The Frying Pan - 2012-08-12

« first day (703 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (4289 days later) »

4:54 AM

@BobMcGee I'm in Loudoun, so not really that close, unfortunately.

6 hours later…

10:44 AM

A quick question about brand names. I just put a comment here about 'it' being 'not done'. However, nothing mentions brand names in the FAQ. Should we add something like that? I think Aaronut's comment here is spot on.

And now, I've got to work, see you later.

2 hours later…

12:50 PM

@BaffledCook In the Chinese Cleaver question, they're specifically asking which one to select, and the featureset and product selection is very limited. There are only a handful of notable Chinese Cleaver makers, and their product have very similar features... and no, we're not going to count the crappy attempts of Wusthof etc to market a stainless Chinese slicer that lacks the distinctive style.

Nobody else is up on a Sunday morning (or afternoon for Rummie/Hell Hound)

1:16 PM

@BobMcGee I'm up and doing useful stuff

preparing my blog post, learning, packing for my vacation

1:42 PM

Hey! anyone here? I've just answered that question about putting whisky in the freezer that was transferred from the homebrew forum

If you look at my answer you might guess that I think the question was asked in the right place to start with.

hi @klypos

Now you mention it, I have heard of "ice-destillation", yes.

In UK it is illegal to distil at home, so the only way to prepare strong drink at home is to freeze water out of homebrew.

But I think that the question was intended to ask about storage, and not distillation. So I wouldn't argue about the transfer.

I don't go near that place because they were very unkind to a friend when she told them how "triple" is made in ENgland

I've never been there, store-bought alcohol is good enough for me.

1:47 PM

English prices are getting worse

Especially for alcohol, or as a part of an overall inflation trend?

Especially alcohol

The way they tax it, the stronger it is, the more they charge

Beer is affordable, cider is cheap, whisky is stupid prices

Really? I know that good quality whisky is stupid prices, but I thought that the cheap stuff in the supermarket bottom shelf stays affordable. And that the good quality isn't expensive because of taxes, but because of the involved production methods they use.

Affordable - yes but the cost of a bottle of "cooking whisky" has gone up by £5 or £6 since around 2006 - and it is all tax.

Good whisky needs good barrels to develop flavour.

"by" 5-6 pounds? Cheapest alcohol here is about 4-5€ for a bottle of vodka. And it being vodka, you don't even get too much of a headache for drinking that quality.

I think I can get some standard supermarket whisky - something like Johny Red Label - for 10 Eur, maybe 12 - I haven't bought any in a long time.

1:55 PM

That is cheaper than here. If you look at the Glenmorangie method, they send the barrels to the US for three years maturing Jim Beam before they use them in Scotland.

Cost of cheap whisky £10.50 vodka £9

divide by 1.2 for €

And 5 pounds of that is tax increase only? (And obviously, there must have been tax on it before 2006)

Go to Gibraltar (no tax) £2.50 retail

What is the reason behind such taxation? Are they trying to create disincentives for drinking?

They have sold off all the utilities (gas, electric) - only way to raise taxes is on car fuels, tobacco, and booze - traditional ways, but charge more for lorry fuel and everything gets more costly

They use the disincentive arguments - but it is because they can't find an easy way to tax people.

Must go out - back in an hour and a half. Bye

bye

2:21 PM

Mmmm, liquor for under $15/bottle

While it is available, I usually don't buy stuff at less than 10 € per bottle. That's the normal price for mass market brands like abovementioned Johny Walker Red label, Smirnoff vodka, light Bacardi rums, etc. The house brands for spirits tend to be terrible in taste and give you a worse hangover. And other stuff is not only more expensive, but also seldom available at supermarkets, one has to go to specialized stores for it.

There's some pretty decent stuff for around $15/bottle where I am

(Or like €12.) We don't have "house brands" of liquor, because laws make it expensive to commercially distill spirits, but there are a low of low-cost liquors that are quite drinkable. Johnny Walker Red is about €20 here.

@rumtscho I have unfortunately a taste for the better stuff... VSOP cognac, Jameson, Glenlivet, and Bombay Sapphire or Tanqueray gin.

@BobMcGee I don't have that taste - probably because I have never tried it

@rumtscho What do you drink?

Besides beer.

