ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝

A geologist and archaeologist by training, a nerd by inclination - books, films, fossils, comics, rocks, games, folklore, and, generally, the rum and uncanny… Let’s have it!

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Hershey’s literally tastes like vomit. And I’m not being hyperbolic with the literally. It genuinely does.

    It’s science:

    Readers who have had the misfortune to encounter a Hershey bar will know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s wretched stuff isn’t it? If you are in possession of a sound mind and a few functioning taste buds then I don’t see how you can possibly enjoy US chocolate. It tastes like sawdust that’s been drowned in sugar and soaked with baby vomit.

    It tastes like that, by the way, because that’s roughly what it is. American chocolate (I’m talking about the non-fancy stuff) has a lot more sugar and a lot less cocoa than its European counterparts. Some producers also allegedly put their milk through a process called controlled lipolysis which produces butyric acid. What’s that when it’s at home? It’s something that’s found in vomit. God knows what else Americans get up to in their chocolate factories. A lawsuit recently filed in New York alleges that Hershey, which has the licence to produce Cadbury products in the US, “fails to disclose” that some of its chocolate products “contain unsafe levels of lead and cadmium”
















  • I already mentioned that there are edge cases. Edge cases do not discredit foundational frameworks that define reality.

    But when you are trying to define or classify things it is the edge cases that are key. It is at the edges that we hope to find a clear divide between one set of things and another.

    Unfortunately, with sex chromosomes, their impact on development and that effect on performance it feels like the more we know the less we understand.

    International sporting bodies have huge resources and access to the best experts in the various fields and they can’t come up with a good way to classify male and female. I could, at least, see the logic in their going for testosterone exposure during puberty as being a useful guide, although it is complex and rather arbitrary, but there are counter-arguments to that which suggest it isn’t useful. So the sporting bodies seem to be falling back on chromosome testing, which is no guide at all to performance and seems to be favoured because it is easy to test for - like the drunk looking for his keys under a lamppost because the light was better there.














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