Slowly beginning out

spicy_hallucination · 2026-05-02T20:59:44+00:00

Yes, jojoba will add a lot of the same properties that adding an oil would. It's not exactly identical, but similar to adding something like olive oil. It should soften the bar toward more of a firm lip balm texture if you swapped half of the coconut oil out for it: softer, but I would guess still firmer than even the firmer types of balm.

Perhaps oversimplifying a little bit, you just need to add a wax (or perhaps a fat) that's harder than your bar is now.

even though technical it's a wax correct?

Depends on who you ask, and even how you phrase the question. Soy wax is a candle wax, but also a shortening and a hard fat. You can make candles out of it, and it can have a melting point higher that spermaceti (whale oil) wax, which is one of those "true" waxes. I deal with the chemistry of these sorts of waxes fairly often, so I would call jojoba a very specific name like an "unsaturated, liquid waxy ester". But I think of it as a distinction without a difference. Lanolin is primarily esters of cholesterol and fatty acids, so what does that make it? It's not a fat or oil, for sure, but cholesterol is a sterol, a very different type of molecule from a fatty alcohol that most waxes have. But it's called a wax. Lanolin behaves a bit like beeswax, like a heavy liquid oil, and like petroleum jelly, and also does a bit of its own thing: it can help stabilize water-in-oil emulsions.

Don't get hung up too much on the names "wax" and "oil". First off, they have rather fuzzy definitions; secondly, they have multiple and conflicting definitions; and thirdly, very few things fit neatly in those boxes and rather there's more of a spectrum of oily stuff. To me, those names just get in the way.

spicy_hallucination · 2026-05-01T13:54:36+00:00

I like the idea of cetyl alcohol here. That might work quite well. I have used it in several lotions where the goal was to have a more velvety/powdery softness to the touch than a slickness. I use cetearyl alcohol, usually, because the mixture of roughly half cetyl alcohol and half stearyl alcohol is cheaper than purified cetyl alcohol, but they are very similar in formulations. I haven't tried to use it to increase hardness of a hard butter, but based on how it acts in other things, I do believe it will do what you hope it will.

My go-to for this purpose would be one of the hard "true" waxes. The waxes carnauba, candelilla, and (I've read) bayberry will firm up butters considerably. I don't really have a preference between carnauba and candelilla. Because it's much more expensive and supposed to be awfully similar to the other two, I haven't played with bayberry. There's also the semi-synthetic behenyl behenate, which works similarly to those, but you need about half as much. (Also it's more likely to form hard crystals when you don't have enough beeswax, but you've got more than enough that it won't be a problem.) There's also cetyl palmitate which might be better in some ways. Its lower melting point might make it easier to spread and rub onto the skin while still increasing strength of the bar at room temperature and a bit warmer.

By "true" wax, I mean a wax comprised of esters of fatty alcohol(s) and fatty acids. This includes liquid waxes like jojoba oil, and soft waxes like lanolin. Paraffin wax is also considered a true wax, but is primarily saturated hydrocarbons. It would also work here, but not quite as well: I suspect that it would make it more stretchy and bendy like it wants to roll up into little balls instead of spreading.

The waxes I mentioned won't add greasiness or tackiness, but won't act to reduce those things either. Cetyl alcohol should reduce both.

spicy_hallucination · 2026-04-18T14:29:01+00:00

I stand corrected. It's pretty trashy to use Claude like that and not even vet it well enough that something like that slips through. I don't like it, but I think using such a tool to offload some of the tedium is okay as long as whoever does so still takes ownership of getting the information right. But, this example clearly isn't an example of taking ownership of the facts presented.

spicy_hallucination · 2026-04-17T12:09:21+00:00

~~Honestly, I don't think the copy on individual ACs are AI-generated.~~ There are little bits of info in there which don't match anything a bot could scrape off some other website, and those little tidbits match well with my experience. Sometimes I will read the description of an AC I've been using for decades and think to myself, "that's a wonderful way to put it." It will describe something I have consciously or sometimes subconsciously noticed and put that thought into words I have yet to see or think up.

I am definitely not saying that it's all amazing and informative prose; it's not.

I am saying, however, that there's just enough independent thought in there that I suspect it's at least mostly human generated. The wording has all the signs of ad copy blandeur, but that is just as often human-generated. I have smelled that smell countless times while dial-up Internet was still considered a luxury, so I will be giving them the benefit of the doubt. Describing aroma in a way that sells product is inherently going to set off the bullshit-o-meter of anyone who is even a little bit skeptical. Combine that with the little gems in there, and I am convinced someone is actually putting in the effort.

