If you place a bowl of dog food in front of a pack of puppies, you’ll see a scurry of snouts scrambling for a bite. As all the slots of space around the bowl fill up, only so many puppies can eat at once. But, what happens when you have hundreds or thousands of puppies vying for a single bowl of food?
That’s the situation mechanical engineering professor, David Hu has on his hands when he plops an orange slice into a bin of full of little, wriggling creatures. To test the “Puppy Bowl Problem” on a larger scale, Hu turns to something a lot less furry (and a lot less cute) than puppies: maggots.
“They’re really just hungry little babies,” Hu says. He and a graduate student at Georgia Institute of Technology are constructing mathematical models of the maggots’ motion to see how so many of these hungry crawlers can eat so efficiently while looking at the variables that influence their speedy food consumption. They might also be the answer to our food waste problem. Meet the maggots of our latest Macroscope video here.
Pet Peeve: the ‘is a tomato a vegetable or a fruit’ argument
A tomato is a fruit by botanical definition: a seed-bearing structure that develops from the ovary tissues of a flowering plants.
A tomato is a vegetable by culinary/common understanding: a savory, soft-tissue plant product that humans can safely consume.
Other plants which are botanically fruits and culinary vegetables: eggplants, cucumbers, peppers both sweet and spicy, tomatillos, avocados, green beans, sweet corn, pumpkins and other squash, soybeans, zucchini.
The only reason we have this argument about tomatoes but nothing else: Nix v. Hedden
Okay. Who thinks of avocado as a culinary vegetable? Is this one of those cultural differences?
Yeah. I think that’s why there are avocado smoothies in Boba Tea shops but not in Western smoothie shopes
Let me ask you a question right back at you– what if it didn’t? Does that change how incredible and powerful it is? What if it didn’t quite happen the way that we have as recorded in Jewish tradition– does that mean that we should simply pack up our Hagadot and Matzah?
PJ
Metaphors? Emotional community gatherings? Traditional ritual experiences?
@ people who were not born in Ireland and particularly Americans
– It is not Patty’s Day, it is Paddy’s Day. Patty is short for Patricia, Paddy is short for Pádraig which has been anglicised to Patrick.
– It is not Gaelic, it is Irish. In Irish, the language is called Gaelige but that’s pronounced Gwayl-geh.
– Literally no one in Ireland has ever eaten corned beef and cabbage
– We have also never said top of the morning
– If you pinch an Irish person for not wearing green on Paddy’s Day they’re likely to slap you.
– Why do you dye your drinks green?
– It is not “North Ireland” it is “Northern Ireland”. It is not “South Ireland” it is “The Republic of Ireland” or just “Ireland”.
– No, I do not know the Dohertys of Mayo.
– Please, if you must, do things for the craic and not the crack. Cocaine is not a great habit lads.
– Drinks like the “Irish car bomb” and the “black & tan” are incredibly offensive (you wouldn’t drink a “9/11”)
However
– Wearing green is grand
– Having a few drinks is also grand, they don’t even need to be Irish (I drink a Swedish cider most of the time)
– Aye sure queue up some Irish music on youtube it’s great.
– If you want one Irish word to use throughout the day a good one is Sláinte (pronounced slawn-sha) – it’s the equivalent of saying “cheers” before you drink!
Please be respectful on Holidays like this! It’s great to join in and show your respect & appreciation for other cultures celebrations, but remember to actually do that! Have fun, but stay respectful to the culture and religion. 😊
Fun history of corned beef and cabbage.
Beef is cheap in America (lots of land, lots of cows, so there’s such a thing as cheap cuts). So a lot of immigrants who could never afford beef in their home country now had access to beef.
(Example spaghetti and meatballs is an Italian-American invention).
Now Americans hated immigrants (plenty stilldo sadly) and hated anyone who wasn’t Protestant so you had segregation. So in New York the Irish Catholic area was next to the Jewish area. There was solidarity between American Irish and American Jewish immigrants. So Irish-Immigrants bought corned-beef from Jewish butchers.
(In Ireland, you may eat bacon or lamb for St Patrick’s Day, but lamb was (and is) expensive in America, and Irish Immigrants got their meat from Kosher butchers – no bacon).
Brisket is a cut of meat from the front of the cow. It’s a very tough cut of meat. The salting process (it’s like soaked in salt for over a week) and cooking for hours and hours (it’s an all day stew) makes it tender.
So corned beef and cabbage is a dish that evolved out of affordable ingredients (tough cut of beef, cabbage and carrots and potatoes are dirt cheap) and proximity to Jewish immigrants.
