• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I’m pretty disappointed in scishow for this one. Usually, they are pretty good.

    There are, in fact, deep conceptual flaws. There are a lot of grifters trying to sell ideas to fight climate change that can be easily defeated by high school level math. They try and spin the obvious shortcomings as “engineering challenges” where you could figure out a way to make it more efficient if only you invested in them enough. The math just doesn’t even check out at 100% efficiency.

    Potential energy is m x g x h. Let’s do the math for the Burj Khalifa. The top floor is at 585 meters. According to their published fact sheet, there are 57 elevators, and the service elevator has a capacity of 5500 kg. Let’s pretend that every elevator has this capacity, and they all go to the top. It would store 5500 x 57 x 9.8 x 585=1.797 GJ. This is about 500 kWh, or about the energy used by 17 average American homes for a day.

    According to wikipedia, the cheapest Tesla has a 57 kWh battery, so if there are 10 electric cars in the parking garage, they can store more energy than all the elevators.

    Hyperloops have the exact same issue, the math never checks out, so any company promoting them is fraudulent.


  • You don’t need a sous vide machine to do that, especially for something that only needs 30 minutes.

    Take a cooler, and fill it with water at the right temp. You can add boiling water or room temp water to adjust up or down. Depending on what you’re cooking, you can aim for a few degrees over to account for the temp of the food dropping the water temp. With 12 yolks, I don’t think it’s necessary. Then just stick your food in and close it up. Depending on how big your food is, how big/good your cooler is, you might want to check the temp a couple times throughout the cook.













  • That’s how it has been in the US. Now, though, if you already have a passport, you can renew online and take the picture yourself, and get it mailed directly to you.

    The thing that makes getting a passport slightly tricky to begin with in some circumstances is needing proper ID. In the US, there’s no generalized law saying that you have to have certain forms of ID. Most people use drivers licenses as ID, but obviously not everyone has one (by choice or as a consequence of drunk driving). There are a lot of people without ID, and there are ways to get ID, but they can be difficult for people without resources. A birth certificate is hard to get if you don’t have one already, especially if you don’t know where you were born.



  • That’s probably most similar to what we’d call “flaked corn”, but it’s not something that we see commonly in stores (in America, at least). It is somewhat similar to “corn flakes” which are different.

    It’s mainly used for brewing and distilling, and it’s made by taking dry corn, partially cooking it with water, putting it through a roller mill, and then drying it out.

    Reading about farinha de milho, it actually might be similar to “corn flakes”, though. It’s a breakfast cereal made by taking ground corn and cooking it in water, and then drying it out in little sheets. It is super common to use as an ingredient in things like fried chicken batter, or as a topping to things you want to be crispy.