John BS @johnabs@qoto.org

@freemo This is my white-whale pen: https://www.penchalet.com/fine_pens/fountain_pens/visconti_leonardo_da_vinci_machina_fountain_pen.html

Hand etched vegetal resin scrimshaw illustration, an excellent power-fill, and an iridium tipped paladium nib, not counting the amazing icosahedron wooden storage box and other fixings...I'm hoping to get it as a present either for finishing my PhD or for getting Tenure/a good paying job, depending on where I decide to go after I wrap up my degree.

So I just made "honeyed egg-fried-rice", just to see if I would like it. It's incredible, and I highly recommend the recipe, which I will attach below. Please note, nearly all ingredients are "to taste" or guesses, but once I really have time to tweak the recipe, I'll post another toot with the amounts I found to be the best for me. I'd also like to recommend adding cured pork, like charsiu, and glazing that in the honey as you cook the dish, but the following is a vegetarian version.

Ingredients:
1-2 day old rice (should have been kept refrigerated, in case that needs to be said, lol) ~ 2 cups/500g
Large Eggs ~3-4
Oil (preferably olive, or neutral)
Onion Powder
Garlic Powder
Chinese Black Vinegar (or normal rice vinegar, your choice)
Soy Sauce (I love lee kum kee for this)
MSG
Peas+Carrots (or any sufficiently small veggies)
Raw Honey, preferably crystallized (or just pure honey with no adulterants, unlike what you get in the US...)

Nonstick pan (ceramic, wok, etc. stainless steel will NOT work)
Wooden spatula

First, coat the bottom of your pan with oil, and allow to heat up until shimmering but not smoking.
Add the rice and break up in the oil to coat and separate all the grains.
Add eggs, and stir-fry rapidly to coat the rice, but slow enough that you don't destroy all the curds. Allow the eggs to nearly set before proceeding to the next step. If you can't get this step right for some reason, pre-cook the eggs (keep them slightly runny) and add them here.
Add all seasonings except soy sauce, honey, vinegar and MSG to taste/smell (rough estimates would be ~1-3TBSP (15-45g) vinegar, onion powder, garlic powder, per cup/225g of rice.
Add the MSG, vinegar and soy sauce to taste, in that order. Be careful with the MSG as it's quite salty, you can always come back to add more after adding the soy sauce to dial in the flavor as you like it. Note: overdo the salt and vinegar notes a bit, these will be rounded out when you add the honey.
Allow the rice to get to the point from "hissing" to "popping" in the pan to build up a nice crust. Keep the rice moving so it doesn't get too crusty in one place (crucial to get an approximation of wok hei without a real wok).
Add the honey (approximately 1-2TBSP per cup/15-30g per 225g) and mix vigorously. It will slowly melt when exposed to the heat, and coat the rice, adding another layer of flavor complexity to the dish.
Finally, add the peas and carrots to the rice (you don't want them overcooked or you'll lose their brightness). Do a final tasting and correct as needed.
Top with any garnish you want (e.g. thin sliced, fresh spring onions) and serve.

Ah, yes, all 4 biological sexes according to Cronometer.

@vicgrinberg Well I suppose maternity tests are even less common...so you can charge even more! 😂

@vicgrinberg You can always charge the bards extra, I'm sure it will come in handy for them to get literally everyone off their collective backs 😂

@trinsec Honestly nothing, but they're an (arguably) safe way to make jokes about topics that any particular individual may feel sensitive about if that sort of comment was pointed at them. If someone said that about me, I would be rather upset as I'm currently struggling with my weight at the gym and am self conscious about it, whereas this joke allows the insult to be aimed nowhere in particular (or I guess everywhere..but I didn't mean to insult literally everyone on qoto's mother 😂).

