15 minutes and 30 minutes are a pretty long time to have to heat food up for.

When I’m reheating soup I generally pull it from the stove as soon as it simmers, so that’s probably around 2 minutes above 95°C and like 5 minutes above 80°C.

Actually making the soup the first time, I may simmer for hours, but some of the vegetable/herb ingredients I’m adding with less than 10 minutes of simmer time, so that wouldn’t be enough to destroy the toxin reliably.

You’re getting the labels mixed up.

As a labeling requirement under U.S. law, anything labeled “American Cheese” must be pasteurized process cheese made from some combination of cheddar, colby, washed curd cheese, or granular cheese, which the law also defines pretty strictly. It must be made from these cheeses, heated and emulsified with an emulsifying salt (usually sodium citrate).

American cheese is allowed to have some optional ingredients and still be labeled American Cheese:

• Food safe acid (as long as pH stays above 5.3)
• Cream or milkfat, such that this added fat can account for up to 5% of the weight of the finished product.
• Water (but the total moisture content of the resulting product must still be within the other limits in the regulation)
• Salt
• Artificial coloring
• Spices or flavoring that do not simulate the flavors of cheeses
• Mold inhibitors from sorbate up to 0.2%, or from proprionate up to 0.3%
• Lechitin, if sold in slices

You can add milk, cream, buttermilk, whey, or certain other dairy products up to 49% of the finished product, but then you’d have to call it “Pasteurized American Process Cheese Food” instead of just American Cheese.

American cheese is made from almost entirely cheese ingredients. The individual slices being sold at the store, though, vary by brand on whether they’re even trying to be American Cheese (or whether they’re some kind of lesser “cheese food” or even lesser “cheese spread” or even lesser “cheese product”)

Regular Kraft singles aren’t American Cheese. Look at the label. They’re “cheese product.” Even the Deli Deluxe line has taken a hit in quality in recent years, even if they are labeled Cheese.

Go with other brands that actually put together a decent tasting American Cheese, and check the label to make sure it’s made with 100% cheese instead of 51% cheese (or less).

Plus evolutionary history shows plenty of examples of animals switching from pure carnivore to pure herbivore to omnivores in between, and back the other direction. All birds are descended from a common carnivorous ancestor, but plenty of birds today subsist mostly on seeds or fruit.

If there is a lot of available biomass to be eaten, nature will find a way and some animal is going to fill that niche. Many of the folivores (herbivores specializing in digesting leaves) that descended from carnivores have to deal with the low nutrient/calorie density of their foods by just eating a lot of it, and have varying levels of microbial symbiosis for helping with that digestion.

For the Shin brand specifically, I like:

• Poached (2 minute boil) or soft boiled egg (6 minute boil)
• Frozen edamame (cooks in the broth in the same amount of time as the noodles)
• Fresh garlic (micro plane or mince and add to the broth towards the end of the cook)
• Baby bok choy (if cut into individual leaves, cooks in broth in same time as noodles)
• Shitake mushrooms (fresh, sliced, quick stir fry in the pot with butter or something to cook before adding water for the broth)
• Kimchi (just dump on top of the finished bowl as a garnish)
• Scallions (slice and put on finished bowl)

I usually only do one or two of these, but the point is to make it way better without actually adding to the cooking time. And the combinations of the above can work pretty well at mixing things up for a long time before getting bored.

Other ramen flavors, I sometimes add some of the above, or shredded cabbage, spinach, peas, other beans or legumes. Sometimes nori, canned corn, canned bamboo. Sometimes with the broth I’ll add gelatin to thicken. For some seafood flavors I might throw in frozen shrimp. Certain flavors can go with sesame seeds.

Lots of people swear by lots of things when it comes to cast iron. There’s a lot of confidently stated incorrect information about cast iron all over the internet, which gets repeated by commenters in places like reddit.

It’s like when people swore by flaxseed oil, which makes for a pretty seasoning that flakes off easily and is actually a terrible choice for cooking.

