Links - 26th January 2020 (2)

Is the freelance life right for you? Or are you mentally built for your day job? - "53 million people do freelance work in the US – which translates to a whopping one-third of the American workforce... The mistake many people make starts from the assumptions made in the last sentence: That as a freelancer, you can do what you want, whenever you want and live happily ever after having lunch with your tai tai friends and leisurely working on deadlines between your nail appointments and yoga sessions...
 freelancing is probably not right for you if:
    You don’t have savings of at least six months to a year. It will take you this long to ramp up your business to a level where you earn a halfway decent regular income. In the meantime, you need to eat. Which leads to the next point.
    You have a lot of financial responsibilities such as a mortgage, car loans, aged parents, children or a fondness for expensive designer items.
    You have no discipline. A successful freelancer will have a set daily routine and puts in the same, if not more, number of hours as a “full-timer”.
    You like company. For the most part, freelancing is a solitary experience. And in the beginning, at least, you won’t be able to afford a co-working office.
    You are the shy retiring type who is too embarrassed to chase your clients for payment. Many businesses will put off paying you for your services for as long as humanly possible.
    You have a thin skin and believe that “no” means you’re worthless.
    Your home environment is chaotic and filled with more distractions than Candy Crush. See point 4."

How much radiation you're exposed to in everyday life - "Bananas give you more radiation exposure than living next to a nuclear power plant"

Here Are 20 Other Ways Europe Can Be Sliced Up - "DataRep has posted graphic designer Yanko Tsvetkov's sweet infographic from the second edition of his Atlas of Prejudice showing Europe through 20 stereotypes."

Irishman pranked his own funeral with a message from beyond the grave - "Loved ones attending the funeral of Shay Bradley, a veteran of Ireland's Defence Forces, were shocked when they heard his voice as his coffin was lowered into the ground in Kilkenny."Hello? Hello? Let me out! Where the f--- am I?" a prerecorded message from Bradley said."Let me out! It's f---ing dark in here!" he continued."Is that that priest I can hear?" he said, adding: "This is Shay. I'm in the box. No, in f---ing front of you. I'm dead." Bradley then began singing "Hello again, hello. I just called to say goodbye."... His daughter Andrea Bradley told HuffPost that her father's dying wish was to have the audio recording played during his funeral... her father's recording was a way of "saying not only goodbye but to also say, 'OK, the sadness is over now — here is a laugh so you can go and celebrate my life with a smile on your face.'""

Semen Inside Marriott Reusable Bath Amenities!?! - "Marriott announced they’d be eliminating single use shower amenities as they look to move to refillable containers. However there appears to be a concern about how safe these bottles are"

Block on GM rice ‘has cost millions of lives and led to child blindness’ - "Stifling international regulations have been blamed for delaying the approval of a food that could have helped save millions of lives this century. The claim is made in a new investigation of the controversy surrounding the development of Golden Rice by a team of international scientists. Golden Rice is a form of normal white rice that has been genetically modified to provide vitamin A to counter blindness and other diseases in children in the developing world. It was developed two decades ago but is still struggling to gain approval in most nations... many ecology action groups, in particular Greenpeace, have tried to block approval of Golden Rice because of their general opposition to GM crops. “Greenpeace opposition to Golden Rice was especially persistent, vocal, and extreme, perhaps because Golden Rice was a GM crop that had so much going for it”... For its part, Greenpeace has insisted over the years that Golden Rice is a hoax and that its development was diverting resources from dealing with general global poverty, which it maintained was the real cause of the planet’s health woes."

