Butter Types

The three main types are uncultured, cultured, and European-style.

Uncultured or sweet cream butter, churned from pasteurized cream is the supermarket standard.

Cultured butter is made from cream that has been fermented with 'good bacteria', and it is churned longer and slower, according to the American Butter Institute.

European-style butter is made similarly, but not all European-style butters are cultured.

Both cultured and European-style butter have less water, more butterfat (from 82 to 87 percent) and a tangier, deeper flavor than mellow, sweet cream butter. There are salted and unsalted versions of each.

There are other variations of butter, such as 'light' butter, which has more water and about half the fat and calories than regular butter, but because it is made to be spreadable, it also contains preservatives and emulsifiers. Whipped butter gets its light, spreadable texture from nitrogen whipped into it after churning. USDA-certified organic butter comes from cows raised on organic, pesticide-free feed, without antibiotics or growth hormones.

Salt adds flavor and extends the shelf life of butter. According to the US Butter Institute, unsalted butter has a two-week refrigerator shelf life and salted butter two months. The USDA is a bit more generous, giving a range of one to three months. What you buy from the store has probably been in cold storage for longer than that. If you are not using your butter quickly, it will stay fresher if you store it in the freezer, where it will keep for up to nine months.

Happy Friday

Happiness does not require acclimation.

I am firmly acclimated to Happiness, especially on a Happy Friday!

World Bipolar Day

I went back and forth as to whether to include this, then decided I should. Seriously, the day, March 30 was chosen, because it is the birthday of Vincent Van Gogh, who is believed to have had bipolar disorder.


World Bipolar Day is a day to remember that those who have bipolar disorder are capable of achieving great things and to remind them that they are not alone. The vision of World Bipolar Day is to bring world awareness to bipolar disorders and to eliminate social stigma.          

National Protocol Officer’s Week

I hesitated to include this one also, but it seemed like the right thing to do. It is celebrated, the week of March 26-April 1 (last week of month). A Protocol Officer is educated and trained to be a skilled advisor, expert, and leader who plans and orchestrates VIP visits and trips, meetings, ceremonies, and events. Leaders rely on Protocol Officers to guide them in U.S. and foreign order of precedence, customs, and cultural differences. I presume they need a week, because all those protocols difficult to accomplish in a day.

Phytocannabinoids

Prior to the US Marihuana (sic) Tax Act of 1937, phytocannabinoids found in hemp were prevalent in a vast majority of the food supply. Hemp oils and hemp proteins were used to fortify food formulations and consumed daily worldwide. Hemp was used as feed stock for nearly all animals that were consumed. Farmers would feed hemp to chickens, pigs, and cattle for its high protein and essential amino acids. The animals would then pass along to humans phytocannabinoids through their meat or milk and mothers would pass phytocannabinoids to their babies during breast feeding.

Cannabis Sativa, including hemp, is one of the only medicinal plants on Earth that grows naturally on nearly every continent of the world. The history of cannabis can be traced well beyond the beginnings of civilization. It has been used as both food and medicine since people began walking this planet. Humans and animals have evolved a system of cells that are nourished and replenished by phytocannabinoids.

Cannabinoids are active chemicals in cannabis that cause drug-like effects throughout the body, including the central nervous system and the immune system. They are also known as phytocannabinoids. At least 85 different cannabinoids have been isolated from the Cannabis plant

Other plants that have cannabinoids include:  Coneflower (Echinacea), Electric Daisy (Acmella Oleracea), Helichrysum Umbraculigerum, Liverwort (Radula Marginata), Chocolate (Theobroma Cacao), and Black Pepper (Piper Nigrum).

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Windows Ads

Have you noticed those annoying ads for Windows products while you look for files? They might just be small pop-ups for things like Office 365 subscriptions or Skype credits, but they annoy the heck out of me.

You can turn them off by following these steps:
Launch File Explorer and the click View > Options > Change folder and search options.
In the Folder Options dialog that pops up, select the View tab.
In the Advanced Settings box, scroll down and uncheck the option labeled “Show sync provider notifications.” Hit OK.
Done, ads gone.

There are also ads on the Start Screen. Some of these can be turned off by opening Windows 10 Settings app, go to Personalization, and click the Start tab. From there, switch off “Occasionally Show Suggestions in Start”. You are welcome.

Earliest Life on Earth

Scientists have recently discovered fossils of what look like red algae in Chitrakoot, India, which suggest that multicellular life arose several hundred million years earlier than previously believed.
Life can be traced as far back as 3.7 billion years or earlier, preserved in "mats" of fossilized single-celled microbes, but it took much longer for multicellular forms of life to emerge. Fossils appear to have been fairly common, beginning around 540 million years ago.

The new fossils, discovered by scientists from the Swedish Museum of Natural History, provide a clearer window into when advanced life began to form. Two types of fossils were found: one with a structure like thread, and the other with a more fleshy form. They are 400 million years older than the previously earliest known examples of red algae, making them the oldest plant-like fossils by a wide margin.

Blockchain

Blockchain is the world's leading software platform for digital assets, offering the largest production block chain platform in the world. The first blockchain was conceptualized by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 and implemented the following year as a core component of the digital currency bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger for all transactions. A blockchain database is managed autonomously and registered transactions cannot be altered retroactively.
It is a distributed database that maintains a continuously growing list of ordered records called blocks. Each block contains a timestamp and a link to a previous block. By design, blockchains are inherently resistant to modification of the recorded data. Once recorded, the data in a block cannot be altered retroactively. Blockchains are "an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way.
Blockchains are suitable for the recording of events, medical records, other records management activities, identity management, and transaction processing. Various regulatory bodies in the music industry have started testing models that use blockchain technology for royalty collection and management of copyrights around the world. Previously unimagined applications, from digitally recorded property assets to regulatory compliance and trading are now actively being developed and deployed. Automated voting systems may prove to be the ultimate blockchain-based technology beyond bitcoin.

Blockchain is a large electronic system, on top of which you can build applications. Currency, like bitcoin is one of those applications. Millions of users and hundreds of thousands of merchants currently use bitcoin digital currency. You can buy and sell bitcoins on PayPal and buy with your credit card or cash. Bitcoin is the decentralized, global, democratized, highly secure cryptocurrency. It use has grown immensely since it began and this global currency is completely separate from any government and its price is not subject to political manipulation. Last time I looked, one bitcoin was worth over a thousand US dollars.

Robot Growth

The International Federation of Robotics forecast that unit shipments for the global market for vacuum cleaning robots, lawn-mowing robots and other household cleaning robots will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33% through 2019.
Global medical robotics market is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 21.43% during 2016 - 2021.
Agricultural robots forecast to increase from 32,000 units in 2016 to 594,000 units annually in 2024 and that the market is expected to reach $74.1 billion in annual revenue by 2024.

The Internet of Robotic Things market is expected to be $21.44 billion by 2022, growing at a CAGR of 29.7% between 2016 and 2022.