The BrainFood Show

⁠⁠In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we begin by discussing the clandestine way Niel Armstrong managed to get his application to the astronaut program in despite submitting it past the deadline. We then look at why he got to be first to walk on the moon when precedent should have had it been Buzz Aldrin.  Next up we look at the oft’ forgotten second thing Armstrong said when stepping out onto the moon.

Moving swiftly on we do a rapid fire of a variety of space related bonus facts including, but not limited to, the real color of the Sun, how much energy it would take to cause the Earth to stop orbiting the Sun, how old the Sun is in Sun years, how many Sun rises and sunsets astronauts aboard the International Space Station see every day, etc.

And for those curious on Simon and my treatise on the proper order of watching Star Trek series and other such thoughts, ⁠the mentioned forum post is here.
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If you've followed this website, our YouTube channel, or BrainFood Show
podcast very long, you know one of our favorite historic individuals is
Theodore Roosevelt- among countless other reasons to be admired, a man
who enjoys a reputation as one of the most terrifyingly badass
individuals to ever hold the office of leader of a nation, with
countless stories detailing his cartoonishly manly exploits. For just a
small sample to start, at one point while he was living as a rancher,
some thieves stole his boat in the middle of an ice storm. Given the
rather dangerous weather conditions, you might think he'd just let them
go. But this was Teddy Roosevelt and it was the principal of the thing.
He states, "In any wild country where the power of law is little felt or
heeded, and where every one has to rely upon himself for protection,
men soon get to feel that it is in the highest degree unwise to submit
to any wrong…no matter what cost of risk or trouble. To submit tamely
and meekly to theft or to any other injury is to invite almost certain
repetition of the offense, in a place where self-reliant hardihood and
the ability to hold one’s own under all circumstances rank as the first
of virtues."

Thus, he spent the next three days building another boat so he could
track the thieves down and take his original boat back. Once done, it
took him a few days of searching, but using his prodigious skills as a
master tracker, he managed to find and capture the men. However,
ultimately the river became too frozen over to continue to the nearest
town that way, so instead he sent his ranch hand companions home and
marched the thieves on foot, alone for 40 hours straight to town. During
this trek, he did not bind the thieves' in any way as he felt sure
they'd suffer from frostbite if he did so. To keep them from
overpowering him while they trudged along through the frozen wasteland,
he simply kept a gun trained on them and, while they slept during rest
periods, he kept himself awake by reading Tolstoy's then relatively
recently published Anna Karenina.

It's also noteworthy here that because of the weather conditions, the
fact that he was in hostile territory in the middle of nowhere, and
escorting a trio of criminals who would have killed him without
hesitation if he'd given them the chance, he was within his rights to
simply execute them on the spot and go home, something the vast majority
of lawmen of his era would have done. Roosevelt, however, felt they
deserved a trial...

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The McRib is a food with both a devout following and many detractors.
But what is the genesis of the world’s most popular fast food chain’s
most mysterious menu item? And why, oh why, is it not available all the
time like the majority of the rest of the McDonald’s menu?

Cooking ribs in the Americas predates the colonial period. But the
earliest records of Europeans cooking foods near what we would call
barbeque were in colonial Virginia. Settlers observed a native way to
cook meat, and they adapted it to their tastes. Later, as slaves were
brought in from Caribbean plantations, the food genre we know as
barbeque developed.

In fact, the word barbeque is a loan word from the Taino language of the
Caribbean. It was originally called barbacoa. It is unclear whether the
name comes from the native islander's method of cutting the meat or the
wooden frame on which the food was smoked. In any case, after it
arrived in the North American colonies, it spread wherever pork was
plentiful.

Important here to the story of the McRib is that barbeque, in the proper
sense, is any meat that is slow-cooked over indirect heat, usually
wood, and not merely meat with barbeque sauce on it. It can take up to
eighteen hours to turn raw meat into barbeque for it to reach
perfection. If brined first, it can take an additional day.

That is part of what makes the McRib a surprise. Rib joints usually
slow-cook. Many places brine it before smoking. Additionally, cooking
with a wood fire is inherently messy. Barbeque meat is also often hand
butchered. None of this lends itself to a fast food chain that in 2011
had to abandon the idea of using celery root in one of its food items
because to offer the item, McDonald's would have had to buy all of the
world’s celery root supply, and there still would not have been enough
celery to meet the projected demand. A frequent problem for the
restaurant chain that annually serves 1/27th of all restaurant food
consumed in the world, and caters to about 1 percent of the world’s
population on any given day.

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⁠⁠In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we begin by discussing the real origin of Tang and what that has to do with Pop Rocks and how they work. We then move on to the interesting story behind the invention of Velcro and how it works.

Next up we look at whether NASA really spent many millions of dollars developing the famous “space pen” instead of just using a pencil like the Russians.

Moving on from there we discuss the fascinating reason why only one side of the moon faces the Earth and how this happened and is still happening, with the Earth itself slowing down such that in theory at some point only one side of it will face the moon.

Moving on, we look at what the actual odds of navigating a typical asteroid field in space would be and whether the depictions in movies here are actually accurate.

Finally, we respond to some user feedback, including on initial attempts listeners of the female persuasion have made to pee standing up without peeing all over themselves (which sounds even weirder to write, but is in reference to a previous space episode ;-)), and the interesting phenomenon of people using the show to fall asleep every night and whether we should take that as a good thing or a bad thing…

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While airplane manufacturers do design the planes with general row
positioning and pitch (the measurement from one seat to the same exact
point on the seat in front or behind it) in mind, with the windows often
lining up with the seats, the designers' exact recommended arrangement
is rarely, if ever, followed. You see, the final placement of seats is
left up to the individual airlines that purchase the plane.

To make the seating arrangement as flexible as possible for airlines,
there are multiple tracks on the floors that the seats are mounted on.
This allows the seats to easily be moved closer together or farther
apart. The airlines can even switch the aisle arrangement via moving a
line of seats to a completely different track.

For example, on some versions of the Boeing 777, Boeing recommends a
layout of 3+3+3 with a 32 inch (81.2 cm) pitch for economy passengers.
In this layout, you need a passenger density of 67% before a passenger
may be required to sit next to someone else. And if some passengers
choose to sit next to one another, the percentage is even higher before
other passengers must sit next to someone. Boeing recommends this layout
because, in internal studies they've conducted, they claim that one of
the biggest factors in passenger perception of comfort on a flight is
whether there is someone directly next to them or not.

Nevertheless, disregarding the manufacturer recommendation, pitch on
a...

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