I've read that red variants of veggies like cabbage get less attacked by caterpillars, and anecdotally, it seems to be true. It makes sense that insects would be evolved to target the more "natural" color.

Here is a really good article about the topic. The gist is that typically in mountaineering, there's not often an official definition of the "start point", but the "end point" is back at the start, so people who die midway on the return journey don't "count". The "top" should be easy to define, but often, the top of a mountain is a large area, and you aren't going to hike around looking for which part is just barely the highest. Also, some true summits are habitually avoided as sacred places to the locals.

I think it ends up being the same amount of work for me. Rinse rice (optional), figure out correct amount of water for that type of rice, place on heat until done. Rice cookers can effectively detect that there's no more liquid water, but that isn't the same as "done" unless you used the right amount of water.

IMO, rice cookers are really handy if you are the type of person who eats rice as a staple food item that you buy in giant sacks and eat the same variety of every day. I have like 6 kinds of rice I rotate through, so I think it wouldn't save me enough work to justify a separate gadget.

I've never used one of the really fancy pressure cooker rice cookers, though, so maybe my feelings would be different.

Yeah, I definitely understand that. I certainly have things that I don't use as much as I hoped (I'm staring at a solar panel doing nothing leaned against my wall). For me, I really need the resulting "thing" to be something that I will use/be excited about.

That's why, for me, fixing stuff that's broken, upgrading stuff, or repurposing stuff you already own is good. Replacing a worn out jack is a relatively simple task that can turn an expensive brick back into a nice thing.

The tools you need are not a very long list. You can get a cheap, crappy soldering iron for $6, solder for $4, a crappy multimeter for $7, and one of those magnifying glass/alligator clip things for $6 from harbor freight. Despite being poor quality, a lot can be accomplished with just those tools.

I ended up buying a bench power supply for like $40, but you can just get DC power supplies from the bin of assorted cords at your nearest thrift store for basically free.

Wow, you couldn't be more different than I am. Over the years, I've bought kits that had tutorials along with them, and I could never get hooked by them. I guess there's better tutorials for things now than "make a bunch of LEDs blink in order", so maybe the terrain is different.

There are so many kits you can find online, and I think a lot of them are more or less interchangeable. I suppose it depends on what extent you want to focus on digital vs analog circuits, but given that you mention robotics, I would assume digital. Grab one of the kits that has an arduino or raspberry pi and a bunch of other components. In the grand scheme of things, components are cheap, but no one is going to ship you the 5 exact resistors you need, so you need to have a fairly large assortment to choose from for different projects. Kits are going to come with different components like digital readouts, joysticks, etc, so just choose one that looks like it has the things you would like to learn to use.

It seems like kits are divided into "contains every part of a specific project" or "contains parts for 1,000,000 potential projects, and here's a booklet of tutorials for some". I prefer the second, but you could prefer the first depending on if you want to go right for robotics use cases.

Personally, my best learning has been through repairing home appliances and stuff like that. Even just "necropsies" on broken things to understand how they work.

Something that you'll notice with electronics these days is that sometimes the difference between a base model widget and the "premium" widget that is 1.5-2 times the price is the addition of a handful of cheap parts. They might be easy to put in and cheap, but they are going to remove as many costs as possible for the base model. For example, a $350 dollar espresso machine with $100 of extra parts added can easily compete with a machine that costs $1000 or more.

I guess maybe it's been a while since I've looked, but that soldering iron seems like a crazy good deal. I've been using a crappy iron with a way too stiff cord for the longest time cause I figured it wasn't worth it for how little I have to solder.

If you wanted pizza to be "italian", it would have to have no tomatoes, peppers, pepperoni, buffalo milk cheese, basil or a whole bunch of other ingredients that are commonly added to pizza.

Pizza is a global food, do with it as you will

Elbows have always been allowed on the table. The rule for fancy dining was that you couldn't have elbows on the table during a course, i.e., when people are actively eating, but before/after, it's fine. That's a reasonable rule to be considerate of space.

Being a coroner in some places. Medical examiners are professionals with a degree (and coroner's usually are too), but the coroner is often an elected position, and elected positions usually only have residency and age requirements. Coroners have a huge level of power because they get to decide what is and what is not murder. Someone dies in police custody? They can call it natural causes, and it never goes to the court system. A political opponent dies by two gunshots? That can be called a suicide.

their operating systems could send sensitive information to Beijing

Cool. So let's pass legislation that prevents any auto manufacturer from sending sensitive info to anyone unauthorized by the owner of the car. Just because you buy a car "assembled" in the US doesn't mean that your data isn't being harvested, stored improperly, and sold to all bidders.

Congress being so bad at legislating has basically forced the Supreme Court to legislate. I obviously don't agree with decisions like ending Roe v. Wade, but abortion should never have been up to them in the first place. Those kinds of decisions should be up to congress to make clear laws.

That's the whole point of how any aid works in most situations. Especially with the US's military-industrial complex. Ukraine gets munitions, US industry gets the money. The point is not to build a military industry for Ukraine.

The infamous "government cheese" was given to the needy in the US not because poor people have a dire need for cheese, but because the government wanted to give a lot of money to wealthy dairy farmers.

To suggest that lawmakers don't understand that that is what they are doing is crazy.