Magma Burritos and Other Microwave Inquiries

I consider myself a microwave expert. Not only am I a fan of science and the scientific method, but I've had my fair share of disappointments when it comes to reheating food in the microwave - I've had both magmic and icy centers in my breakfast burritos, and I've taken it upon myself to perfect my microwave technique over the past few years. I'll go through some experiments I did to understand microwaves, then share my results.

The basics:

A microwave (not the appliance yet, the light wave) is a type of light - like a radio wave or visible light wave. Visible light is high-energy, and it's waves are really close together - nanometers. Radio light is low-energy and it's waves are far apart - meters. Microwaves are right in between those.

Microwaves (the appliance) produce ... microwaves (the light wave)! The waves are medium energy, and they're a few centimeters across. The microwave in your kitchen produces a "standing wave." All that means is that is doesn't really travel, it just goes up and down, up and down in the same place.

So how does this standing wave cook food? Water molecules in your food are like little magnets - they have a positive and a negative side. They also like to line up with the magnetic field around them. If a water molecule is caught up in the middle of the standing wave in your microwave, the magnetic field that is being produced is switching back and forth really quickly, and the molecule goes back and forth trying to line itself up with the shifting field.

Imagine being in the middle of a jump rope, and your job was to always look at the rope - you'd soon find yourself dizzy from looking up, then down, then up again. By forcing all the water molecules in your food to 'look' at the direction of this shifting field, they'll be moving around, turning back and forth, and that energy goes to heat up your food.

Last piece of the puzzle - warm spots and cold spots. You'll know from experience that there are spots in your microwave that don't heat food. These are the nodes - the spot where the standing wave doesn't go up or down, but rather stays put - the handles of the jump rope. The water molecules here don't feel much a pull in either direction, so they're quite content to not waste energy in all this 'heating up' nonsense.

That's the basics done - so here's how I put that info to the test to figure out a few things about my microwave.

Speed of Light:

Because I work in education, one of the first things I did was use my microwave to calculate the speed of light. If you google "Calculate the Speed of Light with a Microwave" you'll find the basic process - find the frequency of microwaves being produced on the back of your microwave (mine is 2450 MHz, or 2.45 billion waves per second). Figure out the wavelength of the microwaves by putting something that melts into the microwave for a few seconds, and measuring the distance between the points that melted, doubling that, then use the equation:

Speed of light (m/s) = frequency (Hz) x wavelength (m) 

I wanted a little better information and visualization, so instead of the standard chocolate, cheese, or marshmallows, I used a papadums - an Indian treat generally not made in the microwave, to generate a 'heatmap' of my microwave in two dimensions. This told me where my hot spots and cold spots were in my particular microwave.

So not great. My microwave is pretty patchy. It's a really good thing that it rotates, otherwise it would just be this patchy mess of hot and cold. I tried putting the rotating tray back in and that yielded much better results:

In my experiment, I calculated the speed of light to be 318,500,000 m/s - a percent error of 6.2%. Not bad, but I've seen better. 

<sidenote> 
Here's the math:

My microwave's frequency is 2.45 billion waves/second (Hertz [Hz])

13 centimeters seemed about average between hotspots. This is the shadiest part of the calculation.

My microwave's frequency, times the measured wavelength, 13 cm, in my case

Calculating percent error. 299,792,458 is the known value.

</sidenote>

Oil, Ice, and Water

Ice is weird. Its solid form floats in the liquid form, it'll dissolve nearly anything, and there are at least 17 at least 17 different forms of it. It's basic form is a crystal structure that comes from the fact that the positives like to like up with the negatives and form bonds when you take energy away from it.

When heating things up from frozen, you have to deal with the issue of our water molecules being bonded to each other in ice. Any individual molecule has to break that bond to be free to rotate back and forth and heat up in a standing microwave.

Another issue is oily food. Oil molecules are non-polar - they don't have distinct positive and negative areas, they're sort of well-adjusted and boring all over. If there's no pull to 'look at the jump rope,' or follow the shifting magnetic field, oil molecules aren't going to want to move around and heat up.

To test this effect, I put an ice cube, the same volume of water, and the same volume of oil in a microwave; each for 30 seconds, each in the center.

