More nice stuff while walking the dog. Isaac Asimov has been mentioned twice in my day. Once by me, once by the SGU. What are the chances?
Dualit Toaster!
Ahh. British engineering and design. Mine at last.
How do you washup a sieve?
The short answer is: you don’t get it messy in the first place
A sponge or cloth is not very good at getting the food detritus from the sieve. You wipe and just move the particles around. A running tap might work if the upturned sieve is washed through with running water but you have to ensure that the whole surface area has been douched. The bristles from a brush might be pushed through the grill on the sieve, but this is somewhat tiresome and tends to move dirt from one place to another.
Ultimately it is a lengthy job and not one that need be done. Drain the veg with the saucepan lid. Maybe use coffee filter inserts but never use a sieve. It’s just not worth the cleaning effort. That’s why you never see them in Star Trek.
TV volume settings
This post is based on a tweet. Perhaps this’ll happen more often. I find something pithy to mention and then I’ll expand upon it in a blog post.
My wife was changing the TV volume the other day and making sure she could see the number it was set on (the amp is perpendicular to where we sit, so quite hard to read). I asked whether she was being fussy about what volume the amp was on. No, was the reply, you are the fussy one.
This is correct as I would prefer the TV volume (actually the amp volume) on either a multiple of 2 or 5. Given that for normal TV viewing the ideal volume is somewhere between 20 and 30 this gives plenty of choice: 22,24,25,26,28. The other volume settings are incorrect to use and even if they create the best listening conditions I would find it hard to settle on one of those.
I do not consider this to be weird behaviour, I consider it to be remarkably sensible although I would probably end up with many logical fallacies should I attempt to explain how this obsessiveness can be justified.
A friend will only get out of bed if, when he looks at the alarm clock, it is a multiple of 5 minutes. If not he will stay in bed until the next multiple. Now that’s weird!
The worst waiting room
I’d like to know if there are worse but the waiting room I am currently sitting in is pretty poor. A row of chairs placed against the wall in what can only be described as a corridor, probably because it is a corridor.
I don’t think there are any magazines or books. The only entertainment is trying to guess why people are here. The noises of muffled chatter, trollies laden with removals going by and clacking over the bumps between tiles along the floor aren’t enough to keep my Internet crazy brain entertained. Just to add to potential humiliation the corridor isn’t off the beaten track either. It’s the route to the three main treatment areas. I’d often walked past these chairs and wondered about what it feels like to sit there. Now I know.
I have to sit up. If I slouch then the people walking along the corridor will have to walk single file, I can’t even cross my legs as my foot would stick out too far and inconvenience a great many people who gave business further along the way.
I’m keeping my head down and typing this to pass the time. Ignoring all that pass. A quick glance along the line of bored patients indicates they have the same tactic as me. There are no posters to wonder about, no collections of leaflets and no flyers for made-up alternative treatments just three tone walls (I kid you not).
I’m going to read a book on the Kindle app. That might pass the time. Could do with a coffee too. Let’s discover the crazy of the Congo with Mister Kurtz!
More adventures!
It turns out I’m pretty tired and reading or playing on the iPhone are out as I’ll fall asleep. I’ve just realised my chair doesn’t even have arms I can rest on. The chairs either side of me have arms and I’m sandwiched starting to feel as though I’ve paid economy. I can’t lean forwards, backwards or take my elbows from my sides.
It looks like the appointment is going to be delayed. All the people before me haven’t been in and I’m losing the will to live.
How to eat an apple
Apart from using a knife (or not) and cutting up an apple I can think of predominantly two ways of eating an apple. This does matter because one way is correct and the other is not so correct.
Circumferential or the Segment method?
A circumferential eater will take a bite, rotate the sphere using the core as the axis and take another bite. This will result in a curve of apple exposed around the great circle of the apple. Then another line of bite is taken from each end (assuming that the eater has a big enough mouth to bite to the core)
A segmental eater takes bites out of the apple from stalk to opposite pole. This results in a segment being eaten and then the apple being rotated to start the process again.
The problem is exposure of the flesh of the apple to the air to turn brown and this needs to be minimised. In the segment method the area exposed for significant time is constant. For the circumferential method the area exposed increases with time.
Which leads to:
The analysis shows that if your bite radius is greater than 0.140 of the radius of the apple then you should eat in segments. Apart from small mammals the bite radius is going to be more than 14% of the apple radius, unless there is a huge apple variety waiting to be discovered.
This post was necessary because every time I eat an apple my wife tells me I am eating it the wrong way.