Posts by Pompous Git

Re: We are in IT

"In fact, in baking is volume or weight more important? I'd imagine in baking you're using weight as a proxy for volume anyway."

Well you imagine wrong. Professionals never measure by volume. Incorrect measurement is one of the main reasons for home baking failure. Too much flour leads to rock-hard cookies, tough bread, and less-than fluffy cakes. Too much sugar and your cookies will be crispy when you wanted them soft and chewy.

America's Test Kitchen reported a 13 % variation in flour weight with 18 cooks all using the same dip and sweep technique. Spooning flour into the measure, the difference between min and max was 25%.

Re: but does it taste any good

@ jake

I'll take your word for it, but I'll continue cooking my pork to 63C. Maybe a hint of pink after 10 minutes' rest. It's plenty juicy at that temperature. Beef I cook to 55C.

Re: Why mm?

"But if you're measuring something like kitchen appliances - 600mm deep, why? It's not 612.46mm - it's 60cm."

Obviously you've never had to fit one then. I'm just looking to purchase an induction cooktop. They come in 8 differing sizes from the supplier I'm looking at. Likely we'll go with the "60 cm" size. Here's the width of the first six I looked at in ascending order of size:

565 mm

580 mm

585 mm

590 mm

592 mm

Depths are all different again and none of them are square. Whatever you do, don't attempt to do any kitchen joinery. You're going to ruin a lot of materials and some of it's very expensive. You can make a small hole biggerer, but shrinking a hole is a whole different ball game.

Re: We are in IT

"What's worse is the yanks can't measure a proper pint."

It's fun watching them drink a proper pint though. They tend to get pissed pretty quick drinking real beer instead of cats' piss :-)

Re: but does it taste any good

"Meat is made to stay pink instead of going grey by cooking it properly."

That's for the tender cuts of beef and lamb. Not a very good idea to eat rare pork.

Re: We are in IT

" Although they went a bit weird when measuring baking ingredients in "cups"."

Not all Merkins are that stupid. Best cookery book I own:

The Science of Good CookingIf my home caught fire, this book would be the one I would want to save even though it's easier to replace than my collection of Elizabeth David classics.

Re: "less appetising parts"

"For the rest of us who know better, that means the better meat with some fat still on it is cheaper."

And the cognoscenti also know that only a little over half of that fat is saturated. Nearly half is unsaturated. I'd rather get my unsaturated fat from meat than safflower oil thankyou very much.

Re: Why mm?

"Because when building something, if your tolerances are a millimetre or so out, you can usually fill the gap adequately with some sort of filler, "

Not really. We went through this 50 years ago in Australia.

◊ You don't need any fractions – no vulgar fractions and no decimal fractions.

◊ You don't need decimal points.

◊ You can easily develop a mindset for assessing distances and lengths using millimetres; it quickly becomes second nature, and big numbers have never been a problem.

◊ You can be as accurate and precise as necessary for the job you are doing. For example in the building trade you rarely require accuracy greater than 'to the nearest millimetre'.

◊ Aiming at 'millimetre accuracy' automatically produces a better job than aiming at 'centimetre accuracy'.

◊ If you use milli as the preferred prefix, there are a smaller number of prefixes.

◊ The whole idea of avoiding the centimetre, decimetre, decametre, and hectometre in favour of the millimetre is to eliminate clutter and achieve simplicity.

◊ By preferring the millimetre, people have to work with only three length units: millimetres, metres, and kilometres and anyone who uses those three length units simply doesn't bother with any of the others. This matches our already established practices of having only three units for mass: grams, kilograms, and tonnes; and only three units for capacity: millilitres, litres, and cubic metres.

◊ Look at the way people so readily adopted the use of grams and millilitres without the need for centigrams and centilitres.

◊ It takes a lot less time to train people to use SI using millimetres so people learn it more thoroughly.

◊ For most people there will only be one 'conversion factor' – 1000 – in the whole system if they choose millimetres instead of centimetres.

The building industry changed from imperial to metric in two years or less. The textile industry chose to use centimetres and still haven't completed the changeover. Today there are nearly a hundred occupations using millimetres and 12 using centimetres.