‘Gastronomic terrorism!’ How the cucumber has sliced Spain in two - "Wounds Jamie Oliver inflicted three years ago when he added chorizo to rice and called it paella remain raw, while hopes of an end to the war over whether onions belong in a tortilla de patatas seem as forlorn as ever... “Cucumber in gazpacho is gastronomic terrorism!” said Dani García, a chef who runs a three-Michelin-star restaurant and who, like his friend El Monaguillo, is from Andalucía.When another Twitter user had the temerity to remind García that he was famous for his recipe for cherry gazpacho, the chef replied: “Are you really comparing the elegance of a cherry to the aggressiveness of a cucumber?”The issue has prompted long and thoughtful pieces in the Spanish press, and churned up another familiar culinary controversy.Charo Barrios, president of the Academy of Andalucían Gazpacho, insists people can put whatever vegetables they like into the soup, and says cucumber is not the only disputed ingredient. “Cucumber’s definitely an option, but there are other debates as well, like whether you add bread,” she says. “Bread gives the soup a different texture and means you’re adding carbohydrates. And then there’s the debate over adding water. It depends on the quality of the tomatoes, but if they’re not great, it could end up too watery. I think it’s more about bread than cucumber, but we think you can add whatever you want, from other vegetables to fruit.”... When most people thought of gazpacho, he added, they thought of a simple tomato soup with cucumber, peppers, garlic, olive oil, vinegar and bread. “But, historically, a gazpacho can be many things: a white gazpacho [with garlic and almonds] is ajo blanco, a green one is made with green tomatoes and an orange one is made with bitter oranges. There are as many gazpacho recipes as there are people: it’s all about how you make it at home.”Fernando Huidobro, president of the Andalucían Academy of Gastronomy and Tourism, laughed off the idea of people getting hung up on a single ingredient. “The oldest, most original recipes for gazpacho are fairly anarchic,” he said. “It was a way for country people to feed themselves: ‘What can I eat easily to get me through my work? I’ve got water, I’ve got oil, I’ve got garlic and I’ve got vinegar. If I’ve got bread, I’ll put bread in’.” It was only later, when people started adding tomato, that the more “official” recipe was born... Spaniards seems to enjoy bickering over how their food should, or shouldn’t, be prepared. Jamie Oliver was threatened and insulted when he included chorizo in a “paella” recipe in 2016. “Remove the chorizo,” ordered one. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists.” The chef could have just called the dish arroz con cosas (rice with stuff), rather than the more sacrosanct label. The most perennial debate, however, is over onion in a tortilla, which pits concebollistas (with-onionists) against sincebollistas (without-onionists), and is complicated by the equally personal issue of how long a tortilla should be cooked for. Some prefer it barely set so it oozes eggy puddles when cut, while others like a drier, firmer omelette."
Ahh... "authenticity"!

As Evergreen State’s enrollment continues to tank, it hosts white-blaming ‘equity symposium’ - "You remember The Evergreen State College, right? It became fodder for national headlines in 2017 as a result of the massive fallout over its Day of Absence observance in which white people were asked to stay off campus for a day.Soon after, its enrollment began to take a nosedive. Two years later, it’s still tanking... So what has the college’s administrators done to right the course? Well, certainly not scaled back on anti-white programming.In mid-November the college hosted the “Evergreen Equity Symposium” that featured a parade of workshops that blamed white people, white fragility, white supremacy, whiteness, racism, institutional racism and unconscious bias for most of the ills in America today.The fact that the university has apparently learned nothing from its national spanking two years ago is not lost on Benjamin Boyce, an Evergreen alumnus who has chronicled the college’s ongoing trainwreck in a series of YouTube videos... The protesters were the aggressive, baseball-bat wielding students from 2017 who surrounded and threatened white biology Professor Bret Weinstein for refusing to leave campus on the Day of Absence, thus forcing his class to take place in a nearby park.But Boyce said look behind the curtain.“My entire work is to show that the protestors were just acting out the fanatical fantasies of the professoriate,” Boyce said. “…They’re still doing the same thing they used to be doing, it’s just a little more filled out.”Making matters worse, the diversity official who organized the symposium took in a salary of $166,000 a year"

