Casein, JQuery, and Lenin

Today I Learned:
1) Some details about milk and cheese-making.
 a) Casein is, by default, inactive. In the stomach, it is processed into various peptides called casomorphins, at least some of which are opioid mimics. It is thought that this leads to addiction by a newborn to its mother’s milk. I wonder if this is part of why cheese is so hard to give up.
b) Lactose, though very common in milk, is mostly removed from cheese along with the whey. The confusing bit is that lactose is still important for culturing the bacteria of cheeses, which break it down into lactic acid, which adds flavor. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2) How to make JQuery do stuff. JQuery is a javascript library that adds a bunch of convenience functions to make it easy to select HTML elements (among many other things). I’ve used JQuery in bits and pieces before, but I don’t think I ever really understood what I was doing. I also learned today why I despise Javascript so much — I think it mostly has to do with it’s terrible debugging features. When I do something totally, utterly, completely incorrect, like forgetting to put a semicolon at the end of a statement, the most common symptom is… nothing at all. Consequently, it constantly looks like javascript just completely, utterly doesn’t work, when the real problem is the usual kind of silly programmer errors that get caught by a better language (say Python) quickly and easily.

3) Vladimir Lenin was intentionally unleashed on Russia after the fall of the last Czar by German leadership near the end of World War I in an attempt to take Russia out of the war via pacifist socialist takeover. It worked.