Wait, so a “stick” of butter is just a regular shaped block of butter?
Yes, do y’all not call it that?
German here. We call it a Stück. Could there be some etymological connection?
No, apparently there isn’t. Stick does have its origin in the Germanic language family, however from what is nowadays in German “Stecken” for it’s penetrative aspect. (Yeah no kidding here, that’s what the etymology dictionary said)
Edit: just read the entry to “Stück” apparently there’s the idea of “Stückelung” as in parts of a larger whole, which coincides to the idea of a “Stock” (stick from a tree) being a separate part of the larger entity “tree”. Going by that logic I can see a similarity
Next try driving over a banana peel. I have some theories about what would happen.
Mamma mia
This reminds me so much of my dad (a house painter) when I was a kid! He was always down to indulge my curiosity by experimenting or building something. It was fun at the time, but I’m now in engineering and I’d say a lot of it is just because my dad thought it would be fun to attach a potato cannon to a go kart.
I’m sure he’s very proud that you became an engineer though!
Potato canons and go karts were the slightly dangerous things we needed as kids.
I recently read a book called “The anxious generation” that goes into depth talking about the developmental changes in young people over the last 30 years, and it attribute a lot of it to the douboe-whammy combination of 90s and 2000s helicopter parenting paired with the rise of the smartphone.
We need to unsupervised, slightly dangerous playtime and mischief to learn how to deal with problems on our own or with peers, and we need human interaction to learn to socialize. Removing both of those leads to an increased number of people unprepared to handle social situations and stress.
The book definitely had a feeling of bias for argument to match preconceived conclusion that social media is bad, but I think there may have been something to it.
Now do it with margarine and write a paper on the differences
I’m very curious about the alternative hypothesis.
Mario Kart banana peel spinout
Boom.
The car slips over the butter and in a comical fashion slides down the stairs
The butter shoots forward and violently splatters across the driveway, like the blood of a murder victim in a horror movie where there’s a lot of blood when someone gets murdered
it triggers a collision error and the car gets yoten into space
Butter flattens car.
Is there a third options like scissors which can defeat one of these but not the other?
Stick of butter like $12 salted these days
Where the fuck you getting your butter? I pay like $4 for 4 sticks of Kerrygold.
…our kerrygold comes in slabs, not sticks…
Slabs are good, but I rarely use more than half a stick at a time. The sticks are just easier to deal with.
I get all my butter down at the local sex shop, “Slippery Al’s”. I slather it on my body when I need to go swimming in the cold Canadian ocean once a week
So why does it need to be salted??
I think you’ll find this 5 gallon pail of duck fat a far better alternative to butter and it’ll be cheaper to get in bulk!
Using this butter calculator, it’s about 160 sticks of butter to about equal the 5 gallons of duck fat. At 12 dollars a stick your equivalent butter will cost you $1,920!
That bucket was only 281 dollars!!
Fuck Slippy Als! Not literally, but you know, do better for yourself!
Pluss if he ever gets seared by a particularly nasty insult while lathered up, I hear duck fat makes a wonderfully flavored variant of the mallard reaction. It’ll leave you with Michelin level scabs.
I for one salt my own body butter
These are the stupid memories that stick with you when you grow up though.
Nobody remembers all the times their parents just said no and dismissed your curiosity. But we absolutely remember the times where our parents engaged in our curiosity.
Good dad. Good kid. A bit of a waste of butter, but it was worth it for the internet points and bonding between parent and child.
Agreed! I fully remember the time my dad explained the water cycle to me at like 6 years old cause I asked the question “how do rivers not run out of water?”
It’s always weird trying to put in perspective how valuable the things we waste are. Like to us, butter is a couple dollars, cuz it’s never not there, we don’t have to think about how much butter there is. There is no other tangible cost than the simple dollar value. So like if you compare it to going to see a movie in the theater, the dollar value kind of makes sense of using this butter for entertainment and teaching. But if butter didn’t feel potentially unlimited to us, the cost might then not feel worth it, even if the dollar value didn’t change.
Must be nice to afford science butter in this economy!
If it’s anything like scientific grade peanut butter then yeah, it’s expensive! https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=2387&cclcl=en_US
Product Expiration Date: 31 December 2029
now I know what I’m stocking my bunker with.
Thank you for this nugget of info. I will always cherish it.
I just sent this to my wife and told her I ordered some peanut butter on line.
I’ll do the same!
wtf, what’s so special about it?
It’s a NIST reference standard. The ur-peanut butter, against which all peanut butter shall be compared (in the United States).
There’s a Nilered video on youtube where he makes an extremely expensive cookie out of reference ingredients
Be forewarned that it’s extremely frustrating to watch. His general chemistry content is very interesting and well explained. But whenever he has to cook anything he becomes a complete doofus that cannot handle even the most basic of research. Like the man will research dozens of papers for hours and successfully make aerogel but then waste thousands of dollars in reference materials because he googled “cookie recipe” and just wrote down the first thing he found without reading anything about the process or technique
His coffee roasting video is similar and it makes me wonder if the food videos he makes are simply rage bait. He doesn’t post them often (frankly he doesn’t post often in general) so I genuinely wonder if he just really despises cooking and baking
That’s why I never picked up on nilered. Any of the videos I’m actually curious about are just frustrating
It’s also frustrating because he believed the NIST reference materials to be “pure” when in reality they’re just standardized. Also they’re not meant for human consumption so they probably taste terrible.
