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Year: 2019 (Page 3 of 9)

Those Tiny Bubbles When You Boil Eggs


If you’ve ever boiled eggs, you’ve surely noticed tiny streams of microscopic bubbles coming from various points on the eggs as the water heats up. I figured this was dissolved air in the water and there were tiny “flaws” on the shell that formed nucleation sites for the bubbles. This is a nice explanation but totally wrong. I’m an engineer, not a zoologist. The correct answer is quite amazing, even mind-blowing to an engineer.

Basic structure of an egg

The truth is that bird egg shells are fabricated with microscopic breathing holes so the chick can breathe while it breaks its way out of the shell. Those tiny bubbles are air trapped inside the egg that expands when heated and streams out of the breathing holes. For me, learning this was kind of stunning because when I was a child long ago I wondered how the chick manages without air while it’s alive and breaking out of the shell. Magic? Nope, just Mother Nature’s engineering.

Chai Flavored Iced Tea

My friend and I drink a lot of iced tea, so I make about a gallon a day. I keep two one gallon jugs in the refrigerator and one is always full.

I joke that I make iced tea on a semi-industrial scale so it has to be quick and cheap. While I like plain black tea, I prefer a chai-like flavor and slightly sweet. I use 1/3 to 1/6 the amount of sugar in Southern sweet tea. There are chai tea bags but I can’t always find them and they are more expensive than generic black tea you can get at grocery stores and Walmart for next to nothing. So, I decided to try to get close enough to the flavor of chai by using my own spices. I found a way that’s stupid simple.

You need a 2 quart saucepan. I prefer heavy stainless. You need a 1 cup measuring cup, measuring spoons, allspice, and black pepper. I use tagless bags or rip the tags off of regular bags.

Fill the saucepan with water and bring to a boil. When it reaches a boil, I turn off the fire and toss in six or eight bags of black tea, or the equivalent. On an electric stove, you should move the pot to a cold burner. I let it steep for 3 minutes or slightly more.

While the tea is steeping, I measure one cup of sugar. On top of the sugar I place 1/4 tsp of allspice and 1/8 tsp of black pepper. Use more if you wish.

When the steeping time is over, I remove the bags and squeeze them out. (I know you’re not supposed to do that.) Then dump in the contents of the measuring cup and stir. I put a lid on it to prevent contamination and set it aside for several hours to cool.

Lastly, I take a gallon jug, stir the pot one more time and pour it into the jug. Add plain water to fill the jug and place in the refrigerator. Done. I’ve done this so many times, I can do it in my sleep.

Try it and please let me know what you think.

Protonmail IP Logging

Around the end of May 2019, a scandal erupted around Protonmail, the encrypted email service, associated with the CERN laboratory, and based in Switzerland. I keep running into this sensational item on social media and am weary of debunking it over and over. So, here’s a blog post about it.

This tempest in a teapot stems from a misleading tweet made by a Swiss lawyer, Martin Steiger, where he states that Protonmail “voluntarily offers assistance for real-time surveillance.” This came from a statement he heard in a meeting. The tweet made it sound like Protonmail offers surveillance to anyone who asks, or even offers it unasked for, so everyone freaked out.

What’s the truth? It’s actually pretty boring. All Swiss-based providers of Internet services are required by law to assist law enforcement when ordered to do so by a court of law. This is the same in virtually every country.

What was said and meant in the meeting that Mr. Steiger attended was that Protonmail cooperates with law enforcement when ordered to do so by a court without fighting the court order. The word “voluntarily” meant that Protonmail complies with Swiss law without objecting.

In the case of Protonmail, cooperating means IP logging, which is all Protonmail can do. The system is designed so they cannot decrypt the contents of emails.

Everything clear now?

Patents

Announcing a new page. In recent weeks, my patent “legacy” has come into the conversation. Looking them up is clumsy and time consuming, so I gathered the most interesting ones and published them on a WordPress page here, along with PDFs of the full patents. Now, I can send just one link.

https://shuttersparks.net/patents/

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