In the grocery store, meat would last a lot longer if it was wrapped in a type of plastic that was impermeable to oxygen. But the meat would look purple/brown, and no one would buy it. Consumers want meat that looks bright red, so the plastic used to wrap meat is somewhat permeable to oxygen. The downside is that the meat doesn’t last as long, obviously.
If we could convince consumers that meat doesn’t have to be bright red, stores could wrap the meat in a type of plastic that was impermeable to oxygen, thereby increasing the shelf life and saving a lot of money and energy in the process.
Wouldn’t this depend on region or type of tree being grown? There are a lot of tree farms in the Eastern Townships, and I have a hard time believing that all those trees are dyed, but then again, I’ve never worked there. I think the most common one is the balsam fir, and they tend to grow for years before harvest and they are green throughout that time. How do the dyes work? Through irrigation systems? Topical? The tree farm my family goes to every year to cut their own tree at doesn’t really seem to have all that much equipment, but I don’t know what to look for!
Another thing that exists pretty much only because the public expects it: aircraft passenger windows. Obviously the cockpit windows are necessary, but there is no real reason to have passenger windows other than because passengers expect them to be there (for some reason, people don’t seem to like being in a windowless cylinder for hours on end?) Windows cause stress concentrations and weaknesses in the fuselage, requiring more stringers/frames to distribute forces thereby increasing the weight of the aircraft and raising costs. For safety reasons, you’d probably only need one or two, to allow an inspection of the engines/wings in the event of fire or to ensure a safe evacuation from one side of the plane. Window cutouts are an even greater challenge in the shift to composite fuselages; because composite materials are anisotropic, cutting a hole in a panel doesn’t simply mean the stresses “flow” around the hole the way it would in an isotropic material like aluminum. So again, more material, more weight and less efficient design has to be used in order to accommodate the windows.
One of my friends in high school had purple ketchup in the fridge (his mom bought it because of novelty), and he would make me use it while we were at the house. Not because it was the only thing there, but so that we’d get rid of it faster. Not much weirder than purple ketchup on a hot dog, as purple tomatoes do not make that color ketchup.
Oranges that grow on trees in yards in my part of Florida are not uniformly orange, but tend to have blemishes and green spots like this tree. Completely uniformly orange citrus looks very strange to me as a Floridian, but I can accept limes and lemons that are fairly uniformly yellow or green as “normal”.
Scotch and white pine get the dye sprayed on them. So do Douglas Firs, but not Frasier firs. I am not sure about the Balsams. The equipment is fairly simple the same sprayer and tanks used for other materials, insecticides, etc. Look at the bark. It adsorbs the dye better. It will be almost black if the tree has been sprayed.
Related to that, there is a model of anesthesia machine made by Draeger that, due to it’s design, doesn’t have that stereotypical “Darth Vader” breathing sounds like other anesthesia machines and vents have.
Anesthesiologists were complaining that the machine was broken because they couldn’t hear it, so they redesigned it and added a small circuit board and speaker to emulate that sound in time with the settings on the machine.
Interesting. I’ll try and remember this and look at the trees next Christmas. I suspect that the local trees aren’t being dyed, since I don’t ever recall a tree with “almost black” bark, but it’s not something I was looking for in the past! Thanks for the explanation!
I believe much meat sold these days is in packaging that seals the product in an atmosphere of pure carbon dioxide, which maintains that bright-red color.
That is more psychological marketing: only recently have car makers started to employ a guy who tests how a car door being closed sounds like and fiddles with it to make it sound better. Along with another guy whose job is to sniff the new car and fiddle with the smell to make it more manipulative.
Saw green ketchup on sale in the UK supermarkets about 5 years ago, not seen it recently. Tried some and it was really hard to overcome the powerful urge to push the food away.
Is that the real reason, or is it also practicality? I remember when the dishwashing soaps came out in concentrated form to save waste, but they found out that people had problems correctly dosing small amounts (“just one drop”), so they stopped that.
Not for all elevators. Some elevators are specially built to work even in a fire* to allow handicapped people to evacuate, and need a closed door button to overcome smoke blocking the light sensor.
Other elevators might be specially wired for purposes of the employees first, e.g. our elevator has ground floor as preference over other floors, and opens a few seconds longer on the ground floor (so the employees can enter with their carts) than on the other floors (where the normal users just get in).
*Obviously not in a flaming inferno, but even just a few minutes until the fire gets serious can be a help.
Since when is plastic a better insulator than glass? Huh? Got a cite for that? Are you using special plastic instead of PET or is the plastic unusually thick? Because I’ve never seen plastic that insulated better than a solid glass bottle.
The other aspect is that early throw-away plastic bottles were made from a type of plastic that leached chemicals into the drink (esp. if the drink contained acid, which most do - at least carbonic acid for the bubbles). So many people have problems trusting plastic bottle for health safety.
Depends on the circumstances. Usually bottlers switch to plastic for sodas etc. because it’s cheaper in production, transport and less breakage, and because customers also prefer less weight and breakage.
But if the glass bottles have an established re-use system and the plastic bottles are throwaway, the calculation looks different. It also depends on how far the bottles are transported.
In a docu about modern electric cars they said how the first prototypes were almost completly silent - but then they noticed during test-drives that the pedestrians were used to listenting to the engine noise of cars and not looking enough for silent cars, so they were brainstorming on what sound would be best to add to make the electric car hearable enough to alert pedestrians.
To me it would make sense to include them because I don’t always have tomatoes lying around in a single household, and if I buy a ready-made dinner, everything necessary should be inside, otherwise, I buy single ingredients.
Actually, that was a big factor, I think, for the success of Miracoli: you got pasta and parmesan and sauce and herbs all in one package back when italian food was new, so the normal housewife wouldn’t have parmesan or herbs in the kitchen already.
Could that be a mandate by the stadium owner/ the police/ the city to avoid injuries from thrown glass bottles / fans using glass bottles to bash others? After all, stadiums now mostly forbid bringing any bottle inside (as well as other potentially dangerous objects).
Since the invention of plastics? The thermal conductivitiesof plastics are pretty much always lower than those of glass; less heat conducted means better insulation. Glass also has lower heat capacities, meaning less energy is needed to raise it’s temperature one degree - also making plastics better insulators.
Some meat packagers used to seal them with carbon monoxide, because CO bonds to myoglobin much more strongly than oxygen, so it would keep the color brighter, longer. But I don’t think that’s the case anymore.
I recall reading a book by Jerry Della Femina called “From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor” some years ago. It is a book about the advertising industry. He told a story about (I think) Johnson & Johnson who spent a fortune developing an “ouchless” antiseptic salve for cuts. However, the product bombed, because the public equated stinging with “it’s working”. So they ended up putting a few drops of alcohol in the mixture to make the “ouchless” salve cause a tiny stinging sensation.