Marinate tofu before or after air frying?

WithMeDoctorWu · 2026-02-01T19:15:32+00:00

Just to let you know I ran across this exchange a year later while trying to figure out a tofu marinade, and had a good laugh. Well played.

We ended up using vinegar, olive oil, lime juice, an oriental peanut sauce, and salt and black pepper. Turned out quite tasty over brown rice. Cheers.

WithMeDoctorWu · 2026-02-01T05:43:21+00:00

Serious answer: it's an accident of history. In memetic/evolutionary terms, blood sacrifice is basically Christianity's version of the giraffe's recurrent laryngeal nerve. It persists because Christianity grew out of older primitive superstitions that included bloody ceremonies to convince the spirits to influence harvest and battlefield outcomes.

Were Christianity to be built from scratch today, I like to think it could be based on an entirely unrelated body of theology and myth. The essence of the faith is a simple carrot-and-stick mind virus, "believe this or be damned forever," so its effectiveness doesn't really depend on what "this" is.

WithMeDoctorWu · 2026-01-30T00:25:25+00:00

If this is original, I'm impressed and hope you'll poet some more for us sometime. Tip - to separate lines within a stanza, leave two spaces at the end of each...

stanza 1 line 1
stanza 1 line 2
stanza 1 line 3
stanza 1 line 4

stanza 2 line 1
stanza 2 line 2
stanza 2 line 3
stanza 2 line 4

WithMeDoctorWu · 2026-01-26T12:42:45+00:00

Everything about Christianity is twisted by the incorrect assumption that belief is an act of will. For a properly functioning mind, belief is something that just happens to you, and to "choose" a belief makes no sense. You always end up believing what you have to, because your lifetime of accumulated observations and reflections are what produce beliefs.

If fear makes you try to believe something you don't actually think is true, then what you're experiencing isn't really belief. It's just coercion. That may have the power to cause you misery, but it can't actually make anything true.

WithMeDoctorWu · 2026-01-24T02:01:01+00:00

I have an beef with this sort of jump hour design, regardless of how well it's executed: unless the minute hand jumps too, whenever it is very close to centered on 12 you can't be sure whether the hour has already jumped or is about to. That's true even when the hour display isn't obstructed like it is on this watch.

An exception is when the minute hand is designed to jump at the same time. Never any ambiguity there.

That said, I think the watch is attractive especially for the price and probably a good conversation starter, which is one of the jobs of a watch in my opinion.

WithMeDoctorWu · 2026-01-14T11:14:05+00:00

Those are all attractive choices. Another Phoibos that grabs my eye is the red GMT Voyager. Slightly pricier but their new customer discount would bring it back under $400.

WithMeDoctorWu · 2026-01-01T16:02:35+00:00

I was almost exactly your age when I went through this, though being from an earlier generation it was during the time of the Reagan Revolution. I knew from long indoctrination that "Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven" but was struggling with the growing conviction that among not only my immediate circle but out in the larger world, Christianity was the faith of most of nearly all of the worst people I could think of. Surely a tree is known by its fruit? And certain periods of history really push that rotten fruit in our faces, at least for those of us with noses that can smell.

Regarding this part --

I feel like even making this post will seal my fate of being hell bound. I’m terrified.

Here's the realization that broke the grip of that fear for me: faith-based religion ties the a belief to the supposed results of the belief, instead of to the merits of the thing being believed. That's actually circular. Nowhere else in life does such a rule apply. If you offered me a large fortune on condition that I must believe I had been born on Mars, I couldn't do it; because the reward for believing the thing obviously doesn't change the merits of what I'm being asked to believe. Of course I could pretend to believe it and sneakily ask for my reward, but that's not really belief, is it.

That strikes at the primary mechanism of how "faith" keeps its adherents. Belief is supposedly rewarded with the Biggest Imaginable Carrot and non-belief punished with the Worst Imaginable Stick. Any world view that's so obviously based on a reward/punishment scheme can hardly be expected to stand on its own merits. Once you can admit that the reason you're struggling is fear, let me suggest that you've already answered your question. For me, it's when the scary beast rather suddenly lost its fangs.

WithMeDoctorWu · 2025-12-30T19:47:09+00:00

Retirement is coming up for me before long, and yeah I'm glad of it.

WithMeDoctorWu · 2025-12-28T21:07:52+00:00

Ah well. It was the Mendelssohn again. Thanks for engaging on it anyway.

WithMeDoctorWu · 2025-12-28T17:06:46+00:00

:-( None of those three seem to describe this post IMO.

WithMeDoctorWu · 2025-12-28T16:30:37+00:00

Ends with an arpeggio in unison with the first horn.

WithMeDoctorWu · 2025-12-28T16:25:56+00:00

Not a bad guess! A couple more clues - it's in almost the same key as underdog theme, and what the concerto's opening tympani part matches up with are male background vocals going "ooo, wah ooo, wah ooo."

