Wednesday, April 17, 2024

Links - 17th April 2024 (1)

Nothing wrong with how that lady cooked rice—but all sorts of wrong with how the Internet reacted - "UK-based Malaysian comedian Nigel Ng, as his “Uncle Roger” character, posted a reaction video on his YouTube channel. In the video, he cries outrage at the BBC Food cooking demo of one unsuspecting Hersha Patel who ruins a recipe for Chinese-style Egg Fried Rice for all to see. His video soon went viral, with now close to 6 million viewers and counting. As one of those millions, I was equal parts horrified and laughing out loud at Ng who recounts in hilarious detail Patel’s every rice-cooking crime. But as with all things viral, either they soon fade into oblivion, or they give us the chance to learn something new, not just about the many ways to cook rice, but perhaps how to better manage our Internet anger. Described as an award-winning presenter and filmmaker by the BBC Food website, Hersha Patel cheerfully prepared an Egg Fried Rice recipe for BBC Food, oblivious to the many crimes she was about to commit... After my initial fury, I took a pause to realize how Nigel Ng as a comedian actually frames his critique—not as seat-of-the-pants outrage, but as a carefully crafted reaction that has us fall for every cultural “trap” his character sets. If you find a way to see through your outrage, you’ll see he’s playing us all along... While Patel was roundly mocked online for her disastrous rice recipe, a little research reveals that she may not be as clueless as she is perceived to be. Patel is of Indian heritage (she’s Asian too!) with her own “Cook with a Little Indian” series on YouTube where she cooks mostly Indian dishes with “overall mind/body health” in mind.  Curious as to why she decided to cook rice in that odd way, I pulled out my old Indian cookbook, 1,000 Indian Recipes by Neelam Batra (2002, Wiley Publishing), turned to the chapter on rice, and, voilà, on page 533, step 1 of the Boiled Basmati Rice recipe reads like this:
1. Put the rice and the water in a large pot and bring to a rolling boil over high heat. Reduce the heat to medium, and continue to boil until the rice is 3/4 cooked, about 7 minutes. (There will be plenty of water in the pot even after the rice is ready.) Drain the rice through a large fine-mesh strainer and discard the water, or use it as a base for soups, stews, or curries.
So here it is in black and white: you can actually cook long-grain basmati rice (as opposed to the short grain variety we tend to favor) like pasta, draining the rice of excess water after cooking. In this recipe, after draining, the rice is then returned to the pot to finish cooking over low heat until the grains separate. Note that the cookbook also covers the “absorption method,” which is the process more familiar to most other Asians, including Uncle Roger.   While the above recipe doesn’t mention Patel’s other crime of rinsing hot cooked rice in cold water, in fact, she’s not the only guilty one. After a Google search on “how to cook rice in India,” here’s what I discovered from longtime Indian recipe blog, Mamta’s Kitchen. When describing the same “pasta method” of cooking rice, the blog elaborates, “Indians do not run cold water on cooked rice, as it is almost always served immediately, fresh and hot. However, this is a good thing to do, if you are going to use the rice for a stir-fry, which requires cold rice. Running cold water will stop it from cooking further and getting lumpy.”   Aha, Patel isn’t guilty after all! She was doing the traditional “pasta method” all along, then rinsing it afterwards for stir-frying. Her only “true crime” is that she didn’t pre-wash the rice before cooking. (Hmm, but could that step have been edited out of the video?)  In fact, the real culprit here is BBC Food which doesn’t bother to give context to this recipe—that it’s a Chinese-style fried rice dish that uses an Indian rice cooking method—confusing us instead. It’s just another example of how Western food media tends to jumble up diverse culinary origins into a vaguely “Asian” category.   With Uncle Roger’s faux encouragement, us Southeast Asians and East Asians became rice-cooking supremacists, instantly condemning Patel for her horrendous cooking skills. But what we really did was bury a part of the whole story—that rice is cooked in every continent on earth except Antarctica, and that rice doesn’t belong solely to us."
From 2020. Apparently Uncle Roger is innocent for unleashing an internet mob
It seems white people aren't the only ones who can do cultural appropriation. Maybe Uncle Roger should slam Indian Chinese food as an abomination