I spent my highschool years drinking €1.50/bottle vodka, Smirnoff was ultimate luxury nobody could afford.

I don't drink much nowadays, don't have anybody to drink with. Sometimes I drink wine when I make better-than-usual dinner, mostly heavy reds.

I have some bottles of high-percentage drinks bought for parties, but can't remember the last time I drank from them. I use them for cooking sometimes. They are the mass-market brands I mentioned.

2:34 PM

You drank vodka in high school?

Aww, you need a drinking partner

Sure I did, and lots of it. That's normal where I grew up.

Christ, I thought high school was rough where I was, but it was never rough enough that you wanted to get drunk regularly

Although I guess there was a pretty large contingent smoking pot to relax

Our drug of choice was generally gaming though

Well, it is officially illegal, but nobody cares. Except for my mother, but she still has the "good communist girl" moral system.

We didn't want to get drunk regularly because it was rough, we did it because we wanted to party a lot, and feel like we are finally getting to be adult.

@rumtscho Blah to good Communist girls. Everyone wants the bad Communist girls.

@rumtscho You were a party animal in high school?

@Cerberus Welcome! We're talking about underage drinking and the joys thereof

There were unfortunate victims, a classmate had to be operated from stomach ulcer at 19. He started each day with a pack of cigarettes, and drank a "bullet" of vodka (200 ml) in the big break. But I think that this would have happened the same way if he had started drinking later, it just would have happened later.

@BobMcGee No, I wasn't a party animal. Compared to the rest of my class, I was timid. I didn't go to all the parties, and I didn't drink outside of parties.

2:39 PM

@rumtscho That is very unfortunate. Did he cut back afterward?

I also wasn't the one to drink most.

@rumtscho You were the quiet, studious one, right?

@BobMcGee I don't know, I lost contact with the class after graduation.

@BobMcGee A bit hard to say, I was a nerd, but I went to a special school where everybody was a nerd.

Hrhm, speaking of alcohol, I'm not sure what to make of these comments, @rumtscho: cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/25515/… AND cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/25515/…

They're undeniably pretty nasty comments, but can't decide if they're nasty & unconstructive enough for removal.

We all drank an awful lot at parties, but also studied an awful lot, we had a much more demanding programm than other high schools.

2:42 PM

@rumtscho Wow, what a coincidence! By a twist of fate, I went to the exact same sort of school, and a lot of people had the same "study hard, party hard." Andrew W.K.'s song "party hard" was basically the school's anthem.

The school was kind of strict about hours and substance use though, so it was trickier to get ahold of stuff.

@BobMcGee My best friend was once in a bar where she didn't know anybody. Another girl our age came to her and asked her, "Are you from [our school]?" "Yes, how did you guess?" "Dunno, you just look that way."

@BobMcGee Ah, great!

@rumtscho Yeah, I have the same experience a lot... people come in and we start talking and a few minutes in we're like "wait, you went to Science and Math, didn't you"?

@BobMcGee Alcohol laws were never strict with us, we got alcohol at the kiosks just outside school and drank it openly leaning on the school fence. I even remember some occasions of somebody getting in vodka in a mineral water bottle and drinking it during classes, once even during a test.

(Our school was actually nerdy enough that the official name actually shortens to "science and math")

2:46 PM

Nice.

I think that things might have gotten a bit harder for the current generation, with us trying to be more European and civilized and also with our government being lead by what is for all purposes a military dictator.

As for the comments, I wouldn't remove them unless the people at whom they are adressed feel personally offended. They are not too terrible.

@rumtscho Wish there were a way to downvote comments so they'd lose some rep for being unconstructive.

@rumtscho If enforcement of underage drinking were that lax and you didn't have to have ID to buy alcohol... well I'm pretty sure we'd have had people showing up drunk to class drunk more often

Did still happen sometimes. Stoned was almost as common

@rumtscho But all kids smoke and drink here!

@BobMcGee I don't care much about them, they're not really worth the trouble. Alright, you could argue that we should do something in the spirit of Summer of love, but really, I don't see why bother.

And get stoned.

2:53 PM

@rumtscho Summer of Love seems like it should involve drugs, sex, and rock and roll. Not necessarily in that order of priority.