Re: "less appetising parts"

""stop getting older."

Unfortunately, I can only think of one way of doing that. I'll stick to the alternative and just slowly get older disgracefully, one day at a time."

There is an alternative way:

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

But that's pretty gruesome, too.

Re: but does it taste any good

"Our local butcher does cheapish sausage rolls that are suspiciously pink inside."

Meat is made to stay pink instead of going greyby either sodium or potassium nitrate (cheap) or potassium sorbate (vitamin C). If it's sold as free of nitrosamines, then it's the latter. Think ham, bacon, corned beef...

"I've come to the conclusion that vegans really don't like animals."

It could be worse. Imagine being a vegan and hating the taste of vegetables...

Re: I've got 12 inches

Or as the King said of his newborn son: "To think that this child only twelve inches long will one day become a ruler".

Re: but does it taste any good

"It's usually the grease in cheap sausage rolls that ruins it for me"

So make your own. Once you've found the recipe that suits you, you're home and hosed.

"You can't beat a bit of meat inside ya."

Said the actress to the bishop.

Re: shaking my head...

"We use lead-free solder on *everything* because we can't get leaded parts anymore."

Try here:

Resin Core 60% Tin / 40% Lead

Re: Repair != Green

"Interestingly, Heneiken in the 1930s experimented with square bottles for export to developing countries, bottles which could be used as building bricks."

I have several books of interesting houses built out of recycled re-purposed materials. One has a description and pictures of a house built entirely out of empty embalming fluid bottles built by an undertaker. It was a very large house so it would appear that undertaking can be quite lucrative.

Re: Repair != Green

"No. It isn't. It's re-using.

You only need to recycle when you can no longer re-use."

Oh dear... So whenever I've referred to composting as recycling in ever so many magazine articles and my books, I was completely wrong! I should have written "re-using". How can I live with myself? Decades of my life wasted promoting a sham!

Re: So what's stopping them using the road?

"The most common thing is self entitled sociopaths seeing how close they can get while passing at 50 MPH."

I used to walk at almost exactly 4 MPH, often for many hours. These days it's more like 1 MPH and that not for very long, but much longer than before my heart implant. Yet bike riders still seem unable to avoid very near misses and the occasional collision.

It's worth noting that the street signage says no bikes on the footpath between 8 am and 6 pm. First collision was ~ 10 am and the second ~2 pm. I'd say it's the bike riders that appear self-entitled.

Re: Repair != Green

"$10 camera batteries are cheap, nasty and dangerous.

The $140 Nikon-branded ones will last far longer, and won't damage your equipment. Or catch fire."

Actually $US10 for two, post-paid. It's true that they don't last as long. The Nikon-branded batteries that I purchased at the same time as the camera lasted twice as long. I'm now into a second pair of $US10 for two.

Only one of the six batteries has overheated on the charger and it was one of the Nikons, not one of the "cheap, nasty, dangerous" ones.

The choice here is binary. Purchase the Nikons or cheap and nasty through fleabay or at least it was when the originals died. There was no middle way. The cheap and nasty ones are also 1100 mAh, rather than 800 mAh so don't need recharging as often.

It's worth noting that for the cost two Nikon batteries I can purchase a replacement Nikon camera that is far better specced. The idea of chucking a camera that cost me ~$AU2,400 onto the tip when it still works fine is anathema to me.

When I purchased a second, similar camera because I'd foolishly left the Nikon at home, it was a Kodak that takes standard AA batteries, rather than proprietary batteries. The lens is inferior and it doesn't do macro...

Re: Repair != Green

"There is a distance over which returning beer bottles to the brewery becomes uneconomic"

The brewery is less than 20 metres from where the beer is consumed in wintertime and less than 30 metres from where it's consumed in the summertime. If anybody is stupid enough to spit chewing gum into one of my beer bottles they won't be drinking any of my beer or wine again!

"Bicycle riders are just as entitled to use the road because they also pay taxes for the roads via general taxation, so STFU with the girly bitching..."

