exasperation

In the U.S., the convention set by the national chains are small (10"), medium (12"), and large (14"), with some having extra large (16") as an option. Most local places will follow that convention as well.

The Chinese have a method for curing eggs in alkaline solution until they turn black and somewhat translucent, too.

With olives, there's basically no way to eat them off the tree and have them taste edible. They have to be processed in some way to remove the bitter compounds, usually by brining or curing. So using an alkaline brine is one method, and not that uncommon (even for other colors of olives).

Other uses of alkaline compounds in cooking include using a lye bath for browning for baking pretzels or bagels, certain types of springiness and chewiness for noodles (for example, for fresh ramen), and processing corn into cornmeal through nixtamalization.

This is the opposite side of the "wowthanksimcured" hashtag/subreddit/topic that was popular about 10 years ago. These feelings don't always have an objectively rational cause. Which also means that if there's some kind of medical cause or intervention necessary, screening for it is important.

You keep calling it a "die off" because you're being visually tricked by the misleading population pyramid. Use the actuarial tables instead.

Among 65 year old men, the probability of surviving to 75 is 76%. The probability of surviving to 85 is 39%. The probability of surviving to 95 is 5.9%.

For women, the odds are 84%, 52%, and 12% of getting to 75/85/95, respectively.

Yes, these are higher death rates than at younger ages. But nowhere near what the shape of the population pyramid suggests, where the 85 age cohort is about 1/4 as large as the 65, which misleadingly suggests a probability of 25% of living 20 more years, when the real number is closer to 45%.

That's the baby boom moving up the chart.

Yes, exactly my point. The boomer generation itself made the population pyramid look different at every stage of its life, which is why the 1980 chart looks so different from the 2023 chart. When you introduce a cohort that has its own slope from birth statistics, the shape of the drop off at 60 is confounded by the preexisting shape of the slope before they entered old age.

So the appropriate method of isolating the variable that shows what you call a "die off" would be to just pull up the actuarial tables that show what percentage of 60, 61, 62 year olds, etc., die that year. Not to compare how many of those there are as a percent of overall population.

You don't think that 1980 chart has a very different shape? The current chart is almost flat from 20-60, while the 1980 chart is actually pyramid shaped, with the steepness is only slightly sharper past 60. And matches the steepness of the range from 25-50. Nobody talks about a 25-year-old die off.

You're better off charting the actuarial tables to convey the data you're trying to talk about (death rates), rather than relying on a stat that is influenced by birth rates and death rates in an opaque way.

That population pyramid is a bit misleading because the baby boom coincides with the ages with the steepest declines. In part, there were significantly fewer people born in 1939 compared to 1959, so you'd expect way more 65 year olds than 85 year olds in 2024.

Yes, the death rate is higher among older people, but the life expectancy of a 60 year old man is still another 20 years.

You can crossover any Dinosaur Comic by setting the butiwouldratherbereading variable to xkcd at the end of the URL.

For example:

https://qwantz.com/index.php?comic=4264&butiwouldratherbereading=xkcd

There's a whole list of them I remember from like 10 years ago but I don't know where to find them.

Sheng Wang had short hair when he first got into the standup game:

https://youtu.be/Qvo9stCkbyA

Both Jimmy O. Yang and Sheng Wang are hilarious, but you should recognize that they are two different people.

That's why it's funny that the bicycling community talks of "dentists" with all their gear. The people best equipped to really pursue that hobby wholeheartedly are the people who make a shitload of money doing something completely different.

It's saying that it's just a fucking hobby. It's purpose is to be enjoyed not mastered.

Yeah, too many people preemptively gatekeep themselves: you're not a real (hobbyist) unless you master (narrow part of the hobby), so you're not allowed to take up that hobby until you're ready to commit to that boring/tedious/difficult part.

I play chess and I don't know the names of openings (and still have a lot of trouble with following notation). Who gives a shit, I'm not going to win tournaments. But I still have fun with it, occasionally play strangers in the park, and have been having fun teaching my kids how to play.

I half-ass my fitness and workout routine. Sometimes I go months in between gym sessions, and sometimes I go 6x a week for months, break some PRs, and then go on living my life. Sometimes I run 500 miles in a year, sometimes I run 10. Whatever. Life gets busy, and my own preferences shift between whether I want to do cardio, weights, sports, yoga, metcon/CrossFit style classes, or just sit on my ass and get weak and fat for a year. I'm in my 40's, so I've been all over the place on all of these things.

I can watch a TV show without needing to start from the pilot and watching every episode that came out. I can watch a movie without trying to understand every reference to everything else in the same cinematic universe. I enjoy watching basketball and football even when I can't name all the players, much less their whole career histories.

And after all that, a funny thing starts to happen. You find that you actually are pretty good at certain things compared to the public, even though you didn't wholeheartedly devote all your effort to that thing.

I like being a dilettante. It's awesome and I'd recommend this lifestyle to anyone. The best way to enjoy a hobby is to be unburdened by expectations.