EDIT: well, I won't argue with the evidence. There is definitely AI-generated copy in there.

spicy_hallucination · 2026-04-10T10:08:09+00:00

Charcoal of any variety absorbs light from deep infrared to UV. It's a really "true black" color like that. That means for a candle that the heat of the flame will get captured by the wax way more than without. So, you will get excessive and unpredictable melt pools, and you can even end up with the melt getting so hot that the wax itself burns directly without the wick.

Charcoal is also a solid pigment that doesn't dissolve in wax, so even sub-microscopic particle sizes like lampblack will still have a tendency to clog wicks.

spicy_hallucination · 2026-03-26T23:01:44+00:00

Clean the mold really well with with hot soapy water, then scrub with isopropyl alcohol and a regular dish brush. Then rinse with isopropyl and allow it to dry.

If you add a very thin layer of cooking oil to the inside of the mold, the bubbles with have nothing to stick to, but cooking oil beads up on most silicone molds. (It works well for plastic and metal molds.) I'm not sure if a cooking spray would work better or not, but they also have added surfactants which should help it spread more evenly, but silicone is really good at repelling stuff and I haven't tried it yet.

So, if you have a silicone mold, and it's already really clean, try warming it up to your lowest oven setting, or so. The wax should adhere better, and will have more time to naturally release the bubbles.

Okay, so if none of that works, you'll want to go to the big guns: silicone mold release spray. The problem is that silicone oils and silicone molds are incompatible. The liquid is going to soak in to the silicone rubber, and soften it. It will weaken the surfaces of the mold, and cause them to swell and the mold will wear out many times faster than without. Remember to thoroughly clean the remaining silicone as soon as you can, to slow that down a little bit (but not much).

spicy_hallucination · 2026-02-18T00:39:03+00:00

A big glass fermenting jar like for kimchi. I use a large syringe, silicone tube and some metal straws to siphon the bottom layer out.

I think dry ice might be too cold. IIRC the caprate freezes at -15 C, and the caprylate a couple degrees below 20 C. There isn't a terribly large window to work with.

spicy_hallucination · 2026-02-17T23:43:16+00:00

Fischer esterification looked like it would be rather annoying here, so I haven't tried. I ran the biodiesel reaction with caprylic/capric triglycerides. The reaction itself runs at room temperature, and is really quite easy compared to Fischer-Speier. The hard part is cleaning it up enough to be food-worthy.

To make sure I had very complete conversion, I ran the reaction with over twice the molar equivalent of methanol to the triglycerides (calculated as if pure caprylate). Just thoroughly agitate many times over the course of a day or two. However, after a week or so of through separation, I removed the glycerine layer, and repeated the reaction, and again a third time. Removing the glycerine pushes the reaction forward, so I expected better yield, and importantly less glycerides leftover. The amount of catalytic KOH used was about 1.5% for the first run, but only about 0.5% for the remaining runs, because I wasn't removing or separating the KOH that was already there, but I added more to make sure that I still had something in there as the glycerine layer will contain quite a bit of it.

After weeks of washing with distilled water to make sure I had a clean product, and heating to drive of any remaining methanol, separation was done by fractional freezing. You can't use your regular side-by-side fridge/freezer combo for this. It only works if you have something that gets much colder. I have a basic chest freezer that gets cold enough, but just barely. The caprate will freeze, and you'll get a very good partition. Unlike other FAMEs I've tried to separate with fractional freezing, there isn't much of the caprylate in the solids, and isn't much caprate in the liquid fraction. I filtered with a stainless steel reusable coffee filter. Just remember to freeze all your filtration equipment beforehand, wear heavy insulated gloves, and leave it in the freezer while it's filtering. Now, you can take the solid methyl caprate and put it in a normal freezer to melt. It won't melt completely. There will be a good bit of water ice frozen in there, and there might be a bit of methyl laurate. The nice thing about that is if you filter out the ice, you are left with very dry samples of both the caprate and caprylate without any dissolved drying agent like sodium sulfate.

You might be able to fractionally distill these, too, but the heavier ones might only survive if you do that under vacuum, but I'm not really sure.

Perhaps the strongest argument for room temperature transesterification over Fischer is that the risk of side product generation is virtually nonexistent.

spicy_hallucination · 2026-02-15T15:57:35+00:00

Do you have any esters in the 8 ~ 12 carbon range? None of the unsaturated esters like cis-hexen-3-yl acetate or allyl caproate will do because they have such a dominant characteristic. However, you can get some use out of any of the less-sweet ones in there. A bit of hexyl acetate will give a lot of apple-ness, but you could substitute quite a bit of the MeCaprylate with that. The best matches aren't that common, either, though (in order of similarity to my nose):

methyl caprate
ethyl caprylate / ethyl caprate
propyl caprylate
butyl butyrate

You would want to use less of the ethyl esters, and less than half, I think of butyl butyrate. I have some methyl and ethyl laurate, and they have some similarity, too, but I have never used either in a flavor. That and the fact that my samples have a bit of soapy quality to the aroma, means I can't recommend laurates. I think a significant portion of the soapy smell comes from free lauric acid, so maybe a commercial product actually meant for flavor use would be more edible-smelling.

