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This bagel slicing video raises more questions than it answers

Finally. Great news for anyone who just couldn’t bear another day of boring, horizontally sliced bagels. Now there’s a way to slice it into two linked halves. The how-to video, highlighted by Flowing Data, comes from George Hart, a professor of engineering at SUNY-Stony Brook.

It’s pretty cool, but it also raised all sorts of questions around the Vox office: doesn’t this make cream-cheese-spreading more trouble than it’s worth? Don’t you risk crushing the bagel in all of your 180-degree-turns and sideways cuts? Why is that bagel so squishy in the first place? Would you even want to eat a bagel whose every square inch had been touched by someone else’s grubby fingers? What if you don’t have a toaster oven? How on earth would lox and capers work here? Let alone eggs and bacon?

On second thought, maybe just do your bagel the boring way today and keep this idea in your back pocket as a really nifty party trick. You know. For all those cool parties you go to. Where they serve bagels.

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