Something You Should Know
A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
Mon, 23 Dec 2024
What would happen if you were walking by the Empire State Building right at the time someone dropped a penny, and it hit you on top of your head? Listen as this episode begins with the science behind this hypothetical experiment that reveals whether you would live or die. Source: Bill Sones author of Can A Guy Get Pregnant? https://amzn.to/3ZZbwkF What does it smell like on the moon? What would it feel like to walk on other planets? These are some of the questions we explore as we take an imaginary tour of our solar system with John Moores. He has been a member of the science and operations teams of several space missions and has written dozens of academic papers about planetary science. John is also co-author of the book, Daydreaming in the Solar System: Surfing Saturn's Rings, Golfing on the Moon, and Other Adventures in Space Exploration (https://amzn.to/4fbYRPt). Who doesn’t love a good sandwich? What makes a great sandwich? What makes a horrible one? Come along as we take a look back through the history and lore and the sandwich as well as some suggestions on some sandwiches you can make that will knock your socks off. Our guide is Barry Enderwick. He is the quintessential expert on the sandwich and has eaten just about every kind of sandwich (good and bad) you can imagine or has been created since the dawn of sandwiches. Barry is the author of the book Sandwiches of History: The Cookbook: All the Best (and Most Surprising) Things People Have Put Between Slices of Bread (https://amzn.to/3VxNVEI) You surely have had the experience of walking outside into cold weather and then your nose starts running. Why does that happen? You aren’t sick – so why do you get a runny nose? Listen as I give you the medical explanation. https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/you-dont-say-why-does-your-nose-run-in-cold-weather PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! INDEED: Get a $75 SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING Support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms & conditions apply. AURA: Save on the perfect gift by visiting https://AuraFrames.com to get $35-off Aura’s best-selling Carver Mat frames by using promo code SOMETHING at checkout! SHOPIFY: Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk . Go to SHOPIFY.com/sysk to grow your business – no matter what stage you’re in! MINT MOBILE: Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at https://MintMobile.com/something! $45 upfront payment required (equivalent to $15/mo.). New customers on first 3 month plan only. Additional taxes, fees, & restrictions apply. HERS: Hers is changing women's healthcare by providing access to GLP-1 weekly injections with the same active ingredient as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as oral medication kits. Start your free online visit today at https://forhers.com/sysk DELL: It's your last chance to snag Dell Technologies’ lowest prices of the year before the holidays! If you've been waiting for an AI-ready PC, this is their biggest sale of the year! Shop now at https://Dell.com/deals PROGRESSIVE: The Name Your Price tool from Progressive can help you save on car insurance! You just tell Progressive what you want to pay and get options within your budget. Try it today at https://Progressive.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why do you get a runny nose when it's cold?
Today on Something You Should Know, why do you get a runny nose when it's cold? Then, come along on a fascinating tour of our solar system. We'll visit the Moon and the planets, Mars, Saturn and Mercury.
Mercury's got this weird orbit. Its day is actually longer than its year. So, when I think about Mercury, I think about being able to sort of outrun the Sun at a walking pace.
Also, what would happen if you got hit by a penny dropped from the top of the Empire State Building? And the history of the sandwich and some incredible sandwiches you really should try.
Chapter 2: What would happen if you were hit by a penny dropped from the Empire State Building?
One example is a sophisticated club that, among other things, has peanut butter, coconut, avocado, tomato, ham. And it shouldn't work, but it actually does. It shouldn't be as good as it is.
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something you should know fascinating intel the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today something you should know with mike carruthers hi there welcome to something you should know i want to start today with a with a question i bet you have asked yourself and that is when you go out in cold weather
Why does it make your nose run? Well, it's perfectly normal for that to happen, and no one is sure of all the reasons why it happens. But here's what we do know. The nose is kind of a fancy air conditioner, and one of its jobs is to warm and humidify the air we inhale. When the air is unusually cold, the nose kicks into high gear to warm and humidify it.
Blood vessels dilate, mucus tissues swell and secrete extra mucus, and this extra mucus results in a runny nose. In addition, as the newly heated, newly moist air is exhaled, the moisture in it condenses when it hits the colder outside temperatures and then drips out as fluid.
