u/TychaBrahe

I have a cat with Medical needs, and one of the things that I like to give him is his favorite, fresh turkey. I recently bought a frozen turkey breast, thinking I could roast it and he could eat turkey until he turned into a turkey.

I didn't want to take the trouble to rearrange my refrigerator to make room to defrost this turkey breast, so I googled, "can you cook a turkey breast direct from frozen?" The AI answer that popped up was that yes, you can. Stupidly, I didn't take the time to read the link, just trusted that the information would be available when I needed it.

Well, it turns out that the AI is taking its answer from a Butterball (US based turkey vendor) site. Which is all well and good. Except that the instructions are for a product that butter Ball makes to specifically go directly from the freezer to the oven. This is an even Butterball product, but it's not that product. And I cannot find instructions for cooking it directly from frozen except for ones using a slow cooker on low, which I know for a fact is not safe.

Fortunately, it will be ready to cook tomorrow after defrosting overnight in the freezer. But dammit, if I had ignored the AI, I would have put it in the refrigerator yesterday.

This was originally written for the eclipse thread the Iceland sub. It applies everywhere, but look east, not at Russia.

•••

If you have a choice about where to go to see the eclipse, try to choose a point at some elevation. You want to be able to see quite a distance in all directions.

The city of Reykjavík is at about 64° north latitude. At that latitude, a cross-section of the Earth would be a circle with a circumference of about 17,500 km or 10,900 miles. Since it takes the Earth about 24 hours to rotate on its axis, that means that the speed at which Reykjavík is rotating about the Earth's axis is about 730 km/hr or 450 mph.

[The farther south you go, the faster the rotational velocity of your location. I see several people talking about going to Spain to watch the eclipse. The latitude of Barcelona is 41.8°N. At that latitude, the circumference of a cross-section of the Earth is about 30,000 km or 19,000 miles. The shadow of the eclipse would be moving toward you at over 1200 km/hr or 750 mph.]

If you can stand on a hill and look eastward, in the direction of Russia [or whatever's east of where you are, if you aren't in Iceland], in the seconds before the eclipse happens, you will be able to see the shadow that the Moon is casting on the Earth run up at you at that speed. Science (and science fiction) writer Isaac Asimov wrote about expecting it but still being blown away to witness the phenomenon.

For example, if you were able to go to the top of Mount Esja, you could see at least 30 km or 19 miles eastward. You would be able to see the eclipse shadow running toward you for a total of about 2 1/2 minutes.

A discussion of the creation and effects of wet microbursts, extremely powerful and narrowly focused storms with rapid rainfall and powerful straight line winds.