LSNED

Speaking of hamburgers, which I was (specifically, hucking them across continents), are you aware just how close we came to going out for “tartars and fries”?

The Tartars (or Tatars) are an ethnic group found around Russia, descendants of Mongolians, who were once at the leading edge of finely chopped meat. The legacy remains in the modern day steak tartare, which is basically a mound of raw ground beef, though the fancy French restaurants make it sound more… how do you say… edible.

While the recipe of ground beef, minced onions, and seasoning stayed much the same, after making it to the port town of Hamburg, Germany they started to cook it. It was from here that the Hamburg steak, as it came to be known, spread across the world in the 1800s.

Side note: the Salisbury steak is pretty much identical to a Hamburg steak, but named after Dr. James Salisbury who promoted eating meat three times a day, and limiting vegetables, fruits and starchy foods.

A little earlier, mid 1700s, it was John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich, asked for some meat tucked between two pieces of bread. He just wanted to be able to eat conveniently while working or playing cards. As such, the sandwich was born.

The two met up on American soil but the exact location is hotly contested. Grasping for any claim to fame there are three US states that have legislation to decree the birth of the hamburger, or more accurately, the Hamburg steak sandwich, happened inside their borders.

The two oldest claims date to 1885, and both share the story of a food vendor at a county fair. In one case a meatball vendor squashed his product flat and served it in bread so it became more portable. It was a hit. The other story is about running out of pork for sausage patty sandwiches on a busy day, and improvising a new recipe using ground beef. That too was a hit.

The second guy also claimed to have created the word “hamburger” not based on the Hamburg steak but rather that the fateful day occurred at the fair in Hamburg, New York. To me, that sounds a little too convenient.

The meatball guy dished up his sandwiches every year and came to be known as Hamburger Charlie. He even had a song and dance routine:

Hamburgers, hamburgers, hamburgers hot; onions in the middle, pickle on top. Makes your lips go flippity flop.

Another story argues the technicality that those both put a Hamburg steak between slices of bread, but the true hamburger was born when it was first placed on a bun. If you buy that, then credit is due to Grandpa Oscar Bilby of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The way his family tells the story of his first annual July 4th BBQ you’d think the man came down from the mountain with his holy grill.

Of course, Texas has its own version of the hamburger creation story, too. It probably wasn’t the first, but it did have the biggest effect when Fletch David took his sandwich on the road. The hamburger hit the big time as a favourite dish at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. And we lived fattily ever after.

• Source:  What’s Cooking in America – History of the Hamburger

Ch-ch-ch-chia! The Chia Pet is deeply rooted in the popular culture of North America so much that it is part of the Smithsonian Institutions permanent collection. It started as an authentic bit of Mexican culture before becoming an “As Seen on TV” sensation.

It is a small animal figurine made of terra cotta pottery. You soak some chia seeds in water, and spread them over the grooved portion of the pottery where they stick long enough to take root and grow. The first official “Chia Pet” appeared on TV in 1982. It was the ram… still a best-seller.

The chia plant (salvia hispanica… a type of sage) itself has a long history and was treasured in the ancient Aztec culture. It was given as part of an annual tribute to the Aztec rulers. To this day the chia seeds are used in Mexico as a health supplement. They may be tiny (about 2 millimeters) but they are packed with goodness. Protein, dietary fibre, strong antioxidants, and the oil is a significant source of omega-3 fatty acids. Also gluten-free.

Australia was the top producer of chia crops in 2008. The herb can grow to 1 meter in height, which if left to grow wild on one of the Chia Pet Barack Obama heads, would just look… tacky!

99% of annual Chia Pet sales occur in December, as it makes the perfect gift for that special person you don’t really like a whole lot.

Bonus Fact: Joseph Enterprises Inc., the company that brings us the Chia Pet, has also brightened our lives with that modern marvel “The Clapper” for turning lamps on and off.

• Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvia_hispanica

I’d like to start off by saying that a CD (compact disc) works very much like a vinyl record, but I’m afraid it would be almost as current to say a CD works much like a telegraph machine. Still, I’ll soldier on with my record analogy, since they both store music (data) in a very similar fashion.

The music on a CD is recorded onto a path (a “groove” in vinyl-speak) that spirals around the disc for about five kilometers. Opposite to a record, the spiral starts in the center of the disc and winds it’s way out. In order to keep things moving at a steady pace, the disc spins at 500 RPM when it’s reading near the center, and slowly decreases to 200 RPM as it gets to the outer edge. The stream of data on the path remains constant.

