I realize driving engagement without increasing labor costs dictates posting silly survey questions several times a week.  But if it keeps up, eventually I’m going to snap and start replying to each with “Human flesh.”

Yep. This is very definitely something that someone—or some-thing—would have to be aiming right at us. I mean, unless they’re a Kardashev Type III civilization using a supernova to power a laser whose message is “Denizens of Chi1 Orionis A: be vapor now.” 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus_II_the_Strong

Now, I ain’t sayin’ she’s a peppermint bark digger

Or cats.

CDC’s take on it is to “carefully wash” fruits and vegetables ( https://www.cdc.gov/norovirus/about/prevention.html ), which will remove any gross contamination. Until that’s done, though, if you’re genuinely concerned about cross-contamination—if you’re running a restaurant, for instance—the things “should be”…

Such precautions are a pretty good idea for poultry—Salmonella contamination is rare, but the effects are serious. Doing it for red meat or fish is just neurotic. NOT doing it with leafy vegetables helps make sure that everyone gets norovirus all at once. (As opposed to within a few days of each other, because…

Cool! The most common food-borne illness vector is leafy vegetables. Bloody norovirus. (That E. coli O157:H7 can get into such things as spinach is just RUDE.)

Well, if you don’t want to implant a magnet in your finger, don’t. The only question for our purposes is whether he’s using a Geiger counter competently, and he appears to be.

Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/12/anti-5g-quantum-pendants-are-radioactive/

The bird tasted exactly as you’d expect a bird that had been boiled for that long in nothing more than some stock and mushy vegetables to taste.

Depends on the field.  For instance, in economics, it’s hard to do a bad experiment, and impossible to do a good one.

I’ve managed to convince myself that pork pasteurized at 140 F is okay ( https://www.seriouseats.com/sous-vide-pork-tenderloin-recipe ), but that’s as low as I can get myself to go.

Not a real big risk, so long as the pigs aren’t fed (or have access to) raw meat themselves. Not a safe assumption in the USA before around 1980-1990 ( https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/trichinellosis/epi.html ), but that aspect of food production has really improved since then.

Well, Comfort’s draft is only ten meters, and Austin has canals, right?  So as soon as we dredge another six meters or so out of those last few hundred kilometers of the Colorado...

A forehead tattoo of mirror writing “Past performance is not a guarantee of future results” is cheaper, and will save you more money in the long run.

There are about 745 billionaires in the USA. ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/business/america-billionaires.html ) I’m cool with pointing and laughing at Musk and Bezos when they do something silly—but at this point, I fear people’s eyes are on the two extraverts who yap about space a lot, while ignoring what the…

So what does it taste like, if not... space?

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are basically digital assets based on and protected by blockchain technology—think a rare baseball card or artwork paid for with cryptocurrency and viewable only by those who have an encryption key.

Mettigel, which is ground raw pork and raw onion, is often presented in the form of a hedgehog--but there is a tradition of alternatives: