Yes, me too. Reading the caveat "– and she would give each pie away" made a lot more sense.
It's a social commitment at least as much as a creative/culinary one, and since there aren't a lot of people you'd want to give a pie minus a slice to, that keeps the extra calories under control.
Hollow things are common, and of interest to many animals. If I thump a log and it makes a noise like it has a hollow space (low tones), then it may contain an animal nest or a beehive & honey, or it may be something I could use as a box or basket or shelter.
Yes, I found the group description confusing as well. The group 4 description starts off with "when foods are refined, bleached ...".
I'm pretty certain the flour used to make standard grocery store pasta is both refined and bleached. Even if I make it at home, I'm using refined and bleached white flour.
And my understanding is that should be considered fairly processed - the refining makes it less fibrous and easier to digest, which spikes insulin levels and is bad for gut bacteria etc.
Minor note: dried pasta is made with semolina flour, not white flour & eggs like many fresh pastas are. It's still a refined (germ removed) ground wheat flour, though not usually bleached.
Exactly! And that's not to say that the idea of "ultraprocessed" doesn't ultimately turn up something extremely insightful and actionable for regular people. The concept just doesn't seem to be a useful one for regular people, yet.
As someone who cooks a lot, I find the concept of "could I make this in my kitchen" to be a helpful guideline. I can tell a chipsahoy cookie is pretty different from anything I've ever made, whereas the ones at the local independently-owned bakery are more similar.
But making that judgement requires more cooking experience than a lot of people have, and executing on it requires the time & money to buy the more expensive stuff that has a shorter shelf life.
This is an interesting way to think about plants and animals.
I'm finding it surprisingly hard to find sources for known age of species - is that information collected somewhere? Or is it something we often just don't know because of how sparse the fossil record is?
Wondering because of trying to look up the age of fern species I do eat (no cinnamon fern near me) and I can't find out.
That's because when something becomes a new species is a surprisingly difficult and contentious debate in biology.
That's simply due to the nature of evolution. It's nearly impossible to look at one past generation of chicken to the next to figure out when the ancestor was no longer a chicken. Yet, go back far enough and you'll find T-Rexes in the mix.
Every generation is a new missing link. It's an extremely fuzzy process.
> Yet, go back far enough and you'll find T-Rexes in the mix
Afaik, T-Rex was never a direct ancestor of modern birds, including chicken. T-Rex and birds are theropod dinosaurs, but it was a very large and diverse group of animals.
But as soon as you've gone up from a chicken to the ancestor of a T-Rex, you do indeed find that T-Rexes are in the mix. They look different from what you'd normally think of as a T-Rex, in the same way that they also look different from what you'd normally think of as a chicken.
> I'm finding it surprisingly hard to find sources for known age of species - is that information collected somewhere? Or is it something we often just don't know because of how sparse the fossil record is?
It depends on what you mean by the age of the species. You can find the oldest known fossil occurrence at the Paleobiology Database [1] and the divergence time from molecular phylogenies via TimeTree [2].
It's pretty tricky to find out, yeah. And new evidence is coming in all the time. All the methods are either floors (a fossil at X date proves a species existed then, but lack of fossils found yet might be inconclusive) or estimates (like molecular clock techniques). Dating fossils themselves (or rather the rocks they're buried in) isn't always easy or possible. For more out-of-the-way species, if anyone has bothered trying to figure out the age it's likely buried in scientific sources that are tricky for novices to find or search, and maybe under debate.
That make wonder, how many fossils there might be at total on earth, and with current trend, how much time would humanity should continue to survive before those remaining will approach zero, if fossil formation as a known rate.
> how many fossils there might be at total on earth
The number is both incalculable and vague - is a shark tooth enough to count as a fossil? How about diatoms and other microfossils?
Diatomaceous earth alone contains around 10^6-10^7 frustules (the shell of a diatom) per gram. If you count them as fossils then the lower bound is 10^18 fossils per year just in diatomaceous earth production (the fossils are ancient but we produce nearly a million tons a year in diatomaceous earth).
What does that mean though? Shark teeth are already mineralized (fluorapatite) so you can find two million year old Megalodon teeth at the Earnst Quarry in Bakersfield that exist just as they did in the mouth of the shark without any extra “fossilization”
Immense numbers. Quarries destroy them by the (enormous) truckload all the time, unexamined, god knows what cool unknown stuff has been ground up. Entire kinds of rock are basically made of fossils, not even always the really tiny kind (note: fossils can be microscopic!)
Then consider what's buried under the sea, totally inaccessible. Or under the ice at the poles.
It's a lot of fossils. And that's without even getting into questions like "what counts as a fossil for these purposes?", just any halfway sensible answer is going to leave you with an unfathomably big number, no need to even dig (ha, ha) into the specifics.
