My question is who was the first person to get up the nerve to ride a bull?
Metal extraction from ore. So, I take this bit of rock that looks slightly different from this bit of rock, and I heat it up until a strange liquid drips out of it, and I let that liquid solidify in a useful shape. That sounds like a great way to spend an afternoon.
I ran this by a couple of historically inclined friends of mine, who suggested that people first found clumps of impure oxidized metal in bogs and such. Oh yeah, a prehistoric dude is hiking around the countryside, comes across a ball of rust in a bog, and immediately thinks “you know, I’ll bet you can make a sword out of that”.
I just wanna know who invented the modern idea of cake. And frosting.
I get the whole cracker/bread thing. Rising agents etc. Sounds like somebody left the dough out too long with wonderful results.
But the whole sugar/dessert/sweet thing? And then coating it in delicious frosting? And then somebody said “There shall be cream cheese” and somebody had to invent red velvet and carrot cake?
It makes me religious. This whole idea.
sigh of bliss
Flour is what your teeth make when you eat grass seeds - it’s a fairly easy step from there to pounding it (rather than grinding) to make a coarse meal.
Cobol is a useful language because its semantics match pretty well to what banks, for example, need to do with computers. However, its syntax is a horrible misbegotten mess apparently derived from the idea that programming is only hard because computers don’t speak a restrictive English-like pidgin. Never mind the mental discipline required to structure both data and code in a way that both manages complexity and allows useful algorithms to fall out of the model. No, what we need is this:
MULTIPLY B BY B GIVING B-SQUARED.
MULTIPLY 4 BY A GIVING FOUR-A.
MULTIPLY FOUR-A BY C GIVING FOUR-A-C.
SUBTRACT FOUR-A-C FROM B-SQUARED GIVING RESULT-1.
COMPUTE RESULT-2 = RESULT-1 ** .5.
SUBTRACT B FROM RESULT-2 GIVING NUMERATOR.
MULTIPLY 2 BY A GIVING DENOMINATOR.
DIVIDE NUMERATOR BY DENOMINATOR GIVING X.
instead of this:
X = (-B + (B ** 2 - (4 * A * C)) ** .5) / (2 * A)
Genius. Pure genius.
The syntax of TECO is another kind of WTF: The language evolved directly from the editor’s command language, which means all kinds of funky control characters are part of the syntax. It’s difficult to edit TECO programs on many systems, not least because many editors insist the files are binary as opposed to text. This is a perfect example of people getting used to an otherwise intolerable situation by a process of slow acclimatization: TECO grew into a Turing-complete programming language feature by feature, entirely ad-hoc and unplanned. By the time it was being used to implement the first versions of Emacs, there was no escape.
Not food related.
Perhaps other people who have worked in retail have encountered this. If you are presented with a credit card that your card reader is not reading sometimes you can solve this by placing the card into a thin plastic bag and swiping it again.
I first encountered it as a customer. I knew there was a problem with my bank card. I had a funky magnetic key to my office door and although I had been warned not to, somehow let it cozy up to my bank card. I handed my card over with my usual “sorry it’s demagnetized” spiel. The cashier said “no problem” and instead of typing in the handy 16 digit number stuck it in a shopping bag and voila! I’ve seen others do it and have done it myself since then, but I always wonder what the person who figured that out tried first…
It’s Worcestershire sauce. Pron. “WUSS-tur-shur”.
Chocolate is the one I can’t get my head round. The beans are inedible. They have to be fermented, which can result in failure with only a day or two’s margin. Then they have to be dried. Then they have to be de-hulled. Then they have to be powdered. Even then, they’re hideously bitter.
I’m damn glad the Mayans underwent that torture, though.
It just occurred to me that this is another one. “Rotten fish and tamarind - delicious! Furthermore, let’s put some into an alcoholic tomato soup and drink it.”
Raw grains ----> boiled grains ----> coarse meal mush —> coarse meal fry cakes ----> beer
Raw grains ----> boiled grains
Raw grains ----> boiled grains ----> flour ----> pancakes ----> bread
I get it. Both beer and bread came from batter sitting around without refrigeration. When you’re hungry, you’re gonna eat it even if it smells a little weird and is bubbling. That’s a fairly easy progression where each step produces something nutritious and even yummy, so there’s motivation to keep doing what you’re doing because you’re not “wasting” precious food. If the fry cake is a little smoother this time, great! If not, no worries, it’s still a fry cake, eat it anyway.
What I simply cannot grok (and I’m an herbalist) is these bizarre psychotropic and medicinal compounds which come out of the rainforest as 6 herbs and a fungus in extremely critical proportions with multiple manufacturing steps, and if you get just one bit of it wrong, the whole thing is bloody well useless. Now that we have a grasp of chemistry, we know that you have to heat it to X degrees to denature that protein before mixing it with Y compound to get Z chemical reactions…but how the great loving fuck did they figure that out without knowing the chemical constituents of those plants?!
Almonds are not poisonous in any reasonable quantity.
However, rhubarb leaves are poisonous, but the stalk makes a delicious pie that washes away the bitter taste of shame and humiliation. Who figured that out?