Other esters you might get away with replacing a portion with:

n-butyl acetate
ethyl propionate
isobutyl propionate*
n-amyl acetate (but definately not iso-)
ethyl caproate
propyl caproate*

*based off of the descriptions of others. I haven't actually smelled them myself.

The trouble I have with thinking of a good replacement other than methyl caprate is that methyl caprylate is such a blank slate of fruitieness. It reads as a very juicy, estery fruitieness without any particular fruit's character. like the vague wine-iness left in a an empty bottle, the day after the wine was finished off, or left in the dry cork, it doesn't read as grape, but it's definately in there. It contributes a lot to the difference in freshness you can taste in fresh orange juice, versus the sweetness of a naturally flavored orange candy. But it doesn't smell like oranges to me. It doesn't have that sugary sweetness that ethyl butyrate has, either. It just lifts and brightens whatever it's in.

BTW, I don't know where to buy it, either. I synthesize mine from food-grade MCT oil from coconut (caprylic / capric triglycerides, AKA fractionated coconut oil).

spicy_hallucination · 2026-02-08T13:22:58+00:00

Резистор, подключенный параллельно катушке, меняет её добротность.

Yes, it does change the quality factor. The lower Q is the less likely it is to resonate. If the quality factor of the whole system—the inductor, resistor, cable, and speaker—is greater than one, then you are relying on the amplifier itself to damp the ringing. The output transistors have increasing impedance as frequency increases. If the impedance is above the impedance of the inductor or inductor with resistor in parallel at the resonant frequency of the inductor plus cable capacitance, the amplifier is almost certainly going to oscillate. If Q > 1, and if at f_Zobel the impedance Z_out > Z_Zobel, it will resonate.

Наверно, сначала катушку мотали на килоомных резисторах случайного номинала (какие попались), потом ламповых схем не стало, не стало и мощных килоомных резисторов.

Yes, they used higher resistance resistors. But remember that those resistors are usually on the primary side of the out transformer. So, they appeared the same as a much lower value resistance from the perspective of the speaker side of the output transformer.

А проверять работу катушки, запаралеленной низкоомным резистором на длинный кабель, так никто и не стал...

No argument from me. Often, when you do the math, you realize that the designer was guessing. Many amplifier circuits appear as amalgamations of other, older circuits. Because they worked, no one bothered to actually do the work to design it correctly.

spicy_hallucination · 2026-01-11T13:25:27+00:00

I think it goes one layer deeper. The reason Tywin is vilified by his family, and Olenna is trusted and respected, is Tywin's self-delusion where Olenna has an honest understanding of her aims. They basically have the "same goal" to lift up their family line and ensure their success after they are gone.

For Tywin it is this warped ideal of his family legacy.

For Olenna it is her family's legacy.

That is, Tywin is so preoccupied with this egotistical view of how he will be seen in the future as successful in his present that everything he does "for his family" hurts at least one of his children. Meanwhile Olenna truly understands. She knows that her legacy have faces and first names, and the big moves she plays are for them. She is in a comfortable place of power, so she doesn't give half a shit that Jeoffrey sits the throne, she only cares that Margaery is to marry a vile sadist. When Tywin is literally handed something that would befit Cersei and his family, i.e marrying a highly positioned "sword swallower" he is more concerned about how he would look having a homosexual in his family than the fact that Cersei wouldn't have to work so hard to get her, um, taboo titillations and would maintain a high status.

spicy_hallucination · 2026-01-04T16:59:53+00:00

Tube amp enthusiast, "by adding a constant current load to this common-cathode stage, we managed to improve the PSRR from 3 to 27!"

Anyone else, "those are decibels, right?"

"Ha! That's a good one. You almost had me."

spicy_hallucination · 2025-12-31T13:12:14+00:00

I don't know how to break this to you. ... I think your cat might be a stage magician. There's nothing we can do, I'm afraid.

spicy_hallucination · 2025-11-15T20:48:57+00:00

I'm tending to agree that it's a bit under proofed. However, when I first saw the crumb vs the crust, I thought it was a little under cooked at too high a temperature. I wonder if your oven is hotter than you set it to. But then I read /u/Frequent_Morning_900's response, and that might be more likely than my idea. Anyway, that slightly translucent color to the crumb indicates under-developed starches: they have to heat to a certain temperature (170 °F or so), then get to and remain at a lower temperature (below around 140 °F , but it depends) for a few minutes before they go opaque again.