@Cerberus but at least there is some kind of control, such as that a supermarket will not sell a bottle to a 12-year-old and will even sometimes ask a 20-year-old for ID.

@BobMcGee I'm afraid that iron-disciplined men like our Big Boss see it otherwise

Blog - Stack Exchange: Kicking off the Summer of Love

Joel Spolsky on July 20, 2012

It’s summer here at StackHQ. Have a flower!

You’re welcome. Now on to some serious work. Can we talk about cultural anthropology for a minute? I’d like to talk about what happens when a community (online or off) gets to be about… oh, three or four years old.

Every community starts out needing to recruit members, so they tend to be very friendly to newcomers.

After a few years, an insider group of old-timers forms. They get to know each other. They know the rules. They know the history and the legends of the community. And it’s only natural to get little bit irritated when newbies show up who don’t know the rules. …

Blog - Stack Exchange: The Hunting of the Snark

Joel Spolsky on July 31, 2012

You can’t fix what you can’t measure, so the first thing we did as a part of our Summer of Love campaign was try to measure friendliness in an objective and repeatable way. We gathered 7000 comments from Stack Overflow and submitted them to Mechanical Turk. For each comment, we asked 20 people to rate the comment as Friendly, Unfriendly, or “Neutral/Unclear.”

There are different ways of massaging the data, but I do want to give you a flavor for the kind of comments we’re talking about when we’re talking about unfriendly comments. Here is a snapshot of the com …

@rumtscho I've read it, I just think the name is funny

I would like to put the kibosh on nasty comments in some fashion, because they degrade the community.

... and the goals of reducing snarky responses make good sense. Goodness knows we're all posted a couple for the most egregious offenders, but there's no reason we can't try to be mostly friendly. Even when telling someone why their "how can I cook a steak" post is closed

@BobMcGee I'm either too much of a robot to see a problem in this, or my bar for declaring something "nasty" is extremely high. Probably both.

I don't think that "never getting offended" is a basic human right.

I sometimes wonder if it's cultural. Certain styles of discourse come off harshly when they're just normal for some people.

@rumtscho It is rather random. Many 12-y-o's can buy beer in a supermarket without much hassle.

3:00 PM

@rumtscho As Spolsky notes, the problem is not the nasty comment offending someone, it's how it limits the growth and development of the community

I saw a television programme recently in which this 12-y-o girl bought some vodka without any trouble in a supermarket.

It was a test.

@rumtscho The goal is to be friendly and professional, so we welcome new contributors that keep the community vital, while still maintaining quality.

@Cerberus Was the test how fast she could drink it?

Confession: I didn't really drink until I was 19 or 20. But, made up for lost time as best one can...

@BobMcGee Well, it skews the community membership for sure. People who feel offended here don't stick around, the ones who don't care about snark do. Which makes the community even nerdier than it would have been otherwise, because non-nerds tend to take such things more personally.

@BobMcGee I absolutely agree that we should all be friendly; I just feel that violations of etiquette do not deserve censorship per se—only if it gets really bad.

@BobMcGee Alas, no. She just bought booze at different stores. It must be said that she looked older. And you can buy beer at 16.

@Cerberus I've heard "oh she looked older!" A lot. It's never a good thing.

3:04 PM

But we don't have many problems here. Physics have it bad. They have a guy there, he is very brilliant and very rude. He fights the moderators all the time, and feels unjustly punished every time they try to curb his rudeness. And because his answers are so good, he has a kind of "following" - people on the site who love him, upvote him, and think that somebody as smart as him has the right to treat others like inferior beings.

@BobMcGee Depends on your intentions!

@rumtscho Who is it?

@BobMcGee Yes, that's why I think that age restrictions for alcohol are dumb, at least very high ones like in the States. Everybody drinks a lot once they are finally allowed to, it doesn't matter if it happens at 14 or at 20.

@rumtscho There is a problem, however, with having the drinking age and the driving at at the same point.

Driving is 18 here, so kids have had the chance to get used to alcohol.

@Cerberus Let's see if you can guess

20

Q: physics.SE's inability to deal with users who are highly persistent, have kook beliefs, and sound impressive?

Does Physics.SE's have any way of dealing with users who are highly persistent, have kook beliefs, and sound impressive? Some of these folks seem to be very successful at racking up reputation points on this site. The characteristics that I've noticed include Some claim to be self-educated, so...