IIRC it’s not that it’s demagnetized - if it’s scratched badly enough, the scratches act as notch antennas to reradiate the RF signal from the card reader and interfere with the return signal from the magnetic strip so that it can’t be recognized. The RF signal is very weak, so wrapping the card in paper or plastic will attenuate the signal to the point where it no longer interferes with reading the mag strip. How did someone come up with this fix? Probably the equivalent of punching random keys to try and fix a frozen computer - “Maybe it’s dirty and the dirt’s getting on the reader?” “Wrap it in something so the dirt can’t rub off!”
Fugu bones have been found in Jomon-period (pre-500 BCE) middens in Japan. Boggles the mind.
Cacao beans themselves may be edible, but the mucus surrounding them is pretty tasty. I went for a canoe ride in Brazil, and they would be floating by. We’d pick one up, break it open, suck the goodness off the bean, and then spit it out. Good stuff, very sweet.
You ate beans out of a Brazilian river? For how many weeks after that were you shitting intestinal flukes?
Domesticated almonds aren’t poisonous - the original wild ones were. From Wikipedia (my emphasis added):
I don’t understand what’s so hard to understand about bread and baked goods.
People ate raw grass seeds. But that’s pretty indigestible, so they kept trying to come up with methods to make them worth eating. Getting rid of the hulls. Drying them. Soaking them. Boiling them. Grinding them. Toasting them. Mixing in other palatable ingredients.
Take a mix of all those methods in a variety of orders, and you eventually come up with all the thousands of permutations of bread. None of the innovations are particularly novel. And note that where wheat wasn’t the staple grain, bread wasn’t invented, because only wheat has a high enough gluten content to form bread. In asia, rice is simply boiled. In the Americas, corn was made into flatbread tortillas. And note that quick breads that use baking soda/powder are very recent innovations, in ancient times quick breads were all unleavened.
Other methods of preparing foods that are toxic in raw form seem pretty straightforward as well. People know that some roots and fruits and stems and such are edible, while others aren’t. But they’re hungry. After eating the edible tubers, they find some inedible tubers and try various methods of rendering them edible. Does boiling them work? How about with multiple changes of water? How about drying, then boiling? How about salting? How about fermenting, then drying, then boiling? And so on. When you’ve got hungry people who can see by analogy that a food is potentially edible, and give them several hundred years of on again and off again experimentation, and it makes sense.
And fermentation is one of those things where it’s damn hard to prevent in the first place, so any food stored for long periods is likely to ferment in some damn way or another, and people notice that foods stored in different ways resulted in different outcomes, some more palatable than others.
So blue cheese didn’t arise in one step. Rather, first was milk. You let raw milk set out overnight at room temperature and you’re going to get yogurt. Let the liquid drain from the yogurt and you’ve got the first cheese. Other things like rennet have an obvious origin…someone tried to store milk in a natural container, in this case a calf’s stomach, and it coagulated. And they ate it anyway. And most of the bacteria and yeasts that create different types of cheese are, get this, human skin bacteria, and it’s easy to see why.
Deliberate creation of alcohol is easy to explain as well. Any fruit juice that sits around for a day starts to ferment. People soon realize that any sweet liquid that sits around ferments. Except there’s only so much fruit to go around, so they look around for other sources of sweetness, and remember that sprouted grains are sweet, so let’s try that, and now we have beer.
Now, smelting metals. The first metals were all native metals, things like gold and silver and copper that can be found as simple raw lumps of metal. So tools made of cold formed native copper are the first metal tools. But copper is pretty rare, and copper nuggets are hard to find, but eventually they learn to smelt the ores. And this was probably done when people looking for metal nuggets built campfires and eventually noticed that sometimes little bits of naturally smelted metal were left at the bottom, tin and lead can be smelted at campfire heats. And noticing that metal nuggets can be found in some campfires naturally leads to various experiments with various rocks and higher and higher temperatures until we get the 7 ancient metals…gold, silver, mercury, tin, copper, lead, and eventually iron.
The one I always wonder about it artichokes. “Hey look! That big thistle over there has a bud full of spikes on it. Let’s cut that sucker off and boil it for a while, and then pull the petals/spikes off one at a time and scrape the ‘meat’ from them with our teeth. Hmm. Let’s dip 'em in garlic butter first. Bingo! And since the ‘meat’ on the petals is so good, we can cut up the part of the stem right under the blossom and eat that, too!”
I’m convinced that snails are just an excuse to eat garlic butter. Nobody actually likes the taste of the snails themselves. Do they?
You need to spend more time around drunk cowboys (or maybe not). I’ve got a friend that would try to ride just about anything after a twelve-pack. And if he said no, all you’d have to do is question his manhood or bet him five bucks.
Or triple-dog dare him!
My new anthropological theory: The triple-dog dare–the mother of invention.
Maybe the Fugu developed the poison glands to protect themselves after people started eating them.
Could be a type of human-enabled evolution. If the fishermen could see at a glance an external characteristic of a more poisonous Fugu, thus selectively (over)harvesting a less poisonous variant, the Fugu may have become deadly fairly recently.
Cooking. Any animal with half a brain knows that fire = bad, so how did we get the idea that deliberately sticking our food in fire for a while would make it better?
For that matter, how did humans get the idea of harnessing this deadly forest-ravaging force for heat and light to begin with?