10 ms·
Mathematically correct breakfast: How to slice a bagel into two linked halves (2009)
- kbelder 5y agoThis seems like it would be recursive; you could (very delicately) repeat the process on each torus, to end up with four interlinked.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sp332 5y agoHis daughter, Vi Hart, has a video about how to solve the three utilities problem on a bagel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CruQylWSfoU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CruQylWSfoU
- nfkx120 5y agoI could have legit named my daughter Vi? Fuck.
- squarefoot 5y agoWell, at least her name isn't Emacs. (ducks and runs)
- nfkx120 5y agoWhich is worse to predispose her to - split personality disorder or obesity
- stickfigure 5y agoBest to name her Ed.
- mnemotronic 5y agoOr Slick.
- kingcharles 5y agoJust to be safe I'll call my daughter PINE, aka PINE Is Not Emacs.
- acheron 5y agoMy sister had twins last year, I should have suggested Pico and Nano.
- stickfigure 5y agoThat may be a finite limit. Some years ago a couple I know married and decided to pick a neutral last name, 'X'. The powers that be would not allow it. So their last name became 'Ecks'.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dotancohen 5y agoYou'd just be frustrated by unexpected behaviour. Vim's a far better choice: https://www.popular-babynames.com/name/vim https://www.popular-babynames.com/name/vim
- maxnoe 5y agoMaybe using is as short form of Viola will speak it by the other parent....
- trevcanhuman 5y agoYou mean the Vi Hart ? What a small world.
- dmoy 5y agoTopology is some crazy shit. I wonder if the guy who sells Klein bottle hats can come up with a knife for cutting this way. Cliff Stoll.
- drdec 5y agoSeems like a good place to mention that I bought a Klein bottle hat from Cliff for my (mathematically inclined) wife for Christmas and she loved it. Also there is more to it than just the item, the packaging and other extras really put it over the top. I can't recommend it enough.
- sonofhans 5y agoWe could ask him — https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=CliffStoll https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=CliffStoll
- dwmbt 5y agothis rules. gonna try it out tomorrow morning!
- ChuckMcM 5y agoDefinitely does NOT fit in the toaster that way! :-)
- mauvehaus 5y agoAs somebody who is firmly anti-toaster oven (they're an inferior toaster and a lousy oven), I'll admit that if you're hell-bent on slicing your bagels this way, you should get a toaster oven. Everyone else can find a better use for that counter space.
- juliangamble 5y agoSounds like an @siracusa review meme.
- Jarwain 5y agoHow do you feel about air friers? Aka convection toaster ovens
- mauvehaus 5y agoI have no idea what this is or how a person would use one in practice, but it sounds like the sort of thing invented by and marketed to people who need to get more exercise and worry less about their use of cooking fat. Edited to add: before everybody gets the impression that I'm a total curmudgeon about kitchen appliances, I think electric kettles are up there with sliced bread and my immersion blender is the best $3 I've ever spent at a thrift shop. I thought food processors were moronic until I discovered how easy they make pesto (so easy!). And I would entertain the idea of sous-vide if it weren't so cultish. On the subject of bread machines, I'm convinced that the world needs no more of them and that the existing supply will suffice for decades if people who wanted to try one went to the thrift shop instead of buying new. I've never seen a thrift shop that didn't have a couple in stock.
- jiggunjer 5y agoAir fryer is just marketing talk for a small convection oven. Useful for small studios or if portability is needed. I bake vegetables and chicken thighs in it because I can't fit a full sized oven into my kitchen. It was a toss up between this and a toaster oven. As I already have a toaster I went with the smaller airfryer.
- loloquwowndueo 5y agoI tried this a while ago and couldn’t for the life of me get it right. At some point I decided to stop wasting my time and ruining bagels and just ate them as they were :)
- zouhair 5y agoHow many bagels got sacrificed in this folly?
- sandworm101 5y agoRead before attempting: https://newyorkerbagels.com/bagel-safety-dont-be-an-er-statistic/ https://newyorkerbagels.com/bagel-safety-dont-be-an-er-stati... Seriously. As any nurse about a "bagel injury" and they will know exactly what you are talking about. It is so common that it is addressed in some military first aid courses.
- clove 5y agoFor problem number 1 listed in your link, the YouTube video I posted elsewhere in this thread is a solution. Moreover, my wife, who is a nurse, has never heard of "bagel injury."
- joveian 5y agoI know someone who recently got a bad cut trying to remove a pice of pre-sliced bread from a frozen loaf. So I can believe "knife vs. frozen bread" is a common cause of injury.
- shakna 5y ago> Moreover, my wife, who is a nurse, has never heard of "bagel injury." Well, if we go by the numbers in the article... > Americans ate an estimated 3 billion bagels at home in 2011, an average of about 11 per person (this doesn’t include bagels eaten at work). And in the course of slicing up all those bagels, almost 2,000 people cut their fingers so badly that they ended up in an emergency room. You have roughly (very roughly) a 0.24% chance of being one of those people injured, each day, across the entirety of the nation. I'd say the chances are low enough that some nurses will have heard of it, and some won't have, depending on distribution of bagel eaters.
- jacobolus 5y ago> 0.24% chance of being one of those people injured, each day 2,000 / 330,000,000 / 365 = 0.00000166% chance of daily bagel injury. Not sure what calculation you did, but as far as I can tell it is off by 5 orders of magnitude.