• The water changed from 65°F to 191°F - a change of 126°F
• The ice changed from 19°F to 55°F - a change of 36°F (a little melted)
• The oil changed from 68°F to 154°F - a change of 86°F

We'll keep these differences in mind as we get to the point:

Microwaving Power Tips:

1) Use the power level

A lot of microwave instructions terminate in a step that says "Let cool for x minues before enjoying," or something similar. That step is there for an important reason. It doesn't really let the food cool to a safe eating temperature - that could be accomplished by simply reducing the cook time. It is there to let the food equalize in temperature. At this point, liquid water in the hot spots of the microwave have a lot of heat, ice is less icy, and oil is pretty much unchanged. If you bit into it now, you'll have hot, warm, and cold patches.

That minute or two allows the heat to spread around and for the whole thing to equalize out to be the correct temperature - melting the ice and warming the oil, while cooling off the magma.

Now onto the tip - microwaves are like the carts at Gringott's bank - one speed only. The power level setting  doesn't make lower-powered waves - it simply turns off the microwaves for that percentage of the total cook time. You can hear the microwave turn on and off while in a power setting other than 10.

Putting that together, if you double the cook time and half the power you get built-in waiting periods for the heat to move around and melt ice and warm oil. You end up with a much more even heating, with no waiting after you're done!

2) Get rid of the interior cold spot

It's hard for heat to travel within food - it's a slow process. If the outside of food gets hot it'll take a while for that heat to travel into the center of the mass.

When possible, arrange your food into a donut shape. This effectively halves the distance from any outer edge to any point in the interior.

3) Give your food some variety

If your food is centered on the rotating tray, and there is a cold spot 4 cm from the center point on either side, any food that particular distance away from the center will never be warmed up. The simplest way to combat this is by placing your plate of food off-center in the microwave. This ensures that every point not in the exact center will experience a variety of locations in the microwave and have a higher chance of spending more time in a hot spot.

Secret tip #4

Most microwaves can be silenced by pressing and holding either Stop, Cancel, 0, or 1 for around three seconds. Some even have a "Sound" button right on the front that you can press to shut them up.


That's all I've got for microwaves tips, but I'll leave you with a few warnings:

• Definitely do NOT put ivory soap in the microwave for a really cool effect like this guy.

• Under no circumstances cut a grape mostly, but not all the way in half like you can find instructions for in this video.

If you do go ahead and do these things, certainly don't cut a 1/4 inch hole in the grating so you can record it with a webcam (the waves are a few centimeters, so a 1/4 inch hole is just as good to contain microwaves as the tiny holes already in the mesh).


Cheers,

  - Scott


P.S. I guess I'll try to make this more of a real thing, so I dinkered around in Inkscape for 10 minutes and made a logo, and I'll start putting some stuff up on Instagram for each post if you'd like to follow there.

P.S.S. I changed the name to be less unwieldy.

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The Prisoner Inside Your Skull

The brain sitting inside your skull right now has two halves: the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere, as well as some stuff near the brain stem responsible for basic functions.

<sidenote> My rule about “what actions come from what brain areas”: if a zombie can do it, it’s probably controlled from the brain stem (hearts, lungs, motor control), if only you can do it (math, love, constantly thinking about that one embarrassing night), it’s probably the cerebrum - the “brainy” part. </sidenote>

Today I want to talk about the corpus callosum – the C-shaped little bridge of neurons that bridges the gap between the two hemispheres. It’s made up of a few hundred million neurons that are responsible for sending information from one hemisphere to another (oversimplified). Each hemisphere is made up of some 10-12 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex. This 60:1 ration between the 'thinking' neurons of each hemisphere and the 'messenger' neurons of the corpus callosum is about equivalent to the communication between Houston and Chicago being handled exclusively by the population of Bozeman, Montana .

A procedure to cut the corpus callosum down the meridian and thereby severing the communication between the brain's hemispheres is often employed as a form of palliative care for people suffering from severe seizures due to epilepsy. To help explain this form of patient care here’s a jargon-y sentence from Wikipedia (average word length is 7 characters):

“The role of the corpus callosum in epilepsy is the interhemispheric transmission of epileptiform discharges. These discharges are generally bilaterally synchronous in preoperative patients. In addition to disrupting this synchrony, corpus callosotomy decreases the frequency and amplitude of the epileptiform discharges, suggesting the transhemispheric facilitation of seizure mechanisms.”

