The Bizarre World of Product Testing & Understanding Highly Sensitive People
Something You Should Know
This episode of 'Something You Should Know' explores two seemingly unrelated but fascinating topics: practical tips for preserving food during power outages and the bizarre, often
Key takeaways
- A full freezer can keep food safe for up to 48 hours during a power outage if left undisturbed.
- Filling empty freezer space with frozen water containers helps maintain temperature longer.
Main topics
- Food safety during power outages
- Extreme product testing methods (chicken cannon, bear tests)
Notable quotes
"Before a jet engine can be certified, you have to put it in front of a cannon and shoot a dead chicken into it."
"I wouldn't trade that emotional sensitivity. I just don't want to drown in it."
Conclusion
This episode blends practical life advice with surprising insights into engineering and psychology, showing that even the most bizarre
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:01) Today on Something You Should Know, when the power goes out, how long will your food last in the fridge and the freezer? Then, the weird ways products are tested. Jet engines, for example. Speaker 3 (0:15) Now, before a jet engine can be certified, you have to put it in front of a cannon and shoot a dead chicken into it. What the jet engine has to do is it has to either be able to keep running safely or it has to shut down safely. Yeah, it's called the chicken cannon test. Speaker 2 (0:30) Also, how to tell the difference between hot and cold water by the sound it makes. And being too sensitive. Is it a flaw or something to embrace? I Speaker 1 (0:41) would say that there's an incredible strength in being emotionally sensitive. I think emotional sensitivity makes you a better person. It makes you a better parent. I wouldn't trade that emotional sensitivity. I like being emotionally sensitive. I just don't want to drown in it. All this today Speaker 2 (0:57) on Something You Should Know. I did something the other day I don't think I've ever done before. I ordered plants for the yard online. Actually, I ordered a little bit of everything. Plants, bushes, a tree. It's coming from Trees.com. You may have heard of them as fast-growing trees, but now they're Trees.com. America's largest and most trusted online nursery with thousands of trees and plants and... over 3 million happy customers. What surprised me was how easy it was. You tell them where you live, and they help you find things that actually work for your climate and growing zone. And there is a huge selection. So rather than driving around to different nurseries, loading everything into the car, and then hauling it home, I sat at my computer, picked out what I wanted, and now it's all coming right to me. And I'm really looking forward to seeing it all show up. Plus, their Alive and Thrive Guarantee promises your plants arrive happy and healthy. Right now, they have great deals on planting essentials, up to half off on select plants. And listeners to our show get 20 % off their purchase when using the code SYSK at checkout. That's an additional 20 % off better plants and better growing at Trees.com using the code SYSK at checkout. Trees.com, code S-Y-S-K. Now's the perfect time to plant. Let's grow together. Use S-Y-S-K to save today. Offer is valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. Speaker 3 (2:39) 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. Speaker 2 (2:52) When your power goes out, one of your first concerns is probably the food in the freezer and the refrigerator. And for good reason, because if the power stays out a long time, that food could spoil. And that's the topic we're going to start with today. I'm Mike Carruthers. Welcome to Something You Should Know. So without power, an unopened refrigerator generally keeps food safe for only about four hours. But a full freezer is a completely different story. If you leave the door shut, it can maintain its temperature for roughly 48 hours. A half-full freezer lasts about 24 hours. And there's a useful trick you can do before the next outage. Empty space makes a freezer warm up faster. So if your freezer is only partially full, freeze containers of water and then use them to fill up the empty space. The extra frozen mass helps everything stay colder longer and gives you emergency ice and water as a bonus. So when the electricity goes out, resist the urge to keep checking the freezer. The less you look, the longer your food will last. And that is something you should know. Speaker 2 (4:11) Before you trust your life to a car, or get on an airplane, or hand a toy to a child, or even use something as ordinary as a screwdriver, somebody has probably tried very hard to make that product fail. They've shaken it, smashed it, frozen it, overheated it, overloaded it, dropped it, and sometimes subjected it to things you would never imagine. Like throwing a chicken at it. which you're going to hear about, and it's all to discover what could possibly go wrong before it goes wrong for you. Welcome to the strange and largely invisible world of test engineering. It turns out figuring out how to break things safely is a fascinating science all its own, and some of the tests that engineers devise and the lengths that they go to are ingenious, bizarre, and occasionally spectacular. Here to take us behind the scenes is Alex Davies. He's a senior editor at Amazon, and he's author of a book called Cobook the Destroyer and Other Tales from the Wild, Unseen World of Test Engineering. Hi, Alex. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hey, it's great to be here. So the title of your book, Cobook the Destroyer, this is of interest to me because where I live, we have a bear problem. Bears get into the trash, and it's been getting worse lately. So we've all been told to get bear-resistant trash cans, which we did, and the bears try. We've seen them try. They can't get in it. But I wonder, well, how do the people that made those trash cans know that bears can't get in it? Do they actually test it on bears? And Kobuk the Destroyer, the title of your book, is a bear who tests. bear-resistant products. So how did that come about? Speaker 3 (6:08) So before bear-resistant products were actually tested on bears, they were run through a couple of mechanical tests. They would drop a metal spiked object onto objects that was meant to simulate the bite of a grizzly bear, and they would push on them with mechanical, you know, hydraulic pistons. And then someone said, Sure, this is mimicking the strength of a bear, but bears aren't just pure strength. Bears are intelligent creatures. And we're not testing whether or not a bear can figure out how to open this thing. They might not just bite it. They might not just push on it. They might twist it around or flip it upside down. And so they turn to a place that's outside Yellowstone National Park, which is a sanctuary for what are called problem bears, bears that have gotten too accustomed to eating human food. Bears that have had too much human contact and thus become a danger to people and in becoming a danger to people become a danger to themselves. And sometimes these bears are relocated. Sometimes they're euthanized. But the lucky ones get sent to this bear sanctuary. Now, it's not just a life of pleasure. They do have to sing for their supper. And they sing for their supper by testing supposedly bear-resistant. products. So if a manufacturer has a new trash can or cooler or backpacking canister, they'll bring it to the sanctuary and the keepers essentially fill it with bear-friendly treats with fish and honey and all sorts of good things. And they just give it to a bear. And if the bear spends an hour trying to get into it and can't crack it open along very certain parameters, so coolers if they can't open it more than an inch or so, and a trash can if they can't flip it open, then the product is considered to have passed. Speaker 2 (8:03) I would have never guessed that. I would have assumed that testing bear-resistant products was about mechanical tests that mimic a bear, not a real bear. That's a great story. And so when I think about product testing, the place that comes to mind is underwriters laboratories, that they've been around forever and that they've tested. My sense is it's mostly electrical things. That's who I think of when I think of product testing. Speaker 3 (8:33) Yeah, they got started. after the Chicago World's Fair. So Underwriters Labs was founded by a guy named W.H. Merrill, and he was one of the first graduates of MIT's electrical engineering program at the end of the 19th century. And he was hired by the insurers putting on the Chicago World's Fair where electricity was going to be one of the big attractions. But electricity was very exciting and very scary because it had a habit of... causing fires and burning down lots of things. And he was brought in to help make sure that all of the electrical connections were safe. And after that, he had the idea of, hey, maybe there's a business here. Electricity is becoming a big thing. And all of these products are going to start going into consumers' homes. And I can be the guy, I can start the company that actually makes sure that these things are safe and usable. And that was a huge intellectual coup for him. That was really the birth of testing as a profession and as something you can make money doing. Because before that, you didn't really need it. And you didn't have electrical appliances in the home, right? Before what you think of as a clothes iron. you had a chunk of iron that you put in the fire to heat it up. That's why we call it a clothes iron. But then all of a sudden there's electricity in that thing and you have to test it to make sure that if you drop it or pull on the cord or just use it a lot, it's not going to start a fire. And that's where Underwriters Labs really got started and created what's now a whole global profession of test engineering. Speaker 2 (10:13) So take us inside the world of product testing, of test engineering. because I just don't know much about it. Speaker 3 (10:22) So I think if you want to understand what actually shapes the products in your life, all of the things that make them functional and reliable and safe, that all comes less from inventors and more from test engineers. Because it's once the product... is created and starts being tested, that's where you figure out where all of the problem points are, where all of the pain points are. And that's where you start making fixes to them. And it's a really interesting job because it relies on this blend of creativity, rigor, and also paranoia. So you have to be paranoid to the point where you can think of everything that might happen to a product. within the reasonable realm of what humans can do and what the world can do to a thing. Then you have to figure out, okay, what of those things do we actually want to protect against? What's worth protecting against? Then you have to be creative enough to figure out how to simulate those things happening in a laboratory setting. But you need to be rigorous enough to create a test that you can repeat reliably so your data is good. And then you also, I have to have a real sense of judgment about it. And that comes into, well, how do you set your standards? How safe is safe enough? How do you balance progress against risk, against safety, against hesitation? And it's