OK, bungled the link the first time. But this is representative of the drama they have. I think you can see who it is based on the answer he gave.

@Cerberus I never even thought of that, but yes, I think you are right. Drinking before driving sounds entirely plausible. You have to learn what alcohol does to you before you are allowed to drive, because the first few times you drink, you are just too cocksure and think that you can certainly cope with the "small" amount you have drunk.

Huh, that was weird. Went mobile and the chat site bugged out.

3:16 PM

@rumtscho My guess is Ben?

I don't know any of these people, except Ron, who I must say I think is a bit nuts, though he is not unfriendly.

@Cerberus No, it is Ron who makes all the trouble.

Ahh OK.

Do you want my impression of him based on our experience with him on Linguistics?

Gossiping is not nice...

So perhaps I shouldn't.

@Cerberus @rumtscho Unrestrained nastiness forms a feedback loop, and grows if not contained, eventually breeding drama and In Real Life drama. You've been around the web for a while, and surely you've seen this happen in some communities? For an example of a vital community that has pretty strict rules, look to the Something Awful Forums. In the other direction, you do have places like 4chan... but I think we can all agree that's not where Stack Exchange should be headed?

@rumtscho But it is actually Ben who is complaining about how everyone is incompetent and doesn't belong on the site?

I don't know him personally, but from what I know of him, he knows more than other people, and when somebody says something he disagrees with, he calls them incompetent or worse. Which offends many people. And when it gets heated enough for the mods to do something, he insists that the mods are wrong to do anything.

3:20 PM

@BobMcGee I have never been on 4Chan. But I am not sure I have ever experienced any such downward spiral. And I would personally opt to just cut it off once people get really nasty. The only people on this site whose behaviour I considered really out of line were a moderator and a founder.

@Cerberus It isn't nice, but I am curious to hear it :) Also, I don't think that I have said something particularly terrible about him.

Well, okay, there were some users, but they were taken care of by the community. It never seemed a real problem to me.

@rumtscho No, I was referring to my gossiping.

@Cerberus yes, but I meant that if I can do it, so can you.

1. Ron's profile page really convinced me that it was a joke, I really believed that.

@Cerberus If I may ask, who was it (you can delete the name once posted if you like), and in what context?

@Cerberus And it's worth seeing 4chan's /b/ for anyone that spends a lot of time online

3:23 PM

2. He seems to be a bit of a megalomaniac: if you say all the experts know nothing, and you know better than "everyone professionally employed in the field"—he said something like that—, that is a red flag.

It's both a shining example and a cesspool of failure for what an online community can be. Very interesting case study for online social anthropology.

3. He seemed to harbour elaborate semi-conspirational theories that seemed frankly nuts, about linguistics.

@BobMcGee I think that the information is public, it is probably still available on EL&U meta and their chat archive for the first case. And in our own Frying Pan archive for the second, if I got the reference correctly.

4. It was clear he didn't know much about other languages than English and Hebrew, nor about linguistics, but that didn't stop him from aforementioned theories, nor did it make him relinquish them when shown strong evidence to the conrary.

While it may be available, it is very difficult to search for a specific incident only by vague reference.

3:25 PM

5. He writes excessively long questions and answers, like 5+ screens long. Also a red flag.

@BobMcGee This was only to say that there isn't much point of secrecy such as "delete afterwards". I will let Cerberus tell you, because he is a better source than I am.

@Cerberus ducks

@BobMcGee Ehm I don't want to be a troublemaker. These people do not bother me any more, they seem to have more or less retired.

@BobMcGee Who? What? /b/?

@Cerberus Oh come on, you can't say something like that without giving a little more information and context

@Cerberus www.4chan.org/b/

@rumtscho You got it.

@BobMcGee Okay, okay, that would be mean.

Be warned, /b/ is NOT work safe, not mind safe, offensive, and depending on your country, probably includes illegal content. It's also a heck of a lot of fun.

3:28 PM

@BobMcGee I've never been there, although I have heard lots of it. Maybe I should go look at it.

@rumtscho I think it is a really intriguing case study in unfiltered, unmoderated online communities. The only kinds of content they remove are where it flat out would get the site shut down, or it's obviously spam. Even then, they aren't great about filtering.

