International breakfasts

Hey Doug! It's good to be back. Here's something I need to know: If I go out to breakfast in Canada, would they offer me American bacon? In Paris, what will I get if I order toast?

A: I'm glad I already had lunch, or I'd have to grab a snack before typing anything else.

Canada is blessed with three regularly available types of bacon: side bacon (what Americans think of as bacon), back bacon, and "peameal" bacon, the last two often referred to as "Canadian bacon" in the US and Ireland. Back bacon is a leaner cut of pork than side bacon, smoked or unsmoked, and peameal bacon (so called because it was traditionally rolled in crushed dried peas) is back bacon that has been brined and rolled in cornmeal. Canadian bacon can also refer to smoked ham, served in small cutlets.

As for ordering toast in France, you would most likely be served a sliced baguette, served hot and crusty, with butter and jam. You could probably request slices of bread from whatever loaves they had available, but the British or American toasted squares would not be a default choice in Paris.

Incidentally, for those who wonder about such things, French Toast is indeed French. It was likely invented in what is now France more than a thousand years ago, and maybe much earlier than that. Recipes from a 4th century Roman collection of French recipes describe how to make French Toast, called, among other things, pan dulcis or "sweet bread" by the Roman citizenry. The dish is still eaten in France as a dessert (not breakfast) called pain perdu or "lost bread", since it was originally designed to reclaim bread that had become too stale to eat. Assuming being stale was the only thing wrong with the bread, it was softened by a mix of eggs and dairy products, then fried before eating. Apart from regional differences in preparation - some like it sweet, with cinnamon and sugar, others like it savory, with cheese or tomato sauces - this is the same way we make it today.

Whirly wonderings

Hey DougO,

There is discussion in these parts as to the validity to the common notion that toilets flush in the opposite direction south of the Equator. It has also been submitted that, when directly over the Equator, a toilet will flush straight down. Can you verify or debunk this?

A: I hate to say this, since the toilet swirl direction is one of my favorite science "facts", but, alas, it is a myth. The idea is that the fact that objects on or near the equator are moving faster around the Earth's axis than objects near or at the poles tends to give moving particles a clockwise spin in the Southern hemisphere and a counter-clockwise spin in the Northern hemisphere. True enough. this is called the "Coriolis Effect", named after Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis. He was some French guy.

However, the Coriolis Effect is generally only noticeable in large systems over time, say in weather patterns. Your petite little porcelain bowl is too tiny, globally speaking, to demonstrate much of a preference either way. The fact that water swirls so vigorously in one direction as it leaves the bowl is due to jets concealed under the rim that are pointed in one direction or the other. It does a nice job of picking up after you (so to speak) and makes a satisfying "whoooshgluglugrattle" sound for your entertainment. You could easily pick another model that does the same thing, only going the other way, no matter where you are on the globe.

If you really wanted to see how forces might work at the equator, you could theoretically build a toilet large enough for the forces to be more apparent. I would say about the size of Cuba. I'm not sure where you could get grant money for it, but people seem to have had luck soliciting money on the internet for more ridiculous things.

Another spacey question

Q: Watching footage of astronauts slurping up globules of water in zero-G always made me wonder: What does a flame look like in zero-G? Let's assume you can burn a candle safely in the ISS. Normally heat pulls the candle up into the familiar tear-drop shape, but in space, which way is up? Is it just a sphere?

A: Voila. The flame is, in fact, a sphere. An interesting side note is that, without gravity, the flame can't get rid of the CO2 generated in the combustion, so it snuffs itself out unless there is a breeze to carry away the CO2 and keep the the flame exposed to oxygen.

The irony is that astronauts have been killed by flames while on the ground. In 1961 cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko, and later in 1967, the crew of Apollo 1, were killed by accidental fires that ignited the pure oxygen environments in their enclosures. Subsequent missions reduced the oxygen content of the air to 60% Oxygen and boosted Nitrogen to 40% to prevent fireballs like those in the future.

