whatilearned
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/weird-world-nist-standard-reference-materials-peanut-butter-whale-blubber-180954379/
TIL about the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) – a US government agency maintaining a reference catalogue of almost any item known; from peanut butter to New Jersey waste water samples. And everything is for sale.
5 Comments
Leave a ReplyLeave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Hey OP! I saw that same video on YouTube today. Peanut butter that’s over $1k for a jar. But what you’re paying for is the scientific data they have gained and the precise way it’s mixed. It’s not sold to be edible it’s sold to be a referance of peanut butter.
Why buy this? For 1k$? It’s precisely made and uniform. Therefore if you have a machine line that has detectors on it for certain amounts of fat and sugars and other ingredients you test the line with this.
I get my networks time from NIST for free. Working pretty well on Stratum 1. Hope to upgrade to a GPS unit in the future.
Do they know how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? It’s 1363, right? Right!?
NIST also performs some pretty important functions. They’ve played a huge part over the past few decades in the validation and standardization of cryptographic algorithms used everywhere in computers today.
I mean, NIST does other things too….