Posts Tagged: energy
turkey cooking times
Over the last few years, I’ve asked students and friends to send me their turkey cooking data. In particular, I ask for the time and temperature of the cooking, along with the weight of the turkey. I also add a place for extra notes, like how the turkey was prepared, if it was cooked in something besides an oven (e.g., a deep fryer or smoker), if it was stuff, covered, or otherwise modified.
This is imperfect, because everyone has all kinds of variations and conditions and measurement imperfections. But here’s a collection of data, mostly from 2020, but also from a few years past:
I’ll explain some details:
- I used most of the data I was given. Some submissions had numbers that were in the wrong units or just typos. I didn’t rule out too much, but if there was something that approximated the surface temperature of the sun or would have taken 4 years or would have killed an entire family, I discarded it. There weren’t too many in this camp, though. Fortunately. There probably are still some errors in here, because, well: science, meet real world conditions. 5th graders deal with this in science fair, so we might as well be brave enough to face it here.
- There are different methods of cooking all mixed together, and the people who used stuffing are mixed in with the non-stuffing people. That definitely causes scatter. But as I stare at this I think it’s less of an issue than I’d thought at first. It helps to have a lot of data.
- And there are different cooking temperatures. I highlighted the low temperatures (under 300 degress F) as blue, and the high temperatures (400+ degrees F) as red. And you see where they generally fall: red dots, with more thermal energy around the turkey, take less time than the general trend, and the blue dots, with less energy around the turkey, take more time than the trend.
- Most important, in spite of all all those weirdities, you can see there’s a definite trend: Bigger turkeys take longer to cook, but not in a linear fashion. My friend and very good physicist, Colin Inglefield, gave an entire physics seminar on this very thing several years ago, and now I have empirical data to help him out. If you’re interested, the Exploratorium walks through a nice explanation of this non-linear relationship, here:
https://www.exploratorium.edu/food/perfect-turkey
Thanks to all of you who contributed data and/or asked others to submit data. I’ll continue to do this and potentially update this page as results pour in each year.
drinking bird
I often host a lab where we study the Drinking Bird in its native habitat. But, in case you don’t have a chance to be in my lab and you don’t have your own drinking bird, here’s some video you can analyze. The bird goes through two of its cycles in this clip, and I repeat those cycles at high speed so you can see things in a different way.
A drinking bird is very simple, which makes its actions that much more interesting, I think. What do you notice? What do you wonder about? Can you trace out cause-and-effect rules in the bird and its motion? Can you create a model for how it’s working? In particular, how can something just move (and there are a few different motions in this bird) when it isn’t hooked up to anything else?
Appendix:
In case you need more footage of the drinking bird for longer amounts of time, I have about an hour and 15 minutes of video, both in real time and at 10x speed:
upward liquids
A lot of people don’t believe me when I tell them this, but I truly don’t understand how water crawls up a paper towel or string or piece of cloth. How does it get the energy to do this when it’s just sitting there; and the towel is also seemingly passive in the whole affair?
I’m a physicist and I work with many like-minded scientists. When I ask them about this phenomenon, they realize that it’s not all that simple, but probably it has something to do with electric forces in the towel and interactions with the water. I’m sure that this is part of the answer. But even so, I’m happy to admit that I don’t really understand it.
So, I assign the problem to my students and ask them to start to investigate different features of liquid absorption. They think of much better investigations than I would, and when we share these we start to come up with more ideas. To get them started, I’ve created this timelapse video of water moving up a cloth:
I thought my idea to speed up the video and include a clock in the frame was clever. I’m proud of that old-school technique.
What do you notice? What wonders strike you? What investigations could this spur? This is just the beginning.
Here’s what the scene looked like the following morning:
And then, later that morning, I detached the cloth and set the loose end on the table. It was originally dry, but then this puddle started to form:
Epilogue
In my classes, I see lots of really great examples of how this phenomenon can be turned into a research project with lots of different variables. Researchers create all sorts of different investigation designs with interesting variables and creative methods. This time-lapse video that Micah created gives a good impression of one of the hundreds of ways the climbing fluids can be studied, and it’s fun to see the process overviewed in just a couple minutes: