Live data from Hacker News

John Locke’s recipe for Pancakes (2021)

rarecooking.com

21–30 of 162 posts

Re: John Locke’s recipe for Pancakes (2021)

#21
post #2

"John Locke was right about almost everything."

Found this in SICP Chapter 1.

The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made.

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

Re: John Locke’s recipe for Pancakes (2021)

#22
Well, that's interesting. That wasn't in my textbooks.

It certainly makes Locke seem a bit more human.

BTW, I've had a bee in my bonnet for years over examples like this. So much stuff is edited out from what we are taught. Sure, this is trite and somewhat useless example but so often this is not the case.

Another example is documentary footage: almost daily, one sees a tiny snippet of a scene cut of some important news or historical event which disappears within a second before one's taken the scene in. Why bother showing it if the scene is incomprehensible?

What makes this so annoying is that we all know there's more footage as cameramen don't shoot scenes like that (they let the camera run as long as possibke). Unfortunately, the ordinary punter never gets to see the stuff that's left on the cutting room floor.

Re: John Locke’s recipe for Pancakes (2021)

#24

This is the right way Don't ever say this, because you really don't know when someone will come along and invent baking powder. It basically obsoleted every recipe the way Dreadnought obsoleted every Navy.

You picked a bad recipe to suggest this on, because this isn't the sort of pancake that you'd want to add baking powder to. :D

English-style pancakes (like this) are thicker than crepes, but they're still thin fried-batter constructs. You don't particularly want them to rise.

Re: John Locke’s recipe for Pancakes (2021)

#25
post #14

Fun fact: nutmeg is toxic to humans in surprisingly small amounts. I wouldn't eat half a nutmeg by myself in one sitting!

It's about half the level you'll start feeling the symptoms of toxicity from what I've seen. So you should be fine unless extremely underweight, but I wouldn't sprinkle any nutmeg on my coffee or whathaveyou to pair with it.

Re: John Locke’s recipe for Pancakes (2021)

#27
post #6

Looks more like a crepe than a pancake.

This is a dialects of English thing.

In Britain: pancakes don't use baking powder. They're flat like a slighly thicker crepe.

I would describe a thick fluffy pancake made with baking powder as a "Scotch pancake", but in Australia, the USA, Canada and New Zealand, that style is just a "pancake".

Re: John Locke’s recipe for Pancakes (2021)

#29
post #27
post #6

Looks more like a crepe than a pancake.

This is a dialects of English thing. In Britain: pancakes don't use baking powder. They're flat like a slighly thicker crepe. I would describe a thick fluffy pancake made with baking powder as a "Scotch pancake", but in Australia, the USA, Canada and New Zealand, that style is just a "pancake".

I'm sympathetic to the confusion, despite having a British origin myself, just because the thick-fluffy pancake is objectively more similar to other things we call "cake".
Post reply on HN