My wife Karen mentioned yesterday that she might cook an egg bake for an upcoming family get-together. I asked her what this was and she said “it is a food made out of eggs that is baked and eaten.” That leaves me still in the dark. I do know how to make a toad in the hole: Butter a piece of bread, tear out the a circle in the middle and fry an egg in it. Coincidentally, Karen alerted me to a strange-looking bird peering out of the little house we have mounted on a tree off our back porch. Can you identify it?

As a newly-minted chemical-engineering graduate of University of Minnesota in 1975, I took a job at Union 76 research in glamorous southern California. Knowing that a hick like me from the midwest USA needed to impress the Hollywood types, I bought the latest fashion — a polyester leisure suit (click this link to see the jacket I bought — pastel blue). What brought this to mind was seeing in this morning’s newspaper an article about Ingeo — a new fiber made from genetically engineered corn. According to the producer, NatureWorks (a unit of Minnesota-based Cargill Inc.) “It has all the attributes of polyester.” Some folks fear the possible health problems from genetically engineered products, but that doesn’t worry me. My concern is that this Ingeo material may lead to a comeback of leisure suits. I am still smarting from the ridicule of the Southern Californians when I paraded around in the mid-70’s in my new blue polyester outfit. A comic came on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight” television show in 1976 and claimed that a researcher dressed up thousands of mice in leisure suits and found that they got cancer — a satirical comment on why this polyester garb so quickly disappeared from the fashion scene. Why are engineers from the midwest always the last to realize things like this?

I came across this story in an e-zine from a technical society. It appears elsewhere on the internet with no documented source so I feel free to pass it along.

Three monkeys are locked into a room that contains a banana suspended from a rope. The dominant monkey grabs the banana, which triggers an icy shower. The other monkeys make the attempt with similar results. Finally all three of them give up on eating the banana. Then one of monkeys leaves and another comes in to replace it. The new arrival immediately makes a move for the banana. Naturally the other two monkeys react violently to prevent this. The new monkey soon learns not to try eating the banana. Another of the original monkeys departs and a replacement arrives. It too is made forcefully aware of the no-banana rule. Finally, the last of the original monkeys departs. The new monkey who arrives is quickly convinced to comply with the rule that no matter how tasty the banana looks, and how easy it could be grabbed, it must not be touched. None of the remaining monkeys know what will happen if they try to eat their favorite food, but the prevailing culture prohibits it even being considered.

Does this story not provide some food for thought about experimenting on how things have always been done? Be careful though, you might earn a cold shower (or worse) for the attempt! Worse yet, you will very likely discover that the banana can be plucked, but those in power will get to eat it. Make sure you at least get a taste for being the one who questions the status quo.

A few weeks ago I was in England chatting with an engineering client over afternoon tea and he blurted out “Is it true that Mentos candy and Extreme Diet Coke react to create a geyser?” I had no idea what he was talking about until this morning when I happened across this video: . James Mack, an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Cincinnati, theorizes that emulsifiers in Mentos break the surface tension of the water around the carbon dioxide bubbles in the soda. The candy tablets also provide nucleation sites on the surface – microscopic nooks and crannies that help carbon dioxide bubbles form and escape explosively. Although this phenomenom has been known for years, it seems to be coming to a head (pun intended!) just in time for USA’s Independence Day celebration this year. It may make a nice fire extinguisher for the grass fires ignited by the firework embers and cast-off sparklers.

*(Source: “Mentos, Diet Coke put the pop in experiment” by Lauren Bishop, Cincinnati Enquirer, July 1, 2006.)

Ty-phoo tea commissioned a study that shows 2:16 pm to be the time when UK workers hit their low ebb. One concludes that this would be just the time for a cup of tea or other caffeinated beverage. The results, based on a sample of 2000 people, indicated that energies peaked at 9:23 am and 4:31 pm (time to go home!). I wondered if warmer-climed countries that take mid-afternoon siestas may be on the right track, so I did a quick search for studies on this. However, the one study I found* reports a significant increase in the risk for heart attacks: “Compared to controls, [victims] were more likely to take daily siestas (44% versus 35%, P = 0.01), and spend more time per siesta (1:07 ± 0:04 versus 0:54 ± 0:04 h:min, P = 0.002)”. Make mine a coffee please — no cream or sugar, only black — thicker the better. I see in this Scottish Heart Health Study that coffee is better than tea for those (like me) who suffer from coronary disease.