Court orders environment minister to unblock Rebel News founder on X - "Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault must unblock Rebel News founder Ezra Levant on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, under the terms of a court order... Levant argued that his inability to see or respond to Guilbeault's posts on the platform limited his ability to engage in debate on matters of public concern... Levant noted in his submission that Guilbeault chose to block him rather than use the social media platform's less intrusive muting function, which allows a user to remove another user's posts from their timeline without unfollowing or blocking that account... "It might sound like a small thing, but if Guilbeault can cut us off from receiving news and other information from the government, what else can he cut off?"... University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, who has followed the case, said that while the order does not affirm a constitutional right, it sends a strong signal about the state of the law.  "We do know that government officials are using these platforms all the time for what are official statements and basically the business of government, and that should be accessible to anyone," Geist said.  "It shouldn't be open to a minister or their staff to decide who has access to publicly available information on a particular platform.""

Sharon Stone finally shares name of producer who 'pressured her' to have sex with co-star in 1993 film - "The actor went on to claim that Evans encouraged her to sleep with Baldwin to help improve his performance on screen.  She said: "He's running around his office in sunglasses explaining to me that he slept with Ava Gardner and I should sleep with Billy Baldwin, because if I slept with Billy Baldwin, Billy Baldwin's performance would get better.  "And we needed Billy to get better in the movie because that was the problem... When Stone first recalled the incident in her memoir, she wrote: "You guys insisted on this actor when he couldn't get one whole scene out in the test. Now you think if I f**k him, he will become a fine actor? Nobody's that good in bed.""

Mental health problems not reduced after obesity surgery in young people - "Young people who have had surgery for obesity do not improve their mental health despite significant and permanent weight loss. However, bariatric surgery increases the risk of early alcohol problems. This is according to the largest long-term study of young people who have undergone bariatric surgery, conducted at Lund University and Karolinska Institutet, among others..   "Obesity surgery has very positive effects on weight, blood sugar, and blood pressure control, but when it comes to mental health, it does not get better or worse after bariatric surgery," says Martin Neovius, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at Karolinska Institutet."

New York teen discovers best friend of 10 years is an actor hired by family - "Lawson Spolansky describes himself in his TikTok bio as an 'embarrassing best friend', but earlier this month he shared a horror story about exactly who he had been 'best friend' to... Dexter apparently told Spolansky he wanted to take him on a trip to Paris, Spain and Universal California using some birthday money he had.  He told him to start planning what to pack, but just one day later began making 'weird excuses' as to why they couldn't go.  Imagine Spolansky's shock, then, when he saw a photo on Instagram of Dexter, his mom and Spolansky's own aunt in Hollywood together.  Baffled, Spolansky questioned Dexter and his aunt over what was going on, only to be met with claims that it must have been a 'miscommunication'.  Jump ahead again to 2021, when Spolansky's boyfriend at the time was working as a pool boy for none other than Dexter's mom.  Only, while working there, he apparently figured out that the woman wasn't Dexter's mom at all, but his agent.  In his video, Spolansky told baffled viewers that he learned his aunt was actually best friends with Dexter's real mom - a woman he'd never met - and that she'd paid her to have Dexter befriend Spolansky. Not only that, but Spolansky claimed his therapist was also the sister of Dexter's agent... Spolansky's aunt has also reportedly refuted the claims to Spolansky."

Meme - *Artificial Inflatable Flower*
Bee: "UH, iT's FoR My BRoTHER'S BAcHELOR PaRTY."
Bee Postman: "Sure, Pal"

Meme - "Today you will paint what I have put before you *teacher with open legs and vase on table*
*3 kids painting vase, 1 kid painting teacher's genitals*

Meme - "I watch One Piece for the character development"
The character development:
Episode 5: *small breasts*
Episode 155: *medium breasts*
Episode 380: *large breasts*
Episode 550: *very large breasts*

Meme - "You can't be friends with the gender you're attracted to"
Bisexuals: *Pablo Escobar Waiting variant*

More Than Half of Iceland Believes in Elves - "Elves are small—only 36 inches high at most. And though they have big ears and wear old-fashioned clothing, they do not wear pointy hats.  Such facts can be learned on an “elf walk” in Hafnarfjörður, Iceland, a harbor town just outside Reykjavík reputed to be the elves’ capital.  Yes, elves. Fifty-four percent of Icelanders either believe in them or say it’s possible they exist. Roads have been diverted around boulders where the elves, or álfar in Icelandic, supposedly reside. A former member of parliament even swears his life was saved in a car accident by a family of elves."
I saw a meme mocking Americans for believing in Bigfoot and claiming in Europe they weren't superstitious

