How rice cooker works?

Rice cooker is an amazing tool to get you rice just right easily, but do you know how it decides when to stop cooking?

Of course, there are more complex rice cookers which may not follow this principle, right know I’m talking about the cheap and simple rice cookers.

It working principle is simple and brilliant: it simply checks temperature

As long as there is water, the temperature won’t rise above 100°C / 212°F, because that is when water start boiling. A part of the water will evaporate, and the rest will be absorbed by the rice itself. Once the water is all gone, the cooker bottom will heat the rice, which will go above the water boiling point, the rice cooker can measure this temperature and it knows there is no more water, and that rice should be cooked, assuming you have put the right amount of water!

Taste

The commonly used map of the tongue, showing the 4 tastes is wrong and creates a bad idea of how taste work. As noted in The Tongue Map: Tasteless Myth Debunked, there is not much known about the sense of taste, a lot more information have been gathered on hearing and vision. It may be due to the fact that this sense is apparently not primordial for survival. It is indeed more important that it may seems as allows us to detect spoiled and unripe food.

Of course, in modern society, it is far less useful in day to day life than vision or hearing.

There are 5 different tastes identified:

• sweet
• sour
• bitter
• salty
• umami

And some are wondering if there may be sixth kind of receptor for the fat.

Umami is the least known one, it is very common in Japanese cuisine, and can be tasted through the receptors for glutamate. It is said to be a lasting one, that will let you with an delicious aftertaste. From the Wikipedia article:

Umami has a mild but lasting aftertaste that is difficult to describe. It
induces salivation and a sensation of furriness on the tongue, stimulating the
throat, the roof and the back of the mouth.

That rises a new important point, we always associate taste with the tongue, but in fact, taste buds are present on more places:

• tongue
• soft palate
• upper esophagus
• epiglottis

This taste buds contains the taste receptors that will react to the chemical component we associate with a given taste, and transmit the information to the brain.

Last, but not least, the smell is tightly tied to taste, we all know when we have a cold taste changes, and can sometimes feel like gone. Both smell and taste are analyzing the chemical compounds of what we smell and eat.

You can read more about taste and smell ties at BrainFacts.

The Largest Vehicles in the world

There are various type vehicles and there are therefore various record holders, so lets summarize that a little.

Largest two-axle

The most known, huge two-axle is the Caterpillar 797:

But it is quite close to the Liebherr T 282B:

And the Bucyrus MT6300AC:

This beasts are haul trucks of 400 short ton capacity, with quite impressive dimension, with no clear winner

dimension	797F	T282B	mt6300ac
height	7.44 m	7.32 m	7.92 m
width	9.53 m	9.09 m	9.70 m
length	15.09 m	15.32 m	15.57m
weight¹	623700 kg	596900 kg	603300 kg

¹: this is Gross Machine Operating Weight

Depending of the criteria you use, you can give the prize to the 797F aor the MT6300AC, knowing the T292B is always close.

Largest mobile artillery weapon

The Gustav Gun, is the name used for the two German 80cm railway guns. You read that right, 80cm, is the caliber, the diameter of the ammunition if you prefer. They were named Schwerer Gustav and Dora, here is a picture of a model version of Dora:

This were developed in the late 30’s and were 47.3 meter long and weigthed 1490 short tons (to stay in the same measures as previously used in this article).

The Schwerer Gustav Wikipedia page contains more information, and nice pictures for scale, of the gun itself, and its ammunition.

Largest construction vehicle

The Terex RH400 is caterpillar track vehicle that is apparently a bigger than our two axle beasts we saw before, you can see it filling a 797B:

You can have a look at its specifications by yourself, but here is a little summary:

• height: 10.17 m
• width: 8.6m and that’s the tracks, the body is even larger
• shovel can reach 20.2 m up

Largest terrestrial vehicle

This is, by far, the Bagger series, the most known is the Bagger 288:

This behemoth is a bucket-wheel excavator thas weight 13500 tons, its length can go up to 220 m and it goes as high as 96 m for a with of 46 m.

And yes, it is a vehicle and can move up to 0.6km/h, not the fastest, but movies 13500 tons at this speed is already quite amazing. Even with the preparation needed to allow it to move, it was moved in 2001 by 22km, this was told to be less expensive than tear it apart and rebuild on the second location.

Bagger 288 is one of a group of similar sized and built vehicles, such as Bagger 281 (built in 1958), Bagger 285 (1975), Bagger 287 (1976), Bagger 293 (1995).

Largest ship

If the Bagger 288 is the behemoth of man-made vehicles, the Seawise Giant was the leviathan.

This supertanker was 458 m long, just for the references

• for french: Montparnasse tower is 210 m high, Eiffel Tower is 324 m
• for New Yorker: Empire State Building is 443 m, One World Trace Center is 541 m
• For Tokyo-Jin: Tokyo Tower is 333m

There are other building taller of course, I just named a few for scale (no banana here).

