J Kenji Lopez-Alt is a chef who leans into the science side of things (check out his The Food Lab if you want to find some science-based recipes).
In this video - one I'm presenting as a companion piece to yesterday's Adam Ragusea's video - Kenji presents a method of cooking eggs that are easiest to peel and a chart that shows the exact cooking time necessary for whatever quality of egg yolk you want.
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| Source - boingboing |
At some point the tediousness of a cooking method outweighs the value of the cooking method.
A thirty-two minute egg that involves mostly thirty-two minutes of active cooking seems to push that tediousness too far for my tastes, especially since I'm not desperate to eat 'perfectly' cooked eggs.
Along the way, however, Adam Raguesea uses some of that thirty-two minutes to explain why egg prices spiked within the last couple of years and the value and decreased funding of public science under the Trump administration.
I don't know Adam's political viewpoints, but I'm pretty sure his views on the values of science align with mine.
His views on egg cooking also seem to agree with mine, because he's not sure all this egg time is worth the trouble.
I've never known what the inside of a catalytic converter looked like before. Admittedly, I had to replace my converter at one point and told the mechanic that I wanted to old one to take in to school and show my students - with some idea that I'd ask the old technology (shop) department to cut it in half for me long, long ago - but I eventually just threw the thing out without doing anything with it.
The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray when confronted with laziness, eh?
Clearly, the catalytic converter isn't lazy at all, however, and the technology used to keep the catalytic converter converting is insanely complicated.
The simple version is that the catalytic converter combusts any unburned hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide byproducts from the combustion happening within the pistons every second of a car's functioning.
...but to make that secondary combustion take place efficiently requires a whole lot of oxygen sensing to and adjusting along the way of that car functioning.
I've posted about entropy before in videos from Steve Mould and Alpha Phoenix. Here Dr Derek takes his turn at tilting at the same windmill: entropy.
The video is a bit long at nearly half an hour, but it's a nice mixture of historical development of the theory of entropy and modern, statistical understanding of entropy's effect on the direction of time in our universe.
I kind of like Steve's video a bit more, but Dr Derek's video is good, as well.
This video steps backward to begin the story of Avogadro's number back in ancient Greece, similarly to how I teach the atomic history in my chemistry class at Princeton.
The development of relative masses of the elements, though, is something that I tend to skim over fairly quickly, though I might start putting a bit more emphasis on this concept in the past.
I do, however, mention - partially thanks to Steve Mould's explanation of moles - define the moles as the conversion factor between one gram and one atomic mass unit.
I didn't know, however, that the value for Secret Number N was discovered in 1909. Now I guess I need to find out how that value was discovered more than 100 years ago.
