Posts by B Jones
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Microwaving works by cooking things from the inside out..
Not really. It uses microwave energy to vibrate the water molecules in things, but microwave energy still has to penetrate the food, from the outside in. Anyone who's tried to reheat a big slab of lasagne or something else solid will know that you get cold patches in the middle unless you stir things around a bit.
If you think of microwaving as a type of steaming or boiling, you'll get some idea of the recipes it works for. Basically it suits anything with an interior liquid content. Fat, it doesn't work so well on.
It works pretty well for melting butter. What it's really hard to do is get the Maillard reaction - getting the fat up to a temperature higher than the boiling point of water so that it caramelises the sugar in things. Reliably and evenly. My sister once heated chocolate to beyond the melting point of the plastic container, and I've had little bits of bacon crisp a bit round the edges.
But yes. It's very similar to steaming in that you usually don't get things above 100C.
Apparently, birds flying into the path of microwave transmitters don't do too well, if they're close enough to the source.
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My local fruit shop sells NZ-grown grapes. They're small and variable in size, with big fat seeds, but have the tangiest grapeyist taste and the skin slips chewily off the fruit underneath. Just like the ones you get off the fence in sunny gardens, sans miniature snails. Nothing at all like the big watery california ones.
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but when you're asked to fix a system that's been really rooted, it's for a man who should have asked for help earlier but didn't.
Heh, like the times I disabled my graphics card trying to upgrade the driver? The second time I did this (I know), I managed to take out the motherboard driver while I was at it. The whole system was completely unusable until I reinstalled Windows.
Misplaced confidence is a better predictor of disaster than gender. Assuming ability is conferred with one's X or Y chromosomes is one way to acquire misplaced confidence.
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Making assumptions about someone's technical ability based on their age or gender is a non-trivial issue - the IT industry has enough trouble with sexism without compounding it in the way it approaches the rest of the world. I still get angry when I think about buying a printer off a sales clerk who directed the answers to all my questions to my male companion.
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My mum taught me MS-DOS commands. She'd take exception to high-tech things with complex user interfaces being not for her.
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Exactly what changes occur when your parsley stops producing yummy leaves and instead produces useless seeds?
Anti-GM be damned, you could make a fortune from frustrated kitchen gardeners if you could invent a perennial parsley or coriander plant. My last-but-one coriander crop got to 2cm high before going to seed.
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The border between tig and tag runs through the North Island, somewhere south of Hamilton. I think someone did a study on it once, which I where I heard about it and realised my cousins weren't just freaks for playing tig.
The great thing about kids' language is that it's passed from kid to kid without it being mediated by any sense of what the proper language should be. I've never worked out why if you wanted to temporarily bail out of a game of tag and be immune from being tagged, you crossed your fingers and yelled something like "fans" but with a soft, almost French N. I'd heard "pax" used similarly, which makes sense from the Latin, but fans is a mystery.
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I don't think there's an Auckland accent as such, but there are a few markers. Auckland kids play a game called tiggy or tig (I forget which), whereas Wellingtonian kids play tag.
It's fun when you've learned a bit of Maori to spot where the announcers on Te Kaea come from. A lot of them have Tuhoe accents - the ng sounds a lot more like n. There's tribal variation on the wh sound too.
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Pretending to be something different from who we are to get on with someone in society is a good strategy. It means we are less likely to have our ideas rejected as something coming from "other". For example, concern trolls use the technique very effectively.
OTOH, it imposes a cost on the listener, who has to work harder to decide whether someone's one of them or not, and may get it wrong. I think that's why it annoys people - it messes with the rules we use for making social interaction easy.
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Fair call - perhaps idiot is too broad a term. But the selection process for being a judge has at least hitherto selected strongly for privileged older men with sheltered upbringings and a sense of entitlement. The sort of chap like Gottlieb whose first thought on the radio this morning was for the poor blokes who can no longer go out cruising for drunk women with impunity, rather than for women who might like to have a few drinks with friends without losing their ability to enforce their basic rights at law.
There are bound to be some like that on any jury, but there may also be people who've got a smidgen of empathy or understanding for the things women have to put up with that men don't.