The Genius Who Killed Himself Trying to Become Immortal - "Alexander Bogdanov wasn't much of a big name in America, but in the Soviet Union he was famous. A science fiction writer, doctor, and pioneer of cybernetics, he was curious about everything. Including the thing that killed him... he kept up with his medical work, especially hematology. He became interested in the possibilities of blood transfusions, especially when it came to life extension. Bogdanov believed he might even make himself immortal if he transfused enough. In the 1920s, he gave himself transfusion after transfusion, and published articles on its salubrious effects. His eyesight was better, he claimed. He had stopped balding. Friends egged him on in this, telling him he looked ten years younger.  To us, today, it's obvious that things were heading for disaster. Bogdanov's ability to transfuse blood far outstripped his ability to test blood. He transfused blood from a malarial student. The student survived. Bogdanov died."

The end of free 'fika' in Sweden, a symptom of economic crisis - "Everywhere in Sweden, in offices and factories alike, the fika break is sacrosanct. In general, everyone stops work first at around 9:30 am, then again at 2:30 pm, for a coffee break with colleagues. In some companies, these get-togethers are more spontaneous but everyone ends up in front of the coffee machine, culminating in the fredagsfika: the Friday coffee break, when they linger longer over pastries.  But since the beginning of the year, the fika has been in turmoil, following the publication of an article in the communal workers' newspaper Kommunal arbetaren on January 3, revealing that there is now a charge for the coffee in some local authorities. Worse still, some communes and regions reportedly differentiate between socio-professional categories. In the regions, for example, 94% of civil servants are entitled to free coffee, compared with just 75% of care assistants.   In some municipalities, employees are asked to fill in a questionnaire when they are hired: If they declare that they like coffee, their salary is automatically cut by a few dozen crowns (a few euros) each month. The Stockholm region has gone even further: Just before Christmas, employees in the health sector learned that they would no longer be entitled to the equally traditional fruit basket, which usually sits next to the coffee machine... These penny-pinching savings reflect a calamitous economic situation for local authorities. In 2023, all 21 regions and a third of Sweden's 290 municipalities ended the year with their finances in the red, according to local government association SKL. And 2024 is set to be even worse, with the deficit rising from 6 billion kronor to 31 billion (from €530 million to €2.75 billion). The reasons for this are inflation and rising interest rates, as well as an increase in needs, particularly in the healthcare sector and care for the elderly."

Meme - "This guy cut me off on the freeway today. I'm not even mad."
Licence plate: "EXCUSMI"

Meme - "I drank my best friends breast milk
I 19m was out on a hike with my friend (who has a 1 year old that she breastfeeds) when my blood sugar became dangerously low. I knew i was gunna pass out because i'm prone to it, and we had no food on us to stabilize my levels because we didn't want to attract animals, plus I haven't fainted in a while so I wasn't worried about it. My friend essentially breastfed me for like a minute to keep me from passing out so we could hike back to the car."

Actual Fact Bot: Revived | Facebook - "Stalin was hit by a horse-drawn carriage twice as a child, which led to permanent damage to his left arm. This injury exempted him from fighting in World War 1 where he would have likely died."

After Time X on X - "DRILLCRYPT the latest in Ransomware can Shutdown whole Production Assembly Lines
The horrible industry of ransomware is spreading into more areas of our lives, now with #DRILLCRYPT manufacturing companies with major production assembly lines like for vehicles which required many different tools made by Bosch, could suddenly find themselves in a work stoppage with their assembly production employees holding tools in their hands that no longer function and instead just display a nice message demanding the company pay a "ransom" in #cryptocurrency within 72 hours or if not, production will just be stopped, with no more cars rolling off the production line.  As @LaurieWired  points out, simple things like Torque values can also be subtly changed to in cause more chaos on the assembly line, which will require more work in by the company in fixing errors in final test assembly.  Over 23 vulnerabilities were discovered by security researchers at Nozomi, which can be used by malicious hackers to setup an attack chain resulting in production line stoppage. It is scary world, we are living in now, as more and more of our technology we take for granted is connected online, and can be subject to attacks and exploits, all because a simple coding oversight in the device's software.
What are your thoughts on the increasing problem of #ransomware attacks on businesses and now in the critical areas of our production supply-chain?"
IOT FTW

