I used to be a party member but left years ago when it got rough! Maybe getting back into politics more directly is the way to go: changing parties from within!
wren
joined 2 years ago
It's just getting more and more difficult to feel okay voting Labour. I know splitting the left wing vote isn't tactically smart, but voting for labour isn't even a left wing vote anymore :(
(I'm still pro-tactical voting, I'm just doing it with more frustration than ever before)
Book purchased! As well as the other one mentioned by Destide earlier. Excited to learn lots, thanks for the recommendations
We've got a gas grill, but didn't know you had to clean the tubes. I always look in all the crevices to check for spiders anyway tho, so hopefully no future accidental fires
Also: I didn't know what a big green egg was until earlier today but they look fantastic! Hope your eggy barbecue dreams are coming true with having one :)
I definitely agree about veggies/vegans getting stereotyped as too-healthy :) Although I do find that, even if a recipe has technically same level of unhealthiness, the vegan equivalent of a meal never makes me feel quite as unhealthy as a meaty one.
I think veggie/vegan creativity makes for much better meals than just your standard unseasoned beef and bread combo. If I'm going to use meat, I might as well use it wisely, but if I can get the deliciousness of meat, without using meat, then that's even better! So SauceStache is a perfect recommendation, thanks! I'm going to watch a lot of his videos (especially the one on DIY Beyond meat).
I've tried bbq-soy-sauce-feta-watermelon once before - I think I was the only person who genuinely enjoyed it. I might end up being my own guinea pig if I end up being too adventurous again :)
Thanks for this, really helpful stuff :)
That book looks great! I love how-to-cook books instead of just recipe books (i.e. Salt Fat Acid Heat or Sohla's Start Here) and that looks like a great BBQ version.
wrt food safety, I should be alright! One of the reasons I haven't BBQ'ed much in the past is that I'm very safety focussed.
Another reason is that I don't eat much meat unless I'm planning on making it really delicious! Meat thermometers will definitely help (with both deliciousness and safety).
The Number 1 reason I don't BBQ more often is that my garden is down a ladder at the moment! Once we've got stairs, (and meat thermometers!) there'll be nothing stopping me :)
Did you have any advice for cooking for veggies? (a lot of my friends are vegan and they deserve good food too!)
It's surprising how climate change gets co-opted into sinister ideals. It's a similar problem to the rise of ecofascism - an unbelievably pervasive school of thought in environmentalists (who you would hope were leftist!)
the bus service in the photo (Purple 17 💜) is so frequent, that by the time you've gotten to the bus stop and checked the time, there's one (or sometimes three) buses coming up the road! Reading council doesn't get enough credit for Reading buses being fantastic
good question!! I actually might have been mistaken by saying sea salt was an INP (whoops).
Sea salt is a great condensation nuclei (CCN). CCN allow cloud droplets to form instead of ice crystals.
For cloud seeding to work well, it's better to seed with INP instead of CCN because if you encourage lots of droplets to form, all you get is a bunch of really tiny droplets, making a really bright white cloud (no rain!). (Side note: that's why rain clouds look dark: they're made of fewer really big droplets.)
Adding sea salt to clouds is a thing though! It's been proposed as Marine Cloud Brightening - adding lots of sea salt to the air over the ocean, making the earth more reflective to combat further global warming.
As far as I know, most inorganic salts are good INP or CCN, but have varying efficiencies. Sea salt dissolves in liquid water whereas silver iodide doesn't, and silver iodide has the right sort of hexagonal crystal lattice for ice to start sticking to. So silver iodide is a great INP whereas sea salt is a great CCN.
Even longer (and reasonably silly) explanation here: https://www.acsh.org/news/2022/09/01/why-are-clouds-seeded-silver-does-it-work-16538
If you mean climate change, then yeah, obviously humans do influence the climate. In terms of individual scale events (weather, big storms) there's not any existing technology that exists that can cause a single targeted big storm event.
This article isn't perfectly scientifically accurate but it's better than most! For those interested, here's a better (detailed) explanation of the science:
Cloud seeding works best in supercooled liquid clouds, which start with barely any ice in. For ice to form in clouds, you need INP (ice nucleating particles), aerosols such as sea salt, or dust, for the ice to grow onto. INP can be pretty rare, depending on where you are in the world.
By adding silver iodide (an efficient INP) ice crystals can form. This means the cloud has both ice and liquid water in (a "mixed phase" cloud).
For multiple reasons, ice grows better and faster than liquid cloud droplets (the "Wegener Bergeron Findeisen effect" for one). Because there's only so much water in the cloud, these ice crystals then grow at the expense of water droplets in the air, allowing for big snowflakes to grow, but droplets evaporate.
This turns it from a cloud with many tiny droplets, into one with big heavy snowflakes, which fall out of the cloud. Before the snowflakes reach the ground, they melt, turning into rain.
TLDR; cloud seeding takes the water already in the cloud, and makes it precipitate slightly more efficiently, but only if you improve the balance of aerosols in the air just right
There is no technology on earth that can make storms of this scale. Cloud seeding doesn't add any water to the cloud. At most, it causes a very slight increase in rain. If you accidentally cloud seed "too much" you nucleate lots of ice crystals within the cloud, making many tiny ice crystals (which don't precipitate at all).
They didn't seed this cloud - but it wouldn't have done anything if they had.
Surprised it's only 16%!