It was benched in january 2010, nowadays the largest floating ships are the Maersk Triple E class:

It is 400 m long by 59 m wide (some villages are smaller than that...). At this time there are 6 in service and 10 others are in said to be in construction with ever more ordered.

One of its interesting spec, is that it is a lot more efficient than comparable ships, and has an announced carbon footprint 50% smaller than same sized ships.

Bases, binary, hexadecimal, ascii

You may have heard that computers use binary, but why is that? Simply because in electronic, if you want to keep it simple, components have two possible state: on or off -> 0 or 1. The hardware is easier to design this way.

0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9...

08, 09, 10...

(4 * 10¹) + (2 * 10⁰)
(4 * 10) + (2 * 1)

0, 1

0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111...
0  1   2   3    4    5    6    7...

101010

0 * 2⁰ + 1 * 2¹ + 0 * 2² + 1 * 2³ + 0 * 2⁴ + 1 * 2⁵
0      + 2      + 0      + 8      + 0      + 32
= 42

0b101010

0x1, 0x2, 0x3, 0x4, 0x5, 0x6, 0x7, 0x8, 0x9, 0xa, 0xb, 0xc, 0xd, 0xe, 0xf

0x0e, 0x0f, 0x10, 0x11

0x2a

a * 16⁰ + 2 * 16¹
10 * 1 + 2 * 16
= 42

0x41 -> 0b01000001
0x61 -> 0b01100001

Cinemagraph

Cinemagraph sometimes called cinegraph are (quoted from wikipedia): still photographs in which a minor and repeated movement occurs.

This image is from here and belong to its author.

The moving part is normally contrasting with the stillness of the rest of the image, this is why most, the description is talking about minor movement.

This phenomenon has become quite popular lately, and can be absolutely mesmerizing when correctly done.

They are mostly distributed in gif, gif always play in loops, but a cinemagraph should be made so the loop point is almost unnoticeable.

If you like this, you can jump into it:

• #cinemagraph tag on tumblr
• cinemagraph communities on G+
• cinegraphs subreddit

All about Garlic

Not really a spice, not really a vegetable, the garlic is part of the onion genus, and we will now have a look at more information about it.

The Brain, Imagination, and Memories

Did you know that when you imagine doing a movement for example, you activate the same areas of your brain as if you were actually doing the said movement?

This gives a tremendous power to the brain on your body, I’ll try to show you how far all this extends, it may be a bit lengthy, but bear with me, this is worth it.

A common example is a tennis player thinking about how he serves before a game, repeating the movements in his mind to be sure to remember every details. Well, while he does this, his brain is actually using the same process as if he was actually serving.

The same goes for senses, if you use your memory to think about a smell you liked, you can trigger your brain in the same way as if you were actually smelling it. And as the brain works a lot in association of things, that is where your brain will also triggers associated memory, that is why a lot of us have memory of smell, or taste of cookies, or other treats we loved in our childhood that are associated with given moments of our life, of the presence of someone familiar, a mother, a grandmother for example.

This is actually used in some cases of hypnotherapy and in Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) like the one called Anchoring.

Anchoring is a very good example, as it makes you associate a state suited to face a situation, to an action. An example would be best:

Assume you are someone with too much anxiety, you can try to remember a moment of you life when you were perfectly calm and felt safe, think about this, and try to feel every feeling associated, the sounds, the taste, the smell, what you saw at this moment, the touch of the wind, or of a warm good old sweater on your body. If you do this properly, your brain should feel like it was at this moment, it will tell your body: everything is alright, and you should feel that way.

But doing the whole process in the case of a panic attack is not possible, that is why once you get to this state, you will choose a simple given action like joining your index and thumb for example, doing this in full conscience, concentrated on your action.

Because of the state you were in, and the act you just did, your brain will associate the two. For a good anchoring it may be required to do this multiple times. But once this anchor is properly set, you should be able to trigger the state you were in, simply by doing the associated action.

This power of the brain is pretty amazing and has quite a lot of possible uses, I actually discovered the basics of this principle in the following video. I find it pretty interesting although, Martin L. Rossman does talk about the Triune Brain which apparently has been unanimously rejected by the scientific community (found in the NLP french wikipedia page). Anyway, even if the principle of the three parts of the brain explained there are not completely accurate, the principle stays the same, and does work.

I suggest you have a look at the video, if you have some time in front of you:

In my opinion (I don’t claim I’m right about this), relaxation, part of meditation, of hypnotherapy and NLP, and probably much more, are all taking advantage of this same capacity of our mind to gets their benefit, and I’m pretty sure there is still a lot more to learn about the subject.

Lethal Doses

A well known fact about alcohol, is that it should be consumed in reasonable quantities. You probably have legal warning in advertisement for drinks in your country. If that is of interest, you can have a look at Health Warning Labels for various countries.

But that’s not the point here, what I want to do, is to list the amount of some common things we do intake regularly, and that can be lethal in higher quantities, and try to relate it to the quantity of beverage or food we would have to consume in order to reach this amount.