I like knowledge! a.k.a. "Stiffs in Space!"

Q: And I also like the last question, from the comments section on the previous post: What happens to a body exposed to outer space? Would it bloat and freeze? Or would solar radiation burn it to a crisp? Should we eventually consider jettisoning our dead to save room on Earth for the living?

For completeness, here's that great question from Courtney that you mention:

Q: If we ejected dead bodies into space, would they decompose? All I know about space is there's no oxygen and it's cold. Would the body just freeze? And when reentering the atmosphere, would it become hot enough to totally cremate the bones, or just the rest of the body?

A: As you might guess, this has been a question that rocket scientists (and nervous astronauts) have been interested in for decades. Exposure to vacuum in space is not only a possibility for people traveling in spacecraft, it has unfortunately happened in at least one case. No bodies have ever been released into space, however, so the real-world effects of exposure of a corpse to hard vacuum are speculation so far. We do know some things, though, so I'll break down a few of the factors.

Vacuum and you

NASA, in preparation for launching men into orbit, ran a series of tests in "altitude chambers" where subjects were exposed to varying levels of air pressure, temperature, and radiation. Several things occur, in an increasingly dangerous and alarming sequence as air pressure drops around a living body. First, there is an explosive release of gases from the lungs and digestive tract. The effect, if the person tried to hold it in, would be something like the scene in Jaws when the rifle bullet ruptures a scuba tank in the shark's belly. Messy. Well, maybe not that dramatic, but you get the idea. Second, without air pressure to keep it liquid, water would boil away from the eyes and mouth, eventually boiling in the blood and heart. An immediate effect would be the bloating and bruising of soft tissues as they are inflated by the water vapor. Third, nitrogen in the victim's blood stream would start to fizz out and cause "the bends", a painful and disorienting state that divers often experience when surfacing too quickly from great depths. The final effect, (and the one that will actually kill you) is "hypoxia", lack of air to the brain that will starve it. Before that happens (around the first 10 seconds) the victim will have his or her wits about them before succumbing to disorientation and unconsciousness. After a minute or so of unconsciousness, they can still be revived with minor injuries. Shortly after, the brain dies.

One effect of a vacuum, however, may sound counter-intuitive. Because heat is usually most notably gained or lost through contact with air or water, a vacuum actually preserves body temperature for a long time. After a brief period of cooling down from evaporation, the body will stay relatively warm, compared to the extremely low temperatures of space itself. That means that the body will primarily dry out rather than freezing, so someone exposed to the vacuum will be in more danger of suffocation than dying of the cold. If left alone, the body would mummify, just like the pharaohs.

Radiation: sunny or toasty?

Sources seem to disagree on how much heat would be generated within the body tissues when unprotected in space. I've seen everything from "fried crispy" to "bad sunburn", but we are talking about a dead body in this case, so the difference is relatively minimal. There does seem to be agreement that solar radiation would not be strong enough to burn the body away. Well,... at least, not at first. The reality is that unprotected exposure to radiation in space would eventually break down the body at a cellular and molecular level. The body would become brittle and eventually disintegrate, bit by bit, over time.

(If you're interested in more detail, this article on Damn Interesting seems to have the best info gathered in one place. It's a great site to thumb through, in any case!)

Going home

I actually have very little data on what would happen to a body falling into atmosphere, but we can certainly guess. Objects from space are free-falling Earthward all the time. If you look at the sky in any place far from city lights, you can see them. Pfft! Gone. Most are tiny - from the size of a grain of sand to the size of a baseball. They create a light show as they generate friction with the air particles in the atmosphere, and burn up in the process. But here's the kicker - whether they reach the ground or not depends on the speed they were traveling when they got here. Small meteorites can reach the ground more or less intact if they were moving slowly, and a big meteor can break up into tiny pieces under enough atmospheric stress. So when you ask "would a body from space burn up entirely on reentry", the answer depends on the corpse's velocity when it hit the atmosphere. It seems that a body, being mostly carbon, would turn into charcoal pretty easily. In any case, I doubt you would find anything recognizable as a people part at the point of impact.

