Generally, if you want to pass food to someone, put it on a plate so they can pick it up themselves.

The only reason to use the back of the chopsticks, is if there is a shared plate of food in the center without a separate set of serving chopsticks. Taking from the shared plate with chopsticks that have been in your mouth could be considered unhygienic. You can use the back of the chopsticks to move the food to your own plate, then eat it.

However this is more like advanced etiquette and not a crucial rule, in my opinion. The only really bad things to avoid are sticking your chopsticks upright into rice and passing food between chopsticks.

The only one I really would avoid is passing things between or touching chopsticks together. This is reminiscent of Japanese funeral rituals and thus considered rude to do at the table.

The others are more about common sense and trying to help you enjoy the sushi as the chef intended:

• They are bite-sized pieces, designed as a flavour combination, so don’t break them up in any way
• If you don’t want rice, sashimi is a good way to get that
• Putting too much soy sauce on the rice can make it fall apart
• (real) Wasabi is delicate and mixing it with soy sauce will certainly destroy its subtle flavour. In any case in a high-end place the sushi chef will have added everything that’s intended as part of the flavour combination before serving the sushi, so adding stuff is not necessary

But again, these are suggestions. Enjoy the sushi how you like, you’re not hurting anyone.

That’s not usually the case in a high-end sushi place. The chef will prepare your orders one by one and serve them out as soon as each is completed, so you will get one piece at a time.

When I was in Japan, you could indicate when ordering whether you wanted wasabi and the chef would place a dab between the rice and the fish. My understanding is that real wasabi loses flavour very fast after being grated. Placing it so it doesn’t contact air helps to preserve flavour.

I would not say real wasabi tastes nothing like the horseradish fake. You can tell the plant is still part of the horseradish/mustard family. It’s definitely a more “clean” flavour though. It’s pretty easy to tell when you get the real thing. The fake stuff looks like a quite intensely green uniform mushy paste. The real stuff looks a bit like grated ginger, but with a pale green colour, often with some variation in colouration.

You do you my man. Go hogwild.

There is a saying in business: Under-Promise, Over-Perform, or Over-Deliver.

SpaceX does the opposite of this.

It literally doesn’t matter though: everyone and their mother are buying falcon 9 or heavy launches. SpaceX accounts for almost 90% of the world’s launched upmass. They are simply the cheapest most reliable option out there and it is not close. The only reason not to fly on a SpaceX rocket is national security or wanting to keep your own domestic launch industry alive.

This wasn’t a SpaceX decision though. The guy who contracted them is the one who cancelled the mission. Mostly because the rocket is not ready yet and he was sick of waiting.

I guess I can pick another number x to be closest to but it has the same problem unless I can guarantee it’s in the set. And successfully picking a number in the set is the problem to begin with! Foiled again!

It seems to me that, since the set of real numbers has a total ordering, I could fairly trivially construct some choice function like “the element closest to 0” that will work no matter how many elements you remove, without needing any fancy axioms.

I don’t know what to do if the set is unordered though.

What if you couldn’t see all the levers. Like every set of levers was inside a warehouse with a guy at a desk who says “just tell me which one you want and I’ll bring it out for you.”

Yup, just like that

Apologies. I’m from a country where the meaning of the period and comma is reversed compared to the US, so I did it this way out of habit.

Honestly, I think it may be possible to build entire roads with enough crushed metal elements in the asphalt/concrete and a slight low power charge throughout the entire surface would be able to keep any vehicle battery at a steady charge.

You might be underestimating how much power a car consumes while driving. For example, a Tesla model 3 has an efficiency of about 130 Wh/km in mild weather at highway speeds. Assuming that on the highway you’ll travel 100 km/h, that means you’ll use 130*100 = 13.000 Wh/h, a constant power draw of 13kW. That’s enough to power perhaps 8-12 houses on average.

A km of road could have, let’s say, 200 cars on it (4 lanes, 20m per car). That means you’d need to pump about 2.6 megawatts of power into every kilometer of road to keep them all topped up.

EDIT: fucked up math

Semmelweis discovered that a particular type of infection was much less likely to occur when doctors washed their hands with chlorinated lime water between doing an autopsy and examining a patient. However he did not know why or how this worked, and did not discover microorganisms (which were already observed by Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek some ~180 years earlier).

BOOM! EVs win!

Is this a real headline? Of a news article? Was that part really necessary?

Another European here. Might be because I’m into baking but I don’t think a bagel should be classified as a roll. Bagels are boiled in water prior to baking which gives them a rather unique texture compared to rolls.

Sadly most commercially available “bagels” are not actually produced in this way.

you’ll see the huge difference between what you get in supermarkets (even good ones with good bakeries like Lidl) and a proper bagel.

I believe in large part this is because traditionally a bagel ought to be boiled in water and then baked in an oven. But to save labor costs, mass-produced bagels are often baked in a steam oven which doesn’t quite give the same chewy texture.

Another factor is, they will generally partly bake them in the factory, then freeze them and ship them off to your supermarket which finishes them off before putting it on the shelf.

He didn’t say “most of the time” though. He said “always.”

I think this is technically true, but mostly irrelevant. Sparta got pretty thoroughly trounced by one of Alexander’s generals while the man himself was out campaigning in Asia, and were effectively subjugated anyway.

It is very fun if you want to be sure that you aren’t missing anything the game has to offer.

You’ve hit upon the crux of the issue, in my opinion. FromSoftware games in general are built on exploration and discovery, finding crazy cool stuff in some dark corner of the game is a big part of the experience. However, for discovery to be properly rewarding you have to allow for the possibility that the player will just miss the stuff you’ve hidden. Indeed, in a blind playthrough of Dark Souls you’re likely to stumble upon a bunch of different secrets and still miss 50% or more of them.

That’s gonna be excruciating if you insist on “100% completing” the game. It kind of goes back to older days of gaming when there was no internet and no guides, and you just played the game and were happy when you saw the credits, and had no idea you even missed anything. I feel like modern games with their map markers for everything and completion percentages visible have kind of changed the way many people approach games.

Not to say there’s anything wrong with using a guide, play the game how you like. And there is definitely an argument that if you bought the whole game, you’d like to experience the whole game.