The groove on a vinyl record is analog; a series of detailed bumps wherein the larger the bump the louder the noise. On a CD, the digital data is recorded in a binary form, meaning a series of zeros and ones, either off or on. A laser beam is focused onto the track, which reflects back from the shiny aluminum surface of the disc. Reflecting back is a one… “on”. To record data, a stronger laser has burned a little pit onto the shiny surface. When the reading laser passes that pit, it does not reflect back, indicating a zero or “off”.

So the factually correct response to “Hey what do you think of this new Vanilla Ice album?” was indeed “It’s the pits“.

If you speed the process up to 44,100 of these reflection tests per second, we can start to hear the music. The binary signal of zeros and ones is read and translated back into analog music for our speakers to rock out.

Another interesting fact for those wanting to take good care of your CDs and DVDs… the shiny side of the disc is actually better protected than the label side. There’s more plastic protecting the shinyand fragile aluminum surface. So you’re better off to set the discs shiny-side down.

• Source: http://www.copy-cd.biz/technical-area/compact-discs-explained.jsp

Chapstick is a trade-marked brand name for lip balm, but the name has become so popular to use with any kind of lip balm that they could be in danger of losing their trade-mark. (like what happened to the Yo-Yo) The one and only Chapstick was invented in the 1870s by Dr. Charles Browne Fleet, a physician who dabbled in this sort of stuff. His original product was like a large wick-less candle wrapped in tinfoil… which wasn’t exactly a blockbuster seller. In 1912 John Morton bought the rights to the product for a whopping five dollars. His wife melted down the large pieces of the balm and formed it into smaller sticks, and its future success got underway.

Now, back to my needlessly shocking headline, how can Chapstick kill you? Strictly speaking, it can’t. Well, I suppose anything could become a choking hazard. Or if Chapstick could be fired from an air cannon at a high enough velocity… (hmm) But what I meant was some of the interesting ingredients in Chapstick. Most of it is made up of wax and oil, along with the usual suspects of any skin lotion. (vitamin E, aloe vera, etc.) One of the more interesting ingredients is Phenol… a.k.a. the Nazi Death Toxin!

Phenol is used in medicine as a germ-killing antiseptic. It even smells like “hospital”. It’s also the structural ingredient in aspirin, and had it’s debut in the manufacturing industry as a chief ingredient of Bakelite, one of the original types of plastic. Most intriguing was it’s popularity in Nazi Germany as a lethal injection. Primarily due to it’s ready availability and quick, effective results. The reason for it to be in your Chapstick is not so dastardly. It has exfoliating properties (removing dead skin) as well as some UV-protection.

Another controversial ingredient in Chapstick is oxybenzone, as found in many sunscreen products. There is some evidence to suggest that this UV absorbing compound becomes carcinogenic on the skin, which can actually cause skin cancer… which the sunscreen was trying to avoid in the first place! So you can add that to the infinite list of “_____ may cause cancer”. Yippee!

But really, the choking hazard is still the most dangerous potential of Chapstick. I’m just saying… you might not want to yawn with your eyes closed while Chapstick is nearby. Who knows what could happen?

• Source: http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/ChapStick

Penicillin remains one of the most significant medical advancements, umm, ever. Before its first use in 1940, infections from a skinned knee or a shaving cut could prove fatal. There was nothing doctors could do to fight bacteria. Until the P-bomb came along.

Alexander Fleming is credited as the one who discovered penicillin while working at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. How he got to St. Mary’s in the first place is by pure chance. His brother, already a doctor, suggested he invest his sudden inheritance in medical school. He chose to attend St. Mary’s because, earlier in his life, he had played water polo against a team from there. Later on, faced with the decision to leave St. Mary’s, he was influenced to stay by the captain of the rifle club. Fleming was a good shot, it would have been a shame to lose him.

So there he was, working in the lab studying the staphylococci bacteria. (aka: staph infection, which at the time was deadly) He was a rather messy kinda guy, and at one point came back to his lab after a long absence to find his bacteria samples ruined. There was penicillium fungus growing in his petri dishes. As he was throwing them out, he saved a couple to show a colleague, at which point he took a closer look. Where the fungi had grown, the bacteria had retreated. (cue dramatic science music)

Now, fast forward a decade through a long, slow moving process of un-exciting research. So un-exciting that the other scientists were tired of Fleming and his fungi. (apparently, he was a terribly dull lecturer who showed no passion for his work) He had managed to extract the “active ingredient” from the penicillium, which he named penicillin, but not much more. Still, had he not continued to work diligently, the medical breakthroughs would have been missed.