Basically, during a seizure, an electrical firestorm is happening (epileptiform discharges), and not only does cutting this highway between the hemispheres localize this disruption, it actually reduces the severity and makes the seizures happen less often. This procedure is called a corpus callosotomy.

Not only does a callosotomy localize seizures, but it reduces severity and frequency

The neurological cost of this procedure was studied by a man called Roger Wolcott Sperry beginning in the 1950’s. At first, there were not many observable differences noted in so-called “split brain” patients who had undergone this callosotomy. Personality, emotionality, or intelligence didn’t significantly change noticeably from pre to post-operation. Upon looking closer, Sperry did begin noticing differences when presenting different information to different parts of the patient's visual field.

Before moving on, some quick brain anatomy: The visual cortex is located along the back of the brain, and spans across both hemispheres. Interestingly, the nerves from each eye cross over on the way to process information collected by your eyes. The information from the right part of your visual field gets processed in the back left, and the information from the left part of the visual field gets processed in the right hemisphere. Further, language processing mainly occurs on the left hemisphere of the brain. Highlighted in red in the lower animation is Broca's area, which processes language. So essentially, both hemispheres can see and think, but only the left hemisphere can talk.

Okay, back to Sperry's experiments. Sperry observed that in patients who have undergone a callosotomy, occasionally their hands would seem to disagree with each other – one hand would try to put a shirt on, while one would try to take it off. The right hand might be raised in violent intent, only to be restrained by the left hand. This points to something very deep, and very spooky– the right hemisphere has different ideas about whether one should put a shirt on and go to work, or whether one should use violence to get ones way. This ‘difference of opinion’ points to what can only defensibly be called a separate... being? conciseness? person? personality? - potentially with different values and opinions. Sperry himself put it this way:

“[The right hemisphere] is indeed a conscious system in its own right, perceiving, thinking, remembering, reasoning, willing, and emoting, all at a characteristically human level, and … both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different, even in mutually conflicting, mental experiences that run along in parallel.”

Sperry performed experiments in which separate hemispheres were presented with different visual information. One could sit a split brain patient in front of a pile of objects and show the right hemisphere text that reads “KEY,” and the left hemisphere text that reads “RING.” The results are processed differently in the different hemispheres:

Right hemisphere, observing the left visual field,

and controlling the left half of the body,

without access to speech processing:

The text reads “KEY.” I’ll use the left arm to pick up the key.

Left hemisphere, observing the right visual field,

controlling the right half of the body,

but with access to speech processing:

The text reads “RING.” I will say “Ring.”

When the patient is asked by the researcher to pass the object in their left hand to their right, and to tell the researcher why they picked it, the processing in the left hemisphere might look like this:

 Left hemisphere: I’ve been handed a key. The text reads “RING.” (Using speech center)

“Maybe you need a key to unlock the box the ring is in.”

Remember - without the ability to communicate through the corpus callosum, the left hemisphere has no idea what has been presented to the right hemisphere, and is totally unaware of the word KEY. The left hemisphere therefore confabulates an answer to the researchers question, using only the information it has.

Another variation of this experiment could be presenting a snowy scene to the right hemisphere, and a chicken coop to the left hemisphere. Among the pile of objects is a shovel. The right hemisphere would look at the snow and pick up a shovel, hand it to left hemisphere who might say “the shovel is for cleaning out the chicken poop.”

All this means that while you're reading this your left hemisphere might be having sort of a mind-blowing moment, while the mute right hemisphere might be rolling its eye and thinking “I can't believe that this is just dawning on them now.”

When I first read about the duality of our consciousness a few years ago, I thought something roughly akin to “that is an interesting little tidbit of information,” but upon reading further into it, and considering the implications, gravity, and spookiness of it started to dawn on me:

At all times, there is a mute consciousness inside your skull – listening, seeing, emoting, thinking, counting (up to about 20), all the while playing along and dutifully controlling the left part of your body. When you were young, before speech developed, the two “you’s” might have seemed pretty equal. Righty was better at spatial reasoning, and lefty was a bit better at counting. After a bit, lefty learned to talk, but righty couldn’t figure that one out, and remained mute as speech became the primary way to communicate with others. So what about cutting the corpus callosum allows the right hemisphere to start asserting itself and occasionally disagreeing with the actions taken by the left hemisphere? Why is this behavior never seen in preoperative patients? Does left brain assert control over right brain?

