It turns out there’s a price to pay for how good pistachios are: Under the right circumstances, they can spontaneously combust. Everyone’s favorite shelled nut is especially rich in fat, which is highly flammable. Thankfully, that only becomes a problem when pistachios are packed too tightly during shipping or storage. It’s important to keep the nuts dry lest they become moldy — but if they’re kept too dry and there are too many of them bunched together, they can self-heat and catch fire without an external heat source.
Though exceedingly rare and easy to avoid if the proper instructions are followed, pistachio self-combustion is a real enough concern that the German Transport Information Service specifically advises that pistachios “not be stowed together with fibers/fibrous materials as oil-soaked fibers may promote self-heating/spontaneous combustion of the cargo.” Don’t worry, though: It won’t happen in your pantry with just a few bags, which means you can indulge in the nut of your dreams without worrying about their flavor becoming unexpectedly smoky.
Sweet potatoes and common potatoes share part of a name and the spotlight at Thanksgiving meals, but the two are entirely different plants — and sweet potatoes aren’t even potatoes. While both root vegetable species are native to Central and South America, they’re classified as unrelated. Sweet potatoes belong to the Convolvulaceae family, a group of flowering plants that’s also called the morning glory family. Potatoes belong to the nightshade (Solanaceae) family, and are cousins to peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants.
Both species get their name from an Indigenous Caribbean term, batata, which eventually morphed into the English “potato.” By the 1740s, “sweet” was added to the orange-fleshed tuber’s name to differentiate the two root crops.
Then there are yams. Although they’re often served interchangeably with sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving dinners, this third root crop is biologically unrelated to either sweet potatoes or common potatoes. These tubers belong to the Dioscoreacea family, a group of flowering plants usually cultivated in tropical areas. Luckily, you don’t have to know their scientific classification to distinguish between the two non-spuds at the grocery store: Sweet potatoes have tapered ends and relatively smooth skin, while true yams are generally larger with rough bark and a more cylindrical shape. At most U.S. grocery stores, what you’re seeing labeled as a yam is probably actually a sweet potato.
This is the entirety of the most intriguing site on the internet, www.micromorts.rip. I didn’t even know .rip was an option, cuz I’d have been all under that.
Micromorts
💀 We are all going to die 💀
Dying! It is what humans do. We do, however, attempt to delay this end for as long as possible. We continue to make horrible decisions around risk and death.
We can use micromorts to help track how risky an activity is and compare it to other activities. This will help us understand what is dangerous and what isn’t.
From wikipedia:
“A micromort (from micro- and mortality) is a unit of risk defined as one-in-a-million chance of death Micromorts can be used to measure riskiness of various day-to-day activities. A microprobability is a one-in-a million chance of some event; thus a micromort is the microprobability of death. The micromort concept was introduced by Ronald A. Howard who pioneered the modern practice of decision analysis.”
For instance, living one day at age 20 is 1 micromort, running a marathon is 7 micromorts, and riding a motorcycle for 60 miles is 10 micromorts. We can easily see that riding a motorcycle is more dangerous than running a marathon.
The following is a collection of activities and the micromorts of each activity. You can than compare, understand risks and then make decisions.
Activity
Micromorts
Mountaineering Ascent to Mt. Everest
37932
Mountaineering in the Himalayas
12000
Being infected by COVID19
10000
Being infected by the Spanish flu
3000
Mountaineerin Ascent to Matterhorn
2840
Living in US during covid19 pandemic (July 2020)
500
Getting out of bed (age 90)
463
Base Jumping (per jump)
430
First day of being born
430
Giving birth (caesarean)
170
Giving Birth
170
Scuba diving (Trained) per year
164
Giving birth (Vaginal)
120
Getting out of bed (age 75)
105
Giving Birth
80
Night in Hospital
75
Living in NYC during Covid19 (March 15 to May 9)
50
Giving Birth
50
Using Heroin
30
serving in the U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan throughout 2010
25
Playing American Football
20
Getting out of bed (under age 1)
15
Ecstasy (MDMA)
13
Going for a swim (Drowning)
12
General Anesthetic (Emergency Operation)
10
Riding a motorcycle (60 miles)
10
Skydiving (per jump) (genera)
10
SKydiving (US) (per jump)
8
Skydiving (UK) (per jump)
8
Hang gliding
8
Running a Marathon
7
Living in Maryland during Covid19 Pandemic (March 15 to May 9)
