There’s many mandatory flammability tests for upholstery in the US related to cigarette ignition and spread. I wonder what would happen if cigarettes were fully banned, would we keep the test method?
I imagine that the tests wouldn't go away completely, they might just be modified to make sure that a faulty Juul or other vape box doesn't cause them to burn. But probably nothing would change for several years, because just because you outlaw cigarettes that doesn't mean people are going to quit overnight.
And then if you outlawed vapes then I'm sure there's still some other fire hazard to worry about and they would modify the tests again.
Hopefully they're rolled back to sane levels. Clothing flammability tests/requirements were more or less an overkill response to a moral panic in the 1970s when the media took and ran with some questionable stories about flammable kids clothing and whatnot. Furniture and drapery are/were of legitimate concern but as we all know it's never just the tip.
I didn't know the moral panic went so far back. I'm only familiar with it starting in the 70s (at the time it was very much a 2nd tier moral panic riding the coatails of the hazards of smoking). While nobody wants more crispy children what that article isn't telling you is that there are a lot of fabric flame retardants are safe in that they haven't been proven unsafe. Fine for your couch, curtains, etc. But stuff you're gonna wear every day, IDK man. Not sure I want literally everyone to have level of exposure to chemicals for their entire life.
>"I know it sounds ghoulish, but the staff of the burn unit in my hospital practically danced around the beds of the three children who were admitted in the past year with burns incurred when their pajamas ignited. The reason was that they were wearing garments that had been treated with a flame-retardant chemical. The burns, therefore, were trivial. The children were quickly treated and sent home. A few short years ago, before flame-resistant sleepwear was on the market, these same children would either have been dead or sentenced to a life of pain and disfigurement."
Your use of the phrase "moral panic" in this context is ironically in support of a moral panic about the dangers of fabric flame retardants.
> [Referring to a Gene Autry costume that had over 100 lawsuits over the burn victims] The cowboy suit and other similar incidents were the impetus for the 1953 passage of the Flammable Fabrics Act, which regulated, among other things, which fabrics could be used for clothing. No more rayon pile chaps for kids (or brushed rayon sweaters for women), as such items had become famous for creating what were widely reported at the time as "human torches."
If I didn't read it why would I say something like "I didn't know the moral panic went so far back"?. Like I said, I'm familiar with the actual standards for flammability that didn't come about until the early 1970s and resulted in the textile industry adding flame retardants to everything. I have no idea what they were legislating in the 1950s but it wasn't the whole industry. Regardless, the point which you seem to be missing is that it's not clear how good for everybody it is to be living their whole lives in and around clothes and textiles that are treated with flame retardant chemicals that are safe in the same way that pesticides and sketchy plastics are safe.
Veritasium has a great video[1] on NIST's Standard Reference Materials including their peanut butter. It talks about some of the other aspects of NIST's business in selling these items, their history, why they exist, and some of the other interesting ones like their standard reference cigarettes.
Along similar lines, the British Standards Institution has defined BS 6008:1980, which is the standard reference cup of tea. ISO has adopted this as ISO 3103.
Along with it being Peanut Butter Day, it is also Tea Day! This is not as much of a coincidence as it might first appear though, since every day is Tea Day.
* If the test involves milk, then it is added to the bowl before pouring the infused tea into it, unless that is contrary to the organisation's normal practice.
* If milk is added after the pouring of tea, the standard notes that best results are obtained when the liquid is between 65 and 80 °C
My organization tends to prefer milk after, But I'm a silly yank who has lots of wrong opinions on a great deal of things (or so I've been told).
As an American I think it depends on how the tea is made. I have a kettle, but I steep in a tea cup rather than another dish to wash. So by standards of decorum I put milk after the tea bags are removed.
I put cream at the bottom of coffee cups before the machine puts coffee in about half the time, though. I have a lot of family in Britain.
Regurgitating web crawl dataset: it's not the best way to brew any tea, just a standardized method used for evaluation/quality control purposes. It helps supply chain workers to notice molds early and to price tea leafs.