Or all sorts of old wives tales about not using detergent, or using chain mail instead of a regular scrubber, or avoiding metal utensils. There’s a ton of misinformation out there that doesn’t hold up to real experience (and often traces back to vibes, not science).

Plenty of people have sanded their lodge pans with no issues. I personally haven’t, but mainly because I don’t care enough about the smooth surface.

I don’t see why the seasoning wouldn’t stick with a smooth surface over a pebbled surface, though. The polymerization should happen at the surface no matter what.

It’s even funny the way the parent comment described it: a girl town right next to the normal town.

That’s not true. Illness and injury still have an effect on reproduction. Someone who spends their life fighting chronic disease is going to have a worse time with sexual selection and reproduction. Plus a lot of characteristics are social in nature, with kin selection being a big part of human evolution, so those who are less able to contribute outside of their direct reproduction still detrimentally affect their genes’ survival and propagation.

U-235 has a half life of about 700 million years, so it’s fair to assume that there’s about 1.1% as much U-235 as when the earth formed 4.6 billion years ago (about 6.5 half lives).

Most uranium on earth is U-238, though, which has a longer half life of about 4.5 billion years, so that the amount of U-238 on earth today is about half of when the earth was formed. But the meme is about U-235, so that’s just background information not directly relevant to the picture.

You’re just listing reasons why they were reliant on a single crop for sustenance. Cool, but the actual historical example shows why that particular arrangement is brittle and vulnerable to shocks, which is the point being made here.

The Irish genocide that you refer to as using the colonizer’s term “Irish Potato Famine” had absolutely fuckall to do with potatoes or the Irish.

But it has everything to do with potatoes (a particular blight that affected potato crops) and the Irish (the actual affected people of this genocide).

The social and political reasons for why the Irish ended up so dependent on a single crop for sustenance is part of the story, of course, but this discussion right here is about the fragility and brittleness of relying on a single crop.

For another example of a plant that just didn’t make it into modern society at scale, there are skirrets. Carrots, parsnips, and skirrets were related umbellifer plants with edible, nutritious roots, cultivated over the centuries as food. Carrots and parsnips were responsive to breeding for root size, and could produce comparatively huge roots, but skirrets never really did. Once the potato was brought over from the new world, the skirret fell out of favor.

If I remember correctly, the book opens with a prologue describing the business/finance hype in biotech, where a bunch of startups are raising funds and racing to get rich revolutionizing how to commercialize the exciting cutting edge in biological science in that era. It has nothing to do with the plot and the characters of the book, except that it establishes the tone, the background, and the incentives at play.

My favorite moment in the book is where they realize that the computer program for tracking populations had an incorrect assumption and just returned the full count if it counted the expected population for an enclosure. Only, the dinosaurs were breeding, so the system didn’t catch that the populations were actually higher than expected, and therefore didn’t notice when some dinosaurs escaped from their enclosures.

I didn’t get what chaos theory was until like 10-20 years later, but to my 12-year-old self it was the first time I learned about how bad assumptions can cascade in real world failures.

Michael Crichton was a successful novelist, and his first foray into show business was writing the screenplay for Westworld, about a park where everything goes wrong. It flopped commercially but basically planted the seeds for him to try it again, but with dinosaurs. Spielberg directed the adaptation and then there was a rush to adapt a bunch of other stuff. He was also an executive producer for ER, as it was adapted from a pilot he wrote, based on his own experience from med school (he graduated with an MD but never practiced).

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Now Dennis, I hear speed has something to do with it.

It’s too hard to try to manually control a fast breath rate like that. What you want to do is to naturally push that up by doing a bunch of physical work so that you’re breathing heavily. Then you’ll be exhaling lots of carbon dioxide!

The problem is that population distribution means that almost nobody is going to be getting on or off the train between Minneapolis and Seattle. The population of North Dakota is 800k, South Dakota is 925k, Nebraska is 2 million, Montana is 1.1 million, Wyoming is 590k, Idaho is 2 million. That’s nearly a whole quadrant of the country with less population than the Houston metro area. If we’re building trains, let’s build trains in Houston and serve the same number of people with like a tiny percentage of track that it would take to serve the upper plains states.