Why millennial men are turning to the Book of Common Prayer | The Spectator - "The Book of Common Prayer is enjoying a revival in the Church of England, despite the best efforts of some modernists to mothball it... It helps that the Book of Common Prayer has had a fair bit of attention recently. The late Queen Elizabeth’s insistence on the use of Prayer Book texts in her funeral rites meant that in September more people witnessed the beauty of this liturgical treasure than watched Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon. The hairs on the back of my neck bristled as I heard on TV the solemn words echo around Westminster Abbey: ‘In the midst of life we are in death.’ And in the lead-up to the coronation, the Prayer Book has once again been in the public eye – although not all the publicity has been good. Cambridge University Press’s beautifully bound new Prayer Book, published in time for the coronation, had to be recalled from its first print run when it was noticed that the text mistakenly included France as a dominion under Charles III. Some priests have held on to their misprints in the hope that they might become rare collectors’ items or in case the sorry state of French politics makes them prophetic.  What’s interesting is that the C of E’s Book of Common Prayer revival is overwhelmingly led by millennials... He jokes that from what he can see no one under 40 is joining a church that doesn’t focus on tradition and rigour. ‘Why should I bother with a church that doesn’t challenge me spiritually or a liturgy that doesn’t demand more of me?’ Though he started his Christian life being baptised in a Californian megachurch swimming pool, he found himself longing for something more exacting."

U.S. Universities Roll Out China-Style Social Credit Tracking for Students - "The app uses bluetooth beacons, which installers stick on walls and ceilings, to ping a student’s smartphone, WaPo reported. The app then records a students’ presence so advisers know when they are not in attendance or have temporarily stepped out of the room for a break...   Carter created a euphemism to explain what his app does. He told WaPo he prefers the term “monitored” instead of “tracked,” because the former supposedly carries a negative connotation. “It’s about building that relationship,” so students “know you care about them,” he said.  Schools can turn to a start-up called Degree Analytics, which uses WiFi check-ins to track roughly 200,000 students across 19 state universities, WaPo reported. Over 98% of a college’s students can be measured and analyzed through Degree Analytics, according to data scientist Aaron Benz, who developed the app in 2017.  Benz’s team designed a set of high-tech algorithms to look for patterns in a student’s behavior and automatically flag when their habits change, a strategy he euphemistically calls scaffolding. Students who deviate from their everyday rhythms are flagged for anomalies."
Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines - The Washington Post - "By logging the time a student spends in different parts of the campus, Benz said, his team has found a way to identify signs of personal anguish: A student avoiding the cafeteria might suffer from food insecurity or an eating disorder; a student skipping class might be grievously depressed. The data isn’t conclusive, Benz said, but it can “shine a light on where people can investigate, so students don’t slip through the cracks.”... Several students said they didn’t mind a system designed to keep them honest. But one of them, a freshman athlete at Temple University who asked to speak anonymously to avoid team punishment, said the SpotterEDU app has become a nightmare, marking him absent when he’s sitting in class and marking him late when he’s on time.  He said he squandered several of his early lectures trying to convince the app he was present, toggling his settings in desperation as professors needled him to put the phone away. He then had to defend himself to campus staff members, who believed the data more than him. His teammates, he said, have suffered through their own technical headaches, but they’ve all been told they’ll get in trouble if they delete the app from their phones."

Meme - "No! She can't come out to play again." *woman to male cat, with female cat and litter of kittens inside house*

Meme - "Big stupid ikea lamp that I hate
Free
A big ass ikea lamp that I've hit my head on about a dozen times. If you can pick it up from Richmond and figure out how to pull it apart, it's yours."

