separately, and then editing them together. Plus things like costume design and wardrobe, set design, props, etc.

The effectiveness of all these tricks do depend a lot on the skill and effort of the people involved, and that often means budget (including time). Rush jobs, or farming the work out to cheaper/less skilled workers, on any of these mean that corners will be cut and the end result will be less convincing, regardless of actual method.

Yeah, “Allah” is what Lebanese, Syrian, and other Arab Christians have called their Christian God as well.

The topography is basically not significant.

The elevation of the highest point on Mt. Everest is 8,848 meters. Compared to the radius of the Earth itself (averaging 6,371,000 meters and varying about 10,000 meters from that average), that 0.139% difference in radius at that mountain not going to be noticeable.

If you shrunk the entire earth down to the size of a 2 meter diameter ball (1 meter radius), Mt. Everest would rise about 1.39 millimeters from the surface.

Simple imperfections in polishing a representative globe would represent larger variations in altitude than exist on the Earth itself.

That’s one of my pet peeves, when people use relative comparisons to overstate things that have very small absolute differences.

55g of CO2 is basically nothing. A gallon of gasoline represents about 2400g of CO2 emissions when burned. So for a typical vehicle that gets 30 miles per gallon, 55g of CO2 is basically the equivalent of driving 0.6875 miles (1.1km).

It’s less than the carbon footprint of a cup of coffee (60g).

Or, alternatively, eating a single quarter pound hamburger would be about 3 kg of CO2, or 55 hours of video viewing at this rate.

I eat a legume for pretty much every meal:

• Peanut butter on regular rotation for convenience foods
• Peas or beans or snap peas as a component in pasta dishes or salads
• Blanched peas or green beans as a vegetable side when I’m eating dinner with a main and sides separate.
• Edamame with Asianish noodle dishes, including instant ramen
• Snow peas or snap peas as a component in stir fries
• Beans in salads (things like kidney beans or black beans)
• Lentils or beans in fast casual rice bowls of a Mediterranean influence
• Some kind of lentil or chickpea dish with South Asian food.
• Beans with Mexican food because duh
• Dried beans with my braises (cassoulet, chili, other random assortments of ingredients in a braising pot/dutch oven), only you gotta be conscious of how dried beans don’t cook properly in acidic environments.

I personally don’t care for tofu. I’ll eat it when it’s a component of a dish I happen to already be eating, but I rarely seek it out to be the star of the dish I order or make, with only a few exceptions.

But adding legumes/pulses to your meals is an easy way to get more protein, including amino acids (like lysine) that aren’t present in traditional grains like wheat or rice. And they’re generally a good source of certain types of soluble fiber good for gut health. I’m also generally less hungry (and get full faster) when I’m eating plenty of fiber and protein, so legumes help with both of those.

I eat a lot, so I still eat a decent amount of meat overall, but as a percentage of my 3500-calorie diet it’s probably smaller than the average Westerner.