The places scientists go to dig up fossils are mostly where a particular stratum happens to exist (the crust gets recycled, so much of the oldest stuff is simply gone in most of the world) and happens to be exposed near the surface. Those same kinds of (for the more common strata, anyway) exist all over the place, just buried too deep to get at except, sometimes, during commercial excavation for things like mining (and then most of it's just gonna be destroyed without a look).
What you're looking for is the phylogenetic tree. Here's an explorable one: https://www.onezoom.org/
Keep in mind that the further you go back the bigger the error bars on these date estimates, and that a tidy split is an abstraction over a more messy reality (example: we know the hominid groups interbred, giving people with european ancestry some fraction of neanderthal dna).
"The average woman’s waistline today is nearly 4 inches wider than it was in the mid-1990s."
I assume they mean circumference rather than diameter, but this is still a shocking increase in only 30 years. I knew the obesity epidemic was an ever-increasing problem, but this really puts it into perspective. I wonder if we'll ever fully understand the causes behind this rapid shift.
>According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the average waist size is 38.5 inches (98 centimeters) for women older than 20 in the United States.2 This represents an increase of roughly two inches since the 1990s, reflecting broader trends in rising rates of obesity and metabolic conditions.3
Fryar CD, Kruszon-Moran D, Gu Q, Ogden CL. Mean Body Weight, Height, Waist Circumference, and Body Mass Index Among Adults: United States, 1999-2000 Through 2015-2016. Natl Health Stat Report. 2018;(122):1-16.
There are some theories. Most fresh food in a generic U.S. supermarket has something like 10-25% of the nutrients per pound than it used to a hundred years ago, thanks to soil depletion, so each generation has to consume more pounds of food to get the same amount of nutrients. There’s been long-standing corruption in the FDA “food pyramid” and “recommended daily allowance” systems to bias the U.S. population from recognizing that added sugar leads to obesity. And there’s the advent of chemical non-sugar sweeteners, which in recent decades are turning out to be just as harmful as sugar, only differently. Those may not fully explain obesity, but they certainly are known and understood explanations for obesity — and yet they remain wholly unaddressed.
I think the problem is not whether we’ll fully understand the causes, but more that every cause we have identified to date would require regulating corporations in profit-damaging ways to solve, and it is likely that any future causes we reveal will be the same. That’s anathema in the U.S.: profits are sacrosanct to the two primary political parties, discounting their occasional extremists who argue (correctly) that we should be regulating in favor of consumers, not profits. Typically, the desire for a ‘full’ explanation is used to delay or derail efforts to implement solutions to each single proven explanation, and so I tend to caution against pursuing a complete answer first, and instead recommend asking why we have not yet addressed the known causes while continuing to search for more.
>>the advent of chemical non-sugar sweeteners, which in recent decades are turning out to be just as harmful as sugar, only differently.
requires citations. People lump sugar substitutes together as one class of drugs, but they very much are not. Some are sugar alcohols, some are glycosides, others are different molecules. Different molecules have different mechanisms of action and paths of metabolism.
Much like one might take a "blood pressure" medication, it is a large umbrella consisting of chemically distinct ACE-inhibitors, ARBs, thiazide diuretics, loop diuretics, calcium channel blockers (dihydropyridine and non-dihydropyridine distinctly), and more. These drugs generally do have class effects, but the class effects from an ACE inhibitor (bradykinin cough, angioedema, etc) are quite different from diuretics (hyponatremia, frequent urination, etc). One person's 'blood pressure medicine' is not the same as the next.
I agree that the prevalence of sugar substitutes in the western diet demands scrutiny, and I am concerned about their effects, however any current research lumping them all together without strict attention to pharmacological mechanisms supported by translational research is worse than useless - it is misleading.
In the sense of what we 'know' about modern medicine, we 'know' almost nothing about sugar substitutes. The body of evidence is vanishingly thin. I want more research into this topic, but right now, it's just not there.
I'm not providing citations for my tangent here; it's too far off-thread and I'm investing my academic research free time into WtHR instead (see elsethread).
There is no source supporting your claim of nutrient decline in that magitude thanks to soil depletion. It's mostly due to modern crops that grow tall fast, and are thus mostly made up of water.
Some argue that it’s instead because we’ve promoted food strains that have more sugars and less nutrients, and I’m still studying that, so I have no position to offer about it yet. Brussels sprouts is a good example of doing this in a way that doesn’t damage the nutritional value, but the general U.S. avoidance of anything pungent or bitter is reflected in having bred out all of the ‘unattractive’ nutrients from our food strains. A good litmus test for this is to check for dandelion greens on the shelves; if present, the market likely sells a broad spectrum of produce that isn’t simply designed to be a sugar bomb; if absent, I’d be shocked if you found anything nutrient-dense at all.
There’s also another element: the shift of women from being stay at home mums to joining the workforce.
In the past there used to be always one family member staying at home and cooking food. That is not the case anymore for many families.
I knew since the beginning how important is to eat home made meals, so I told my wife when we started our family that we would always eat home made food every day unless we were out for another reason. We all have healthy weight levels.