Space cremation for dollar$?

While the idea of saving lawn space for development by chunking our dead into space has some appeal, I doubt the economics work out. However, I'll just betcha you could make a pile of money charging people to have their ashes scattered in space. Oh, wait - someone's already done that.

Hey DougO, Where ya been?

No new posts in over a year?  What's up with that?

They don't call it the Poop deck for nothing. Do they?

Q: So Doug-O what part of the ship is the poop deck, and why in Salacious Crumb do they call it a poop deck? Is there some misunderstanding of the word poop and it actually has nothing to do with feces? Did they just think it was funny? Please explain.

A: The "poop deck" of a ship is the raised platform at the back that forms the roof of the aft deck cabin.  The back end of a ship (the aft end, in naval parlance) is called the stern (as opposed to the bow in front), and the word for stern in French is la poupe.  Ha ha.  Poupe.  At any rate, the poop deck was where the helmsman stood to steer the ship, as well as the captain and his officers when they weren't occupied elsewhere, since the raised perspective gave an excellent view of the the deck, the rigging, and the horizon in all directions.  As the poop deck was the command center, where all the most important decisions radiated from, maybe this is the root of the term "the straight poop".

Why the English, constantly at war with "Pierre" across the channel, tolerated naming an important part of their ships with a French term is hard to imagine.  Maybe the average sailor just didn't know that they were doing so, and the officers were too well-bred to make a fuss about it.  Maybe it was simply that everyone on board was constantly on a low-level drunk from grog and so used to weird naval terms like "scuppers", "larboard", "bowsprit" and "figgy dowdy" that "poop" didn't sound unusual.

He Chose...Poorly.

Q: Hey DougO. I meant to ask this an eon ago, but a baby got in the way. Now I finally have time to address real issues. Thus: I was sitting in my bathroom one day, um, relaxing, and happened to notice a tiny little spider had spun it's web in the bottom corner behind the door. It was just sitting there, waiting. So it occurred to me, how patient are spiders? I mean, if real estate is all about location, location, location, then this little guy just bought a money-pit in downtown Beirut. No way was he ever going to catch anything there to feed on. So how long will a spider wait for prey before it packs up and moves? Will it just sit there and die?

A: You would be surprised how little people seem to worry about spiders starving to death.  Most research into that sort of thing seems to have been done by exterminators, who would rather not tell you how it can be accomplished if they can charge you for it instead.

I have managed to dredge up some pertinant information, though.  First, spiders are always a little thirsty, so much so that scientists have been able to attract them with syringes full of liquid.  It's at that point that they feed them LSD or THC, then film the webs thay make and laugh at them, subsequently putting the results up on YouTube.  Take into account that spiders are liquivores, living on the inside juices of their prey, and you can see how they are consequently also hungry all the time.  This is good conditioning for a predator, but bad for developing patience.

Complicating this problem for the spider is that most species of spider that build webs are entirely dependent on the web for food and information about its surroundings.  They are nearly blind, and use the vibrations of the web itself to read air currents and interpret sounds.  Their only option, therefore, is to build a web in a likely spot for smaller company and hope.  It doesn't hurt their chances to build where it is dark and slightly damp, too, so that they dry out slower.

Some exterminators have mentioned (reluctantly) that wrecking a spider's web and then hampering its attempts to repair or rebuild it will eventually cause the spider to starve.  But there wasn't much information on how long that might take.  Given that a Black Widow can live up to five years, and a Bird-Eating spider maybe 15 years, it's hard to guess what their staying power is, as opposed to, say, flies, who might die in a day or two under the best conditions.  

I would propose an experiment.  Search around for a spider that seems to be successful, then observe it over a period of time and see how many bugs it seems to be consuming per day.  That should give you a round figure, per ounce of spider.  Then, if your bathroom spider does go to that Big Creepy House in the Sky, feed it to the successful spider.