Small Things Rising

I'm making lunch and it's naturally hard to focus on it when you could be thinking about physics.

As a non-experienced food maker I stick to the method of, you throw a bunch of ingredients in a pan and heat it up and then it magically semantically changes from "ingredients" into "food". I have moved up a notch in the cooking world after realizing not all ingredients behave in the same way. Notably, zucchini and spinach.

Turns out there's a whole spectrum of how long you should cook something so it is neither raw nor burnt. Inconveniently, ingredients have been designed to different ranges of cooking time. Also inconvenient is my lack of a staff, so my overall annoyance is roughly proportional to the number of dishes used.

I need to cook everything in one pan, and lacking any sort of useful experience I constantly find myself with the problem of a pan full of pretty well-cooked stuff, and one new raw-ish ingredient. If only I could layer the bottom of the pan with the next thing I'm adding!

Fortunately, if you just cook your bigger things first, you can just shake and everything works out fine. This is called the "Brazil nut effect" for unknown reasons. When you shake a container full of a bunch of stuff, the biggest objects rise to the top. Unintuitive when our gut tells us "big equals heavy." Intuitive when you think about little bits falling through the cracks left by the big bits.

Reminds me of fixing televisions by kicking them. I routinely try this whenever possible, the astonishment on the rare times when it works is worth it.