Thermodynamics and chemistry: The Science Of Barbecue

Joe Hanson of It's OK To Be Smart (youtube channel) and the owner of Franklin Barbecue in Austin, Texas discuss the thermodynamic and chemical science behind grilling meat.

In this week's video, I stop by the #1 BBQ joint in America (seriously, you can look it up) to learn about the science of BBQ!

The interview is with Aaron Franklin (here's his brisket recipe and here's his series of video barbecue lessons):

The science behind these things: how wood burns, how airflow works, if you start thinking of how fluid dynamics work inside the barbecue, science has a pretty huge part of it. I think good barbecue is a balance between science and gut instinct.

More on barbecue science here and here.

Previous posts with Joe Hanson components:

Valyrian steel, length of the seasons, dragon biology: The Science of Game of Thrones, bonus geological map

The science of kissing.

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Great movie poster at Mad Magazine - Barack Obama’s Unfortunate New Movie: Trading Private Bergdahl

A blog post at Mad Magazine has this excellent poster:

BOWE AND ARROWS DEPT.

Recently, President Obama exchanged five Taliban leaders for an American POW, Bowe Bergdahl. One prisoner for five is an iffy trade to begin with — but even moreso when it was revealed that Bergdahl had deserted his post. So, Obama got his man, but there was a lot of collateral damage — it kind of reminds us of a movie we once saw…

via Weasel Zippers.

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Man attempting to blow nose and smoke cigarette at same time winds up burning house down

Imagine if he'd farted, too - he might have taken out the neighborhood.

DAVIDSON COUNTY, N.C. — A Davidson County home is destroyed after officials said a house fire started when a man smoking a cigarette tried blowing his nose.

Authorities said the tissue caught fire when the man smoking tried blowing his nose. He reportedly tried stomping it out, but couldn’t and the fire spread.

Silver Valley fire officials said the home was fully involved by the time they arrived. A man and woman, both in their 60s, lived there and got out safety, officials said.

The home is said to be a total loss. The fire marshal is investigating, although it is not said to be suspicious. The American Red Cross is assisting the victims.

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Tuesday links

Which brand of ball point pen is best for an emergency airway puncture?

How to Tell Someone’s Age When All You Know Is His/Her Name.

June Is Goat Trauma Awareness Month.

Doing the math: How Far Are You Flung When an Amusement Park Ride Goes Wrong?

The c. 1275 miraculous transplantation of a leg.

Giant Living Sculptures At Atlanta Botanical Gardens’ Exhibition.

How well can you spell? Take the test.

ICYMI, Friday's links are here, including buttered coffee, DIY wrist-mounted X-Men Pyro flamethrowers, Wolverine claws, and Magneto magnetic shoes, and Vonnegut's letter home after imprisonment in an underground slaughterhouse during the Dresden bombing.

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The c. 1275 miraculous transplantation of a leg

I find it hard to imagine where stories like this come from, especially in this level of detail - apparently the leg being transplanted here was from a freshly dead Ethiopian.  The episode is described by Jacobus de Voragine in 1275, translated into English by William Caxton in 1483:

A verger’s dream: Saints Cosmas and Damian
 performing a miraculous cure by transplantation
 of a leg. Oil painting attributed to the Master of
Los Balbases, ca. 1495.

“Felix, the eighth pope after S. Gregory, did do make a noble church at Rome of the saints Cosmo and Damian, and there was a man which served devoutly the holy martyrs in that church, who a canker had consumed all his thigh.

“And as he slept, the holy martyrs Cosmo and Damian, appeared to him their devout servant, bringing with them an instrument and ointment of whom that one said to that other: Where shall we have flesh when we have cut away the rotten flesh to fill the void place?

“Then that other said to him: There is an Ethiopian that this day is buried in the churchyard of S. Peter ad Vincula, which is yet fresh, let us bear this thither, and take we out of that morian’s flesh and fill this place withal. And so they fetched the thigh of the sick man and so changed that one for that other.

“And when the sick man awoke and felt no pain, he put forth his hand and felt his leg without hurt, and then took a candle, and saw well that it was not his thigh, but that it was another. And when he was well come to himself, he sprang out of his bed for joy, and recounted to all the people how it was happed to him, and that which he had seen in his sleep, and how he was healed.