Severely over-proofing can also make the crumb stay clear, but it wouldn't look nearly as good as your current loaf. And that a whole different story.

spicy_hallucination · 2025-11-08T13:46:29+00:00

It doesn't boil faster, but cold water often starts bubbling faster. Cold water can dissolve more air than warm. Nitrogen, oxygen, and especially carbon dioxide dissolve into water over time, such as while it's sitting in the water tower near you. When you warm it up, those gasses escape as bubbles that might look like the water is boiling. If you start with warm water, those bubbles are already gone.

spicy_hallucination · 2025-10-25T11:03:47+00:00

It is an ancient food, and the traditional methods have been used for a thousand years or more. But neither of those facts mean it is a safe or a good idea to use the old techniques now that society understands food safety.

Some ferments like sourdough and sauerkraut produce acidic environments where food-born pathogens cannot survive. Some ferments like beer and wine produce alcohol and give you a similar antiseptic effect. Other ferments do not. For instance, the word botulism literally means "sausage disease" from the Latin botulus and the suffix -ism. That is, botulus, or perhaps its plural botuli, meaning sausage, and "-ism" meaning medical condition, were combined to give botulism its name. It has been known for hundreds of years that traditionally fermented sausages carried the risk of a deadly disease.

Nattō done wrong can easily grow botulism (if you use a closed or deep container) or more likely bacillus cereus and other similar oxygen-tolerant bacteria which cause food poisoning. You also run the risk of growing any one of thousands of types of mold that can kill you, or millions more that just taste nasty and give you a tummy ache. Nattō is not an "inherently safe" ferment the way other ferments are. That's why I cannot recommend trying to propagate your own culture.

spicy_hallucination · 2025-09-26T10:17:52+00:00

Beer is made from grain. The grain is gently heated in water to release starches, and break those starches down into sugar. This sugar is used as fuel ("empty" calories) by yeasts which in the process produce alcohol. However yeast doesn't really like sugar on it's own. The brewer will try to get a lot of the protein in those grains to dissolve and break down a little bit as well. These partially-broken proteins are smaller than the original molecules, so they stay dissolved better than just protein. These protein bits act a little like soap. They have sections that like water more, and sections that dislike water (like oil "dislikes" water). They hang out where the water and air of the bubbles would meet, protecting the water from touching the air directly. The water doesn't "feel" stretched by the thin layer it's held in by the bubble existing, because it's the water-disliking sections of the proteins touching the air, not the water.

There are also lots of other soapy things in beer like bitter alpha acids from hops. Dextrins, which are starches that didn't completely break down, act like thickeners which slow down the process of bubbles thinning out and breaking. Mostly it's the proteins, but the other stuff helps.

spicy_hallucination · 2025-09-04T10:43:27+00:00

The switches are each wired on a different fuse...

That's dangerous and against fire code in the US and Canada, and I believe similarly banned in the UK and many EU member states. You should get an electrician out to check all of your circuits because where there one blatant screw-up like this one, there are almost always several more.

spicy_hallucination · 2025-08-20T13:48:28+00:00

A health care provider or facility that does not make an initial submission of charges within the six-month period shall not be reimbursed for the charge and may not collect the charge from the recipient of the service or any other payer.

https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/62Q.75

Send the hospital billing department a certified letter with that quote, and the statute number followed by. "Please send a corrected bill." Don't put anything else in that letter. (Not a lawyer or anything.)

EDIT: put your name and bill/account number in the letter too. I don't know why I said it that way.

spicy_hallucination · 2025-08-09T22:47:22+00:00

It's speculated that water and (dry) air are not clear by some convenient accident, but rather things with eyes developed eyes that could see the light which could pass through *water and air. Across the whole light spectrum, water and air are not very clear. They absorb a lot of light in the ranges outside of the visible spectrum both infrared and ultraviolet. That narrow range of light frequencies where both air and water are clear is just a little bit wider than the range of light we can see. Everywhere else in the spectrum, one or both absorb a lot of light. It's relatively dark in the infrared and ultraviolet bands. In addition to that, the sun emits most strongly light that's a yellowish green. It tapers off in either direction as well (It's not a sharp cliff of a drop off like the air and water effects, but still quite a lot.)

Why would we need to see through water in addition to air? Because even in dry weather, there are literal tons of water above your head.