(They’re for things like calibrating machines.)
I don’t even understand it. Cooking is the same as chemistry! Just follow a damn recipe! And use a kitchen, not the lab equipment! 😬
The ones I’ve seen, at least, there wasn’t really anything he used that couldn’t have just been 1:1 with a normal recipe. But he fucked it all up trying to change things on the fly and overthinking it.
In his defense lab equipment can be utilized in cooking to great effect. The most common use in modern cooking being sous vide, which is just a repurposing of immersion circulators that have been in use in the laboratory context for decades. But centrifuges, rotary evaporation, homogenizers, etc all have great culinary applications.
thus the entire field of food science and why your homemade food is never as texturally amazing as commercially processed food. It’s one of the really frustrating aspects of capitalism; those processes can really make truly amazing textures but the companies that control the (very expensive) machinery are often overly concerned with cutting costs. So something ends up with an amazingly smooth texture but tastes like butt because they cheap out on ingredients.
That said you absolutely should not use lab equipment that is used for the shit he does for culinary purposes. Equipment that has processed mercury should not be used for culinary applications, ever, no matter how much you clean it
the main thing about buying things from nist though (as pointed out to him in the comments) is that the materials are guaranteed to be pure. not edible. that flour could have been literal years out of date.
She originally asked about science eggs, but that was a big no.
Your Son: … Daddy? … Where do babies come from?
Guess the kid’s gonna need an experiment for that one too
Me: Your mom’s uterus.
My son: What’s a uretus?
Me: Uterus. It’s where babies come from, keep up.
Son: … ? … how did the baby get there?
How does fruit get onto trees? The same way, it grows there.
If Mom had been home, she’d have told you both to put the butter in a clean plastic bag first, unsealed so it won’t pop. That way it could have been salvageable, and your tire wouldn’t be greasy.
I dunno, plastic bags sound like confounding variables. The 4 year old peer reviewers won’t stand for this!
Depends on the goal of the experiment. If the only aim is to determine the sqishability of the butter, then a plastic bag would be acceptable as it would provide no meaningful resistance to the tire. However, if one wishes to determine the precise nature of the butter’s squish, then many more experiments need to be made, both to establish a control and to analyze additional squish conditions (butter temperature, wrapper on/ off, use of plastic bag, etc.)
The question was what happens when you run over a stick of butter, not how squishable is a stick of butter
Reminds me of the time I put a partially filled Gatorade bottle under my parents’ Jeep as a kid. I remember trying to run it over with my bike, but would just go right over it. Then I got curious what the Jeep would do and wedged it under the back tire. But we didn’t go anywhere till the next day, so I forgot I put it there.
The following day, we’re backing out of the garage when there’s a sudden loud POP. I quickly turn to look and see Gatorade covering that area of the garage. Scared the hell out of my mom.
Was an informative time for everyone involved.Maybe this is a good lesson to do a pre-trip walkaround inspection every morning before commuting to work. Takes less than a minute.
Next question. If your tire was bald, would it stick to the ground or the tire?
Probably still the tire, the material is chosen for grip / stickiness
I’ve been giving this way too much thought 😆
I think it would come down to if the fold in the wrapper was facing up or down. If the tire had tread, I don’t think it would matter, but if the slit were facing down, I think the wax paper would keep it from sticking. Unless the pressure squeezed the butter out, in which case I think you’d end up with most of the button on the tire and the wrapper on the ground.
It probably also depends on the surface. Are you driving over gravel or a smooth concrete garage floor? Is the surface wet? How about the tire? Is the tire warm (recently driven) or cold? What about the ground?
There are a lot of variables here that could absolutely determine where it sticks.
And bald doesn’t mean smooth.
I would often turn it around and ask them first, what do you think might happen, and walk them through why they think that. Let them build their own hypothesis to be tested.
Teaching your children to think for themselves? We’ll have none of that here!
Good for you. Socratic method.
I think they’re both smarter than me because of it. But it was easier to use the built-in curiosity of a kid (the imfamous repeated WHY) to drive them to learn things than to just feed them whatever answer was available, or not at all. That’s the worse thing a parent can do is shut down a kid’s craving for answers.
It’s a good habit to question how we know what we know. Kudos to this guy for encouraging his child’s curiosity!
Way to flex Nick you rich bastard.
Notice it wasn’t an egg!
It does look like fairly expensive butter, though.
Maybe. It looks like the shape of Costco butter, since they recently made them thicker and shorter than what we’d get at the grocery store.
The expensive butter usually comes in foil, at least from my experience.
This ain’t no margarine, but it’s also no Kerry Gold. Definitely middle class butter.
