recipes are basically an engineering text

I would love to see more systematic recipe formats.

Around 15-20 years ago there was a website called “Cooking for Engineers” that used a table format for recipes that was pretty clever, and a very useful diagram for how to visualize the steps (at least for someone like me). I don’t think he ever updated the site to be mobile friendly but you can see it here:

Cheesecake
Dirty Rice

He describes the recipe in a descriptive way, but down at the bottom it lists ingredients and how they go together in a chart that shows what amounts to use, what ingredients go into a particular step, what that step is, and how the product of that step feeds into the next step.

You’re thinking of indigo.

Red

Orange

Yellow

Green

Blue

Violet

That’s 6.

The law falls back to a bunch of hidden rules if the language isn’t explicit.

“No vehicles in the park” is a simple rule, but then poses problems when you have to ask whether that includes baby strollers, regular bicycles, or electric assist bicycles, whether there’s an exception for ambulances in an emergency, etc.

Somewhat famously, there was a case a decade or so ago where someone was prosecuted under Sarbanes Oxley’s obstruction of justice provisions, passed to criminalize Enron-like accounting coverups. The guy was convicted for tossing undersized fish overboard to avoid prosecution for violating fish and wildlife rules. The statute made it a crime for anyone who “knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence” a federal investigation. So the Supreme Court had to figure out whether a fish is a “tangible object” in the meaning of the law, when it is clearly a “tangible object” within the normal meaning of the term, but not the type of object that stores records, as everything else described in the criminal statute.

So that just means, in the end, simplicity of language can betray complexity of meaning underneath. Lawyers tend to prefer to make things clear up front so that there’s no uncertainty later on, and that just leads to unreasonably complicated language.

But imagine describing an area in meter•feet instead of square feet or square meters. That could really piss everyone off.

You don’t need an extra document to define each term as it is expected that others in the field will understand the language used.

For lawyers, it’s the opposite, actually. Lawyers are overly cautious and choose to explicitly define terms themselves, all the time. If they can reference a definition already in a specific law, great. But they’ll go ahead and explicitly make that link, instead of relying on the reader to assume they know which law to look up.

So any serious contract tends to use pages and pages of definitions at the beginning.

Imagine programmers being reluctant to use other people’s libraries, but using the same function and variable names with slightly different actual meanings/purposes depending on the program. That’s what legal drafting is like.

Probably. But it’s also a bit of a difficult question to compare the two.

One prominent estimate is that about half of all humans who have ever lived died from mosquito-related illness, about 50 billion of the 100 billion humans who have ever lived.

For humans, it’s estimated that about 3-4% of paleolithic humans died from violence at the hands of another person, and that number may have risen to about 12% during medieval history, before plummetting in the modern age.

But that’s the comparison of direct violence versus illness. Humans have a strong capacity to indirectly cause death, including by starvation, illness, indirect trauma. How do we count deaths from being intentionally starved as part of a siege? Or biological weapons, including the time the Nazis intentionally flooded Italian marshes to increase malaria? Do we double count those as both human and mosquito deaths?

And then there’s unintentional deaths, caused by indifference or recklessness or negligence. Humans have caused famines, floods, fires, etc.

So yeah, mosquitoes probably win. But don’t sleep on humans. And remember that the count is still going on, and humans can theoretically take the lead in the future.

Ok but mosquitoes historically are the #1 killers of humans, by an order of magnitude

Homo sapien: am I a joke to you?

You’re comparing animals with fat throughout the muscle to birds that don’t.

No, I’m comparing the same species of animal. We’ve gone from 100+ day old birds weighing 2.5 lbs to 47 day old birds weighing 6.5 lbs in the last century. That seems comparable to the difference between old roosters for coq au vin or old dairy cattle for vaca vieja and their respective supermarket counterparts.

Also, the connective tissue only starts to break down once getting to about 192f and needs to hang out for a good while between there and 210 to slowly break down.

No, collagen starts to break down slowly as low as 130°F, but the breakdown speeds up as the temperature rises. There are ways to play around with this with different techniques, where doneness is more than just getting the meat to temperature. It’s why poaching chicken used to be more common than it is today. It’s why chicken wings taste best when double fried. It’s why confit works so well for duck legs.

Also, steak was best 200 years ago as it is now.

Ok, again, if you’ve ever had to work through cooking something like vaca vieja, you’ll notice that it doesn’t cook the same way as a steak that’s been dry aged, or a regular steak at Costco, or a lean grass-fed steak. If your steak technique is the exact same for all of them, you’re probably missing out.

And I’m guessing the NY Times wasn’t exactly building this conclusion based on only steak recipes. 150 years is gonna have a lot of non-steak recipes in the mix.

Methods changed because we got better at cooking.

That’s part of it. But also, trends come and go. I’d rather have a 1950s cheeseburger than a 1990s cheeseburger, and much of the post 2010 scene has been re-implementing some old techniques that fell out of favor (smashing patties, simpler bread for buns, fewer toppings) and a backlash at some of those things that got out of control. Cocktails went through something similar too, with old classics coming back (either as is or with a new variation).

I’m sure any comprehensive catalog of recipes over decades is going to include some fads that fizzled out, like low fat stuff in the 90’s, etc. It’s not some kind of inexorable march of progress.

I’m betting chicken always could have cooked faster.

Chicken can be cooked to temperature quickly, but that alone likely wasn’t enough. We know this for plenty of cuts of pork and beef that the connective tissue needs time to break down, not just a pure cook to temperature (see braising, smoking, and sous vide techniques).

Something like coq au vin, which was developed for cooking older, tougher roosters, traditionally calls for a low and slow cook to break down the tougher animal.

You can also see the difference when buying cuts like vaca vieja (old dairy cattle slaughtered for meat), which calls for different preparation based on the tougher meat.

So no, I can believe the meat itself is very different today, and the recipes adjusted to the change in ingredient characteristics. We’ve documented that the manner of raising animals is totally different, so why would you be skeptical that the meat is different?

Same but also because I haven’t felt the desire to get taco bell without having been drinking first.

Interesting that egg sizing labels aren’t that universal. In the U.S. most big stores primarily stock Large (minimum weight 56.7g) and Extra Large (63.8g), while Jumbo (70.9g) is still probably more common than Medium (49.6g).

(My methodology for getting weights was that I used the government labeling requirements for minimum weight per dozen, converted ounces to grams, divided by 12).

No sorry this is gastro-entomology.

What is violet at the end of the visible spectrum, then? We call the higher wavelength stuff ultraviolet, and violet looks purple to me, so I’m having trouble reconciling this stuff with what you’re saying.

If you paint a black cow black, and it gets bit less, that would sort of give it away wouldnt it?

They already did sorta do that. One of the three groups was painted black on black, albeit with stripes. Those were bitten as much as the unpainted black cows.

To take it to the furthest conclusion I’d paint them entirely in black, and entirely in white (in case there’s something different between the white and black paint besides the color).