Both :)
Some countries have their own standard bodies [1], but I would not be surprised if some smaller countries just used NIST standards. And even countries with their own standards use some of NIST or ANSI indirectly when they become ISO standards.
The saddest thing about this isn't the waste of resources on this nonsense, but that the reference stuff is not actually peanut butter. It's some Kraft-like paste that contains hydrogenated vegetable oil and whatnot. You can tell even from the photo that it's not just peanuts.
Instead of concocting reference garbage, maybe your government should just ban anything that is not just ground peanuts from being called "peanut butter".
NileRed has a humorous YouTube video where he bakes cookies using only NIST reference ingredients. It costs something like $2000 to bake a single cookie and has all the flavor of cardboard.
Isn't that the entire point of everything done? Crazy wild ass things nobody in their right mind would try, but getting to watch someone else do it drives those views.
Usually the expectation is that this someone knows what they're doing, and it was weird how in this particular video that just didn't apply, at all. It was like watching him do chemistry video without having any idea what amounts of base chemicals to use or what steps to follow and just making it up in order to conclude "this doesn't work, the base chemicals are clearly bad" at the end of it =)
Yeah his recipe was very odd. That sort of cooking is very fiddly. I rubbished a whole batch of cookies a few weeks ago just by cooking them ~2 mins too long. Sweats seem to be very exacting one what you need to do to make them come out correctly. Other kinds of cooking you can +/- a lot of things and still get something good. Sweats on the other hand. You better get it 'just right'.
Can confirm. Baking by mass, cooking by eyeballing amounts into the pan and constant tasting.
About the only time my cooking is science is candy. Every degree matters, percentage matters so much, etc. A few degrees means crystals are radically different.
Imo both cooking and baking are "science" until you have the requisite experience to mess around, then they both become art. You can absolutely guess your way into a great cake recipe based on feel.
I think the two important differences are that the results of bad cooking tend to be slightly more edible than the results of bad baking, so many people don't even realize they can't cook. And many more people are forced into cooking via necessity, so the average skill level is higher.
Having a temperature preference for steak is just that, preference. Saltiness is a preference. As is most things in cooking.
Raw dough is always raw dough. You can't fake rising, etc.
Not to mention, if you watch cooking/baking shows, you'll see just how much overlap there really is. Some challenges in Masterchef involves baked goods, cakes, macaroons, etc. Some challenges in the Great British Baking Show involves cooking things. Either to make savory pies or to make compotes or jams, etc.
It's certainly true that there is plenty of science in cooking and plenty of art in baking. My comment is very reductive.
That said, cooking is generally far more forgiving that baking. If you put some amount of chicken in an oven set to a temperature of "very hot", you'll eventually have cooked chicken.
If you mix some amount of flour, water, and yeast, let it sit for some amount of time, and then put it in a "very hot" oven, you're unlikely to end up with what anyone would call "bread". It may not even really be that edible unless you were to grind it back into a power and mix it with water.
I'll back you up here. While i don't do a lot of baking, I've done enough over my life to get a feel for what the ingredients do. I adjust enough that I think most folks would describe it as "not following the recipe".
I will often reduce sugar, add things (cocoa, nuts and so on). As an example if you add cocoa you need to add fluid to compensate. More butter (or oil) leads to a "wetter" crumb and so on.
It takes more experience than regular cooking to do this though, and th feedback cycle is slower.
If you please, I request Type III, Style D, shape (d). Low-fat sugar cookies in patriotic shapes, including but not limited to Uncle Sam, Bald Eagle, Torch of Liberty, Letters "USA", American Flag, Statue of Liberty, etc.
He makes a big deal of the cookie being pure, like the ingredients he is using are superior to ordinary ingredients. But they aren't. They are reference ingredients, merely intended to be precise rather than pure. You can buy human waste from NIST too.
The reference flour is like a decade old. Not exactly optimal for actual baking.
I don't know the answer, but this doesn't seem to tell us one way or the other. Even if there is independent lab testing for the final certification, it would be crazy for the company to not perform their own testing many many more times during the R&D process.