“And they sent hastily to the tomb of the dead man, and found the thigh of him cut off, and that other thigh in the tomb instead of his. Then let us pray unto these holy martyrs to be our succour and help in all our hurts, blechures and sores, and that by their merits after this life we may come to everlasting bliss in heaven. Amen.”

Previous posts in the vintage medicine category: 

Anoint the gums with the brains of a hare: advice from c. 1450 on soothing a teething baby.

Advice from c. 530: How To Use Bacon, including for medicinal purposes such as "thick bacon, placed for a long time on all wounds, be they external or internal or caused by a blow, both cleanses any putrefaction and aids healing".

Mostly weird, and some not so weird, medical treatments from the old days, including this:

How to Stop Bleeding, 1664:

“To Stench a Bleeding Wound: Lay hogs Dung, hot from the Hog, to the Bleeding Wound.”

~Samuel Strangehopes, A Book of Knowledge in Three Parts (166[4])

Dubious medical device du jour - the prostate warmer.

Advice from 1380: How to Tell if Someone Is or Is Not Dead, with bonus Monty Python.

How to Slim Down in Fourteen Days: Advice from 1595.

Urine-drinking Hindu cult believes a warm cup before sunrise straight from virgin cow cures cancer, baldness.

Wellcome Library, via Retronaut.

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June Is Goat Trauma Awareness Month

The Childhood Goat Trauma Foundation was created in 1982 by a small group that originally came together as a an informal support group for problems that were the result of traumatic experiences at petting zoos as children.

Related, here's the supercut of goats yelling like humans - turn the sound down, but not off:

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June Is Bustin' Out All Over and the frisky sheep problem

Rodgers and Hammerstein's June Is Bustin' Out All Over is Mark Steyn's song of the week (and is now completely stuck in my head), and I loved this bit of background information:

Traditional Northern New England roof-dancing
 as captured in Rodgers & Hammerstein's Carousel

In Carousel, "June Is Bustin' Out All Over" is, in essence, a paean to the mating season, and so at one point Hammerstein opted for a Maine version of the old joke about singing Gershwin in Wales or the Falkland Islands: "Embrace me, my sweet embraceable ewe." As Hammerstein wrote:

June Is Bustin' Out All Over!

The sheep aren't sleepin' anymore

All the rams that chase the ewe sheep

Are determined there'll be new sheep

And the ewe sheep aren't even keepin' score!

Etc. Everybody working on the show liked it. Then they started holding backers' auditions. And among the potential investors who attended a run-through of the songs was Mr G M Loeb, who subsequently sent Oscar Hammerstein a letter:

I do not think rams mate with ewes in June as they do in your lyrics but I am not really certain. We have been told to keep our rams separate at all times except when the ewes are in heat but we did not follow this precaution and in several years all mating seemed confined to September-October - no mounting whatsoever in June, or if so no results.

To modify a later Hammerstein song, the ewes were more likely to decline every mountin' than to exhibit the enthusiasm shown in "June Is Bustin' Out All Over". With the show slated to open on Broadway in April 1945, the author replied to Mr Loeb:

I was delighted with the parts of your letter praising my work and thrown into consternation by the unwelcome news about the eccentricly frigid behavior of ewes in June. I have since checked your statement and found it to be true. It looks very much as if in the interests of scientific honesty I shall have to abandon the verse dealing with sheep.

Sometimes, as Hammerstein liked to say, research "poisons" your work. And it seems to have done so in this case. But, after giving more thought to the matter, he decided to keep the offending quatrain. Which was just as well. A decade later, when Rodgers & Hammerstein were making the film version of Carousel, the Production Code Administration objected to certain "suggestive" sections and the author found himself running short of lyrics. The censors were relaxed about the four-legged friskiness but drew the line at those lines quoted above about the boys in Augusty feelin' lusty. Strange to think that a mere half-century ago, such a couplet was deemed too sexual for a Hollywood movie. But Hammerstein dutifully rewrote:

June Is Bustin' Out All Over!

The moonlight is shinin' on the shore

And the girls who were contrary

With the boys in January

Aren't nearly so contrary any more

- which the Production Code Administration graciously agreed to permit. As for the embraceable ewes, Hammerstein found himself fending off the occasional sheep breeder over the years and took to justifying himself as follows:

What you say about sheep may all be true for most years, but not in 1873. 1873 is my year and that year, curiously enough, the sheep mated in the spring.

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