bigtcm

As a moderator of /r/askculinary and a frequent commenter over at /r/nfl as well, I think I am uniquely qualified to answer this.

The benefit of heating them up in the microwave is convenience. They're done in 5-10 minutes and they're heated all the way through, but they're soggy and soft. Conversely in an oven, the heat is high enough and the humidity is low enough so you get a nice crispy crust, but sometimes the middle isn't heated all the way through before the outside starts to burn. Oh and it takes like fucking 40 minutes.

What I'd recommend is heating them in a microwave for 5 minutes or so, because the microwaves will heat from the inside out, and then put into a hot oven for about another 10 minutes. You'll get crispy pizza rolls that are most definitely heated all the way through without waiting until half time to eat.

Mr. Poetter,

Speaking as a PhD student studying genetics and biotech, I think the public needs to really be educated as a whole about science. Also, our lab's funding got cut big time. I think our lab might be shutting down for good within a year and a half or so...but that's not exactly relevant to my point below.

I fear that the public is becoming anti-science because apparently scientists are "out to get them" or that we're trying to "confuse them with our fancy language". I fear that Congress is becoming this way as well - which makes sense if they're being elected by constituents with the same mentality. I find it incredibly depressing that people think that I'm going to destroy the world with my Frankenstein experiments, when I'm just trying to make everyone's lives better through genome sequencing and GMOs (for microbial biofuels).

If what you typed up there is true and you are indeed elected into Congress (good luck by the way!), please try to push for awareness and education amongst your peers and let us know what we can do (as a scientific community) to help.

Thanks and good luck again.

Edit: Spelling.

Chief is not inherently racist, but Redskin sort of is.

As someone of East Asian descent, I don't think I'd have much of an issue if Kansas City decided to change the mascot of the Chiefs to the Ninjas or the Samurais.

But if they decided to change it to the Kansas City Slanty Eyes? I think I might have a problem with that.

Former chemistry teacher here! I'm six and half feet tall and weigh a shade over 200 lbs (will be relevant in a second).

So you know how some atoms are bigger than others? Hydrogen has only one proton, so we'll say it has a mass of 1. Oxygen has 8 protons and (usually) 8 neutrons, so we'll say it has a mass of 16. If we decide to weigh out 500 masses of each atom, we'll have 500 hydrogen atoms, but we'll only have ~31 (500/16) atoms of oxygen.

Similarly, if we decided to weigh out 500 lbs of bigtcm - you'll have two and a half bigtcm's while we may have 3 - 4 hufflepuffinweed's.

Chemical reactions, (and also most relationships between people!) deal in numbers, not weight or mass: 2 H2 + 1 O2 --> 2 H2O. In this case we have 4 hydrogen atoms mixing with 2 oxygen atoms to create 2 molecules of water. Similarly, we say oh I hooked up with 1 girl last night, or I hooked up with 3 girls at a party! We never measure them in terms of mass.

If I define a threesome as 2 girls and 1 guy, how many girls would I need to give threesomes to 3 of my guy friends? (The answer is 2x3 = 6). If I had a dozen guys, I'd need two dozen girls. If I had 100 guys, I'd need 200 girls. I can't relate it to mass, because it doesn't make sense. 200 lbs of girls will not necessarily go with 100 lb of guy. I need to count numbers of people here rather than just mass.

So skipping all the details, we'll just say that several famous historical chemists worked out that if you measure out a substance's mass in grams, you'll have this whacky number (6.022 x 10²³⁾ atoms. 1 gram of hydrogen = 6.022 x 10²³ atoms of hydrogen. 16 grams of oxygen = 6.022 x 10²³ atoms of hydrogen. This whacky number is a mole.

And that's pretty much what a mole is. In the previous example of people, we used a funny word (a dozen) to describe a number (12). A mole is just a funny word that describes an obscenely large number (of atoms...usually).

Now lets revist that chemistry example. 2 H2 + 1 O2 --> 2 H2O

It doesn't make sense to say I'm going to mix 4 grams of hydrogen with 2 grams of oxygen, remember we're dealing with numbers of atoms here, not just mass. We can say we want to mix 4 dozen hydrogen atoms with 1 dozen oxygen atoms. Similarly, we can also say we want to mix 4 moles of hydrogen with 1 mole of oxygen.

I hope this unnecessary and unsolicited chemistry lesson made some sense. Any questions?

Superb! Admittedly that dramatic crescendo had me at the edge of my seat!