Bl00ps

EDIT: THIS IS FROM DECEMBER 2025.

Affected products: 1 pound bag of frozen shrimp

Lot EA14 25118 with a best by date of October 28, 2026

So I used to test and occasionally solder electric circuit boards such as the above for work.

You know, soldering. With a soldering iron. Which can easily reach several hundred degrees CELSIUS. Several times the boiling temperature of water. Just to put this into perspective.

Those boards need to resist that heat (and I need to resist bad puns more often) and are thus built to withstand that heat.

This looks to be a thin film resistor which has a ceramic core wrapped in resistive film, usually made of nickel/chromium. With some sort of insulating coating over that with the cute little color bands. That’s mostly just a fun fact, because regardless of material glow colors are reliably indicative of temperature. Here is a handy chart for this

To start, Q (energy) is mC delta T

Which is the mass time the specific heat times the change in temperature.

For the specific heat we can use ceramic, as it makes up the bulk of the resistor

Power is energy/time, and while we can't know how long it took to get the resistor that hot, it couldn't be too long because there would be much more board damage as it passes through lower temperatures, but it had to be time for the picture to be taken. I'm using 20 seconds which feels about right to me, but not really based on much evidence.

Therefore we have the power is

Which comes out to 252.7 watts

For reference, the power of a resistor is I^2R, so for a 1 ohm resistor passing, say, 2.5 amps (since it is pretty big so its handling a fair bit of current) it's dissipating 6.25 watts

So yeah

The USPS just changed how postmarks work - and it will affect MAIL-IN VOTING while hitting Americans with late fees on everything from tax payments to rent checks.

Starting in 2026, your postmark date won’t reflect when you actually mailed something anymore. Instead of stamping mail with the date you dropped it in a mailbox or handed it to a postal worker, USPS will now mark it with whenever their sorting machine gets around to processing it - potentially days later.