So what's stopping them using the road? Why the fuck do they prefer the footpath where they are a danger to themselves and pedestrians. Hobart City Council has spent huge amounts of ratepayers' money providing bike riders with bike tracks that motor vehicles aren't allowed to use, yet bikers don't seem to want to. They prefer holding up traffic flow for some godforsaken reason. And no, bike riders in Australia do not pay for roads; bikes attract no registration fee unlike motor vehicles.

"Two abreast cyclists can easily fit within a fraction of a car footprint, so are much easier to _safely_ overtake."

That's complete and utter bullshit! The law requires the driver of the motor vehicle to approach a bike no closer than 1.5 metres. Two abreast with 1.5 metres between and 1.5 metres to the left of the leftmost rider means the left hand side of the motor vehicle has to be at least 4.5 metres from the left hand edge of the road while overtaking. That is, the vehicle needs to enter the oncoming traffic lane and there are several roads around Hobart where that is insanely dangerous. Taroona Highway for example.

I thought the topic was greenwashing BTW.

Re: Repair != Green

"There's a common, but simplistic idea that recycling is always the right answer"

I've been told I don't understand recycling. I'm still using beer and cider bottles acquired in the early 1980s. But that's not recycling apparently. One takes them to the tip, smashes them into smithereens in a big steel barrel so they can be sent to Indonesia, get melted down and made into arguably inferior new bottles.

Re: Repair != Green

"Maybe the only reason people are buying replacements from Dodgy Dave is because there are no official replacements available."

Not forgetting price. My Nikon camera batteries are $AU140 each in Australia, plus an unspecified stocking fee when I got a quote. I purchased two for $10US post-paid from the US.

"So if they were riding on the footpath, how are they causing the pollution of a 100 cars backed up behind them?"

Different locations; different times.

"And how the fuck do you ride at 60km/h in a city?"

No need, just ride in the fucking bike lanes provided for the exclusive use of fucking bike riders you fuckwit! I have seen exactly one bike rider doing so. They much prefer to hold up traffic by riding in the lanes that motor vehicle drivers are required to use.

"And yes I get pissed off at cyclists who think laws don't apply to them, the same way I do with car drivers."

Not half as pissed off as I'm getting being knocked about. I'm taking X7's advice and will be carrying a walking cane to stick through the spokes of the next fuckwit who comes near enough. Might even save a toddler's arm. It probably hasn't occurred to you that they have a right to use the footpath in safety, not just OAPs.

I note also that I have never seen a single motor vehicle driver attempting to drive along a crowded footpath. Ever.

Re: All they have to do...

"if someones marching in the carpark crying "Sieg Heil"

It doesnt mean "all hail our glorious leader" or whatever the literal translation is , it means "We are right wing xenophobic thugs with chips on our shoulders who blame everyone else for our failures in life and hate everyone not like us and are prepared to express that in violence ""

Really? My friend Julian and I do that. Both of us are of German and Jewish parentage. We think it means we are both John Cleese fans and that we like giving the politically correct the shits. Instead "we are right wing xenophobic thugs with chips on our shoulders who blame everyone else for our failures in life and

hate everyone not like us and are prepared to express that in violence". Whoda thunkt?

"Perhaps if it was a relative of yours being almost killed and shown on YouTube you would be able to conjure up the empathy needed to understand this?"

I'm told that as an Aspie, I don't do "real" empathy and truth be told, I don't even know what real empathy is. That said, I had the shit seriously kicked out of me back in the mid-70s. Local pub I ate at almost every day kicked me out when I walked in seeking assistance. Doctor's surgery around the corner: ditto; I didn't have an appointment. Staggered past a building site and the builders' labourers rendered me first aid commie bastards* that they were. I couldn't have given a flying fuck about these events appearing on film. I just wanted the pain and the bleeding to stop.

You can stick your "real" empathy where the sun don't shine.

* At the time the Builder Labourer's Federation were constantly in the news as the bad guys of Australian industry.

"The video is almost certainly illegal all by itself: there's a whole load of laws about public order, incitement, standards of decency in media, etc."

