Veritasium
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18:32 · 13M views · Nov 19, 2022
Veritasium visits NIST to explain Standard Reference Materials, the carefully characterized items such as peanut butter used to calibrate instruments and keep measurements consistent. It covers why they exist and why they are expensive.
Whenever NIST's pricey peanut butter or reference materials come up, commenters point to this as the clear explanation of why they exist.
10 comments from Hacker News
Veritasium [1] did a video of exactly this and explains why it exists [at 2m35s]: > An ordinary jar of peanut butter costs less than $5. And on the label you can see the ingredients and the amounts of different nutrients like protein, fats, sugar, and sodium. Those values have been measured by the manufacturer using different machines and analytical techniques. But how do you know those results are accurate? Well, this is where the government's standard jar of peanut butter comes in. It is mixed up so carefully and thoroughly that each jar contains exactly the same substance. > "We take great pains at homogenizing these things. Make sure it's consistent." > Then scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, take years to painstakingly identify the quantities of all the different compounds in the peanut butter with specified uncertainties. This peanut butter is then known as a standard reference material or SRM. They sell these perfectly characterized SRM samples of peanut butter to researchers and manufacturers so they can calibrate their equipment. Essentially, the buyer knows that their equipment is working properly if, when they run the standard peanut butter, they get the values NIST supplies on the certificate. > "We've spent a lot of time to make sure that we're confident and, you know, we can spend years studying the amount of fat in here and trying to figure out exactly what those numbers are." > So what you're paying for is not really the pe
Correct. Veritasium actually did a video on exactly this set of items last year[0]. The tl;dr is that NIST has a large collection of items which are rigorously produced and tested, with detailed documentation about their composition and test results, which allows companies to test their own products to very specific standards. For instance, peanut butter has aflatoxins -- known carcinogens. NIST's standard peanut butter has known levels of aflatoxins. By purchasing this peanut butter and testing it on your own peanut-butter-aflatoxin-sensing machine, you can calibrate your machine to detect aflatoxins in peanut butter to a reasonably high precision. 0. this video
Veritasium has a great video[1] on NIST's Standard Reference Materials including their peanut butter. It talks about some of the other aspects of NIST's business in selling these items, their history, why they exist, and some of the other interesting ones like their standard reference cigarettes. [1] this video
You're forgetting the NIST. They operate at a net profit, selling things like Standard Jars of Peanut Butter for equipment calibration ($1,069 per unit). There's a cool Veritasium video on it: this video
Assuming this is in reference to the great Veritasium video[0] going over what these reference materials are used for and why they're so expensive. [0] this video