June 17, 2016 at 01:09AM

Today I Learned: 1) If you (presumably accidentally...) try to boil water in a rice cooker with dried out leftover rice still in it, it will froth and fill the rice cooker with bubbles. This doesn't appear to affect its steaming properties, however, and it will cook steamed buns just fine. 2) A monk's spade is a curious and fascinating polearm weapon with a concave crescent-shaped blade at one and and a convex crescent-shaped blade at the other. According to wikipedia, the monk's spade is descended from a practical variation on a walking stick carried by travelling Buddhist monks in China. A shovel on one end was used to properly bury any corpses the monk came across; a crescent-shaped, unsharpened implement at the other was used as a non-lethal weapon against animals, designed to be pushed up against the animal's throat to keep it at bay. So says wiki. 3) Big metal heating elements, like the ones found in pressure cookers or on old electric stovetops, aren't generally just big pieces of metal that conduct electricity. That, as one might guess, would be dangerous, and easy to short to boot. The actual conducting material is a relatively small coil of wire wrapped around solonoid-style inside the heating element. This is packed in a heat-conducting, electrically-insulating paste-like substance, which is covered by a metal sheath to hold the whole thing together and protect it from damage. This metal sheath is what you see when you look at a heating element. Thanks to Andrey Shur for teaching me about how heating elements are built!