There's not much you can do about it unless it becomes really severe, and apparently there is a prescription available from your doctor. But it's just normal. And that is something you should know. So you must know something about the solar system. I'm sure you learned in school that we have a sun and that planets revolve around the sun.
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Chapter 3: What does it smell like on the Moon?
Are they related at all? Or are they just rocks in the sky that orbit around the sun?
Well, there is a family relationship here between all of the different planets in our own solar system. Back when the sun was forming, you had this disk of gas and dust. And it was warmer closer to the sun, and it was cooler further out. And over time, this disk cooled. If you're far enough out, so around where Jupiter is, then you could condense out things like water ice.
And there's a lot of water ice in this disk. So once you condense out a lot of water ice, that can suck up a lot of the rest of the gas and you get gas giants. In the closer part of the solar system, closer to- Wait, what is a gas giant? Sorry. Oh, so Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, these are planets that are mostly made of hydrogen gas.
They don't have a solid surface the way that what we call the terrestrial planets do. The ones that are closer in, the terrestrial planets, these ones are made up of rocks. And these are places where water couldn't condense as ice. It was too hot. So instead, you had to wait until rock could condense, and that's what made up these planets.
So a lot of the variation that we see in the solar system is sort of dependent on what kinds of temperatures were present in that very early disk of swirling gas and dust.
We are on a tour of the solar system, and our tour guide is John Moores. He is author of the book, Daydreaming in the Solar System, Surfing Saturn's Rings, Golfing on the Moon, and Other Adventures in Space Exploration.
I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.
And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director. You might know me from The League, Veep, or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.
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Chapter 4: What is the experience of walking on Mars like?
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So, John, what about the sun? I mean, obviously we can't go there, but what is the sun? How long is it going to last? What does it do?
What about the sun? Well, the sun is middle-aged, so it's about four and a half billion years old now. Based on what we know of other stars, it's likely to live to be about 10 billion years old. So we're right in the middle there. You're right. You couldn't stand on the sun. You couldn't get very close to it without having a lot of trouble.
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Chapter 5: How do the planets in our solar system relate to each other?
as ice and cloud particles on these giant planets. And they might be colored by other compounds. So you get these wonderful hues of yellows and reds, and each place is different. I'd say Jupiter's probably the most brightly colored. It's got the biggest variation. Saturn's a little bit more muted, more towards those yellows. And then when you get out further to Uranus and Neptune, more blues.
When you look at and you take a journey through our solar system, which you've just taken us on, and it's pretty fascinating, but you get the sense that most of it is so inhospitable. Does it ever make you think, why us? Why Earth? Why is this so friendly to life and nothing else is?
It is interesting, right? An interesting way that the philosophers of science think about this, they have something called the anthropic principle in which the reason that the earth is here and why does the universe have the physical laws it does.
And they say that the reason for this is because if it didn't, if it was anything else, then we wouldn't be here to observe it and we wouldn't be able to even ask the question. It is a special place, the Earth, I have to say. We haven't found anything quite like it out there in the cosmos anywhere else.
Something I find really fascinating just looking in our own galaxy where we have hundreds of billions of stars and hundreds of billions of planets, we now know more planets than there are stars out there, is just how many different things there are, how many different ways of putting together matter and placing it at different distances from other stars and mixing things up.
To me, it's a wonder there's not more places. And maybe we'll be lucky and find more places that have life like we have here on the Earth. But so many ways for solar systems to go right, at least as far as human beings are concerned, and so many ways for them to go wrong.
Well, this is really interesting. I've learned a lot. I feel like I know my neighbors better in the solar system, so thanks for taking us on a little tour. I've been talking to John Moores. He has been a member of the science and operations team of several space missions. He's written nearly a hundred academic papers in planetary science, and the name of his book is
is Daydreaming in the Solar System, Surfing Saturn's Rings, Golfing on the Moon, and Other Adventures in Space Exploration. And if you'd like to read it, you can get a copy at Amazon. There's a link in the show notes. Thank you, John. Thanks so much, Mike. Great to be here.
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of the rings of Saturn?
And sandwiches historically, it seems, for the most part, contained meat. But now there's a lot of non-meaty sandwiches.