Case in point, many people will take turns trying to come up with the worst burn in the form of "yo mama" jokes as a way to have a competition between wits. Obviously it's easier to deal with such insulting jokes about your mother if the other person has never met her, thus making it a way to give someone the taste of a tounge lashing without the whole mess devolving into actual verbal abuse/bullying (this, of course, changes if the person actually knows your mother and makes it too personal).

In this case it was just the vehicle for the math part of the joke, which I thought was pretty funny.

Oh, and I thought of a math joke:

"Yo mamma's so fat they call her Hilbert because her curves are space filling".

Thank you, I'll be here all week 😂

Today I finally built my first package for gnu guix: zotero! It works now, and I'm quite proud of myself, as it wasn't easy to do :) If anyone is using guix, the link to the build is on guix-science!

@freemo @SteelFolk edit, my apologies, I meant the apparent color in the original comment

@freemo @SteelFolk Right, and looking at this source, I don't see any mention of blue, hence my reservation.

@freemo @SteelFolk Please don't take this the wrong way, but could you source that claim on the hematite's true color? I've looked everywhere and cant find confirmation.

And even if we take that the color is as you say, the likelyhood of growing unadulterated crystalline hematite that would have this color in such a thin film, while adjacent to metals with their own crystal structures that would impact the hematite crystals seems low and doesn't explain the gold/straw color during the hot blueing process either.

@freemo @SteelFolk

1. You do see the multicolor effect in the event the film is not uniformly thick, which is what you can observe in that article on the thermal treatment. However, a uniformly thick film can only reflect a specific wavelength (here's an example for titanium anodizing https://youtu.be/O2RaIJhZ81I?t=755): this is visible from the first part of the article I linked in which they deposited AlTiN on steel and achieved similar coloration to blueing, and similar evolution of the colors based on the films' thicknesses in nanometers. Also note that a large factor in the final color's iridescence is the surface finish: rougher finishes will look less iridescent.

2. [Hematite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hematite?useskin=vector) and [magnetite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetite?useskin=vector) are not blue even in low concentrations or when powdered finely, only black or red, or brown depending on the crystalline structure. If this were the explanation, you would not expect to see gold and "straw" colors appear in the beginning of the hot blueing process, only blues that get progressively darker.

3. The material does not need to be completely transparent, as this layer has to be thinner than the wavelength of light it's reflecting (thus on the nanometer range). Based on the fact that light is wavelike, it can penetrate into thin films of materials that are normally opaque at larger scales. As an example, it occurs on those structural proteins I mentioned which aren't transparent either.

If I'm wrong, I'm pretty sure @SteelFolk can probably correct me, but I'm fairly certain it's the same process as what's going on in the Titanium and Aluminum versions.

Oh, and thanks for the fun discussion, it's been a while since I've been able to talk about this stuff :D

@freemo @SteelFolk If you watch that video, you'll see a different effect than what you're referring to which is apparent from the iridescence of the coating, additionally, the film changes color to gold first, then blue, based on temperature, which is indicative of the thin film effect, as noted here, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00202967.2022.2154495, in the section on Thermal Tinting.

@freemo @SteelFolk Yeah, but my point was that despite the black color of the magnetite, as long as the film is thin enough, the color of the part can be iridescent blue, same thing with other structural colors: proteins that are normally drab brown can still be all sorts of colors as long as you make the light interfere in certain ways, which is neat IMO 😁

@amberxorluci Umm ackshually, by the Pauli-bottom exclusion principle, two bottoms cannot occupy the same space or they end up coercing one to "change spins" and be the top. Clearly this must be the case, or their mutual struggle to be the bottom would result in a similar phenomenon to the following video 🤓😂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2uRrbxQ1Qs&t=22

@SteelFolk @freemo Thanks for the clarification! I couldn't recall if it was exactly the same thing (magnetite vs standard rust) anymore 😅

I used to do a lot of surface chemistry before a big career switch, so I couldn't recall the exact details, but I was mostly commenting on the structural coloring caused by the technique (thus, the technique's apparent namesake), even though the passivation is the intended application 😁