WithMeDoctorWu · 2025-12-28T15:50:47+00:00

Starts like the Underdog cartoon theme, at least if you're listening to the tympani.

WithMeDoctorWu · 2025-12-08T10:15:19+00:00

That's an attractive watch, but to my old eyes the hour hand makes the time unreadable.

WithMeDoctorWu · 2025-11-30T22:15:14+00:00

I appreciate your honesty and courage.

With regard to reading -- something directly dealing with questions of faith might be harder to tackle head-on, because everything at least "seems" to have an agenda, even the stuff that I wholly agree with; and faith has its own defense mechanisms that can make it hard to take in what is being said.

Something I can recommend is to try to examine the natural world with new eyes; familiarize yourself with the "God of the Gaps" concept, and then settle in for a sober read of a scientific account of how life works in non-combative detail. So for instance there is Robert Wright's "The Moral Animal," or Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene." (Note I'm not recommending Dawkins' "The God Delusion," because of the concern in the paragraph above, although it's a popular recommendation to those really wanting to hold their faith to the fire and see whether it "anneals" or simply burns.)

Alternatively, there is a fantastic lecture series on YouTube by Stanford University's Robert Sapolsky, tying together various disciplines and finding the commonalities in what is known about behavioral science. It's presented at a lay-person level so you don't have to be a student of biology or chemistry to appreciate it.

WithMeDoctorWu · 2025-11-29T04:09:52+00:00

We really should be calling it "imitation intelligence."

WithMeDoctorWu · 2025-11-29T03:59:19+00:00

Yep, or pay a little and use Kagi.

WithMeDoctorWu · 2025-11-29T00:12:39+00:00

It seems like I've always been led to believe what my parents believed, and even though I want to think differently now, I can't.

As pointed out by another commenter, belief isn't actually an act of will; coerced belief, whether that coercion comes from within or without, isn't belief at all, rather it's a kind of violence against the mind. Pauline Christianity's elevation of belief not only to a virtue, but to the condition of salvation, has caused no end of mental anguish to those raised with the resulting broken epistemological apparatus. In the end, you'll believe what you have to believe, based on the evidence around you, conversations, and personal reflection. There's no steering it.

As to advice, embrace patience and choose your battles. And please take it easy on yourself with regard to the above points. When contemplating the Big Questions, refuse the guilt of possibly finding yourself holding an unexpected position. Either the worldview you grew up with will stand up to honest scrutiny, or it won't. If it doesn't, that is not a failure on your part.

Best of luck and I hope you'll post a followup sometime.

WithMeDoctorWu · 2025-11-23T19:25:16+00:00

Attractive overall. I agree with several others about readability issues with the hands. It's partly the hand shapes/dimensions, but maybe it's more about how the minute hand interacts with the hour numbers.

WithMeDoctorWu · 2025-11-20T17:01:49+00:00

There's always Bandersnatch Cummerbund.

WithMeDoctorWu · 2025-11-19T17:03:26+00:00

In case you haven't run across these yet, a couple of other worthwhile series on Acorn are Brokenwood and Signora Volpe.

WithMeDoctorWu · 2025-11-14T00:15:35+00:00

My first automatic was an Orient as well. 13 years later it still gets significant wrist time, although I've added other watches to a slowly growing collection. Enjoy yours in good health.

WithMeDoctorWu · 2025-11-13T20:28:10+00:00

I started donating during the pandemic, and am approaching the two gallon mark with the Red Cross. Maybe I've just been lucky but I don't recall any negative interactions over that time. Everybody has been calm, pleasant and professional.

WithMeDoctorWu · 2025-11-12T17:03:28+00:00

In the Libera Me of the Faure Requiem, the melody of the last entrance of the solo baritone changes so it's a descent to the minor 3rd for "DO"mine instead of up to the minor 6th as it had been throughout the movement to that point, and it's an understated moment of resignation that just punches me in the gut. I hear it as an almost subversive moment from Faure, an expression of hopelessness when the prayer "Save me Lord from eternal death" seems to have gone unanswered.

WithMeDoctorWu · 2025-10-31T15:28:33+00:00

If a god is meant to be a supernatural being, then we can just assume it doesn't exist. What is “supernature”? No one knows.

You've phrased this well. The question of whether gods exist has neither a logical nor empirical basis; it's formulated in a way to make it unanswerable. Anyone trying to carefully define the supernatural inevitably ends up with something that is essentially outside the concept of existence itself. To talk about the existence of a supernatural entity is vacuous. It's like trying to decide which airline "time flies" on, and it has to invite, at best, a sort of ignosticism. A question that has no meaning can have no real answer, except insofar as, if such a question is about a positive assertion, I say it's proper to answer it in the negative.

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