I have a friend who does mass spectroscopy testing to measure volatile chemical emissions from consumer goods. They don't do final certification testing for the relevant government agency, but they are contracted by the companies themselves to provide continuous testing services as the products are being developed and manufacturing processes are being dialed in. Once they have a finished product, it's sent to a government lab (or independent contractor, I'm not sure) for final certification.
There are audits, and lying can result in fines. But yes, as with most regulations businesses are expected to follow them but they can not follow them at the risk of repercussions.
Yeah basically. There's pretty wide margins allowed on the accuracy too AND in practice major mistakes in labeling happen. But unlike allergens, even quite significant errors usually don't result in serious consequences, so the cost, development delays and other side effects of really strong enforcement aren't really that worthwhile.
Relying on potential lawsuits alone to ensure compliance with complex requirements is irresponsible.
That's like saying that the customers and shareholders of a given company are sufficient because they can sue, and therefore financial audits of the company are unnecessary.
The solution doesn't have to be a heavyweight centralized agency, either. Simply requiring periodic tests by an independent, licensed third party (just like financial auditors) should be sufficient.
There's lots of competition in food manufacturing. Your competitors would likely suggest an investigation if your company started selling something like 10cal/Tb butter. If your swindling falls under the threshold of notice, then honestly you're probably within the fairly generous acceptable error bars anyway.
We do this for meet and it's done wonders for the quality of products that fall under the USDA.
The FDA is technically in charge of the doing these inspections for stuff that doesn't fall under the USDA, but they are fully captured doing the D in FDA and not the F.
It'd make sense to move that responsibility out of the FDA and into the USDA to form a new food focused agency. It'd also make sense to regulate supplements, but there's a lot of monied interests that don't want more/better oversight so good luck seeing that happen.
At a minimum, consumers should be reasonably confident that what's on the label is in the package. That's not really true for supplements.
> We do this for meet and it's done wonders for the quality of products that fall under the USDA.
Sometimes typos are just fun. Could you imagine if everyone of your meetings had to follow strict FDA guidelines? Not sure if that would improve or worsen the typical meeting experience. Maybe a chart on the meeting invite like calories/sugars/etc that would indicate the type of meeting. If the sugars are too high, it will be one of those meetings where everything is super positive and sickening to sit through. A high protein value could indicate there will be actual useful information in the meeting.
If there's sufficient backing and motivation due to say...another impeding lawsuit, there most definitely will be, not just one, but a handful of "independent tests" each backed by the plaintiff and the defendant.
There's also NIST 1196a, "Standard Cigarette". As a friend said, I bet they taste like drywall and taxes.
https://www.nist.gov/image/cigarettes-lab
https://www.nist.gov/fire/history/standard-reference-cigaret...
There’s many mandatory flammability tests for upholstery in the US related to cigarette ignition and spread. I wonder what would happen if cigarettes were fully banned, would we keep the test method?
I imagine that the tests wouldn't go away completely, they might just be modified to make sure that a faulty Juul or other vape box doesn't cause them to burn. But probably nothing would change for several years, because just because you outlaw cigarettes that doesn't mean people are going to quit overnight.
And then if you outlawed vapes then I'm sure there's still some other fire hazard to worry about and they would modify the tests again.
Hopefully they're rolled back to sane levels. Clothing flammability tests/requirements were more or less an overkill response to a moral panic in the 1970s when the media took and ran with some questionable stories about flammable kids clothing and whatnot. Furniture and drapery are/were of legitimate concern but as we all know it's never just the tip.
If you'd like to learn about the actual origin of flammable clothing restrictions and the difference the regulations made, here is a good summary:
https://www.parent.com/blogs/conversations/2023-why-are-we-a...
I didn't know the moral panic went so far back. I'm only familiar with it starting in the 70s (at the time it was very much a 2nd tier moral panic riding the coatails of the hazards of smoking). While nobody wants more crispy children what that article isn't telling you is that there are a lot of fabric flame retardants are safe in that they haven't been proven unsafe. Fine for your couch, curtains, etc. But stuff you're gonna wear every day, IDK man. Not sure I want literally everyone to have level of exposure to chemicals for their entire life.