It was actually other researchers, first Dr. Cecil Paine, and later Dr. Howard Florey, who did the work of applying penicillin to medical testing. The first human patient, a police officer who had cut himself shaving, was a successful test… except that he died. The penicillin did stop the infection, and he did get better, but then they ran out. (they were even trying to reclaim the fungi from the man’s urine!)

Such was the problem for a few years. The medicine worked great, but they could not produce enough. Until the final random events in the story. A different sort of the penicillium fungi was found… in a grocery store… on a cantaloupe. This one produced 200 times the amount of penicillin. After some mad-science experiments with x-rays and UV light, they produced a mutation that generated 1000 times as much. That oughtta do it.

So consider that next time you’re shaving. Have you thanked a cantaloupe lately?

• Source: http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/faculty/wong/BOT135/Lect21b.htm (the loooong story)

Throughout history our clocks and watches have really been our best guess of what time it really ought to be. Throughout the ages, we’ve just been getting more accurate with our means of estimation. In China, around the year 960 to 1279 you could tell the time by following your nose.

They used incense, which is basically a slow burning scented match. If the manufacturer could reliably produce a stick that would, for example, take four hours to burn knowing the burn would be at a consistent pace means it could be used to tell time. By changing the chemicals used along the length of the stick they could change the smell once an hour, or change the colour of smoke. “Oh, (sniff) lavender… must be three o’ clock.”

If they had a series of weights strung up above the incense, the strings would burn as the fire passed by, the weights would drop and hit a gong to chime the hour.

Clocks are less smelly now, and pretty much all watches and wall clocks have a quartz movement since their invention around 1970. That means it’s using quartz to accurately measure time, because unlike burning incense, quartz is reliably consistent. We know that a quartz crystal, when given a small electric shock from a battery, will vibrate precisely 32,768 times per second. With a electronic device to count these vibrations, and then send out a pulse every 32,768 counts (every second), your watch stays true to the time all year long.

Our super-official clocks take it one step further, and rather than using the vibrations of a crystal which could get dirty, or have electrical problems, they count the movement in a single atom. Specifically they track the changes in energy levels in the atoms which is reliably consistent to a tiny degree… like, umm, clockwork! These clocks are immune to power outages, and keep better time than the solar system itself. So how much longer before daylight savings time means we actually shoot rockets to physically move the sun?

Side note: today’s the day to change your clocks back an hour, and/or temporarily extinguish your incense.

• Source: http://www.nawcc.org/index.php/education/just-for-kids/about-time/how-does-it-work

Hammocks, the ultimate sign of summer relaxation, have a long history of work-related use. Today’s post is a little late being published only because I was in the back yard doing some last minute research.

Not counting one man’s crazy idea for a swinging bed in Athens (around 450 BC), the origin of the hammock traces back to South America. They were created and used by natives of the Amazon forests as the ideal sleeping arrangement for the climate. Sleeping off the wet ground had many benefits, from the cooling air circulation, to keeping away from creepy-crawlies. They were originally made from tree bark, and later using twine from the fibrous leaves of the sisal plant. Due to their natural fibers, it’s tough to determine how far back the hammock goes, but the best guess is hundreds of years before Christopher Columbus showed up in the neighbourhood.

After his famous 1492 adventure, Columbus brought some hammocks back to Spain with all his other souvenirs. (This was before the common camping/hiking mindset of “take only sketches, leave only footprints and smallpox”) The hammock was a bit of a novelty in Europe, but wasn’t too popular until a century later the British Royal Navy made the canvas hammock the official bedding on ships. The swinging of the hammock went along with the sway of the boat, and prevented midnight tumbles. It also had the advantage of taking up very little space, and packing away during the day. British sailors brought the beds with them to their civilian life, and hammocks started to take hold.

After their naval success, other government institutions have looked the the hammock for it’s efficiency. It is used by the military, including in Vietnam when the US Army issued waterproof hammocks for the rainy weather. The trouble was, the waterproof bottom just meant that you ended up sleeping in a puddle. Hammocks are used in space as well, though I suppose that’s more a matter of just tying yourself down to something. For a brief experiment, England tried using hammocks in their prisons in the 1800s. It was great, in theory, but the more violent inmates quickly found some, uh, creative uses for the large brass rings used to make them.

Bonus Fact: The word hammock comes from the Spanish word hamaca, which was picked up from Haiti probably on the same Columbus trip. The related Haitian word means ‘fish net’.

I’m still trying to figure out why a hammock emits some sort of sleep-inducing chemical. Further research will be necessary.

• Source: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2018004/a_brief_history_of_the_hammock.html?cat=37