Goggles works for me.

Glad to hear that. So got me thinking about the wood glue dissolving on the bottle (polyvinylacetate). PVA is also used as a heel on some cheeses (gouda, I think). Maybe goo gone could be used to take the heel off cheese.

WD-40 sounds like an interesting idea. Most people think of it as an oil, but in fact WD-40 is a cocktail of many different solvents, plus mineral oil, IIUC. It’s indeed more of a cleaning product than a lube.

Whenever I see that stuff on the shelf I think “I have acetone… why would I buy that? Probably just acetone with a different label”. But I’m probably wrong… if that were acetone it would not be “surface safe” and they’d get sued for damages. So indeed, probably worth a try.

That’s surprising. Acetone dissolves a lot of plastics even when they are in a new state. I might try it in a small area but I’m skeptical. I would expect it to worsen the situation.

oh shit… I never thought of the canning. I suppose the canning process kill it. Which I suppose also means buying kimchi in jars loses the probiotics for the same reason.

The fresher kraut in the grocery store seems to be in plastic bags in the refrigerated section, but I’m not sure I can trust that either… those bags have to be sealed just as well. OTOH, I’ve bought food in the fridge section with plastic film over it which really balloons out when close to expiry, apparently due to gas emitted by the bacteria. So maybe they aren’t killing the bacteria in those cases.

actually after using alcohol and letting it dry it’s not really coming off on my hands. Just still a little sticky. But temp could be a factor. I wonder if on a hot summer day it will be more likely to mark things that touch it. If that happens, my temptation will be to cut out a piece of sheet metal and try using a 2-component epoxy.

Someone in my family seems to be suffering from digestion problems due to lack of gut bacteria, which was likely killed off through docs over-prescribing antibiotics like crazy… like candy. So I searched for info on restoring gut bugs. A common dietary recommendation for gut bug restoration is to stop eating red meat, or to cut back on it, I forgot which. IIRC it’s because some gut bugs thrive on red meat much more so than other gut bugs and it creates an imbalance.

I have no idea how solid that info is but someone should be checking that. Only like 1% of the population qualifies to donate their feces for fecal transplants. Not joking. Their shit is literally valuable. Those people are found to have a strong healthy variety of gut bugs. When their feces gets packed into gelcaps and someone swallows them, the consumer can repopulate their gut with good bacteria. Someone should follow those stool donors around and see how much red meat they are eating.

Note as well recent research shows that race horses which have the healthiest gut bugs win more prize money. Not sure about mortality, but @fossilesque@mander.xyz’s article focuses on mortality when maybe that’s a little too blunt of an instrument.

You don’t seem to be accounting for university image. Are the optics of this worthless? IMO, this guy should pitch a tent on the campus grounds and make a media spectacle of it.

Might be a good test to see how quickly a dorm room can be freed up and administrative red tape overcome.

I would not focus on the low pay (that’s a complex problem), but rather the embarrassing fact that this prof cannot get housing in the university dorms. WTF.

from the article:

Others questioned why the university doesn’t offer housing for professors. One commenter shared their own experience: “I was an adjunct professor for a year and realized I would be headed towards homelessness, so I left.”

Surely only administrative incompetence can be the cause of profs not qualifying for dorms. If there is enough professor demand for dorms, they should be organizing a dedicated floor or building for profs.

Consider as well this prof’s academic enthusiasm could be (rightfully) exploited further by putting him in a dorm. He might even be happy to answer questions from other dorm residents after hours.

For centuries, saffron has been a prized dye

Bizarre that such a costly substance would be used as a dye for clothing. Why pay what’s likely the equivalent of HP ink when you can just get a box of Rit yellow dye at the supermarket?

Surely the price will drop when someone figures out that drones can fly around and harvest the saffron.

If you read the whole thread, I would not have to spell this out. These are preservatives (source):

• honey
• salt
• garlic
• sugar
• ginger
• sage
• rosemary
• sage
• mustard
• mustard seed
• cumin
• black pepper
• turmeric
• cinnamon
• cardamom
• cloves
• vinegar
• citric acid
• lemon/lime juice

They generally work by killing/repelling/deterring microbes that to a notable extent happen to be of the unwanted variety. Before yesterday, I thought salt worked similarly to the others on that list. Yesterday I learnt that salt is uniquely functions as a preservative due to a different mechanism (a drying effect).

Your logic is nonsense. To claim that because substance X does not kill /everything/, it cannot serve as a preservative – this is broken logic that you brought to the thread. Nothing on that list of food preservatives kills or deters every microbe - not even every harmful microbe. Of course they selectively mitigate /some of/ “the bad bacteria” (but note it’s a bit straw mannish for you to use the article “the” in your phrasing imply /all/ unwanted microbes). Most preservatives mitigate enough unwanted microbes without unacceptable overkill to beneficial microbes to justify use as a preservative. They are selected as preservatives for this reason. Foods that fail to significantly select against unwanted microbes (i.e. most foods) don’t get tagged as a preservative. How are you not grasping this?

You also have noteworthy bad assumption: that evolution does not happen outside of the ocean. The claim that because life started in the ocean, the ocean is therefore suitable for everything – this is bogus. Try putting a freshwater fish in the ocean. If a complex organism can evolve to become intolerant to the environment of its ancestors, why wouldn’t microbes also evolve to develop intolerances?

Indeed, that’s a good point. I wonder how many people don’t know that. I used to think “nothing will survive 250°F in my pressure cooker” and was tempted to cook some questionable pork. But yeah, would have been dangerous because chemical toxins from bacteria output would “survive” (persist) in 250°F. So after some quick research, I tossed it.

Though I might be surprised if 24hrs is enough time for brine to not only accumulate bacteria in high numbers but also allow enough time for bacteria toxins to be produced. How fast does that happen? I would have thought a day is too short (I don’t think I ever let more than a day pass between boils).

Actually that logic is broken IMO. A food preservative need not make life impossible for all organisms. E.g. hops (and consequential acidity) preserves beer to some extent by making life hard for some unwanted organisms. But hops do not kill everything (of course, because you intend to drink the beer). Beer can still spoil despite the hops.

But as I said in my correction, salt works as a preservative through a drying effect, which I did not previously realize (TIL).

I could always transfer it to glass or plastic to protect the pot but I guess laziness was the original motivator. Salt is cheap enough that I’ll probably just toss it going forward.

Yeah, indeed I just realized from an article I linked that salt only works as a preservative by drying out food. So salt water is indeed useless.

i get 403 forbidden w/that link. And archive.org chokes on it too for some reason. Does your source counter this source?

(edit) ah, I see the problem. Salt only works as a preservative by drying out food.

I can’t imagine it’s particularly food safe to leave your starchy pasta water out for a few days and then reuse it.

I haven’t tested a few days of non-use. It’s usually if I happen to make pasta two days in a row, and (more rare) three days in a row (where it still boils daily).

Also aren’t you afraid something will come to live in 2 days in warm salty water

Wasn’t salt the most popular preservative in the days before refrigeration existed? The stuff boils with heavy salt (like ocean water), so starts off semi-sterile due to the boiling. Then I don’t imagine many things looking for a home in brine, which then boils again the next day. This water is saltier than foods that rely on salt for preservation.

Starchy water sitting around is a breading ground for bacteria. Don’t do that.

That water is brine, if you do it right. Salt is a good preservative. I’ve tested it with up to 2 reuses.

Also, dishwashers don’t clean with salt water. They use the salt to reset their internal water softener.

Not sure why you thought I thought dishwashers clean with salt water. The manual’s advice was to mitigate salt grains that did not get into the salt reservoir that would sit on the stainless steel potentially for days.