It's good for your health

The poisonous botulinus organism does not grow in canned vegetables if the pH is less than 4.5. Some investigators (Journal of Chemical Education, 22, 409, 1945) have recommended that in home canning of nonacid foods, such as beans, without a pressure canner a quantity of hydrochloric acid be added. The amount of hydrochloric acid recommended is 25 ml of 0.5 N hydrochloric acid per half-liter jar. Calculate the pH that this solution would have, assuming it originally to be neutral, and neglecting the buffering action of the organic material. Also calculate the amount of baking soda (NaHCO3), measured in teaspoonfuls, that would be required to neutralize the acid after the jar is open. One teaspoon equals 4 grams of baking soda.

by Linus Pauling from General Chemistry

W

This book is really short. Short books are hard to write, but you made me do it. My readers are excellent correspondents, and this is something I've learned from them along the way: Write lesser.

by Seth Godin from The Dip

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Image can be anything

FB: Well, there are certain days when you start working and the work seems to flow out of you quite easily, but that doesn't often happen and doesn't last for long. And I don't know that it's necessarily any better than when something happens out of your frustration and despair. I think that, quite possibly, when things are going badly you will be freer with the way you mess up by just putting paint through the images that you've been making, and you do it with a greater abandon than if things have been working for you. And therefore I think, perhaps, that despair is more helpful because out of despair you may find yourself making the image in a more radical way by taking greater risks.

from David Sylvester's Interviews with Francis Bacon

Photo: Joe Bob's Auto Shop from www.projectseven.com/tutorials (Author: Uknown)

Working on a masterpiece

Sometimes in order to get going with the writing it's necessary to just write and write and write like this until something comes and one doesn't know what that something is going to be until, suddenly, it is there: numinous, luminous, voluminous. (Cut.)

by Toby Litt from Finding myself

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