I visited the Mimbres Culture Heritage Center when they hosted a hummingbird banding weekend. Hummingbirds are fierce little warriors and fascinating to watch. I have three feeders out for them at my house now, and my windy ridgetop is not the best birding location in the county.
On your vacation through southwest New Mexico, be sure to visit the Mimbres ruins and, if you time it right, see the hummers.
A pan and a cooktop definitely will be easier
Since at least 1899, Americans have speculated about frying an egg on a summer sidewalk. Can it be done?
Short answer – no. Long answer – it depends. Ah! The joy of “it depends.”
You can’t believe YouTube! You didn’t really think you could, did you? You’ll have to try for yourself.
Do this at home, if you don’t mind making a mess. First – set the parameters of your experiment. How cooked must your egg become?
When you cook an egg, the heat transfers energy to the molecules, causing the proteins to unravel. After a few minutes, the strings of proteins weave and bind together, and most of the water evaporates.
Yolk proteins begin to condense near 150 degrees Fahrenheit, while the albumen proteins ovotransferrin and ovalbumin thicken near 142 and 184 degrees, respectively. smithsonianmag.com
Let’s say you like runny yolks. Maybe softly-set egg whites too. So aim for… oh, let’s round it off and say, 140 degrees F.
I know from my wildland fire fighter training that dry grass baking in the sun can routinely reach 100 degrees F. A record for the highest official temperature on Earth comes from Death Valley USA: 134.1 degrees F (56.7 °C) That’s the temperature of the air, not a solid soaking up photons.
People quibble over that record, and you may not want to take your egg to Death Valley, but this seems promising.
It’s not just temperature that matters, it’s heat transfer. Ever bake a cake? Did you tap the cake’s top to judge if it’s done? Would you tap the pan? The difference is heat transfer rates.
So how about the sidewalk? Concrete isn’t the best material to transfer heat to a food item, which is why we don’t have a lot of concrete fry pans.
Asphalt would be better, “smoother and tighter, and also going to be hotter and hold its heat better… If you’ve got a road that’s at 150 or 155 degrees and you crack an egg onto it, it’s going to lower the temperature [at that spot], and that temperature’s not going to heat back up anytime soon.”
My home town in upstate New York, USA, has sidewalks made of slabs of black slate. Better than concrete for sure, but I don’t know how it compares to asphalt.
There are lots of ways to cook with solar ovens, and mirrors, aluminum foil, and magnifying glasses can help too. Is any such equipment allowed for your experiment?
I made one for you too
I tell you what. I’m going to sit in the shade with a cold drink. Let me know how your experiment turns out.
Thanks to smithsonianmag.com for their article.
Volunteer weather spotters – citizen scientists – solve a mystery for the pros.
National Weather Service meteorologists noticed something puzzling on their radar screens in Southern California… weather spotter told them the mysterious cloud was actually a giant swarm of ladybugs npr.org
Ladybugs are common in California, people even breed and sell them to home gardeners for aphid control, so swarms aren’t unusual. A swarm ten miles wide might be a good sign for the environment or not. There isn’t enough data to say.
Huge displays of wildlife were once a mark of North America. From bison to ladybugs to passenger pigeons (which we of European extraction destroyed – my elegy is here.)
While hiking in Colorado I once came across a swarm of ladybugs that had landed, covering a rocky slope as far as I chose to explore. On a ridge in New Mexico, I found another group blanketing short trees on a sunny ridge between huge Ponderosa pines. It’s good to share the land with wildlife, and it’s not a choice of people or bugs. We can have, and we need, both.
!8th century dowser, but the concept is older
I recently ran into this post on the Ideomotor Response, a real and captivating effect. You experience unconscious, unintentional physical movements that seem to contain knowledge beyond your own. It’s sort of neuromotor crosstalk that feels magical and has given us Ouija boards, automatic writing, and dowsing.
If you’ve never tried dowsing, give it a shot. It’s one of those remarkably compelling experiences that only science can sort out.
As I had a chance to see for myself.
Out here in rural New Mexico a lot of well drillers use, or at least offer, dowsing. I live on thick layers of ancient limestone and dolomite, crisscrossed with volcanic intrusions and alluvial deposits. Water is usually deep and not found in the lovely, predictable aquifer layers that favor much of North America. We see a lot of expensive dry holes.
Superstitions thrive when you seek an outcome that is very important but heavily influenced by chance. Whether winning a ball game or drilling a well, it’s hard to avoid developing a belief in lucky socks or dowsing. The ideomotor sensations are compelling – dowsers are honest people.
One of my neighbors was convinced he could detect water with dowsing rods. He was as curious as I was to find out if dowsing could be proven. We worked out a test protocol, and agreed that 5 or more “Hits” would be good evidence.
I added my procedure under the More Tag below – feel free to use it if you’d like.
Here are our results:
My neighbor got 2 hits, well within chance and below his expectation. He’s a bit mystified (indeed, one experiment needs to be replicated) but it was fun to be able to run an experiment ourselves.