Obviously, this would have to be absorbed quite fast, as the body would try to eliminate as much of it as fast as it can.

Remember that this are assumed lethal doses, serious problems will arise far earlier! Please do not assume you can safely go to half of this without any issues, plus all this is only theoretical.

Tickling

Tickling is kind of odd, it is extremely hard to control for most people, and yet, you can’t really tickle yourself.

The reaction you encounter when tickled is actually a panic and anxiety reaction, it is a form of defense against possible crawling insect that may be poisonous for example. So the body needs to react quickly to avoid any risk.

So why can’t I really tickle myself? Well that is because you won’t feel in danger knowing you are the source of the tickling and that you control it.

Interesting enough, the reaction is not the same if you are tickled by someone you actually are OK with tickling you, or not, probably based on the level of confidence you have toward this person, thus adjusting the level of danger your body feel and the reaction to the tickling.

Blood and its color(s)

We, as most mammals, have red blood. This is due to the presence of iron in our blood, which when oxidize turns reddish.

Doppler Effect

Most people know about the Doppler Effect, some without knowing it, some had to go through a Doppler ultrasound, some of us even know it causes the slide of the sound in sirens passing by...

Definition: The Doppler effect (or Doppler shift), is the change in frequency of a wave (or other periodic event) for an observer moving relative to its source.

So what does that mean?

Sound and light are waves:

To perceive one of these, we need an emitter, and an observer, for the siren example, the ambulance siren is the emitter, and the microphone recording the sound, is the observer.

But as the emitter moves toward the observer, the wavelength are shortened, once the ambulance has passed the observer, it gets further away from the observer, and the wavelength is getting longer.

When the wavelength is shorter, a sound will have a higher pitch, once the wavelength gets longer, the sound will have a lower pitch, thus creating the change you can hear when the ambulance passes by.

A representation of the wave of a moving emitter:

There are a lot of usage for this effect, but 2 are more known to the public:

• Car Speed Radar
• Doppler ultrasound

So when the police measure car speed to give you a ticket, they are using the exact same principle, the radar will beam a wave at a known frequency, and receive the beam reflected by the vehicle, having its wavelength impacted by the vehicle speed, Based on the difference, the device will determine the speed.

In the case of Doppler ultrasound used in medical imaging, it is actually used to measure the flow of blood in the body.

Finally, I would add that the expansion rate of the universe, is measured using redshift which are an example of the Doppler effect.

For more examples of its usage, and more detailed explanations, don’t forget to check Wikipedia page, which is quite complete!

Human Brain and Cooking

No I’m not talking about cooking the human brain, but about the fact that humans is the only species that cooks its food. And there is a reason for that, this is what allows us be how we are. Cooked food allows an easier way to digest food, and to absorb more energy from the food than when eating it raw, so it is not only a question of taste, or killing bacterias, but it also is a way to help our digestive system get the most out of food in a shorter time.

In fact, if it was not for cooking, we would have to spend about the whole day eating raw food to have enough energy to power our brain and body. The truth is that our brain is just the same as any primate brain. The number of neurons for a brain of a given size is the same for any primate, ours is simply bigger. Note that I insisted on the primate, that is because we don’t have the biggest brain, that probably would be the whale, brain, but we do have the highest number of neurons, and that explains our cognitive abilities. It also is the most energy hungry brain, and the only way we can be a viable species is by cooking, and that is an amazing fact, that I find not known well enough.

To get more information on the subject, you can dive directly into the work of Suzana Herculano-Houzel or, for a shorter and yet very comprehensive version, watch this great TED talk she gave:

Maillard Reaction

Did you know that seared steak, bread crust, French fries and more are coming from the same exact chemical reaction? It is called the Maillard Reaction, you can read more about it on Wikipedia. It is one of the two Nonenzymatic browning, the second is the caramelization. There also are other Food Browning that may be worth a read if you are interested in the subject.

Back to the Maillard Reaction, the basic point is that amino acids and reducing sugar gets combined. Most of the time, heat is what triggers the reaction, but it can also happen without it in various cases, the more sugar and amino acids the lower the temperature required is.

One thing is for sure, in the case of meat, you will need far more than what can be achieved by water, that’s why boiled meat won’t get brown, and taste different. That is why some recipes will require you to fry meat before adding them to the stock.

Want to give it a try for yourself? You can follow the steps of this experience, it is worth a try!

Interesting for Malt lovers, this reaction is also used to prepare the malt used in whiskey and beers, that is what gives it its color. There is a very interesting article that goes in length about it if you wish to find out more.

And here is a video about Maillard Reaction and caramelization by foodsciencetv:

Welcome to The More You Know

Hello all!

The purpose of this website is to share some interesting things we can learn online, no matter the subject, if it is worth knowing, it is worth sharing.

Like Buddha said:

There is no wealth like knowledge, and no poverty like ignorance.

So I hope this will be a good place to learn and share more things along the way, let’s rock!