Many years ago I have switched to eating almost only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients.
When I eat the food cooked by me, I always eat some fixed portions and I am completely satiated when I finish and until the next meal. I eat only twice, in the morning and in the evening. When I finish eating, I do not have any desire to eat more, even if I consider my food very tasty.
On the other hand in the rare occasions when I eat some industrially-made food, unless the food is bad it is very frequent to be difficult to stop eating, as I am not satiated and I feel the need to eat more. This happens even when eating commercial bread, in comparison with the bread made at home, which does not use any ingredients besides flour, water, salt and yeast.
I am not sure which is the reason. It could be that my food always has an adequate content of proteins and healthy fat, and no added sugar besides some naturally sweet vegetables or fruits, while the commercial food might contain various non-nutritive ingredients and excessive sugar.
When I'm running a lot, I tend to eat less and healthier,* because I don't want to feel bloated or sluggish during the next run. Junk food loses its appeal to me.
* With the exception of sugar cravings right after a run, which sometimes leads to me buying pop. I don't mind having some every once and a while but keeping it around is a bad idea.
Someone (not me obviously) should look it up, because I would think that if it was circumference, it would be "4 inches longer" not wider. Because that case, ...wow.
part of it is just raw obesity increase, but part is also an aging population. even if women today WERE the same size as women of the same age 30 years ago, the average over the total population would still be up.
> Hourglass. A subject would fall into this shape category when there is a very small difference in the comparison of the circumferences of her bust and hips AND if the ratios of her bust-to-waist and hips-to-waist are about equal and significant (Simmons, 2002)
> Rectangle. A rectangular subject would have her bust and hip measure fairly equal AND her bust-to-waist and hip-to-waist ratios low. She would not possess a clearly discernible waistline (Simmons, 2002)
Over here (E.U) I'd say most women definitely would be "hourglass shaped" in some way more than any other shape - maybe some would be a tie with "rectangle" but I'm breaking the tie by saying it's fair to say hourglass does not mean wasp-waist either - so I couldn't reconcile my anecdotal observation from the stated facts until it dawned on me that this was U.S stats.
> One 2007 study found that half of women (49%) in the U.S. were considered rectangle-shaped. Only 12% of women had a true hourglass figure.
> Results from the 2007–2008 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), using measured heights and weights, indicate that an estimated 34.2% of U.S. adults aged 20 years and over are overweight, 33.8% are obese, and 5.7% are extremely obese.
And apparently it's worse for women (35.5% obese) than men (32% obese).
Anyway I'm not sure what "true hourglass" is supposed to even mean (wasp-waist?); according to the definition you got some waistline + balanced hip and shoulders => you're hourglass. If you start using "rectangle" as a fallback when in doubt then of course it's going to rate higher.
Funnily enough the very study linked is a comparison with another country (Korea):
I can't find a citation now, but I recall reading at some point that weight gain with age (in adulthood) didn't used to happen very much before the obesity epidemic, though nowadays we take it as a given. I wish I could find a source for/against that idea, I'm curious now if it's true.
Increasing weight with age must be an American thing. My observations in my friends circle and family circle outside of US is that we have all kept same size (1 up/down) since early adulthood.
This looks very cute! Is there a way to disable the little dancing unicorn jelly at the bottom of the page? I have such a hard time reading text if there is motion so close to what I'm trying to read
It is an animated gif. You used to be able to just press escape to pause them, but Firefox and Chrome have both removed that behavior. Instead you can install a plugin, or in Firefox you can set `image.animation_mode` to:
`once` - play once on load then stop.
`none` - do not play on load
`normal` - loop forever if the gif says to
With the popularity of animated "emoji" on some forums these days, I couldn't function without some way to globally disable animated gifs.
An idea the website could borrow from video games is removing elements after a while, like _n_ page views. (You can store the state in cookies, LocalStorage, or perhaps track server-side by IP+useragent.) The reader enjoys the dancing jelly for a few pages, and then as it gets old, it goes away automatically.
(On Gwern.net, we call this 'demo mode', and we use it to hide some UI elements after a certain number of interactions or page-views, under the theory that if you've, say, uncollapsed a collapse region a few times, you've gotten the idea, and you no longer need a big obtrusive text label saying 'click or hover to uncollapse'.)
I was just this morning reading one of those navel-gazing moltbook posts where the agent describes their "soul.md", and one of its few instructions was all-lowercase (which it was doing).
That early sentence "i’ll be vulnerable here (screenshots or it didn't happen) and share exactly what i've actually set up:" reads pretty clawdbot to me.
While this seems like good advice for breakfast, I'm not sure it's going to help too much with figuring out how to cut an infinite mathematical pancake with an oddly-shaped mathematical knife.
It's a very different but rather interesting puzzle!
It's a social commitment at least as much as a creative/culinary one, and since there aren't a lot of people you'd want to give a pie minus a slice to, that keeps the extra calories under control.