St. Patrick’s Day Celebrations as we know them now (parades and the like) were started in America by Irish-American immigrants. Because WASP Americans (white, Anglo Saxon, Protestants) hated Catholics and hated the Irish.
And for all immigrants there was a big push to assimilate (give kids English sounding names, forget your language, become Protestant). But people don’t give up religion easily, names and language maybe, but not God.
So still today you have Irish Catholics, Italian Catholics, Mexican Catholics, etc and even Americans who aren’t practicing Catholic or aren’t religious may view being raised Catholic as part of a cultural identity linked to their heretage (the same way someone who doesn’t practice Judaism is still Jewish, some difference since Judaism is a hereditary religion, but for immigrants in a country that hates Catholics, being Catholic, having that tradition was and is part of being an outsider to American, part of an identity those in power hated and tried to erase).
So holding giant Irish pride parade celebrating the Catholic patron Saint of Ireland was sort of a “fuck you” to anti-Catholic anti-Irish sentiment. A “fuck you” to the idea that being an American meant erasing your traditions and history and pretending to be a White Anglo Saxon Protestant.
Look at us being proudly Irish and still Catholic. Obnoxiously, visibly Catholic and acting ways that the puritanical Protestants hate.
So what was a family religious Holiday became a big, visible celebration of heretage and homeland (a shared identity). And since it’s a celebration immigrants splurged by buying a big cut of beef (beef is cheaper in America, but immigrants did not have a lot of money and meat is still more than vegetables, so any cut of beef was still a special occasion thing) and supported their Jewish neighbors who ran the butcher’s shop.
(also, since it’s a St’s Feast, Lent restrictions on meat and drinking alcohol didn’t count, so eat a lot of meat and drink).
St Patrick’s Day in the US has its own history, heretage and ties to religion (and persecution for that religion). Traditions are tied to that history. So Corned Beef and Cabbage may not be a thing in Ireland but it’s a part of Irish-American tradition, history and culture.
i am well aware that the really aggressive and wildly pseudoscientific vegans are a noisy minority but like it still always really gets me when vegans try to claim that humans are herbivores like.. look at me with your forward facing eyes and speak to me with your mouth of diversified teeth for both tearing and chewing and try to convince me
the highly trustworthy source of peta absolutely crushing the notion that humans are omnivores by pointing out that most of us dont get impulses to scavenge rotting carcasses. dont know how we could argue with that one
that argument doesn’t even remotely work bc people do get hungry from looking at meat, and if someone is hungry enough they might well get the urge to kill and eat an animal, in many places we just don’t associate food with the physical corpses of animals bc we aren’t involved in the process of slaughter.
Yea, cus if you were part of the slaughter, most wouldn’t eat it. You just wanna pretend and hide yourself from the murder.
i am the slaughter
Not to mention that there are people who eat roadkill. The anti-roadkill taboo is cultural. That post is kind of like saying “When you see a cow, are you temped to snack on it?” to a Hindu audience when most Hindus aren’t vegan, they just have a cultural taboo against eating cows.
I think the cafe near my work is in dire financial straits, which is a bummer, they make good coffee.
Bummer indeed. Btw, there is no good coffee in New York. Just so ya know.
I thought it was just Ithaca that sucked on the coffee front, but no. So far, the entire state is coffee-inadequate.
What’s worse, they’re utterly clueless about this fact. They tout their dry, flat, bitter-ass swill as great stuff. The local favorite is claimed to have learned from a Seattle roasting master, but I hope that’s a lie.
There is a local roaster at the end of our street, so all I smell is burnt fucking toast all morning and many afternoons.
Burnt. Toast. And I mean boring ass gas-station white bread toast, too.
I suspect it’s all about the caffeine content for them.
*scratches Cornell and Columbia off my list of PhD programs*
I remember a New Yorker article once hyperbolically described NYC coffee as “a lipstick stained mug filled with dirty hot dog water to carry down 6th avenue until a drop of what is either Legionnaires disease infected air conditioner leak or someone else’s spit lands in it”,
The burned coffee sounds just as bad. I’m sticking with the West Coast. Tho my friend who is super into good coffee said the best coffee he had came from Calgary (Phil and Sebastian) and Yellowknife (Barren Ground). I need to visit both to figure out if he was right.
Coffee’s bad but the pizza and bagels are excellent.
don’t forget that february 15th is reduced valentine’s candy day. this holiday only happens once a year and if you miss it you have to wait until november 1st (reduced halloween candy day) to wrack down on cheap, noisily decorated candy. get ur chocolate. get ur sweethearts. get u some teddy bears and heart-shaped decorations while ur at it. treat yourself!! 😍🍫
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