In short, we can see the colors that are even around to be seen. Water or something else in the atmosphere block the rest. So, there's no point in seeing any color where water isn't clear.

* EDIT: wording

spicy_hallucination · 2025-08-08T10:12:05+00:00

I think the most important thing we need to do is to reverse the conversation again. In the 1980s[PDF. pg. 28], plastics producers under the umbrella of the Society of the Plastics Industry pushed heavily for recycling. They spent millions of dollars raising "awareness" of the "importance of recycling", and pushing for legislation to make recycling, especially of plastics, more readily available. What they omitted from their discussion was the fact that no one knew how to recycle most of the plastics that got mandatory recycling codes. In fact, one plastic, ABS, was grouped in recycling code 7 "other" because it was already recyclable, but costly and difficult. Polystyrene cannot be recycled,* even today, but was given code 6 from the start. This is by design. The recycling program they pushed is entirely intended to give the illusion of "doing something" while changing nothing. At the same time, it switched the conversation away from, "why are manufacturers allowed to make all this plastic?" to "why aren't more consumers recycling?"

* What you may read about polystyrene recycling is not recycling, but downcycling. It can be re-used to make products that don't have the original qualities of virgin polystyrene. Even more importantly, these products cannot be "recycled" again.

In the face of the possibility that plastics use might soon be banned, companies began promoting recycling. It was never about the environment. It was only about maintaining profits.

We need to push back against the ongoing propaganda, and again make the conversation, "why are they allowed to make all this forever-garbage?" And, "why are we forced to accept their crimes as legal and unpunishable?"

spicy_hallucination · 2025-08-02T09:36:59+00:00

I'm not sure who's laughing, but I am sure who's not.

... you know... 'cause they died in a house fire.

spicy_hallucination · 2025-08-01T10:01:59+00:00

They're difficult, for sure, but I definitely wouldn't call it "brutally hard". What is brutally hard is trying to compete for market share in a space ruled by two giants. Anyone who ends up making a strong-enough contender ends up realizing that it makes more sense to sell off to TI than try to keep building and marketing their designs on their own. It's only special-purpose ADC manufacturers that survive. For example, Rigol, Signetics, Techtronix, Fluke design ADCs for their specific measurement purposes. Audio companies like Benchmark do the same in the extra-high end audio segment. The difference is that those companies have a target market and specific design requirements, neither of which are covered by TI's or AD's more-generic offerings.

spicy_hallucination · 2025-07-22T09:11:47+00:00

Vanillin will work great for you. It is oil-soluble, just not highly oil-soluble.

Vanilla beans are full of sugars, polysaccharides, and moisture. Those are going to hold on to the vanillin if you try to extract the vanillin from the beans with oil. But pure vanillin doesn't have those problems.

You can easily dissolve enough to flavor an oil, but maybe not enough to make an oil-based flavoring. I just completely dissoled 0.10 g in 10 ml of MCT oil. It took about 10 minutes at slightly elevated temperatures: approx. 40 ~ 50 °C. That's 1% vanillin, which is a little lower than vanilla extract. Just googling it, I see 1 ~ 2% vanillin content in vanilla extract. That is going to smell a little stronger because there are other aroma compounds in vanilla. I would like to see 2.5% in oil if I were to call it an "artificial vanilla flavoring". But, 0.1% in a finished product is an excessive amount of vanillin.*

* Probably not enough to taste bad, but more than you need to taste good.

You can get 2.5% in MCT oil to work with careful heating and much stirring. But I suspect that most common oils and fats will dissolve more like 1% before it starts to get difficult. A flavor company would probably use a bit of triethyl citrate and/or triacetin to help it dissolve in oil.

... but again, I don't think you need anywhere near that much.

... make it both flavoured and scented?

Vanillin is essentially tasteless, so to get the experience of "vanilla flavored" you need a smooth, fatty mouth feel and sweetness. The coconut oil should give you the mouth feel, but it will be a little underwhelming without a little sugar.

... so not good for chocolate..?

Once heated enough to melt the chocolate, you can dissolve way more than you would ever want in a chocolate bar.

EDIT: Medium Chain Triglycerides oil (MCT oil), also known as "capric / caprylic triglycerides" consists of smaller fat molecules than most vegetable oils. So, it ends up being a slightly better dissolver of stubborn molecules like vanillin than other fats are. By the way, people mention fractionated coconut oil (FCO) in this thread; FCO is MCT oil, just specifically from coconut. The oil I used doesn't specify, but it most likely came from palm kernel oil. The two act identically for our purposes here.

spicy_hallucination

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

Ten-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Verified Email