an edible cracker with just one side. mathematically impossible and yet here I am monching on it.
‘scuit’ comes from the french word for ‘bake’, ‘cuire’ as bastardized by adoption by the brittish and a few hundred years
‘biscuit’ meant ‘twice-baked’, originally meaning items like hardtack which were double baked to dry them as a preservative measure long before things like sugar and butter were introduced. if you see a historical doccument use the word ‘biscuit’ do not be fooled to think ‘being a pirate mustve been pretty cool, they ate nothing but cookies’ – they were made of misery to last long enough to be used in museum displays or as paving stones
‘triscuit’ is toasted after the normal biscuit process, thrice baked
thus the monoscuit is a cookie thats soft and chewy because it was only baked once, not twice
behold the monoscuit/scuit
Why is this called a biscuit:
when brittish colonists settled in the americas they no longer had to preserve biscuits for storage or sea voyages so instead baked them once and left them soft, often with buttermilk or whey to convert cheap staples/byproducts into filling items to bulk out the meal to make a small amount of greasy meat feed a whole family. considering hardtack biscuits were typically eaten by dipping them in grease or gravy untill they became soft enough to eat without breaking a tooth this was a pretty short leap of ‘just dont make them rock hard if im not baking for the army’ but didnt drop the name because its been used for centuries and people forgot its french for ‘twice baked’ back in the tudor era, biscuit was just a lump of cooked dough that wasnt leavened bread as far as they cared
thus the buttermilk biscuit and the hardtack biscuit existed at the same time. ‘cookies’ then came to america via german and dutch immigrants as tiny cakes made with butter, sugar/molasses, and eggs before ‘tea biscuits’ as england knew them due to the new availability of cheap sugar- which is why ‘biscuit’ and ‘cookie’ are separate items in america but the same item in the UK
the evolution of the biscuit has forks on its family tree
I love it when a shitpost turns into an actually interesting post.
Termites are just cockroaches with a fancy social life
Reordering demotes one infamous insect group to being a mere branch of an equally infamous one
BY SUSAN MILIUS
Termites are the new cockroach… Literally.
The Entomological Society of America is updating its master list of insect names to reflect decades of genetic and other evidence that termites belong in the cockroach order, called Blattodea.
As of February 15, “it’s official that termites no longer have their own order,” says Mike Merchant of Texas A&M University in College Station, chair of the organization’s common names committee. Now all termites on the list are being recategorized.
The demotion brings to mind Pluto getting kicked off the roster of planets, says termite biologist Paul Eggleton of the Natural History Museum in London. He does not, however, expect a galactic outpouring of heartbreak and protest over the termite downgrade. Among specialists, discussions of termites as a form of roaches go back at least to 1934, when researchers reported that several groups of microbes that digest wood in termite guts live in some wood-eating cockroaches too.
Once biologists figured out how to use DNA to work out genealogical relationships, evidence began to grow that termites had evolved as a branch on the many-limbed family tree of cockroaches…
Cooperation among different species of birds is common. Some birds build their nests near those of larger, more aggressive species to deter predators, and flocks of mixed species forage for food and defend territories together in alliances that can last for years. In most cases, though, these partnerships are not between specific individuals of the other species—any bird from the other species will do.
But in a new study published in the journal Behavioral Ecology, scientists from the University of Chicago and University of Nebraska show how two different species of Australian fairy-wrens not only recognize individual birds from other species, but also form long-term partnerships that help them forage and defend their shared space as a group.
“Finding that these two species associate was not surprising, as mixed species flocks of birds are observed all over the world,” said Allison Johnson, Ph.D., a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Nebraska who conducted the study as part of her dissertation research at UChicago. “But when we realized they were sharing territories with specific individuals and responding aggressively only to unknown individuals, we knew this was really unique. It completely changed our research and we knew we had to investigate it.”
“Fat acceptance” blogs urging overweight people to shed negative feelings about their body image can lead to healthier diet and exercise choices, a study has found.
The fat acceptance movement, which seeks to foster a support network among overweight people, has inspired a plethora of blogs and web forums such as Corpulent, Fat Heffalump and The Rotund — an online community that’s become known as the “fatosphere”.
