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The extraordinary shelf life of the deep sea sandwiches
- unwind 4y agoVery interesting, and daring of them to taste food having spent 10 months in the ocean! That must have been an epic "for science!" moment, for sure. Semi-meta: as a non-native speaker, does the expression "a handful of apples" feel natural? Is that, like, 4-5 apples, or whatever you feel a handful corresponds to? I mean, most people will struggle actually holding more than one or two apples in a single hand, but perhaps that part is so idiomatic that the literal meaning of the words don't matter? Would you say "a handful of aircraft carriers"?
- eschneider 4y agoMore like putting out a platter of "Free Food!" for grad students.
- jfengel 4y agoYes, that's fine. English speakers regularly use "handful" to mean "about five". As a random example I googled "handful of buildings" and got >700,000 hits, e.g. "Charnley-Persky House is one of a handful of buildings that display the combined talents of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright". You can even have "a handful" of non-physical things: "a handful of ideas" gets almost 5 million hits on Google, e.g. "We started with a handful of ideas that sprung out of our collective experiences on social media."
- unwind 4y agoCool, thanks!
- jmkb 4y agoTo me (native English a la USA) apples are in a sort of uncanny valley between things that could in fact be measured by the physical handful, like peanuts, and things that couldn't -- buildings being way off the charts, obviously.
- thaumasiotes 4y agoContext will make the difference. If you say "grab a handful of apples", no one will believe you meant to say it, because that doesn't make any sense. "There are a handful of apples" is a different usage, which people will accept.
- jmkb 4y agoWell maybe. I've literally grabbed handfuls of wild apples, about the size of ping-pong balls. (Maybe better described as feral apples? Old orchards with trees unpruned for decades.)
- staunch 4y agoFYI: anyone eating wild apples should take care to avoid "beach apples" cause they're highly toxic. https://www.google.com/search?q=beach+apple&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=beach+apple&source=lnms&tbm=... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchineel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchineel
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- egypturnash 4y agoSame. A single apple, as found in the grocery store, is about one handful. Once you start talking about things much bigger than what an average human hand can hold then "a handful" does work as a synonym for "a few things" - probably less than ten.
- zdw 4y agoNever really thought about this, but I wonder whether "handful" also is roughly equivalent to "number you can count on one hand" (ie, around 4 or 5 if counting with fingers).
- lotsofpulp 4y agoAs an American English speaker, I have never come across context where a handful means about five. Handful has meant a relatively small amount, with the actual quantity always depending on the context of the item being discussed.
- derefr 4y agoThe parent says "about five" because you have to choose to say "a handful" over "a few" or "several" or "a dozen or so" or just "many." Five is the sweet spot where none of those other terms apply.
- eCa 4y agoAs a non-native English speaker, I’m curious about what the minimum and maximum values of handful would be (and what the items being referred to are)? When the same term is used in my (western European) language, I would probably put the assumed range in 4-6, potentially 3-7.
- thaumasiotes 4y agoI wouldn't think about it in terms of minimum and maximum values. I'd use "a handful" to emphasize ideas like this: - The number of items being quantified is small - You could make and understand a list that included them all - I don't know the exact number offhand But what counts as a "small number" varies depending on what you're talking about.
- pengaru 4y agoAgreed. A handful of M&Ms or Skittles is far more than five...
- glxxyz 4y agoA handful means either the amount you can hold in your hand "add a handful of salt", or a small number so "Country X only has a handful of aircraft carriers" is fine. I think with apples it would be the second meaning but it's a grey area. With something smaller like "a handful of cherries" I'd go with the amount that can be held.
- fritzo 4y agoGreat observation! Indeed a "handful of blueberries" is a larger number of blueberries than the number of planets in "a handful of planets", or senate bills in "a handful of bills", and more than the handful of examples I've mentioned
- ch4s3 4y agoI would never personally say a handful of apples because it is an object where the size might be in question and potentially a few small apples might fit in you hand. Conversely yes I’d say a handful of cars/buildings/ships to mean 4-6 ish.
- dr_dshiv 4y agoSounds like a lot more science is needed. I wish ocean science was funded at a greater level — and I wish it were easier to do research (incredibly expensive and regulatory).
- andrewmutz 4y agoIf high pressure slows down the spoilage, can I use a pressure chamber to preserve food, rather than a refrigerator?
- pazimzadeh 4y agoWhat happens if you combine both?
- Nzen 4y agoPV = nRT [0]. The (P)ressure is directly correlated with the (T)emperature. You would need to use a small (V)olume to balance the equation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_gas_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_gas_law
- s1artibartfast 4y agopoor application of the gas law. There is no reason to treat the situation as adiabatic. Theoretical assumptions are important!
