• 11 Posts
  • 35 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 27th, 2023

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  • What if I can hear wi fi? How could I tell?

    Wouldn’t it be bothering you if you could?

    Well, I suppose not necessarily… I hear a hum but it does not bother me because I don’t generally fixate on it. When I notice it, I then realise I’m being lazy and need to get out of bed and get my attention on something. Some people suffer, like Diane Schou, who moved to a town that didn’t trigger her electromagnetic hypersensitivity.

    I suppose a test would be to enter a sound-proof room which then also has a faraday cage, and get tested. The tester would have controls for emitting sounds mostly outside the statistical hearing range, along with one to turn on a wifi AP, and some dummy switches that emit nothing. Then for you to raise your hand when you hear something. I read about someone taking a test like that, and she raised her hand whenever some electronmagnetic something was played (wi-fi iirc). It was something that was unusual and surprised the researchers. I cannot find the story on that now. Might have appeared in Wired mag… not sure.





  • I appreciate the research and references.

    For the greenhouse gas emissions, the electric kettle should pull ahead in the future as renewables take over

    Perhaps in most regions outside of populist-rightwing-controlled regions, that will be the case. ATM I am not in the US but still they are tearing down the nuclear power plants and building 3 new natural gas fired plants. So progress is moving backwards where I am.

    Centralised gas burning would be more efficient than burning it on a domestic stove, but hard to grasp that the difference would be enough to exceed conversion and transmission losses. Worth noting that there are a couple ways to get hot water from gas:

    • simple pot on stovetop
    • water runs through a coil of fire-heated pipe inside an insulated box – aka a tankless combi boiler

    The 2nd option would not give boiling water, as I would not want boiling water to run through the domestic pipework, but I wonder how a small tankless gas-fired tea water appliance might do as far as increasing the gas efficiency, should it be invented.

    In any case, if electric-fueled heat were generally efficient, I would expect the gas-fired combi boilers to be much less popular. Though note as well that economy is not closely tied to efficiency. Natural gas cost per kWh is much cheaper in my area than electric cost per kWh (by a factor of 2 I think).



  • Gas has a conversion efficiency of 100% but not all of it every the kettle. That leads to efficiencies lower than the electric ones.

    Yes but you’re only talking wall to water. From energy source to water gas is the most efficient because it does not have the lossiness of generation and transmission that electric does.

    With good induction it is also faster than every other method so that would be my choice if I had an induction cooker.

    You’re purely talking boil times. But the end game is brewed tea, in which case it cannot be faster because after boiling the water you still need ~1—3 min to brew it. That’s why the inline heating elements in dispensors are interesting. It starts brewing immediately so the 1m50s it takes to boil all the water can be neglected.












  • I just downloaded the manual and skimmed through pages of safety info. This was the only relevant statement about that:

    “Limit the length of use and check the skin’s reaction.”
    “Overly prolonged radiation may lead to the skin being burned.”

    Since they don’t mention a duration of exposure, I get the impression this is just pointing out the obvious for liability purposes in case someone does something foolish.

    The 15 min seems to be more about protecting the device itself from over-heating. Which I suppose means it’s not well designed… overly fragile. And I guess the lack of fan would enable the device itself to take on lots of heat. (edit: sorry, just read that it has a fan… though it could be fragile nonetheless)

    update: I also see that the bulb lasts 2000 hours. I’ve seen 250 watt bulbs claimed to last 6000 hours for like ~$20. So I guess this thing is garbage.




  • If you’re able to smell the products of the bacteria,

    Your phrasing implies that the bacteria itself is odorless and that any new odor (other than what cooked turkey normally smells like) is entirely borne from bacteria output. Is that correct?

    The food was sealed so odor builds. Upon opening the bag I get a full strength dose of the odor – which is gone if I miss the opportunity to do the instant sniff. What plays tricks with my mind is the fact that sometimes an odor is just a stronger dose of the normal food odor. But as something rots there is a gradual subtle increase in new odors that makes it hard to know. I have always lived on the edge in this regard and consume borderline cases where it’s hard to tell. And I have always gotten away with it… never had food poisoning.

    In any case, the turkey odor clearly had some wrong odors so I opted to freeze it to use as rat bait the next time rats invade the house (along with a frozen raw beef steak where I was also too slow to consume). I now have enough rat bait to take on 100+ rats. And what I’ll probably find is that the rats are smart enough to avoid it.



  • In a web search on how long cooked turkey lasts, the results were 3—4 days in the fridge in the first ~20 or so hits. Exceptionally, one deviant article said 5—7 days but I lost track of it.

    I regret not vacuum sealing the meat, each piece individually. All was in a big zip lock. On day 1 and day 2 I opened it to pull out a piece, which was more opportunities for contamination. Some sites say there is only a 2 hour window of time to get it into the fridge after the initial cooking. In my case that was probably more like ~6 hours. So I guess I made plenty of mistakes.