Also, this isn’t some theory, hypothesis, or speculation – it is considered well-evidenced by top physiologists and neurologists that you harbor two conscious entities inside your skull, one unaware that the house isn’t empty. Sleep well.

-          Scott

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How Many Years Have There Been?

I recently got nerd-sniped (exposed to an interesting question that ‘took over’ my thinking for a while) by the question “How many years have there been anyway?”

Heading into the New Year, the first answer that comes to mind is “2,019,” but this is one of the few we can eliminate right off the bat. There have been 2,019 years since Jesus of Nazareth was 4-6 years old. This method of counting up the years was begun in 525 by a Christian Monk named Dionysius Exiguus, but we know there were years before that, so 2,019 years is not our answer.

If you ask people from around the world you’ll get answers ranging from 13 (Mayan Long Count), 227 (French Republican Calendar), 1397 (Kurds and Afghans), 1440 (Islamic), 1940 (Indian Civil Calendar), 4716 (Chinese year according to an online converter), 5779 (Hebrew calendar) – or if you ask your computer it’ll say “1546300800” (unix).

There are groups that think we ought to base the year system on something that acts as a common heritage to all humans. Italian scientist, geologist, and field-founding badass Cesare Emiliani created an idea called the Holocene Calendar that would add 10,000 years to the current Julian date, making the upcoming year 12,019. Moving the ‘year 0’ to 10(ish) millennia ago acknowledges a large part of human history and eliminates the need to count backward when looking at cultures like the Romans, Norte Chico, Indus River Valley civilizations, or Egyptians. This is an interesting place to start a calendar, but does nothing to further our quest for an answer to our question.

The next method I thought of was counting the number of years since the very beginning. The universe formed about 13.8 billion years ago, so let’s see how that answer fits. One year (roughly) measures how many times the planet Earth has gone around the star Sol, so it doesn’t really make sense to say that there have been 13.8 billion years.* The Earth hasn’t been around for quite that long.

The universe's baby photo

<sidenote> Futuristic societies are often imagined to measure their time in years even though they have either left the planet Earth long ago, or never knew of Earth at all. An Earth-year in that context seems like a really poor choice of timekeeping unit. </sidenote>

Looking at the Earth, then – that has been around for about 4.543 billion years. This is the first answer to the question that fits. Let’s go ahead and make our math teachers proud and circle our answer:

At this point I thought I was done, but then another question started to bother me: if we consider a year to be the time it takes for a particular ball of rock to float around a particular ball of gas one time, 4,543,000,000 is looking good, but if we consider a year as a concept devised by human beings, then that number is far too large.

Humans have been around for the past 300,000 years or so, and they have probably kept at least a crude track of the handful of years they are alive through all of it, so our next answer that fits the question is:

If you want to get really pedantic, and trust me – I do – then you can consider when we started calling this shifting of seasons and shadows a “year.” The word “year” goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European language family, believed to have been spoken from about 4500 BCE to 2500 BCE.  This word “year” has alternatively been spelled “gear,” “gar,” “yar,” etc… in different languages throughout the years, but has stayed remarkably similar for millennia. So our next number answers the question: “how long have we been calling this phenomenon a “year?”

For our next answer we’re asking how many years have been lived by humans? If you ask me and Paul Manafort how our year has been, you’ll get two very different answers… so how many years have been lived by individual humans? The Population Reference Bureau has a bizarrely precise 'estimate' of the human population at 108,470,690,115, and each of them lived through about 40 years on average.** That means that humans have cumulatively seen about 4.3 trillion years go by – in other words, if each human lived one at a time, we’d have seen the universe go by more than thirty times. This is another answer to our question:

Until now I’ve only been considering Earth years, but when someone wants to know how long it takes Mercury to go around the sun, they ask “how long is a year on Mercury?” So if we ask “how many lengths of time are the ‘year’ for a particular planet (which is another way of asking how many planets there are), we can get yet another answer.

There are a few a few different ways we can find exoplanets. To try to find out how many planets there are we can look at the the data. The Kepler and K2 missions have been hunting planets to help us find out how many stars have planets, and if they do, how many. It turns out, that our solar system is probably about average. Taking a look at the number of stars in the Milky Way and figuring on an average of 5 planets/star, we see that there are about a trillion planets in our galaxy (a safe estimate).

