Book purchased! As well as the other one mentioned by Destide earlier. Excited to learn lots, thanks for the recommendations

We’ve got a gas grill, but didn’t know you had to clean the tubes. I always look in all the crevices to check for spiders anyway tho, so hopefully no future accidental fires

Also: I didn’t know what a big green egg was until earlier today but they look fantastic! Hope your eggy barbecue dreams are coming true with having one :)

I definitely agree about veggies/vegans getting stereotyped as too-healthy :) Although I do find that, even if a recipe has technically same level of unhealthiness, the vegan equivalent of a meal never makes me feel quite as unhealthy as a meaty one.

I think veggie/vegan creativity makes for much better meals than just your standard unseasoned beef and bread combo. If I’m going to use meat, I might as well use it wisely, but if I can get the deliciousness of meat, without using meat, then that’s even better! So SauceStache is a perfect recommendation, thanks! I’m going to watch a lot of his videos (especially the one on DIY Beyond meat).

I’ve tried bbq-soy-sauce-feta-watermelon once before - I think I was the only person who genuinely enjoyed it. I might end up being my own guinea pig if I end up being too adventurous again :)

Thanks for this, really helpful stuff :)

That book looks great! I love how-to-cook books instead of just recipe books (i.e. Salt Fat Acid Heat or Sohla’s Start Here) and that looks like a great BBQ version.

wrt food safety, I should be alright! One of the reasons I haven’t BBQ’ed much in the past is that I’m very safety focussed.

Another reason is that I don’t eat much meat unless I’m planning on making it really delicious! Meat thermometers will definitely help (with both deliciousness and safety).

The Number 1 reason I don’t BBQ more often is that my garden is down a ladder at the moment! Once we’ve got stairs, (and meat thermometers!) there’ll be nothing stopping me :)

Did you have any advice for cooking for veggies? (a lot of my friends are vegan and they deserve good food too!)

It’s surprising how climate change gets co-opted into sinister ideals. It’s a similar problem to the rise of ecofascism - an unbelievably pervasive school of thought in environmentalists (who you would hope were leftist!)

the bus service in the photo (Purple 17 💜) is so frequent, that by the time you’ve gotten to the bus stop and checked the time, there’s one (or sometimes three) buses coming up the road! Reading council doesn’t get enough credit for Reading buses being fantastic

good question!! I actually might have been mistaken by saying sea salt was an INP (whoops).

Sea salt is a great condensation nuclei (CCN). CCN allow cloud droplets to form instead of ice crystals.

For cloud seeding to work well, it’s better to seed with INP instead of CCN because if you encourage lots of droplets to form, all you get is a bunch of really tiny droplets, making a really bright white cloud (no rain!). (Side note: that’s why rain clouds look dark: they’re made of fewer really big droplets.)

Adding sea salt to clouds is a thing though! It’s been proposed as Marine Cloud Brightening - adding lots of sea salt to the air over the ocean, making the earth more reflective to combat further global warming.

As far as I know, most inorganic salts are good INP or CCN, but have varying efficiencies. Sea salt dissolves in liquid water whereas silver iodide doesn’t, and silver iodide has the right sort of hexagonal crystal lattice for ice to start sticking to. So silver iodide is a great INP whereas sea salt is a great CCN.

Even longer (and reasonably silly) explanation here: https://www.acsh.org/news/2022/09/01/why-are-clouds-seeded-silver-does-it-work-16538

If you mean climate change, then yeah, obviously humans do influence the climate. In terms of individual scale events (weather, big storms) there’s not any existing technology that exists that can cause a single targeted big storm event.

This article isn’t perfectly scientifically accurate but it’s better than most! For those interested, here’s a better (detailed) explanation of the science:

Cloud seeding works best in supercooled liquid clouds, which start with barely any ice in. For ice to form in clouds, you need INP (ice nucleating particles), aerosols such as sea salt, or dust, for the ice to grow onto. INP can be pretty rare, depending on where you are in the world.

By adding silver iodide (an efficient INP) ice crystals can form. This means the cloud has both ice and liquid water in (a “mixed phase” cloud).

For multiple reasons, ice grows better and faster than liquid cloud droplets (the “Wegener Bergeron Findeisen effect” for one). Because there’s only so much water in the cloud, these ice crystals then grow at the expense of water droplets in the air, allowing for big snowflakes to grow, but droplets evaporate.

This turns it from a cloud with many tiny droplets, into one with big heavy snowflakes, which fall out of the cloud. Before the snowflakes reach the ground, they melt, turning into rain.

TLDR; cloud seeding takes the water already in the cloud, and makes it precipitate slightly more efficiently, but only if you improve the balance of aerosols in the air just right

There is no technology on earth that can make storms of this scale. Cloud seeding doesn’t add any water to the cloud. At most, it causes a very slight increase in rain. If you accidentally cloud seed “too much” you nucleate lots of ice crystals within the cloud, making many tiny ice crystals (which don’t precipitate at all).

They didn’t seed this cloud - but it wouldn’t have done anything if they had.

it’s a feminist movement, in backlash to misogyny and pro-natalism in South Korea (it’s becoming more widespread, though). The 4Bs are the “four no’s”:

• no dating men
• no sex with men
• no marriage with men
• no childbearing

It gets a lot of pushback and is called selfish etc. but women are very angry & upset that the government only sees them for their reproductive use, and it’s reasonable to not want to date someone who doesn’t view you as human.

So much beautiful snow photography (stock footage etc) comes from Wisconsin. It’s well known for snow and snow research. Sad to see the landscape changing over there

Surprised to see none of the comments mentioning the 4B movement

It’s a concern already for low-lying atoll islands like those in the Maldives and Tuvalu. Half of Tuvalu’s capital city is expected to be flooded by 2050, but they’ve been seeing the effects for years unfortunately.

It really depends where you are though - my town is at around 100 m elevation and about 80 km inland. When I was a kid, my mum used to have nightmares about tidal waves coming over the horizon because she was so scared of sea level rise.

Where were you when I was doing a research project on wheat!? I’m not based in agriculture science at all, but supposedly, wheat in South Africa has the lowest carbon footprint in the world, but we still didn’t recommend that the client used wheat from S. Africa because it didn’t seem sustainable and the yields were low. I had no idea it was that bad, though.

Interesting, thanks! Whilst supposedly simple, I think it might be pretty counterintuitive to some people. I’ve often seen that dryland farming is lower carbon footprint per kg of food produced (i.e. per bag of flour), but carbon footprint isn’t all that matters to the environment (and I’m not entirely sure I trusted those sources anyway).

EDIT: Thought more about it and definitely agree even in addition to the carbon footprint thing. When doing carbon footprint calculations, people don’t take into account the possibility that the land could be used for something much better (i.e. rewilding).

I’ve never heard anyone complain about dry land farming before! I’ve had a brief Google and all the sources I can find are pro dryland farming because it’s more sustainable/resilient/uses less. is there analysis somewhere that says otherwise?

I’ve been keeping an eye on the ensemble since early last week - at one point it was forecast that Cornwall was going to get 6 inches of snow! Snow is notoriously tricky to forecast unfortunately

I saw the bakeries one first - fooled me into thinking this was sincere haha

In Sweden they have kebab pizza (kebab meat, iceberg lettuce, raw onions, salad cream) - it’s actually great but it’s horrific microwaved. They also have “banana curry” pizza (did not attempt)

Jasmine green tea (occasionally with oat milk) or oolong is usually my favourite. In terms of English breakfast tea: definitely Yorkshire Gold!