>"I know it sounds ghoulish, but the staff of the burn unit in my hospital practically danced around the beds of the three children who were admitted in the past year with burns incurred when their pajamas ignited. The reason was that they were wearing garments that had been treated with a flame-retardant chemical. The burns, therefore, were trivial. The children were quickly treated and sent home. A few short years ago, before flame-resistant sleepwear was on the market, these same children would either have been dead or sentenced to a life of pain and disfigurement."
Your use of the phrase "moral panic" in this context is ironically in support of a moral panic about the dangers of fabric flame retardants.
Did you even read it?
Here you go, buddy:
> [Referring to a Gene Autry costume that had over 100 lawsuits over the burn victims] The cowboy suit and other similar incidents were the impetus for the 1953 passage of the Flammable Fabrics Act, which regulated, among other things, which fabrics could be used for clothing. No more rayon pile chaps for kids (or brushed rayon sweaters for women), as such items had become famous for creating what were widely reported at the time as "human torches."
>Did you even read it?
>Here you go, buddy:
If I didn't read it why would I say something like "I didn't know the moral panic went so far back"?. Like I said, I'm familiar with the actual standards for flammability that didn't come about until the early 1970s and resulted in the textile industry adding flame retardants to everything. I have no idea what they were legislating in the 1950s but it wasn't the whole industry. Regardless, the point which you seem to be missing is that it's not clear how good for everybody it is to be living their whole lives in and around clothes and textiles that are treated with flame retardant chemicals that are safe in the same way that pesticides and sketchy plastics are safe.
Edit: I was right, turns out the 1953 law is basically "don't sell anything that's more flammable than typical" https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/16/1609.1
Flame retardant treatment requirement for cotton was discontinued in 1996.
Sorry, it's clear we are talking past each other. You have a great week.
[Cuba Libre Cigar Co. stands by, ready to assist]
Relevant SRM #2387 use case https://github.com/scottvr/PBVD?tab=readme-ov-file#future-ex...
The PB is ~1/3 of the entire materials cost. ;-)
From the BOM:
…
Veritasium has a great video[1] on NIST's Standard Reference Materials including their peanut butter. It talks about some of the other aspects of NIST's business in selling these items, their history, why they exist, and some of the other interesting ones like their standard reference cigarettes.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esQyYGezS7c
I know inflation's gotten bad and all but it seems a bit crazy that the typical diet is $901: https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=1548b&cclcl=e...
Related:
NIST Standard Peanut Butter – $1,107 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38016900 - Oct 2023 (35 comments)
NIST Standard Reference Materials Catalog [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41917035 - Oct 2024 (9 comments)
Along similar lines, the British Standards Institution has defined BS 6008:1980, which is the standard reference cup of tea. ISO has adopted this as ISO 3103.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3103
Along with it being Peanut Butter Day, it is also Tea Day! This is not as much of a coincidence as it might first appear though, since every day is Tea Day.
Wait wait wait, milk in before the tea? That's not right.
It can be either!
* If the test involves milk, then it is added to the bowl before pouring the infused tea into it, unless that is contrary to the organisation's normal practice.
* If milk is added after the pouring of tea, the standard notes that best results are obtained when the liquid is between 65 and 80 °C
My organization tends to prefer milk after, But I'm a silly yank who has lots of wrong opinions on a great deal of things (or so I've been told).
As an American I think it depends on how the tea is made. I have a kettle, but I steep in a tea cup rather than another dish to wash. So by standards of decorum I put milk after the tea bags are removed.
I put cream at the bottom of coffee cups before the machine puts coffee in about half the time, though. I have a lot of family in Britain.
Regurgitating web crawl dataset: it's not the best way to brew any tea, just a standardized method used for evaluation/quality control purposes. It helps supply chain workers to notice molds early and to price tea leafs.
Milk before tea reduces thermal shock on fragile fine china tea cups
Dharma Initiative Peanut Butter
Mandatory Tom Scott videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvJzi0BXcGI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAsrsMPftOI
(2016) - the NIST Peanut Butter now costs $1,217 (https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=2387&cclcl=en...)
Do other countries also use NIST's products as standards, or do other countries have their own standards/NIST?