With 100 billion galaxies, each with a trillion planets, it stars getting easier to just count the zeros after the number rather try to say the number.

My final number for “How many years are there?” is the number of planets, each with its own unique year:

Written out: 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Cheers,

    -Scott

*An amount of time equal to 13.8 billion years has elapsed, but we are counting the number of years, not counting how much time has passed in units of years. A "year" doesn't make any sense if the planet Earth isn't orbiting the Sun.

** There is an oft-quoted statistic that people used to die by age forty, but that is an average, not a maximum. Socrates, Ben Franklin and Saint Anthony were not freaks who managed to double the normal lifespan and live to see 80, but just regular old people. The 35-40 life expectancy figure includes a large infant mortality rate – if you lived past 5, you could expect to see 60.


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A Story About A Very Important Human

Image: The Guardian

Vasili Arkhipov was arguably one of the most important people in human history; not because he was a great political leader, or extremely influential, but for three reasons, two of which were outside of his control. First: he was in the right place at the right time. Second: humans had recently achieved the capacity to erase the future of the species, and third: he made a choice. That choice is what I'll talk about today.

To create some context, Arkhipov lived during a time shortly after the invention of the nuclear bomb in the 1940's, and a number of nations had developed operational nuclear warheads - the USSR and the United States among them. The political climate between these nations was... a bit tense. The nations would have really liked to go to war with each other, but both heads of state were luckily rational enough to understand the reality that nuclear war is to be avoided at nearly all cost. This is a concept, called Mutually Assured Destruction,- states that if one nation launched a nuclear warhead, the other would be able to retaliate, so neither wanted to take the first shot.

Arkhipov's choice took place during the Cold War, specifically during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In October of 1962, Arkhipov was second-in-command of USSR Submarine B-59. He had also achieved the rank of flotilla commander by this time.

On Oct. 27th, there had been no contact between Moscow and the B-59 for several days. Nearby, the American Navy began dropping depth charges to coax the submarine to surface so they could identify it, despite being in international waters. Not knowing whether war had broken out between the USSR and the US, the officers on the submarine has to decide on a course of action.

Usually in this situation, the decision to launch a nuclear warhead requires the consent of the captain and the political officer. Captain Savitsky and the political officer, Ivan Maslennikov, wanted to launch a nuclear warhead, but because of Arkhipov's position as the flotilla commander, he was also required to agree to a launch. Of the three decision-makers on board the B-59 that day, only Arkhipov was against the launch, and so a launch did not occur.

Were the crew to decide to launch an attack against the United States, we almost certainly would have retaliated and nuclear war would have broken out between the two heavily-armed superpowers, and we would be living (or not) in a very different world today.



Cheers,

   - Scott


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Potpourri

Hello!

There are a lot of topic I run across that I can't write a whole worthwhile blog post about, but I'd still like to share these little tidbits with you, so I'll try to assemble a few of those here.

Tidbit 1:

There is a bright red star in the constellation Scorpio called "Antares." It is a fascinating star that is 883 times larger than our star by diameter, meaning that if it were in our solar system, it would envelop all four rocky planets.

The fact that it is so red, coupled with the fact that the star is usually visible for most of the year created confusion because astronomers would often mistake the star for Mars, which eventually led to its name:

ant... = not
...ares = Mars

We called the star "not Mars."

Tidbit 2:

I was curious what the name for those coffee cup wraps was, so I looked it up. On the Wikipedia page, I found a whopping 7 "aka's" in the Wikipedia page. One of them was the term "zarf." A zarf is an ornate metal device made to hold a coffee cup. Here is one from the British Museum:

Image: britishmuseum.org

I think I'm going to call those coffee sleeves "zarfs" from now on.

Tidbit 3:

I heard a story about the early space mission Aurora 7, launched with Scott Carpenter inside on May 24th, 1962. The mission went mostly to plan, except for one variable the folks on the ground couldn't control: Scott. Transfixed by the view from the window, Carpenter used attitude control to point the capsule at things he was interested in seeing, and as a result landed 250 miles off course - a fact NASA was not pleased about.

The astronauts got to name their own missions, and Scott Carpenter decided to call his "Aurora." Now, he grew up in Boulder at Aurora and 7th, so many Boulderites (including me) assumed it was a reference to his street corner until I saw the video below. It turns out it was because his orbit would enable him to see the aurora borealis for the first time.