What Is "Sushi-Grade," Anyway? A Guide to Eating Raw Fish at Home - "Officially, the terms "sashimi-grade" and "sushi-grade" mean precisely nothing... when you see a piece of fish labeled sushi- or sashimi-grade, that means that the seller has judged it safe to eat raw. The claim is only as trustworthy as the fish market that makes it... "Any wild fish except tuna species—bigeye, yellowfin, bluefin, bonito/skipjack—those wild fish need to be frozen for specific periods of time at specific temperatures to get rid of parasites." The exact temperatures and times can be found on the FDA website, but suffice it to say that those temperatures, reaching as low as -31°F, are well below what a home freezer can reliably produce and maintain, which is why it isn't advisable to try this at home. Sushi restaurants and fish markets use what's called a "super freezer"... Exempted from the FDA's freezing requirements are, as Herron mentions, large species of tuna—deemed safe based on the frequency with which they are eaten in raw form and the infrequency of related, documented parasitic infection—as well as aquacultured fish, like salmon, given verification that the feed it's raised on is parasite-free... Despite the FDA's blanket recommendations for the elimination of parasites, which is the main goal of its freezing guidelines, very few infections from eating raw fish have been documented in American medical literature. In the US, eating raw fish that hasn't been frozen is rare enough that the agency's "Bad Bug Book" uses Japan as a reference point, since the practice is far more prevalent there. But even in Japan, where freezing of fish meant for sashimi is not required, reported infection rates are vanishingly small compared to the total population... Freshwater fish and some anadromous fish—fish, like salmon, that divide their life cycles between fresh and salt water—are susceptible to broad fish tapeworms, which are widely considered more harmful than other parasitic worms... The human body is sufficiently different from that of whales and elephant seals—typical anisakid end hosts—that it forces the worms to wander around inside of it. As they do so, they probe along the intestinal wall, trying to penetrate it and sometimes getting stuck in the process, which can necessitate resection. (Interestingly, because humans are a natural end host for tapeworms, Sakanari says that tapeworm infection, as disgusting as it might sound, would be preferable to larval anisakid infection. The pathologies associated with the adult fish tapeworm infection are by and large less severe, and can be treated with a simple anthelmintic.) Sakanari notes that preparations like ceviche, in which fish are submerged in an acidic bath, do nothing to kill off anisakids, since they thrive in highly acidic environments... parasites in raw fish are less of a concern than bacterial contamination... fillets are then allowed to air-dry in a refrigerator designed to maintain a controlled temperature and humidity level to reduce the moisture content in the flesh, a process sometimes referred to as "aging." "Taking the moisture out is sanitary, and it makes the fish more flavorful," Haraguchi says, noting that "a lot of people make the mistake of packing fish right after it's filleted, and there's a lot of moisture still left, whether it's from the fish or from the water used to clean the fish."
This may be where the claim that freshwater fish are dangerous because they have human-harming parasites but saltwater fish don't because the physiology is different comes from - a distortion about a claim about a specific worm

Why Hayden Christensen Played Anakin PERFECTLY - Star Wars Explained - YouTube - "His entire demeanor is always as if he's processing something. And that's the genius right there... It's how Anakin should be - conflicted. He was always conflicted. Luke sensed it in him even into his older age as Vader. Anakin always had this hate, and it's because of what happened to him as a kid that something that only got worse the more that he was mistreated and stressed out"

Could the world cope if GPS stopped working? - "It's a remarkable story for an invention that first won support in the US military because it could help with bombing people - and even it was far from sure it needed it. One typical response was: "I know where I am, why do I need a damn satellite to tell me where I am?" The first GPS satellite launched in 1978 - but it wasn't until the first Gulf War, in 1990, that the sceptics came around.As Operation Desert Storm ran into a literal desert storm, with swirling sand reducing visibility to 5m (16ft), GPS let soldiers mark the location of mines, find their way back to water sources, and avoid getting in each other's way.It was so obviously lifesaving, and the military had so few receivers to go around, soldiers asked their families in America to spend their own money shipping over $1,000 (£820) commercially available devices... The American taxpayer puts up the billion-odd dollars a year it takes to keep GPS going, and that's very kind of them"

Can you charge different customers different amounts? - "Imagine, said Coase, you were a monopolist, you alone produced a certain thing. Many people wanted to buy it - some would pay a lot, others much less although still enough for you to turn a profit. Ideally, you would like to charge a high price to the first group, a low price to the second.But how could you get away with that? One possible answer is to launch at a high price, then lower it to widen your market.That's what Steve Jobs tried with the first iPhone, which cost $600 (£468). After two months, he cut the price to $400 (£312). Predictably - although it apparently surprised Steve Jobs - the people who had rushed to pay $600 were less than impressed.  That's why Coase argued this strategy could not work.  The first set of buyers would see through the trick and realise if they only waited, they could buy the thing more cheaply.  This idea is called the "Coase conjecture", as explained in a paper published in 1972... He had anticipated what would later become known as the "trickle-down" theory of fashion: people tend to emulate those they consider above them on the social scale... why did Wedgwood not fall foul of the Coase conjecture?  After a while, his aristocratic clients must surely have worked out that whenever Wedgwood launched something they had never seen before, they could simply wait to pick it up more cheaply.  But the trickle-down theory works both ways. If people are trying to emulate their social superiors, what do you do if you're already at the top of the scale? You try, of course, to look different to the people below you.  Some economists now discuss fashion as an exception to the Coase conjecture. Even if you know you'll get something cheaper if you wait a while, sometimes you still want it right now.  A few years after he wowed the Queen, Wedgwood observed Queen's Ware was "now being rendered vulgar and common everywhere". If the great people wanted to set themselves apart from the middling people, they would have to show off their wealth and good taste by buying something new."