- clove 5y agoDon't forget that you should cut all your bagels as soon as you bring them home for easier storage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ksNsbs2Z-Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ksNsbs2Z-Q
- bryans 5y ago> In additional to the intellectual stimulation, you get more cream cheese, because there is slightly more surface area. As someone who uses half of a brick per bagel regardless of size, I'd say surface area is a non-limiting factor for cream cheese application. If you want more cream cheese, just have more cream cheese -- it's delicious, on top of being more filling (and arguably healthier) than the bagel itself.
- na85 5y agoI used to love cream cheese until I looked at the ingredients list. Buncha weird ass bean gums and stuff. No thanks. Now I use ricotta, or just butter.
- blindmute 5y agoYep, it's a chemical product for sure, full of xantham gum and other such "ingredients". Some cheap brands you can actually taste the gum, or so it seems... I stopped eating it
- Cpoll 5y agoIsn't xantham gum just a product of sugar fermentation? I'm all for fewer ingredients, but cheese is still as much a "chemical" product if the stabilizers and mold extractors are removed.
- blindmute 5y agoLots of nasty things are "just products" of simple ingredients, like seed oils. If the ingredient was invented in a lab less than 100 years ago, I try not to eat it.
- bryans 5y agoThat's rather disinformative. There is nothing about locust bean gum extraction that is unusual or unsafe, and it certainly wasn't "invented in a lab." It's a seed that gets milled into powder.
- gverrilla 5y agovery nice. with pedagogy potential
- beeskneecaps 5y agoIs that sharpie on a bagel? My parents always told me not to plot with my food.
- ouid 5y agoNow glue them back together into S2xS1.
- StanislavPetrov 5y agoAs clever as this is, a bagel cut this way is far more likely to end up face down in my lap as I'm trying to wolf it down while navigating traffic on the morning commute.
- nfkx120 5y agoThis is going to make toaster ICs more complex. Going to need a BAGEL pin, and a BAGEL_ALT pin.
- jahewson 5y agoBagoid?
- sh4rks 5y agoStopped reading when I saw he drew on a perfectly good bagel with a sharpie. People have no respect for food nowadays.
- s5300 5y agoBit of an odd gripe IMO, but either way Sharpie ink is non-toxic & you’d have to ingest more than an entire marker to do any real harm.
- OJFord 5y agoDo you hate anything being used for an alternative purpose, or just food? What if the bagel had been made from the scraps of flour spilt in dusting over the years? Or found where someone else (or the supermarket) had already discarded it? I don't think it's 'waste' to use something differently.
- IncRnd 5y agoThis method doesn't always leave the bagel looking aesthetically pleasing. The bagel, even in the linked video linked in the article, appears to have been hacked apart by a machete wielding attacker, leaving tufts of bread falling out. There is another way! To do so, cut the bagel just one time (not four), turning the knife around the bagel until the bagel is 180 degrees flipped when the knife returns to the starting position. Here is a short video for this sort of a mobius-bagel method. [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ktfo8D3cCr0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ktfo8D3cCr0
- ycombinete 5y agoI thought the first photo was an example of a failed bagel slicing attempt, until I started reading the article.
- stickfigure 5y ago...and I thought I was clever to cut my bagel in 3rds to eat "low carb".
- divbzero 5y ago> What is the ratio of the surface area of this linked cut to the surface area of the usual planar bagel slice? The surface area of the usual planar bagel slice is straightforward, but what’s the most intuitive way to integrate the surface area of a twisting strip?
- newaccount74 5y agoI think you need to find a parameterisation of the strip X(phi, r), calculate the cross product of the unit vectors (dX/dphi cross dX/dr), then integrate that (X being a 3D vector while phi, r are scalar parameters).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- scbrg 5y agoHaving grown up in a non bagel rich country, I've been puzzled ever since I first encountered them. What's the point of the weird shape? What's wrong with a square or even circular piece of bread without an inconvenient hole in the middle? For an outside viewer, it looks like someone went out of their way to create a shape that makes it as difficult to deal with as possible, and then mass psychosis took over and everyone went all Hail bagel shape! for no good reason. What am missing?
- gjvc 5y agothe uniform shape helps ensure even heat transfer for when they are cooked in boiling water (to which is added baking soda), and baked evenly in an oven. (in case you are wondering why they are boiled, it's to develop a chewy crust)
- ars 5y agoIt's not for the oven, it's for when they boil in water. A proper bagel is boiled first, then baked. It's also used for transportation and display by threading a rod or string through the hole, but the main reason is for even boiling. Same as a doughnut (except that is boiled in oil).
- scbrg 5y agoAh. That makes sense. Thanks for the answer :) Still, I eat plenty of bread that's non bagel shaped and fairly evenly baked. I guess I pay slightly more for the more difficult production process then, or have to suffer bread that's just not quite as perfectly uniform in texture as it could be. Well worth it, if you ask me, to not have to deal with the frustrating shape. Mileages vary, of course :)
- bigDinosaur 5y agoI, too, kind of share your perspective, and indeed prefer the texture and structure of non-bagels to bagels. I just find them unnecessary and harder to put fun fillings inside them.
- quickthrower2 5y agoWould make a good bar room hussle.
- supercucklchaim 5y agoThis thread pretty much sums up the state of the modern tech industry, we will be OK for another decade at least. I hope our future generations are as exemplary, too! ;) Yes, we are well adjusted and have real priorities, just imagine how envious bagel-aficionados would be and what they would think if they knew what we look like. :(
- echlebek 5y agoIt's hilarious to get super technical about the way you cut your bagel, and also use a bamboo cutting board, which is sure to dull your knife much faster than other kinds of cutting boards.
- acqbu 5y agoHmm, I can see this becoming an interesting interview question - a sort of "why are manhole covers round" squared