:5743402 Wow, that is extremely egregious. I can't believe someone like that would do such a thing.

Alas.

Shog was never rude.

I can understand why people reacted so strongly to that, and wouldn't know what to do with such a response.

Shog?

So he is not the guy I was pissed at, in case that's what you thought.

@BobMcGee I think it all started as so many conflicts - based on religious views

3:33 PM

Religious views?

What you're saying could be taken two ways: either Shog was impacted, or that they were a founder

Not that anybody said it openly

@Cerberus yes, exactly. He censored things which a good WASP boy finds terrible.

Shog or the person in question?

@BobMcGee No, I just mention his name because he said I was mad at him a while ago.

I have found that otherwise reasonalble people feel self-righteous when they are imposing their religion-derived morals on the world.

3:35 PM

@rumtscho Well, I would expect the archetypical WASP boy to be well versed in such language!

Some of it anyway.

@BobMcGee I went to /b/ just now. I don't see anything special about it.

@rumtscho Oh, oops, dear moderator, could you please delete those two messages for me?

Where names are mentioned.

@rumtscho It is possible. I know I sometimes mock religion beyond propriety in a chat room, which I shouldn't.

@rumtscho Gracias!

The boys in my highschool class were generally carrying on loud conversation in the breaks which was on a level similar to or below /b/.

@rumtscho Refresh a few times. If you don't see something hilarious or offensive I'll be shocked.

Not only in the breaks, but all the time outside of lessons. In the cafés after school, or at partys.

3:39 PM

@BobMcGee I don't really understand this page. Random is the right word.

@Cerberus You've heard of Anonymous?

Yes.

The guys with the Guy Fawkes masks that protest and shut down major sites?

This is where they came from.

I know.

@BobMcGee I sure saw offensive things. But nothing unusual. Also nothing shocked me, but I'm not easily shockable.

3:39 PM

How about 220V?

@rumtscho Refresh enough and you'll see gore, child pornography, and every form of prejudice known to humankind.

@BobMcGee I saw it halfway down the second page, but this stuff doesn't impress me.

@rumtscho shrug

That's a model of what happens in an unmoderated community: very random.

Yes, sure.

Actually, I used to read a Russian site which was a bit similar, but more creative.

The members would post short stories written by themselves. They were mostly humorous. And this humour was based on generally politically incorrect things.

Communities like that have their place, and are great fun at times, but for they are not good at accumulating high-quality content.

The signal to noise ratio is quite low.

3:47 PM

Depends. This Russian site's content was good quality.

I guess that they probably moderated it, or just showed dumb people the cold shoulder, so the dumb ones didn't stick around.

Usually one of those two things is what happens

But unfortunately, while I'd like to debate further, it is time to run

The stories they posted were well-written and very creative. It is just that extreme topics like child pornography and gore were prominently featured in some of them, and minor offences like strong racism and homophoby were considered so normal that their absence would have been puzzling.

4chan, the russsian version!

Oh, good thing that you mentioned "run" - I think I should go for an actual run.

@BobMcGee No, they have other sites which are more anarchic.

Or maybe I should leave the run for tomorrow. Hmmm.

4:09 PM

Hmm...so what have you decided?

@Cerberus I think I won't run today. Right now, I am fresh enough to do some more hours of useful work. If I go running, I will return tired and do nothing.

Ah!

I am glad you are saying that.

I get the same thing, but some people seem to get all energetic from working out!

Normally, you shouldn't do it so hard as to be too tired to work afterwards.

But I am not doing it for sport as much as for fun. And this includes running as quickly as possible downhill.

Ohh, isn't that dangerous?

5 hours later…

9:25 PM

Americans, can you buy fresh lychees in the supermarket?

9:39 PM

As a Dutchman, I can buy fresh strawberries in the supermarket.

We hope that your question has been answered to your satisfaction. Thank you for belonging to the Mobistar community. We appreciate your clientèle.

« first day (703 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (4289 days later) »

Transcript for

Aug '1212

The Frying Pan

Sometimes hot, always heavy. (cooking.stackexchange.com)

join this room
about this room

00:00

06:00

12:00

18:00

all times are UTC

site design / logo © 2024 Stack Exchange Inc; legal

mobile