Well, actually there, there's, uh, there are intersections in some of the older cookbooks, especially in the early 1900s, there was a movement towards health for the first time ever. Uh, and so there's a fair amount of vegetarian sandwiches, uh, in those books as well. Um, but they weren't necessarily focused on vegetarian. It would be a vegetarian cookbook maybe.
Um, but the sandwiches themselves would not be called vegetarian within a sandwich recipe book.
But I think people who are going to eat a sandwich, if you said, Hey, let's go get a sandwich. But it's going to be a vegetarian sandwich. Most people would kind of, the air would go out of the balloon. You know what I'm saying?
Okay. I mean, not if you're a vegetarian. But, you know, like, for example, that tomato sandwich that I referenced earlier from Turkey and the Wolf. I have yet to meet anyone who didn't absolutely love it. And I'm talking meat eaters. I'm a meat eater. And it blew my mind. So I tend to wait and see and kind of taste it and then get disappointed if need be.
What's the deal with these little dainty finger sandwiches and cucumber sandwiches you think they serve at Buckingham Palace or something? Those to me don't seem like real sandwiches. They're sandwiches, but they don't fit the mold of a big hearty sandwich. Yeah.
Yeah, sandwiches. So what you're referencing is something called tea sandwiches. The other thing to consider is that sandwiches weren't always intended as the end all be all of a meal. They were part of a there were a course within a larger meal.
And so you have these diminutive sandwiches that are small and very minimal in their ingredients, you know, and not very hearty because they're not intended to actually fill you up. They're meant to accompany tea or to be sort of like a whet your appetite before we bring out the goose kind of thing. Why is a club sandwich called a club sandwich?
Contrary to popular belief, it just evolved out of clubhouses in the late 1800s, early 1900s. Some people tend to think it's like chicken and lettuce under bread or something like that, and it's unfortunately no. It's clubhouses. And it's funny to see them emerge in the late 1800s and early 1900s and how varied they were relative to now.
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Chapter 7: What happened to Pluto's status as a planet?
Chapter 8: Why is Earth so conducive to life compared to other planets?
There's one from France called the pan bagnat and it's basically you make this sort of nice was salad but with anchovy fillets and tuna and you dress it and you put it into this hollowed out loaf and you wrap it really tightly with Saran wrap or cling film and you wait it down in the fridge overnight and all that dressing soaks into the bread. It does.
The bread is crusty so it doesn't completely sog out. And you just get this amazing, delicious sandwich the next day. So that is definitely one that has stood the test of time because it's been around for quite a while. One more. One more. Okay. Well, I think the Reuben is a great example, particularly pastrami Reuben.
You just basically have mustard, pastrami, sauerkraut, and then you griddle it. Oh, and Swiss cheese. And then you butter the outside and griddle it and get it nice and crispy. And it's just delicious. You get a little sharpness from the sauerkraut. You get the richness from the meat, a little bit of spice from the meat, a little spice from the mustard on there.
The nuttiness of the Swiss cheese, the nuttiness of the Swiss cheese is fantastic. So that would be another one I'd recommend. Do you consider the tortilla wrap food, is that a sandwich? Not to me. To me, a tortilla is pretty uniform in thickness and it's wrapped around something as opposed to holding something. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Like the closest it gets would be for me would be a taco, but a taco is more of a sling. That said, you know, got wonderful tortas, many, many different kinds and they're delicious.
What's another interesting piece of lore about sandwiches or some really, really horrible sandwich or something?
Well, you know how I mentioned that sliced bread was being sold in 1928? More people were buying it than baking it. Well, Fleshman's brothers had a dip in sales and they were concerned about it. So they got together with a marketing agency in New York and they came up with the Eat Fresh Yeast for Health campaign.
And this manifested itself in different ways, but one of them was a recipe from 1936 for the yeast sandwich, wherein you took a compressed yeast cake, added table sauce, which is Worcestershire sauce, mashed it up, and put it between buttered bread. It blows my mind that they actually convinced everyone to eat yeast like that, and it was terrible, obviously. Made for a terrible sandwich.
I've never eaten wallpaper paste, but I imagine that's what it's like.
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