Particles are interesting bundles of localized energy present in particular fields that happen to have a particular set of properties.

Quasiparticles are interesting bundles of localized energy present in particular fields that happen to have properties similar to particles and also happen to be describable in terms of collective effects of what we call "particles".

Particles simply aren't as "fundamental" as you seem to think they are.

Perhaps you think it's uninteresting because you mistakenly think that there's some deep, fundamental difference between a particle and a quasi-particle that makes one "real" and the other "not real".

That's hard to answer for a few reasons. I'm not a particle physicist, the subject is kind of complicated, and most people start off ill-informed (sorry!).

Antiparticles are not particularly weird and particle-antiparticle interactions are, in particular, not some kind of physical witchcraft. I always have disliked that it's called annihilation. At the subatomic level, particle interactions are common and they generally involve the "creation" and "destruction" of particles. For example, maybe a neutron decays into a proton, an electron, and an electron antineutrino (by way of one of its down quarks changing into an up quark). Particle interactions are all sort of a shuffling of energy between the different flavors of bundles of energy we call particles. Lots of different physical quantities, like charge, are conserved, limiting what interactions can happen.

In the interest of simplicity, a lot of what I'll say next is slightly wrong.

Antiparticles aren't particularly weird. Particles all have a set of physical properties. It turns out that for each particle, there is another particle that is basically exactly the same, except all these physical properties are opposite. So an electron has charge -1 and an antielectron (positron) has charge +1. In fact, if you look at a legal particle interaction and replace all of the particles with their antiparticles, it's still a legal particle interaction.

An implication of this is that if a particle and its antiparticle interact (not a particle and *any* antiparticle, but *its* antiparticle), the net total for any of their conserved quantities (like charge) is zero. That means the major legal interaction is that the two particles are destroy and produce photons. While photons are particles, we tend to think of them as just energy, so the particle-antiparticle interaction is an "annihilation": two particles go in, energy and zero particles come out.

The "its antiparticle" bit is important. You don't see a lot of antielectrons because a free antielectron would easily encounter an electron and annihilate. But there are plenty of antineutrinos because they interact weakly with the rest of the world. An antineutrino interacting with, say, a proton does not cause annihilation. Even an antielectron interacting with, say, a proton doesn't do anything special.

Oh, also, it turns out that, at least for the "normal matter" particles like electrons and protons, the universe seems to contain pretty much only the normal-matter particles and (relatively) no antiparticles. There doesn't seem to be any reason, in physics, for one to be preferred over the other. (It's just that in one region of space, you couldn't have a mixture and also have stable matter.) So that's weird.

This is all a long-winded way of getting to the answer that particles that are their own antiparticles aren't particularly exciting. They all have the property that conserved quantities (at least, those that are negated in antiparticles) are zero. So they all naturally have annihilation interactions: when two collide, they can annihilate and form protons. But the annihilation interaction isn't particularly dramatic or weird, it just sounds interesting. The particles all probably also have interactions with all sorts of other types of particles, too, and it really comes down to what particle it happens to collide with first. Maybe a photon and an antineutrino interact with a proton and form a neutron.

Most of the particles that are their own antiparticles are relatively neutral to normal matter (and consequently, also to normal antimatter). But they're all a very different kind of particle from normal matter. They're things like force-carriers (photons) and muons, and they interact with electrons and protons differently from how electrons and protons interact with each other.

For some real fun, look up Feynman diagrams, a neat way of writing down different legal particle interactions. One axis is space (in one dimension) and one axis is time. Now, any 90-degree rotation of a legal interaction is still a legal interaction.

The summary (and the article!) imply that it is rare and strange for a particle to be its own antiparticle. This is not the case. Plenty of boson and mesons are their own antiparticles: photons, gluons, pions, etc. This isn't a particularly weird situation.

However, fermions are another story. Fermions and bosons are the two kinds of fundamental particles. They behave very differently. While there are bosons that are their own antiparticle, there are no known fermions that have this property. All the fermions we know of are Dirac-type. It's been long postulated that there could be Majorana-type fermions, which, among other things, are their own antiparticles.

It's interesting, but not quite as crazy as implied.

Before the digital age, they seized physical documents, which were usually trivial to access (with a warrant) and decipher.

It doesn't just require a jailbreak. It also requires the user to install the software.

I think it also tends to be much faster, for the same reason. Add ingredient, zero, add ingredient, zero, etc. You can tear through measuring a complicated set of ingredients in no time.

I tend to use grams unless the recipe actually specifies weight in US customary or if there is some particular motivation for using lb/oz. (Brewing supplies here, for example, are all sold by the pound or ounce, so it's useful to stick with those units.

Right. This is specifying the recipe by weight, though. It's just specifying it by relative weights, using a very convenient custom unit system.

The Mars Climate Orbiter was never intended to land, but it did.

And no. It had nothing to do with words with multiple meanings. Nobody in the US in engineering (or science, really) should be confused about what pound-seconds are. (This is despite the fact that both "pound" and "second" have multiple definitions.) What crashed the Mars Climate Orbiter is that the spec for a piece of software required that it produce results with one unit, and it instead produced results with a second unit. That's going to be a problem, regardless of whether the incorrect unit it produces is kN-s, dyn-s, lbf-s, cm-g/s, or kg-km/hr. (And if you think that scientists and engineers who use metric always use the SI base unit, you clearly don't do science or engineering.)

Now you're misstating the precision of the measurement and using units that aren't necessarily marked on the measuring devices. (Dry-measure cups are not often not graduated.)

The ambiguity doesn't really exist. People are either being intentionally difficult or users of the metric system are too stupid to handle words with multiple meanings.

Note that they are actually measuring by weight, using a custom unit system.

You are confusing two issues: metric vs. US customary units, and measurement by volume vs. by mass.

I assure you that both metric and US customary unit systems have units for volume and mass, so you can measure either way using either system. It's also the case that neither unit system specifies how one is to measure ingredients in the kitchen.

It is European convention to measure many kitchen dry ingredients by weight. It is, unfortunately, US convention to measure many dry ingredients by volume. This is okay, even convenient, for some things where the real quantity doesn't particularly matter. (While cherry tomatoes will vary, you could probably use twice as much or half as much without any trouble.) For precision measurements, you need to use weight. This is what's used by professional cooks in the US already and is becoming increasingly common in cookbooks.

Incidentally, if you buy your butter in sticks, it's easy to measure a cup of butter. Otherwise, it's convenient to post a list of standard densities for things like butter.

While cup is a standard and precise unit of measurement, there are lots of materials in cooking you should not measure by volume (whether that volume is in cups or mL).

This is equivocation. The word "cup" denotes both a standardized unit of measure (volume) in the US customary units and also an object for holding and consuming liquids. They have only a historical relationship to one another.

Whenever the word "cup" is used in the context of measurement, it means the unit of measure.

In the US, "cup" is a capacity measurement, just like fluid ounces. You don't measure with any sort of arbitrary cup, you do it with a calibrated measuring cup (which is generally marked in fl oz and mL as well). You could use any graduated container, though. I like beakers.

Same goes for teaspoons and tablespoons, which are volume measurements that are only historically linked to any of the spoons one might eat with.

The one European cooking convention that's actually useful here is using weight for dry measure instead of volume. Most dry-measure materials pack well (like flour) or have nonstandardized grain sizes (like salt), so you cannot make a precise measurement by volume. We're converting, though -- most good cookbooks will list both. (Professional cookbooks will only list weight.) People on TV will generally tell you to stop measuring by volume. Etc.