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Last week we heard the results of an experiment in double dipping. Prof. Paul L. Dawson of Clemson University wanted to test the conventional wisdom that redipping a chip after you’ve bitten some off will spread germs in the community dip. Of course, he had state-of-the-art equipment and plenty of students for his experiment, which found up to 10,000 bacteria can be transferred to the dip by each double-dipper. But people who have no such resources do their own experiments every day.
1. Nailing Jelly to a Wall
You’ve heard the phrase “like nailing jelly to the wall” to describe a difficult task. Graeme Cole decided to find out exactly how difficult it was to nail jelly (or Jello for Americans) to a wall. He chronicled his experiment step-by-step with pictures.
2. Does Toast Always Land Butter Side Down?
Does toast really tend to fall jelly side down more often than dry side down? The Cockeyed.com Science Club put that old idea to the test! They toasted and buttered two entire loaves of bread and dropped each piece. The first loaf had a 20% “survival” rate, meaning the toast landed butter side up. The second loaf, to which they added honey, jam, or Nutella to each piece of toast, only had a 5% survival rate!
Continue reading for more people who tried it out.
3. Will Pineapple Remove Fingerprints?
Thomas Scott heard that pineapple will remove your fingerprints. From your fingers. He was inspired to test this theory, and recorded the experience on video. The results showed that not all home experiments are altogether safe. Sometimes it’s better to learn from the experience of others.
4. Grilled Cheese Made with an Iron
Roy and Laura were impressed by the grilled cheese sandwiches made with a steam iron in the movie Benny and Joon, and wondered if the technique could be duplicated by “ordinary folks in an ordinary kitchen.” They recreated the scene and documented the process in pictures. Their conclusion? The “wool” setting is best.
5. Frying an Egg in a Computer
Trubador set up a heat sink inside his computer, and fried an egg, just to show us that it can be done. It took a little longer than using a stove, but the results were edible!
6. Combined Oil Cooling and Deep Frying
Sc4freak began with one experiment and ended up with something completely different.
I had recently read a few articles on submersion cooling, where you take your computer and dump it into a tub of non-electrically-conductive oil. It seemed to work really well, and was cheap. So I saw it as a type of poor man’s water-cooling. I bought a large aluminium oven tray and 9 litres of canola oil.
Yes, he submerged his motherboard in cooking oil. The computer worked just fine. But he was hungry and had used all the cooking oil. The solution? Put the fries in the cooling tray with the motherboard! He heated the oil, cooked the fries, and kept playing Quake to see how long the computer would function.
Have you ever heard some nugget of “conventional wisdom” that you wanted to test in the real world? Or better yet, have you ever actually tried such a test?
Comments (23)
Comment
I did a similar test where I attempted to fry an egg using just the heat from the sun on a hot day when in Australia. Did it work? Not brilliantly, but I videoed it and put it on the internet.
I just realised that was over a year ago! Memorable.
Good article,
Rob
posted by Rob Scott on 2-5-2008 at 6:45 am
2) Mythbusters did a segment on the whole bread/butter thing.
4) 1978 High School Speech class. The assignment was to give a “demonstration speech” and my teacher, as an example, showed us how to make grilled cheese sandwiches with an iron. I seem to remember that he did wrap it in tin foil first.
posted by KJ on 2-5-2008 at 7:41 am
Mythbusters created a contraption to test the butter side up/down theory. In the end, the force used to mash the butter into the bread was the most important factor to the scenario. Mashing the butter down hard created a cup-like piece of toast, which was more likely to slowly float, butter side up, to the ground.
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!”
posted by jenny on 2-5-2008 at 10:03 am
That actually makes a lot of sense.
posted by Miss Cellania on 2-5-2008 at 10:16 am
Yay for Mythbusters!
I like the nailing jelly to the wall one. It makes me want to try other jell-o tricks (namely, putting office supplies in it, ala the Office…but I’ve seen the commentary, so I know that in the end they couldn’t get it to work in actual jell-o, the stuff was just too heavy).
posted by Fruppi on 2-5-2008 at 10:17 am
I left a pop-tart in my car one day. It had a shiny silver wrapper, and when I came out from class that afternoon, my pop-tart was toasted! Yummy.
posted by Pearl on 2-5-2008 at 11:16 am
Thanks for the link to Cockeyed.
The producers of Mythbusters actually contacted me when they read our toast-dropping experiment online.
They also invited me down to the studios in San Francisco. I’m a big fan, but I have never actually seen that episode!
posted by Rob Cockerham on 2-5-2008 at 1:25 pm
Clemson! Go Tigers!