*Siesta and the risk of coronary heart disease: results from a population-based, case-control study in Costa Rica

I’ve just capped off two weeks in Great Britain by touring Dewar’s
World of Whiskey at their Aberfeldy Distillery in Scotland. They
let me taste their famed White Label blended brand, which
according to Dewar’s “Never Varies.” I must say that I could not
tell the difference of it versus their Aberfeldy Single Highland
Malt or the 12 year old Special Reserve — they all burned me
through and through (I do not normally drink hard liquor). This
lack of subject matter knowledge may explain why I flunked Dewar’s
computerized blending challenge and prompted the software to say
that my whiskey would be good for “stripping paint” and that “a
monkey could do better and would probably be easier to train!” If
only I had brought my computer along to use Design-Expert
software’s marvelous statistical mixture design features. It
would have helped me match White Label with the correct blend of
the six components: Highland earthy malt, Island salty malt, Islay
peaty malt, Lowland malt, Speyside sweet malt and the spirit base
— raw grain whiskey. I wonder how long it would take a monkey to
uncap a beer — I think I could top it at this task. Anyways,
after this debacle trying my hand at blending whiskey, I may have
a brew or two.

Joke: Why is 6 afraid of 7? Because 7 ate 9! You don’t get this? Perhaps you suffer from dyscalculia — a learning disability that creates severe difficulty in understanding and using functions or symbols needed for success in mathematics. (Or maybe this joke is very stupid!) Like dyslexia, which affects reading ability, dyscalculia can be caused by a visual perceptual deficit. The UK government’s Department for Education and Skills includes this numeracy problem in its leaflet on Guidance to support pupils with dsylexia and dyscalculia. What brought this to my mind was hearing someone at my household this weekend complain that the DVD burning process was only “5/3rds” done! Maybe fractions should be put in a special category — they really are terribly hard to fathom. I thought I had fractions mastered until the time I traveled into the hinterlands of western Wisconsin into a chain of lakes peppered with cabins. The one I wanted was on 178&23/32nd street. It challenged me to calculate that I ought to keep on going past 178&1/2, 178&5/8th and 178&11/16th streets.

The May 15 issue of Sports Illustrated magazine passes along a prediction by statisticians that the Minnesota Twins have virtually no hope of winning this season, even though they’ve only played about one-fifth of the games. The team started the year with a 2 to 1 shot at achieving the playoffs in Major League Baseball, but after their 13-18 start, the odds are now 200 to 1 against this. These probabilities come from a Monte Carlo simulation done by Clay Davenport — a statistician specializing on baseball, also known as a “sabermetrician”. His latest stats can be seen in the Baseball Prospectus Odds Report, which touts that its analyses stem from “Playing the rest of the season a million times.” Evidently the Minnesota Twins management read this report because local sports writers have been spreading rumors that the team will divest itself of highly-paid stars Tori Hunter and Shannon Stewart. Due to a rash of injuries, the New York Yankees need outfielders as soon as possible and they have the money and prospects to entice the small market Twins into giving up their season. As a Minnesota fan, I say that these statistics be damned!

When you are faced with something dreadful, like a final exam in statistics class, do you just want to get it over with as quickly as possible? If so, you are acting irrationally because it makes more sense to delay something unpleasant as long as possible. However, according to a new study in Science magazine reported by Sandra Blakeslee in the New York Times, some people are extreme “dreaders” who prefer more pain if it gets things over with, sooner. The research by Dr. Gregory S. Berns, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University, was literally shocking: His team of scientists applied voltage to their subjects’ feet at levels and delays of their choosing. Berns found that when it comes to dread the waiting time makes it more intense. That must be what makes a college course on statistics so dreadful — waiting the whole semester for the final exam! It seems to me that the certainty of something scary like this is also a key. For example, at the moment, the avian flu is creating great dread because it seems likely to become an epidemic and create many deaths. However, if this likelihood abates with time and/or medical preparations advance to a more comforting level, our dread will drop off. Unfortunately, it is hard getting around a final exam!

PS. According to Schachter & McCauley, authors of “When Your Child is Afraid,” an adult’s most common fears, in order of magnitude, are: public speaking, making mistakes, failure, disapproval, rejection, angry people, being alone, darkness, dentists, injections, hospitals, taking tests, open wounds, blood, police, dogs, spiders, deformed people.