Tidbit 4:

Image: 99percentinvisible.org - check them out if you haven't yet!

You have almost certainly seen these. Paths where people simple cut the corner and trample the grass to get where they are going. As many hours as someone might put into designing walkways in parks or campuses, many a time, people will take the way that best suits them. These paths actually have a name - desire paths. There's even a subreddit for it.

Fairly appropriate, I'd say

Tidbit 5:

Brothers and sisters together are called "siblings," but did you know that you can refer to your nieces and nephews together as your "niblings?" Also - your brother or sister can be called your 0th cousin.

More:

Tidbit 6:

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The tongue twister "She sells sea shells sitting by the seashore" refers to a real person - Mary Anning. Anning lived in England in the early 19th century and was a paleontologist, fossil collector and dealer. Among other accomplishments she was the first to discover complete plesiosaur and ichthyosaur fossils.

Tidbit 7:

If you happen to have a kidney stone the solution for passing it might be in an unexpected place: Frontierland at the Disney World Resort in Orlando. According to this study, kidney stones are passed 63.9% of the time after riding the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.

Image: AmaryllisGardener

A flight to Orlando and a ticket to Disney World:

Cheaper than some healthcare.

I really suggest reading that paper through. It's full of little gems like this one:

Many people in the United States probably live within a few hours’ drive of an amusement park containing a roller coaster with features capable of dislodging calyceal renal calculi.

Here's a video of the researcher describing his work: 

I love science.

Cheers,

   - Scott

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The Erdős-Bacon Number

A lot of you will be familiar with the Bacon number. It's a play on the "six degrees of separation" concept that states that everyone in the world is six or fewer degrees separated from anyone else, one degree being someone you personally know.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

This graphic shows a minimum spanning tree, which is not what I'm talking about, but I'll take the heat from all the angry graph theorists. 

Someone's 'Bacon number' is this concept played out specifically with Kevin Bacon. Film buffs might play a game trying to link actors to Bacon in as few shared movies as possible.

To give an example, my Bacon number is 4. One of my cousins went to a doctor that had also worked on Micheal Jordan, who appeared in this commercial with Kevin Bacon:

So from me to my cousin (1), to the doctor (2), to Michael (3), to Kevin, there are 4 steps. (I also have a Bacon number of 4 via a family friend, Cozi Zuehlsdorff, Christopher de Stefano to Kevin)

Note: another definition of the Bacon number is that one must use film credits rather than personal connections, and it's this definition we will be using later on.

<sidenote>
Facebook generates a lot of data, and decided to calculate the average connectivity of its users: 3.57 degrees
</sidenote>

Image: Topsy Kretts

Paul Erdős

Another similar number exists, and that is the Erdős number. Paul Erdős was an unusually prolific mathematician and collaborated with a huge number of scientists during his career. Many academics calculate their "Erdős number," which is calculated in a similar fashion as the Bacon Number, but rather than personal connection, you would use academic papers that share the authors' name.

Using these two numbers, you can calculate someone's Erdős-Bacon number, which is the sum of the two numbers. Naturally, this requires both being credited in at least one film as well as author an academic paper, something very few people have done.

A number of famous names have low Erdős-Bacon Numbers:

Richard Feynmann appeared in the film Anti-Clock, which gives him a Bacon number of 3, and an Erdős number of 3 gives him an EBN of 6.

 Carl Sagan had an EBN of 6 as well.

The scientist Stephen Hawking actually has a lower Bacon number (2) than an Erdős number (4), for an ENB of 6.

Natalie Portman, as well as the Big Bang Theory actress Mayim Bialik, have both published papers, giving them Erdős numbers of 5. Both have Bacon numbers of 2, giving both women an EBN of 7.

Perhaps the lowest Erdős Bacon Number belongs to a man named Albert A Chan. He acted alongside Bacon in Patriot Day, giving him a Bacon number of 1, and has published work that achieves an Erdős number of 3, giving him the lowest Erdős-Bacon Number at 4.

Another quick note on interdisciplinary achievement - only one person in history has ever received both an Oscar and a Superbowl Ring - film producer and businessman Steve Tisch. Tisch, as the Executive Vice President of the New York Giants, received Superbowl championship rings for the 2007 and 2011 seasons, as well as an Oscar for producing Forrest Gump.


Cheers,

    - Scott


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