Both :) Some countries have their own standard bodies [1], but I would not be surprised if some smaller countries just used NIST standards. And even countries with their own standards use some of NIST or ANSI indirectly when they become ISO standards.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standards_organization
The saddest thing about this isn't the waste of resources on this nonsense, but that the reference stuff is not actually peanut butter. It's some Kraft-like paste that contains hydrogenated vegetable oil and whatnot. You can tell even from the photo that it's not just peanuts.
Instead of concocting reference garbage, maybe your government should just ban anything that is not just ground peanuts from being called "peanut butter".
Here are the US Government regulations of what is necessary for products to be labeled as "Peanut Butter":
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-B...
I appreciate you digging this up; thank you.
Would you be interested in a job at the United States Department of Health and Human Services?
You've got exactly the kind of attitude we're looking for!
(2016)
NileRed has a humorous YouTube video where he bakes cookies using only NIST reference ingredients. It costs something like $2000 to bake a single cookie and has all the flavor of cardboard.
I really love the channel, but I can't help to feel that he was held back by his, ehm, limited knowledge of cooking.
Perhaps he was simply "playing it up" for the camera, but I thought it was hilarious how worried he was about his cookie cracking.
Yeah, I would have liked to see a "control cookie" with normal ingredients. I suspect it wouldn't have been much better.
Unfortunately he had no idea how to bake, let alone bake cookies, and his recipe made no sense at all. It was kind of a waste of money.
> It was kind of a waste of money.
Isn't that the entire point of everything done? Crazy wild ass things nobody in their right mind would try, but getting to watch someone else do it drives those views.
Usually the expectation is that this someone knows what they're doing, and it was weird how in this particular video that just didn't apply, at all. It was like watching him do chemistry video without having any idea what amounts of base chemicals to use or what steps to follow and just making it up in order to conclude "this doesn't work, the base chemicals are clearly bad" at the end of it =)
Yeah his recipe was very odd. That sort of cooking is very fiddly. I rubbished a whole batch of cookies a few weeks ago just by cooking them ~2 mins too long. Sweats seem to be very exacting one what you need to do to make them come out correctly. Other kinds of cooking you can +/- a lot of things and still get something good. Sweats on the other hand. You better get it 'just right'.
Cooking is art, baking is science.
Can confirm. Baking by mass, cooking by eyeballing amounts into the pan and constant tasting.
About the only time my cooking is science is candy. Every degree matters, percentage matters so much, etc. A few degrees means crystals are radically different.
Imo both cooking and baking are "science" until you have the requisite experience to mess around, then they both become art. You can absolutely guess your way into a great cake recipe based on feel.
I think the two important differences are that the results of bad cooking tend to be slightly more edible than the results of bad baking, so many people don't even realize they can't cook. And many more people are forced into cooking via necessity, so the average skill level is higher.
Having a temperature preference for steak is just that, preference. Saltiness is a preference. As is most things in cooking.
Raw dough is always raw dough. You can't fake rising, etc.
Not to mention, if you watch cooking/baking shows, you'll see just how much overlap there really is. Some challenges in Masterchef involves baked goods, cakes, macaroons, etc. Some challenges in the Great British Baking Show involves cooking things. Either to make savory pies or to make compotes or jams, etc.
It's certainly true that there is plenty of science in cooking and plenty of art in baking. My comment is very reductive.
That said, cooking is generally far more forgiving that baking. If you put some amount of chicken in an oven set to a temperature of "very hot", you'll eventually have cooked chicken.
If you mix some amount of flour, water, and yeast, let it sit for some amount of time, and then put it in a "very hot" oven, you're unlikely to end up with what anyone would call "bread". It may not even really be that edible unless you were to grind it back into a power and mix it with water.
I'll back you up here. While i don't do a lot of baking, I've done enough over my life to get a feel for what the ingredients do. I adjust enough that I think most folks would describe it as "not following the recipe".
I will often reduce sugar, add things (cocoa, nuts and so on). As an example if you add cocoa you need to add fluid to compensate. More butter (or oil) leads to a "wetter" crumb and so on.
It takes more experience than regular cooking to do this though, and th feedback cycle is slower.
