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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • Is it really impossible to make a protein bar savory?

    In order to make something that is shelf stable without refrigeration, it needs to be either hostile to harmful microbes or sealed in a way with no harmful microbes inside (and will have to be refrigerated after opening).

    There are a few ways to do it without sealing, including reducing water activity low enough that microbes can’t grow. Flour, rice, oats, nuts, and other bulk dry goods generally follow a dehydration process. Oil doesn’t have water in it, so sometimes there are high oil substances (peanut butter) that don’t have enough water to support microbial activity.

    Another way to reduce water activity is to bind the water molecules with other molecules. Sugar is by far the most common substance useful for reducing water activity, because it’s possible to mix water with a lot of sugar. Honey is shelf stable because it’s something like 15% water and 85% sugar. Maple syrup is about 33% water and 67% sugar. At those sugar levels, microbes struggle to actually resist the osmotic pressure and use the water present in the substance.

    Note that salt can’t really do the same thing. A brine that is 95% water and 5% salt is basically inedibly salty. But 95% water is still top high to really inhibit microbial growth. At most, you hope that good microbes outcompete bad microbes (this is the basis for pickling sauerkraut, Kim chi, certain types of pickled cucumbers, where lactobacillus strains will outcompete harmful bacteria and mold). But even these foods may keep much longer when refrigerated. Even soy sauce, at 16-20% salt, is recommended to be kept in the refrigerator (for quality, not necessary for food safety).

    There are other ways to inhibit microbial growth, or just the harmful microbes: acid or alcohol can do a lot.

    But as a result, the easiest way to make a shelf stable bar is to dehydrate it, maybe add a bunch of sugar, and use ingredients that still have good taste/texture when dehydrated. So they use a lot of things like nuts, chocolate (high enough sugar to have low water activity), trapped air bubbles (good crunch when totally dried out). And the sugar allows it all to bind together.

    And there are other ways to bake savory goods. They just have to be crispy all throughout, and usually thin enough to bake/fry dry without making it too hard to be pleasant. Think chips, pretzels, even savory mixes like Gardetto’s or Chex mix. Even the bread stick components have to be dehydrated to the point of being brittle and crispy, like a crouton. Turning that into a shelf stable bar form that actually tastes good, without adding sugar, would be difficult.






  • My question (do taller women have a preference for less height difference compared to shorter women) was actually answered by the graph, because the slope of the line is less than 1.

    A 1.6m woman seems to most prefer a 1.78m partner (18cm taller), whereas a 1.8m woman seems to prefer a 1.89m partner (9cm taller). I other words, it’s not that they’re less choosy, it’s just that they expect a smaller delta when they themselves are tall.

    Of course, the thick line in that graph doesn’t correspond with the headline numbers mentioned (21cm), but I also notice that the thick line isn’t the center of the acceptable range. That is, women seem to be more forgiving of people who are taller than their ideal than they are of people who are shorter than their ideal. That’s an interesting finding, too.



  • But her height is actually useful. She’s a starter in a sport in which height is a useful physical trait, which helped her with university admissions with a scholarship. She’s apparently a professional who has been on the roster of some overseas teams, and plays for her national team (Canada).

    Plus growing up in a family with tall people might make it easier to deal with. Her dad is former NBA player Mike Smrek and presumably has a social circle of very tall people and maybe even their very tall children.

    So I don’t doubt that a lot of tall women actively dislike their own height. But this particular woman probably has reason to like being tall.


  • This effect is even more pronounced when examining satisfaction with actual partner height: women are most satisfied when their partner was 21 cm taller, whereas men are most satisfied when they were 8 cm taller than their partner.

    I don’t have access to the full article, but it sounds like they didn’t examine the sliding scale of height preferences, by one’s own height.

    The article says that taller people have a taller ideal height for their partners. And it also says that on average women’s preference is a partner 21cm taller than themselves, and men had a preference for 8cm shorter. But from the publicly available text, it doesn’t seem to report on whether that preferred delta between one’s own height and the ideal partner height changed with the absolute height of themselves.

    So I’m curious: does the data support the conclusion that a 5’ (1.52m) woman would prefer a 5’8" (1.73m) partner, and that a 5’8" (1.73m) woman would also still prefer that 21cm/8 inch difference, looking for a 6’4" (1.94) partner? Or is there a sliding scale where already tall people aren’t exactly looking for excessively unusual outliers, and that the preference of tall women is something smaller than 21cm, such that the overall average might be that very short women prefer a big height difference but very tall women prefer a small height difference?




  • I disagree with you. I’d never want to go back to the old defaults in forums, of un-threaded conversations where every comment is equal (and generally sorted by timestamp). Some comments are just better than others, and a user interface should prioritize the better comments.

    Comments that are interesting, funny, or informative can be read by more people when they’re shown earlier in the page.

    Comments that are rude, factually incorrect, off topic, etc., can be de-emphasized in the user interface, even if they don’t technically break any rules. I’d rather it be a community driven decision than a mod-driven decision of the harsh consequences of comment removal or user ban.

    The key is to find a community whose collective opinions you respect. Crowds may not be perfect, but they’re generally better than individual mods.

    And a naive “newest first” sort algorithm just prioritizes frequent posters and incentivizes “bumping” threads, which also detracts from the overall quality of a forum.



  • There’s evidence piling up that there is an inverse correlation between outdoor time in childhood and nearsightedness. It’s believed that the brightness of sunlight helps stimulate eye growth in a spherical shape, whereas children who don’t get a lot of sunlight are more likely to have eyes grow in a non-spherical shape with greater distance between the lens and the retina.

    You can search the scientific literature for myopia and childhood sun exposure for a large number of studies on the topic.

    Does screen time correlate with myopia? Maybe, but through the confounding variable that both stats tend to be inversely correlated with sunlight exposure.