doyle's New Writeups

weight loss (thing)

2013-02-09T12:35:23Z

If your goal is to lose weight quickly, laxative, diuretics, and amputations will all quickly reduce your overall mass, at least as defined by what your read on a scale.

If you want to lose fat, however, you're going to need to pass most of it through your nose and mouth. No worries, though, you'll first need to break down your globs of fat, rearrange them, and ultimately pass a few electrons onto oxygen to form water.

By the time you're done, most of your fat's mass is now carbon dioxide (the oxygen came from water during hydration reactions). The solid jiggly stuff that some folks see as a problem is released as a gas! But not from the end you might have thought....

(On the flip side, the solid stuff of trees is mostly from a gas--yep, carbon dioxide again!)

More fun with high school chemistry
ScienceQuest 2013

Water from fire (idea)

2013-02-09T05:34:53Z

In the Newtonian universe, the one most of us live in, stuff is stuff and energy, energy. In high school we write down chemical reactions without thinking twice, or at all.

We "learn" that complete combustion gets us to water and carbon dioxide.We're more concerned with balancing these equations than we are with the reality they represent.

Here's one for burning propane:

C₃H₈ + 5O₂ => 3CO₂ + 4H₂O

If you burn propane completely, you get water.

Want evidence? Grab a propane torch, light it, and sweep the flame over some cool metal--a kitchen faucet works well.
What do you see?

Yep. A flash of "fog"--go ahead, taste it. It's water.

Feeling braver?

Next time you're grilling some clams, hold your hand a bit over the fire, not so close as to fry yourself (that I even…

pumpkin (thing)

2012-02-25T23:48:17Z

Harvest time.

The angel of death carries a scythe, a trite cartoon figure in these times--the media will carry on long after you rot. If you did not believe you were eternal, you might be more careful. And if you were more careful, you might be more judicious. And if too many of us are too judicious, the economy collapses. So keep believing you are eternal.

My father died August 3rd. I held his hand when his heart stopped once, then twice, then forever. I'm not feeling so eternal these days.

My father flew planes. He grew up in the slums of Pittsburgh. He was poor. He was tough. The United States military has money to burn. If you are a slum child, a farm boy, or a prince, you are welcome to try to fly for the United States Marine Corps. Few are good enough. He was good enough.

On the day he died, one of his best friends, Bob Nixon,…

maple syrup (thing)

2012-02-20T01:26:21Z

"The Savages of Canada, in the time that the sap rises, in the Maple, make an incision in the Tree, by which it runs out; and after they have evaporated eight pounds of the liquor, there remains one pound as sweet ...."
from British Royal Society paper, 1685
"The Maple Syrup Story History of Maple Syrup"

It takes a sugar maple growing in the northeastern United States nearly 40 years to reach a diameter of 12 inches, wide enough to tap for maple sap, more than half a lifetime for most of us. A tree this size will yield about 10 gallons of sap in a season, which gets boiled down to a quart of maple syrup.

One quart.

A quart of fancy grade maple syrup at retail prices will get you about $15-20 dollars. To get this quart of syrup, 10 gallons of sap needs to be boiled down, either using wood or petroleum for fuel. Making maple syrup will put a little cash in your pockets.

The same tree will yield about $5…

Growler (thing)

2012-02-17T00:50:45Z

So I would rush Spider, or Irish, or Scotty, or whoever was my crew, with the can for beer and the demijohn for red wine. And again, lying at the wharf disposing of my oysters, there were dusky twilights when big policemen and plain-clothes men stole on board. And because we lived in the shadow of the police, we opened oysters and fed them to them with squirts of pepper sauce, and rushed the growler or got stronger stuff in bottles.
Drink as I would, I couldn't come to like John Barleycorn.
John Barleycorn, Jack London

Now that the literary reference is out of the way, let's jump straight to the definition. A growler is a half gallon of ale, no more, no less.

In the good old days, before the 18th Amendment, you could either drink your beer at the saloon, or send your kids with a bucket (growler), which could be filled for a nickel. The pail…

Separate the wheat from the chaff (thing)

2012-02-11T17:19:11Z

Bloomfield, New Jersey, sits on the border of Newark, part of the urban fringe. No commercial farms exist here now, and if someone pursued such a quixotic venture, they would not grow wheat. We already have Kansas for that.
Still, given the rabid efforts of many Americans in these parts to grow lawn grass, it seemed a reasonable proposition to grow some wheat in a tiny patch of the backyard. Wheat is just grass all grown up.
One May afternoon, I scattered about a pint's worth of seeds over a 20 square foot patch, scritched the earth with a rake, and then went about my business. Three months later, I had my very own amber waves of grain fluttering in the warm August breeze.
I carefully cut down my wheat, tied it up into stooks, and let it dry. A little pride crept in as I admired my stook, my connection to the past, smug as only a Luddite can be. My smugness would soon be cured.

S…