This post really has nothing to do with the story.
posted by Ryan on 2-5-2008 at 1:28 pm
The buttered toast thing goes along with the reason why you should always pick tails when you flip a coin as the “bust” usually sticks out further on most coins than whatever is on the tails side making it heavier on the heads side.
posted by Kevin McDonald on 2-5-2008 at 2:12 pm
It is possible to float office supplies in jello. I floated some plastic toys in a mold for a coworker’s birthday. Caution: do NOT eat the jello afterward!
posted by bedhead on 2-5-2008 at 3:28 pm
@ bedhead
“Gone and put my stapler in a jelly again…”
Office UK FTW. :D
posted by Becca on 2-25-2008 at 12:34 am
5) how did he keep his cpu from overheating? The only time I ran my cpu without proper heating, it supased 215 degrees farenheight in minets and shut itself down.
posted by Schöp on 2-25-2008 at 12:22 pm
It eventually did. The end of the story:
“Eventually, though, the strain of 120 degrees C ambient temperature and the load of Quake 3 caused the computer to overheat and crash. I rebooted it, and it loaded back into windows. Although Quake 3 still crashed when trying to play. At that point, the chips were ready. I turned off the heat and enjoyed my snack while I waited for the oil to cool so I could use the computer again.”
posted by Miss Cellania on 2-25-2008 at 12:36 pm
You can actually fry an egg on the sidewalk in Oklahoma and Texas with or without a skillet; I’ve done it as a kid many times.
posted by Cassie on 2-26-2008 at 3:56 pm
Another fun thing you can do with eggs-
When your radiator is leaking, throw an egg in the top. It’ll stop the leak when it heat and cooks w/ in the system and plugs it. Eventually, the pressure of the system will push it out. But then you just get another egg. Or fix your car…
Eh… I stuck with the egg for about 6 months and it was fine! Lernt that’n on MythBusters too…
posted by Sarah on 2-27-2008 at 2:13 pm
Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi mag (ASIMOV) did a great April Fool’s edition in the ’80s where they had a detailed physics analysis of the forces at work on a falling piece of buttered bread. As I recall, the analysis included a graph correlating annual rainfall in Sweden to duck populations; very reminiscent (prescient, actually) of venganza.org’s famed Pirate Theorem.
posted by Pajibill on 3-12-2008 at 12:38 pm
the survival rate of loaf A is higher due to the fact that butter is lighter in WEIGHT than honey, jam or nutella. And there is also no way to ensure the product was evenly spread in exact amounts unless there is a spreading machine i’ve never heard of…this one goes out the window. That doesn’t stop me from yelling “BUTTER UP!” every time i drop it, though.
posted by Ella on 4-2-2008 at 11:06 am
Actually, the first time I know of that the egg and radiator thing is mentioned is in an old episode of mcguyver.
posted by jax on 5-28-2008 at 7:42 am
There have been several videos and even a couple new reports on baking cookies in your car. Most have been on the safety of leaving any living thing in your car during the summer, some just to see if it could be done.
The usual result: not completely done, but edible.
posted by Tru on 8-10-2008 at 2:42 am
There are probably even earlier examples — but the bread/butter issue was tackled by Magnus Pyke, producer of a long-ago popular science program on BBC. He wrote a book, published in 1976, actually titled “Butter Side Up”.
posted by Gollum on 9-7-2008 at 1:54 am
my dad used to heat up his c-rations in the radiator of his car when he was in the army. also, when i lived in california i was able to make a hot dog rotisserie out of an oatmeal container, foil and a skewer (also fried an egg on a piece of foil. took about 10 minutes) used the sun as a “cooker”
posted by Katie Sue on 12-29-2008 at 9:32 pm
Departmental shredder are auto start-stop so you don’t have to monitor shredding long runs of continuous forms. Select from high speed or large capacity models. Every Destroyit shredder model has a 10-year warranty on cutting heads and can take staples and paper clips.
posted by Paper Shredders Ratings on 1-23-2009 at 4:07 am
My husband was an only child of a single mother who was often away from the home. This incident occured when he was six…
He was home alone. He wanted hot dogs. These were the days before microwaves and he was not allowed to use the stove.
So he took a extension cord which he had stripped, some six-penny nails and a soda bottle. Enter hot dog. This wonderful contraption was then plugged into the wall with the expected disastrous results. Complete with the blowing a power transformer and causing most of the (small) town to lose power!
My favorite story.
posted by Zelda on 2-2-2009 at 7:21 pm