- adamdusty 4y agoTo elaborate on the other comment, the ideal gas law isn't applicable when you can add or remove energy/mass to the system. There's no reason you can't pack a refrigerator sized chamber with enough air to be high pressure at a low temperature. Based on the equation, you get to choose what n is so you if you set T to a normal refrigerator temp of ~4C then you can vary n to get whatever P you want. I hope that made sense.
- traverseda 4y agoIt's called high pressure processing or pascalization.
- droopyEyelids 4y agoYes absolutely. It's really cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascalization
- montecarl 4y agoAvoid paywall: https://archive.vn/9xs6M https://archive.vn/9xs6M
- cobaltoxide 4y ago"it had an eclectic résumé that included, in 1966, helping to recover a 70-kiloton hydrogen bomb that was dropped when two military planes collided over the Spanish coast." That doesn't sound right. 70 kilotons would be very small for a hydrogen bomb. Indeed, one Wikipedia article says it was a 1.4 megaton bomb, twenty times the number the Wired article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSV_Alvin#:~:text=On%2017%20March%201966%2C%20Alvin,a%20swordfish%20during%20dive%20202 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSV_Alvin#:~:text=On%2017%20Ma.... And this other wikipedia article says: "The Y1 nomenclature indicates a W28 warhead with a yield of 1.1 megatonnes of TNT" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash
- LarryMullins 4y agoThis page says it was a Y1 yield variant, 1.1 megatons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B28_nuclear_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B28_nuclear_bomb A Y3 would have been 70 kilotons, and a Y5 is the 1.45 megaton variant. > "On 6 July 1967, the Alvin was attacked by a swordfish during dive 202. The swordfish became trapped in the Alvin's skin, and the Alvin was forced to make an emergency surface. The attack took place at 2,000 feet (610 m) below the surface. The fish was recovered at the surface and cooked for dinner." I hope they stenciled a swordfish onto the sub.
- can16358p 4y agoHow was the sandwich not physically destroyed by the pressure and almost completely dissolved in water though? I mean isn't it deep down in the seabed? Am I missing something?
- quickthrower2 4y agoPressure would be bad for most lifeforms but since the bread doesn’t need to stay alive it is probably fine. Since it will be soggy anyway the pressure is coming outside in and from inside out. There is no overall inward pressure to crush it like a junkyard car.
- chrischen 4y agoSo they taste tested a sandwich soaked in sea water and said it was palatable?
- jrmg 4y agoI wondered that too. I think the sandwiches were inside the sub, which was still full of air?
- gorgoiler 4y agoAnother deep-seafood story: Alvin was used by Tjeerd van Andel and other Scripps scientists to visit the Galapagos ridge hydrothermal vents and study the ecosystem there. They found giant molluscs, each the size of a grapefruit. Recall that these organisms, living in an isolated ecosystem two miles underwater and visible through the windows of what was basically a wet spaceship were pretty much the closest we’ve come so far to finding aliens. The dive team harvested some, brought them to the surface, and… ate them for dinner. Apparently they were blood red like steak and had a strong mineral taste. They stopped after some other bright spark got out the Geiger counter — black smoker fauna accumulate unusual amounts of radiation. Apparently the dive site was named Clam Bake. I don’t know if the name came before or after the mega-mussel meal. Heaven help us if alien life on Europa is discovered by a hungry Dutchman.
- bane 4y agoI have no idea what the timing of this event is, but there's an interesting confluence of clams and aliens in the world that is almost hilarious off-topic, but I'll bring it up anyway. "Operation Clambake" (xenu.net) is a long running Norwegian site dedicated to shining light on some of the more egregious problems with the Church of Scientology. * note: some of the very first "Anonymous" protests were fomented on 4chan, advertised on xenu.net, and targeted notable Scientology buildings. I think the demonstrations (both physical and digital) were under the name "Project Chanology". It was some of this prototypical protest movement that was later co-opted and brought into the Q-anon movement. * note2: there's also some fascinating history involving the site w/r to SEO ranking and other google hacking activities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Clambake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Clambake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chanology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chanology
- vaidhy 4y agoI thought you were about to talk about Mother of Demons - one of my first intro to Baen Publishing where humans land on a planet (accidentally) populated by mollusk civilizations.
- sph 4y ago
- whoi 4y agoAlvin is still going strong nearly 60 years later, and the at-sea operations team is currently looking for early career mechanical and electrical engineers to keep the submersible ready to make scientific observations every day. (The Alvin menu these days is typically a peanut butter sandwich and a thermos of coffee.) There are plenty of on-shore jobs too, including a just-posted senior software engineering lead for the AI and Embedded Technologies team, with more software-oriented jobs to be posted soon. Don't hesitate to apply, we do consider adaptable candidates from backgrounds outside of oceanography and robotics. https://allcareers-whoi.icims.com https://allcareers-whoi.icims.com