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Money and Cheesecake
Jun. 8th, 2011 07:36 amSo, I got the internship \o/ My project will be to determine the supercritical points of various water-ethanol and water-ethanol-[fuel surrogate] mixtures. No one ever needed to know before, so the testing was not done. Supercritical fluids do strange things, so although good estimates can be done with some fairly simple calculations, they actually do need to be tested. I've been reading a lot about supercritical fluids. They are interesting, and needed to make decaf.
Today . . . is the beginning of Cheesecake Holiday. It is actually called Shavuot (sha-voo-oat), which means 'weeks' in Hebrew. This is because we counted seven of them.
Why, you might ask, did we do that?
And there is actually a perfectly logical reason for this, at least in Israel, a hot country which has the perfect climate to get three crops a year, although not out of the same field. See, the staples in ancient Israel were wheat (for bread), barley and rye (for beer), olives (for oil), and various kinds of pulses (lentils, chickpeas, etc.)(to supplement dietary protein). There were also other fruit crops, like dates and pomegranates. In addition, people raised different kinds of domestic animal, like cows, sheep, goats, donkeys, doves, chickens, and geese.
Of these, the most important were the wheat and barley. These crops, though, are water-hungry. Israel in the summer is beastly hot and dry, and so they couldn't be grown then. Israel in the winter is beastly cold and wet - the kind of grey drizzle that leeches heat from your bones and makes you wish it'd freeze so it couldn't soak through your clothes - but it very rarely ever does freeze, and it rains much more. So back in ancient times, before modern irrigation, the wheat and barley were grown in the winter, and then harvested in the spring. This spring harvest occurred during the seven weeks of the Omer.
(For those of you keeping track: the pulses went into the ground immediately afterwards, and grew during the summer, as they didn't need so much water. Those, and the third crop of fruits, get a different holiday.)
In addition, this being the spring, all of your livestock ought to be giving birth to babies! Assuming they do, they are now all producing milk, so you should have lots of milk and cheese and yogurt and such around.
Thus, Shavuot, which is a happy harvest-type festival, for all it is in the spring. It is traditional to eat dairy foods at this time, to celebrate the abundance of milk. Thus: cheesecake.
Go be religious. Have some cheesecake.
Today . . . is the beginning of Cheesecake Holiday. It is actually called Shavuot (sha-voo-oat), which means 'weeks' in Hebrew. This is because we counted seven of them.
Why, you might ask, did we do that?
And there is actually a perfectly logical reason for this, at least in Israel, a hot country which has the perfect climate to get three crops a year, although not out of the same field. See, the staples in ancient Israel were wheat (for bread), barley and rye (for beer), olives (for oil), and various kinds of pulses (lentils, chickpeas, etc.)(to supplement dietary protein). There were also other fruit crops, like dates and pomegranates. In addition, people raised different kinds of domestic animal, like cows, sheep, goats, donkeys, doves, chickens, and geese.
Of these, the most important were the wheat and barley. These crops, though, are water-hungry. Israel in the summer is beastly hot and dry, and so they couldn't be grown then. Israel in the winter is beastly cold and wet - the kind of grey drizzle that leeches heat from your bones and makes you wish it'd freeze so it couldn't soak through your clothes - but it very rarely ever does freeze, and it rains much more. So back in ancient times, before modern irrigation, the wheat and barley were grown in the winter, and then harvested in the spring. This spring harvest occurred during the seven weeks of the Omer.
(For those of you keeping track: the pulses went into the ground immediately afterwards, and grew during the summer, as they didn't need so much water. Those, and the third crop of fruits, get a different holiday.)
In addition, this being the spring, all of your livestock ought to be giving birth to babies! Assuming they do, they are now all producing milk, so you should have lots of milk and cheese and yogurt and such around.
Thus, Shavuot, which is a happy harvest-type festival, for all it is in the spring. It is traditional to eat dairy foods at this time, to celebrate the abundance of milk. Thus: cheesecake.
Go be religious. Have some cheesecake.
