Crypto provides banking services (savings, moving money, exchanging overseas money, pensions, mortgages, ...) which in a lot of countries are normally entirely exploited by the government to the point that crypto is far superior. And yes, of course that means it's for dodging taxes, moving criminal gains, and dodging sanctions by Russia and North Korea.
But in many countries "exploited" means that the country is so corrupt that "yes, but your crypto savings can disappear overnight" is not a very good argument against crypto, because the normal system has the same problem. In some countries the very currency of the country itself has that problem, and it's not always hyperinflation. For example, I've heard quite a few times from Chinese people that they prefer bitcoin over Yuan, just for the ability to dodge the banking system. Apparently one factor is that normal people can't use Yuan outside of China without very strict limits (which is another instance of "why does anyone trade with China? They are never going to allow a fair bidirectional trading relationship with their citizens. Trading with China, you can only lose".
Crypto is also the only way Venezuelans, Egyptians, and many others ... have any banking services at all.
So I would argue crypto is a lot more useful than Apple. Just not to people living in the richest countries.
Yeah it's insulting. It would be very long and boring to list all the things I thought of and discarded, just to ward off such attempts at help. If someone doesn't ask your advice, don't give it.
It's obviously of more interest as a piece of outreach than as a piece of mathematics. Nevertheless I've always wondered about the e^ipi + 1 = 0 formulation. It seems ugly and ad hoc, and the connection between the "5 constants" is not all that meaningful.
That e^ipi = -1 is related to the much more profound observation that the complex numbers represent a sort of rotation into a previously unknown dimension of numbers.
There was a lot of hubris around microwaves. I remember a lot of images of full chickens being roasted in them. I've never once seen that "in the wild" as it were. They are good for reheating something that was produced earlier. Hey the metaphor is even better than I thought!
There are many years since I have switched to cooking only with microwaves, due to minimum wasted time and perfect reproducibility. And I normally eat only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients.
Attempting to roast a full chicken or turkey is not the correct way to use microwaves. You must first remove the bones from the bird, then cut the meat into bite-sized chunks. After using a boning knife for the former operation, I prefer to do the latter operation with some good Japanese kitchen scissors, as it is simpler and faster than with a knife.
If you buy turkey/chicken breasts or thighs without bones, then you have to do only the latter operation and cut them into bite-sized pieces.
Then you can roast the meat pieces in a closed glass vessel, without adding anything to the meat, except salt and spices (i.e. no added water or oil). The microwave oven must be set to a relatively low power and long time, e.g. for turkey meat to 30 minutes @ 440 W and for chicken to less time than that, e.g. 20 to 25 minutes. The exact values depend on the oven and on the amount of cooked meat, but once determined by experiment, they remain valid forever.
The meat cooked like this is practically identical to meat cooked on a covered grill (the kind with indirect heating, through hot air), but it is done faster and without needing any supervision. In my opinion this results in the tastiest meat in comparison with any other cooking method. However, I do not care about a roasted crust on the meat, which is also unhealthy, so I do not use the infrared lamp that the microwave oven has for making such a crust.
Vegetable garnishes, e.g. potatoes, must be cooked at microwaves separate from the meat, as they typically need much less time than meat, usually less than 10 minutes (but higher power). Everything must be mixed into the final dish after cooking, including things like added oil, which should better not be heated at great temperatures.
Even without the constraints of a microwave oven, preparing meat like this makes much more sense than cooking whole birds or fish or whatever. Removing all the bones and any other inedible parts and also cutting the meat into bite-sized pieces before cooking wastes much less time than when everybody must repeat all these operations every time during eating, so I consider that serving whole animals at a meal is just stupid, even if they may look appetizing for some people.
Neither "roasted" nor "steamed" are completely appropriate for this cooking method.
While there is steam in the vessel, it comes only from the water lost from the meat, not from any additional water, and the meat is heated by the microwaves, not by the steam.
Without keeping a lid on the cooking vessel, the loss of water is too rapid and the cooked meat becomes too dry. Even so, the weight of meat is reduced to about two thirds, due to the loss of water.
In the past, I was roasting meat on a covered grill, where the air enclosed in it was heated by a gas burner through an opening located on one side, on its bottom. With such a covered grill, the air in which the meat was cooked would also contain steam from the water lost by the meat, so the end result was very similar to the microwave cooking that I do now, also preventing the meat from becoming too dry, unlike with roasting on an open grill, while also concentrating the flavor and avoiding its dilution by added water or oil.
I greatly appreciate this type of thinking. If you debone the meat yourself, do you make stock or use the bones in any way? You obviously care about personal process optimization and health factors, and I'm curious to what extent you are thinking of the entire food/ingredient supply chain.
> There are many years since I have switched to cooking only with microwaves, due to minimum wasted time and perfect reproducibility. And I normally eat only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients.
Some of us also like the food tasting nice besides the reproducibility of the results.
Like I have said, meat prepared in this way is the tastiest that I have ever eaten, except if you are one of those who like real meat less than the burned crust of meat.
Even for the burned-crust lovers, many microwave ovens have lamps for this purpose, but I cannot say whether the lamps are good at making tasty burned crusts, because I have never used them, since I like more to eat meat than to eat burned crusts.
The good taste of meat prepared in this way is not surprising, because the meat is heated very uniformly and the flavor of the meat is not leached away by added water or oil, but it is concentrated due to the loss of water from the meat, so the taste is very similar to that of meat well cooked on a grill, neither burned nor under-cooked, and also without adding anything but salt and spices.
“Burned crust” is not what people want. If it’s burnt it went too far. The fact that you are equivocating the two makes me think you haven’t ever had properly cooked meat or are very confused about what “burned” means. https://www.thetakeout.com/how-to-brown-meat-while-cooking-1...
This convo is hilarious, you rock. I'm not surprised someone was open minded enough to master the art of cooking with a microwave. Also there are different type of fast cooking apparatus that are usually reserved for restaurants but I could imagine they might be up your alley. (I can't right now recall the name of such a device but its similar in function to microwave maybe it is a microwave at its heart?)
As I understood it, if you used the esoteric functions of the microwave, you COULD cook food like it was cooked on a range, but it required constant babysitting of the microwave and reinput of timers and cook power levels.
I'm a bit of an LLM skeptic but chatgpt could probably explain this kind of thing pretty well and a) it's interactive so you can ask if you don't understand a step b) there will be no filler to pad the content for ads (well not at the moment anyway)
I skimmed the paper so might have missed something, but iiuc there is no algorithm used for comparison. They did not run some well defined algorithm on some benchmark instances, they estimated the cost of simulating the circuits "through tensor network contraction" - I quote here not to scare but because this is where my expertise runs out.
Curious why not? Assuming you only used the metadata. I think they would be considered raw facts and not copyrightable.
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