tingilinde

four million pounds a year

Junior's cheesecake is a major consumer of cream cheese - a shortage is hitting them.

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How much of each cheesecake is made up of cream cheese? It's actually close to 85% cream cheese. That's why it's so good. Cream cheese, fresh eggs, sugar, heavy cream, vanilla.

It's not like you could substitute it. There's no alternative. Listen, there's no alternative. That's why I got upset when I saw these articles about bagels, worrying about their schmear. They can still make a bagel. We cannot make a cheesecake.

Have you ever experienced anything like this shortage before? Never. Never. I was discussing it with someone at Kraft the other day. Never. We've been around for 71 years. This has never happened.

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dropping the ball for creativity

Maybe Edison was right.

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When Thomas Edison hit a wall with his inventions, he would nap in an armchair while holding a steel ball. As he started to fall asleep and his muscles relaxed, the ball would strike the floor, waking him with insights into his problems. Or so the story goes.

Now, more than 100 years later, scientists have repeated the trick in a lab, revealing that the famous inventor was on to something. People following his recipe tripled their chances of solving a math problem. The trick was to wake up in the transition between sleep and wakefulness, just before deep sleep.

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The paper in Science Advances

 

 

restoring some old tech

The shuttle simulator!

Not complete as the computers are obsolete and too much of a task, but still impressive.

a tip of the hat to John

 

where you sit with omicron

 

The Danes are predicting it could be dominant there is six days.  The English say about a week or so..  Those are two countries that measure well.  It's undoubtedly true for the rest of Europe.  The US will probably follow soon and we're more unprepared.  By Christmas maybe.. when people are traveling. 

 

 

there's no guarantee that covid will evolve to become milder

A nice piece by Andrew Pekosz.

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As someone who studies viruses, I often hear the phrase, “A dead host is not a good host,” or some version of that. This is probably true for most viruses, and certainly if a virus killed every person it infected it would eventually run out of hosts, which is not a good thing for the virus.

But what is really important is how efficiently the virus spreads. Does making a person very ill provide the virus with some advantage that makes transmission more effective? If the answer to that question is yes, then the virus may continue to make people severely ill because that strategy works.

But there’s no high-level “thinking” involved. All viruses mutate, and those mutations occur randomly. A good portion of those mutations don’t affect the virus’s ability to replicate or spread at all. It is these mutations that give the variant a unique fingerprint that can be used to trace chains of transmission and understand how it is spreading locally and globally. Mutations that limit the virus’s ability to replicate are rarely detected because those variants can’t compete with the original virus and quickly go extinct.

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behind the scenes

 

 

more brilliance from Anne Telnaes

 

name image and likeness in the lower 95%

Name, image, and likeness benefits for those in non-elite college sports programs.

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What is similarly clear, according to companies that have helped to broker or administer agreements for tens of thousands of athletes, is that many participating players are not even making $1,000 each.

Athletes are still barred by N.C.A.A. rules from receiving direct salaries for playing sports at their schools, but Opendorse said this week that those with deals that passed through its platform had earned an average of $1,138 since July 1; it did not report a median. INFLCR said its median transaction value since July 1 was $51, and that its average deal was worth $1,306.

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de-befuddling usb

Soting through all of those plugs and cables.

USB-C was supposed to be the last cable you would ever need. It hasn’t worked out that way.

 

 

small rewards work

A massive study of motivational techniques for exercise.

 

on biomass

It isn't carbon neutral and is potentially quite bad.  Unfortunately some European countries have gone that route claiming to be green.  Not that many countries are doing well.