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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

While I was searching for previous information on the Prusa i3, I found these two interesting articles on Hackaday.

The first one, about the history of the pasteurization of milk. It’s interesting that I haven’t learned about Alice Evans in my previous schooling. But, the main point and important point is this Alice Evans was the key person to study the bacteria found in cow’s milk, trace the link with the bacteria found in goat’s milk and the associated illness that can develop in humans, search for evidence of a similar medical illness in America, and recommend pasteurization on all cow’s milk, even milk from healthy-looking cows. Initially, there was strong opposition and resistance to this switch, largely due to the cost of the pasteurization equipment and the prospective cost of having all cow’s milk pasteurized. So, the dairy industry started by making a compromise. “Grade A” milk would be unpasteurized milk taken from healty-looking cows under strict cleanliness standards. Everything else would be pasteurized.

The story of how the dairy industry switched over to finally pasteurize Grade A milk too is interesting. One day the child of a high-ranking officer in the dairy industry came down with great illness. A doctor’s examination concluded that the illness was brucellosis, caused from bacteria in the milk they drank. Of course they were only drinking Grade A milk, which was unpasteurized. This was the tipping point to change the dairy industry to pasteurize all milk.

20181117/https://hackaday.com/2018/11/13/alice-evans-brucellosis-or-why-we-pasteurize-milk/

Now, a brief summary of this one is interesting. Automated telephone switching equipment initially came about to defeat fraud. But, ironically, nowadays it is used heavily to commit fraud, via spam computer dialing. Part of this is due to the network design pre-dating the era for the need of strict security measures, other of it due to government regulations on openness and exchange of the network not allowing for much to be added in the way of security.

20181117/https://hackaday.com/2018/11/12/hello-and-please-dont-hang-up-the-scourge-of-robocalls/