In a study published in the journal Qualitative Health Research, researchers from Monash University, the University of New England and the University of Canberra interviewed 44 fatosphere bloggers from Australia, the US and the UK about how their involvement in the movement had changed them.
“There’s been a lot of criticism of the movement that it promotes obesity and encourages people to give up on weight loss and makes their health worse,” said one of the researchers, Dr Samantha Thomas, a Senior Research Fellow at Monash University’s Department of Marketing.
“We saw there was a lot of opinion about the movement but very few people had actually studied it.”
Interviews with the respondents revealed many had experienced feelings of worthlessness, shame, crash diets, cycles of starvation and binge eating and laxative abuse before discovering the fatosphere.
“Having that support and feeling empowered, people slowly found that their health behaviours began to change dramatically. For example, many people suddenly felt confident to do swimming, something they would not have done before,” she said.
“People shifted their focus away from weight loss and more toward health. A lot of people started to take part in physical activity not as a way to lose weight but because they enjoyed it. Instead of pounding it out on the treadmill they start playing with their kids. It’s actually a massive shift in the way they looked at things.”
Shifting the focus away from restricting food and toward listening to the body’s needs could also lead to better food choices, said Dr Thomas.
“There are actually a lot of lessons for public health here,” she said.
“The term fat acceptance is really confronting for people. That’s why we have seen a lot of blame and criticism. Society tells us it’s not OK to be fat for a whole bunch of moral and medical reasons,” she said.
“This study shows that far from promoting obesity and promoting negative health behaviours, the movement is really positive for some people’s health.”
So basically, if fat-bashers actually cared about people’s health (as they so often claim to as an excuse for their intolerance and hatred) then they’d actually support fat acceptance instead of trying to tear body-positive folks down?
Surprise! When you’re not made to feel miserable about yourself, you become more motivated to take care of the self that you have. Who knew?
Okay but what if all of the potions edits in Snape’s old textbook were just things he overheard James say in potions class because “no Padfoot you crush the bean! Cutting it doesn’t do anything! Trust me my dad told me”
But I love this because then when Harry always talks about how the prince is a much better teacher than Snape he would actually be learning from his father and grandfather…
I’m not crying
My eyes are just glistening with the ghost of my past
Based on what I’ve read on Pottermore, that’s basically 100% accurate cause James’ dad created a ton of potions (like Skele-Gro and the hair potion Hermione uses for the Yule Ball) and got super rich and that’s why James never had a job and left Harry tons of money. James would have handy potions making knowledge of that sort.
That’s exactly what I meant
A lot of people took this to mean that James was the one who was really good at potions and it was his favorite subject but all I meant was that he was probably very knowledgable about potions and couldn’t help giving his friends advice that Snape probably overheard
Like my dad is a doctor and although science may not be my thing I’m still probably more knowledgable than the average person especially with all of the lowkey medical work I’ve done over the years
OMG OMG OMG!
Ok, ok ok,
You know that joke that went around about “Why didn’t Harry recognize The Prince’s handwriting when he’d been staring at it on the board for 6 years?”
What if that was because it was James’s handwriting? He wrote the notes and Snape stole the book from James as a “Haha, fuck you, lets see how well you do without your cheat sheets”
Then writing ”This book belongs to the half blood Prince.” to gloat that he took something from James Potter.
James is the only one we see use Levicorpus besides Harry.
I know that means James created sectumsempra, but still, it was a time of war and death eaters, maybe he created it as a last resort thing.
New head cannon
It actually makes more sense that James would have notated Sectumsempra “for enemies” because what would Snape care? If he wrote it, he would know what it does. Maybe James even overheard it or saw it used and wanted to warn himself in case he ever remembered the word but not the context and what would happen.
(also cry with me because harry wouldn’t know what james’ handwriting looked like)
That’s ok I’ll just cry myself to sleep tonight.
And it makes sense for Snape to want to get much better at Potions. Lily was repeatedly said to be the star of the class by Slughorn, and Snape must have wanted to impress her just to have something in common to talk to her because let’s be real, they deviated from each other when he started hanging with the dark magic practitioners. And who better to cheat off from than James Potter, the guy who’s like his archnemesis?
HOLY FLYING SHIT it just makes so much SENSE though, i feel like that’s a hidden obviousness J K Rowling has been waiting years for us to get
BettSplendens Tumblr Evac 