Meme - Venn diagram: "Christianity"
"Mexican porn"
Intersection: "Jesus is coming"

In search of ant ancestors - "Ants are arguably the greatest success story in the history of terrestrial metazoa. On average, ants monopolize 15–20% of the terrestrial animal biomass, and in tropical regions where ants are especially abundant, they monopolize 25% or more"

Meme - "When your mom kicks you out of the house, thanks a lot. 'family' my ass!"
"dude you okay? if you need a place to crash u can stay here"
"ill message you later bro, and thanks 4having my back! just so pissed off cuz family are meant to have my back but they dont"
"I kicked you out of the house because your little sister is pregnant and you are the father. You are a disgrace and after i respond to this silly status i am blocking you of facebook and you are never allowed back in my home again!! how can you even have the audacity to post this?? you are not my son anymore you are fucking dead to me. im disqusted with u"
"wtf. *** mom do realise how u hve made me feel? U have just fucking outed all of our personal shit out into the open n u think thts okay? Fuck u I dnt even fucking care if I'm dead to u what happened is between Jessie an I and we explained everything tht happened u should have my back ur meant to be my mom and u are treating me like a fuckin criminal"
"you are a criminal didjdi you comitted incest and not to mention your little sister is 15 and u are 31 IT'S FUCKING DISGUSTING!!! i am ashamed i cant even show myself in the grocery store or anything because i feel so embarrassed. u have ruined this family and ruined your sisters life & do not care if the whole world sees this status because u dont deserve any sympathy i wish i never gave birth to you!!"
"what the fuck"

Jon Hartley on X - "On why he is retiring from academia: "It just didn't make sense to me to keep on puttering around, doing all this work, spending years to write papers that no one cared about when I had other ways of getting my ideas out. And really my interests were elsewhere. I didn't get any thrill. It'd be one thing. If I got a thrill from publishing, if I loved the act of publishing, and it made me feel great to see my nature in some journal, then it would be different. But I never cared about that. I just liked answering the problems and I realized there were better ways, there were better venues for me to answer your problem. And so really the question is, why am I retiring now? The question I should ask myself is why didn't I retire a long time ago? It made no sense. I've just been, I've thought, I've known for years, it's the wrong place for me to be. And it just took me a long time to figure out how to extricate myself from academics. And I'm so glad I'm doing it. It's good for everyone. It doesn't make any sense to, it feels to me awful to be in a place where I'm not excited and where I'm not contributing materially. So, for me, it feels like a breath of fresh air to be saying, "Hey, I'm not going to be an academic anymore. I'm going to be doing what I really love to do."""
On Steve Levitt

Meme - "MP3"
"A portable device you can bring with you to play music!"
"MP4"
"An upgrade to the first device that lets you play videos as well!"
"MP5"
"?"

Albert Göring - Wikipedia - "Albert Günther Göring (9 March 1895 – 20 December 1966) was a German engineer, businessman, and the younger brother of Hermann Göring (head of the German Luftwaffe, founder of the Gestapo, and leading member of the Nazi Party). In contrast to his brother, Albert was opposed to Nazism, and helped Jews and others persecuted in Nazi Germany.He was shunned in post-war Germany because of his family name, and died without any public recognition, receiving scant attention for his humanitarian efforts until decades after his death"

Meme - "MEDIA LITERACY
Fashes (bad)
- Doing a space racism
- Doing a propaganda
- Doing a militarism
Brown people (good)
- Being ugly and disgusting (wholesome)
- Doing an anti-colonialism
- Doing communism"

Auron MacIntyre on X - "The Starship Troopers discourse is always great because leftists inevitably end up identifying with with hideous murderous hive insects while passionately rejecting everything that is beautiful and heroic"

Meme - SyckoSlayer @SyckoSlayer: "The more bug simps telling me that humanity is bad and we should die out, the more my views on aliens start siding with this guy: *Colonel Quaritch from Avatar*"

Meme - Human Killing Bug: "FOR EARTH!"
Gamer: "Wow, THIS IS LIKE PROPAGANDA!"
Gamer with mask: "NOTHING GETS PAST ME" *trans flag* *polar bear global warming poster* *box of masks* *Kony 2012 mug* *"I stand with" t-shirt* *plaster on arm (vaccinated)* *"In This House We Believe Black Lives Matter Women's RIghts Are Human Rights No Human Is Illegal Science Is Real Love Is Love Kindess Is Everything" sign*
FOXFORD COMICS 2024. MIND GAMES"

Thailand Zoo Orangutan Grabs Woman's Breasts, Lands a Smooch!!! - YouTube
羡慕😂😂 | Instagram (Similar)

Meme - "do NOT take the snoopy gas station adderall"
"ADDY. Focus Stimulant"

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