If you are baking cookies using standard reference ingredients, you had best be using a standard reference recipe.
https://www.dla.mil/Portals/104/Documents/TroopSupport/Subsi...
If you please, I request Type III, Style D, shape (d). Low-fat sugar cookies in patriotic shapes, including but not limited to Uncle Sam, Bald Eagle, Torch of Liberty, Letters "USA", American Flag, Statue of Liberty, etc.
I'll settle for an ANSI standard pizza and an ISO standard cup of tea.
NileBlue*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crjxpZHv7Hk
NileBlue is his second channel. I don't think it's incorrect to call him by his main channel's name.
Sure, was just correcting the channel name in case anyone was looking for the video. I wasn't attempting to be a pendant.
NileGreen*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAU0FX1d044
He makes a big deal of the cookie being pure, like the ingredients he is using are superior to ordinary ingredients. But they aren't. They are reference ingredients, merely intended to be precise rather than pure. You can buy human waste from NIST too.
The reference flour is like a decade old. Not exactly optimal for actual baking.
> Food manufacturers use the SRMs to calibrate their test methods and equipment.
So we trust them to self-report their nutrition labels, rather than having an unbiased lab perform the test? That seems problematic.
I don't know the answer, but this doesn't seem to tell us one way or the other. Even if there is independent lab testing for the final certification, it would be crazy for the company to not perform their own testing many many more times during the R&D process.
I have a friend who does mass spectroscopy testing to measure volatile chemical emissions from consumer goods. They don't do final certification testing for the relevant government agency, but they are contracted by the companies themselves to provide continuous testing services as the products are being developed and manufacturing processes are being dialed in. Once they have a finished product, it's sent to a government lab (or independent contractor, I'm not sure) for final certification.
There are audits, and lying can result in fines. But yes, as with most regulations businesses are expected to follow them but they can not follow them at the risk of repercussions.
Wait until you read up how the FAA certifies planes!
Yeah basically. There's pretty wide margins allowed on the accuracy too AND in practice major mistakes in labeling happen. But unlike allergens, even quite significant errors usually don't result in serious consequences, so the cost, development delays and other side effects of really strong enforcement aren't really that worthwhile.
If they lie then it’s a lawsuit, and the tax dollars and waste that would go into a centralized solution like you want would be eye watering
Relying on potential lawsuits alone to ensure compliance with complex requirements is irresponsible.
That's like saying that the customers and shareholders of a given company are sufficient because they can sue, and therefore financial audits of the company are unnecessary.
The solution doesn't have to be a heavyweight centralized agency, either. Simply requiring periodic tests by an independent, licensed third party (just like financial auditors) should be sufficient.
There's lots of competition in food manufacturing. Your competitors would likely suggest an investigation if your company started selling something like 10cal/Tb butter. If your swindling falls under the threshold of notice, then honestly you're probably within the fairly generous acceptable error bars anyway.
We do this for meet and it's done wonders for the quality of products that fall under the USDA.
The FDA is technically in charge of the doing these inspections for stuff that doesn't fall under the USDA, but they are fully captured doing the D in FDA and not the F.
It'd make sense to move that responsibility out of the FDA and into the USDA to form a new food focused agency. It'd also make sense to regulate supplements, but there's a lot of monied interests that don't want more/better oversight so good luck seeing that happen.
At a minimum, consumers should be reasonably confident that what's on the label is in the package. That's not really true for supplements.
> We do this for meet and it's done wonders for the quality of products that fall under the USDA.
Sometimes typos are just fun. Could you imagine if everyone of your meetings had to follow strict FDA guidelines? Not sure if that would improve or worsen the typical meeting experience. Maybe a chart on the meeting invite like calories/sugars/etc that would indicate the type of meeting. If the sugars are too high, it will be one of those meetings where everything is super positive and sickening to sit through. A high protein value could indicate there will be actual useful information in the meeting.
How is there going to be a lawsuit if there is no independent test?
If there's sufficient backing and motivation due to say...another impeding lawsuit, there most definitely will be, not just one, but a handful of "independent tests" each backed by the plaintiff and the defendant.
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