As others have already noted, if the law has been broken, then the miscreants should be prosecuted. Thus far nobody linked to any of these videos, so I went looking. Found the following on the first page:

Muslim Gang Attacks With Hammer After Prayers in Bradford UK

I note the absence of masks/hoods that some commentards claim prevents plod IDing the perps.

"Most of this shit is all about showing off, so why give them an opportunity to do so on the global stage"

Most of Hollywood is about showing off and a great deal of Hollywood's output is gratuitous violence. And it's boring to boot. If you don't like violence, don't watch it.

Re: Well Said

"We can all see that coming, so the companies themselves ought to be thinking about how to change their business model to survive that. One way would be subscription-only services; it would double up as a means to strongly identify users posting such material."

It would also reduce the already modest income of people like this:

Alan Gogoll: Mulberry Mouse

Tiff Eckhardt: Drive

Re: UK politicians

"Whining about people saying things they don't like"

is not confined to politicians. Internet acquaintance of mine retired from the US Marines to NYC. He didn't take kindly to the neighbourhood he chose to live in being terrorised by a gang of hoodlums. So he door-knocked the neighbourhood and assembled a group of recently retired Marines. They confronted the gang and told them in no uncertain terms what was going to ensue if they continued operating where they were not welcome. Undisciplined mob meets disciplined, highly trained killers no contest! Problem solved.

Re: It's an American company.

"Just look carefully to see if a nipple is briefly exposed."

I always do that; it's a hobby of mine. Often I find myself wishing the exposure were of longer duration, but that's just in the nature of my hobby.

"When you've got a video of something that society has decided is unacceptable say, 5 or 6 guys kicking the absolute shit out of another guy, or making serious threats against someone (which are very likely to be acted upon), that's a problem."

No. The video is not the problem. It's "kicking the absolute shit out of another guy" that is the problem.

"Also, to be fair to the idiot plod, many of the guys in these videos wear things called "masks" which can make it fucking difficult to identify them."

Assertion. Link to youtube vids establishing this as fact rather than speculation required.

Re: I like the mouse

"I have always voted for the best candidate as I am apolitical."

I'm not...

Steamboat Fatty

Re: Couldn't agree more !!!

"BTW, did I tell you my memory is increasingly unreliable these days?"

I can't remember...

Re: Demonstrating that maintaining complete annonymity is seriously hard work.

"Shirley you mean "cognoscentified"?"

I rather like the double i in cognoscentiised...

Re: "he shall ever ever know it"

"My guess is: Pompous Git."

What I would have guessed too, except it wasn't so if I had guessed, I would have been cheating.

Re: Same impression here

"The reason Linux has 3% market share on the desktop is because of years of Microsoft leaning on H/W manufacturers to ship Windows and only Windows pre-installed."

That's the myth. The reality back in the 1990s was that Lunix had decided to adopt a version of ISO 8859 character set that excluded typographers' quotes, the en dash, the em dash, the ellipsis and several useful ligatures. Microsoft, Lotus, Digital Equipment Corp and Commodore had adopted an earlier version of ISO 8859 that's called Windows ANSI.

Hence the quotes around “this” in Windows ANSI were either ("), or `` for the opening quote and (") for the closing quote. Missing also were †, ‡, €, ƒ, ‰, and ™.

For those of us in publishing, Lunix had effectively put itself out of the running, even had DTP software of the calibre of Pagemaker, Ventura, or QuarkXPress been available. The introduction of proper typographers' marks in Windows and MacOS word processors meant any correspondence generated on Linux looked distinctly amateurish. It's not only MS that shoots itself in the foot.

It's also part of the myth that you could only purchase a PC with Windows installed. Apart from portables, only two out of dozens of PCs I've purchased came with an OS.

Edit: dunno why I can't get inch marks to display here. [sigh]

"That's some next level socratic shit."

You're just taking the Pythia...

Re: Newton's third law

"And now you tell me my interviewer was wrong. Well, one of you is. And my money's on you."

You can describe the universe with forces (Newton) or you can describe the universe as curved space (Einstein). It's not a matter of either one being "wrong"; they are incommensurable descriptions and both are useful. Feynman's 12th Lecture:

Characteristics of Force