Cooking With Potential Energy

[jf...@furrs.org]

Oldie but goodie: cooking a turkey with “potential energy” (i.e., throwing it repeatedly out of a tall building):

http://www.ohio.edu/mechanical/thermo/Intro/Chapt.1_6/energy/CookingPE.pdf

This comes to us from the “science” journal, “The Journal of Irreproducible Results”, which I first encountered circa 1989 when I was working in the periodicals binding unit of the library at Virginia Tech. The journal isn’t what it once was — there was an ugly schism in the mid-1990s that led to the creation of the “Annals of Improbable Research”. But if you can find a copy of “The Best Of The Journal of Irreproducible Results,” a bound edition of some of the greatest articles, it’s worth buying. My all-time favorite article was “National Geographic: The Doomsday Machine”, which posited that the weight of decades of accumulated National Geographic back issues would stockpiled in attics and spare rooms across the nation would cause a devastating earthquake.