2593: Deviled Eggs

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Deviled Eggs

Title text: The foil on the toothpick represents the blue flash.

Explanation

A deviled egg is a dish created by cutting a hard-boiled egg into halves and replacing the yolk with a paste frequently made using the yolk itself, additional ingredients such as mustard and mayonnaise, and topped with a red spice (usually paprika). Importantly, the paste has a larger volume than the original yolk because of the ingredients (and probably some air) added into the originally homogeneous yolk substances. Randall Munroe parodies the dish by creating several alternative versions of the dish for other professions using word plays on the name of the dish.

Chef - Deviled egg

The original dish with the excess paste piled above the egg white.

Landscaper - Leveled egg

Many landscaping projects involve leveling irregular ground surfaces.^{[citation needed]} A landscaper may prefer to serve their deviled egg with a leveled flat surface. (This happens to resemble a normal hard-boiled egg cut in half.)

Designer - Beveled egg

Bevels are a design pattern of creating non-perpendicular surfaces between adjacent edges. A designer may prefer to serve their egg with the edge of the white beveled to give their eggs a more modern, aesthetically pleasing look.

Physicist - Demon egg

This deviled egg is designed to look like the Demon Core which was a sub-critical plutonium sphere manufactured during the Manhattan Project to investigate the properties of criticality. The Demon Core consisted of three parts: two plutonium-gallium hemispheres and a ring designed to keep neutron flux from "jetting" out of the joined surface between the hemispheres during implosion. The set of plutonium pieces got their name from the 2 criticality incidents that occurred when scientists were investigating this property. The first accident resulted in the death of Harry Daghlian. In the second incident, experimenters covered the core with two neutron reflecting shells separated only by a handheld screwdriver. (No, really.) The screwdriver slipped, causing the core to become completely covered by the neutron reflecting shell, bringing the core past its criticality limit. A large amount of radiation caused the subsequent death of physicist Louis Slotin. The dome of the boiled egg and the toothpick resemble the configuration of the experiment.

The demon core was also referred to in 1242: Scary Names.

The title texts refers to ionized-air glow, a blue light emitted by air submitted to an energy flux from radiation and seen during the incidents involving the demon core.

For a detailed explanation of the Demon Core, Kyle Hill produced an Youtube Documentary regarding the Demon Core.

Transcript

[The comic consists of four variations of deviled eggs.]

[A typical deviled egg, with half of the white part of a hard-boiled egg and a paste of yolk in a rough cone. The paste is speckled with red dots.]

Chef

Deviled egg

[A deviled egg, except the paste has been flattened to be level with the white.]

Landscaper

Leveled egg

[A deviled egg, except the edge of the white has bevels.]

Designer

Beveled egg

[A deviled egg, except the paste is now two hemispheres, one set in (and level with) the white and the other on top with a toothpick wedged between the two hemispheres at the left egg keeping them separated. The toothpick has a small piece of blue foil wrapped around the edge of the toothpick.]

Physicist

Demon egg

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Discussion

First commit was accidentally wiped off because an edit conflict with somebody who changed "created by a bot" to "created by an EGG" :( Am sad now. Mumingpo (talk) 02:45, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

Shouldn't that be "created by a CHICKEN", anyway? Although I suppose the chicken was created by an egg...172.69.79.223 12:24, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

The blue flash mentioned in the title text represents Cherenkov Radiation. In the case of the Demon Core accidents, those who saw the blue flashes saw it because of gamma radiation being slowed by the fluid inside of their eyeballs. 172.69.42.137 02:46, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

Not according to [Wikipedia]. There it says that the blue glow in criticality incidents such as those with the demon core is not from Cherenkov radiation.

While False (talk) 09:15, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

To quote that same wikipedia article on that specific point: [Citation needed.] The article explains a blue glow after an ionizing event, but it doesn't explain the blue flash during the event. 172.69.42.106 08:37, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Pretty sure the blue flash relates to the sunset phenomenon (usually a green flash as mentioned in 766: Green Flash, but can be blue). Clam (talk) 02:47, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

Whenever the explanation is added, it needs to reference 1242: Scary Names, which talks about the Demon Core. Trimeta (talk) 02:49, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

Summary would likely be better formatted in table to match spatial arrangement of original comic labelsAbstreudel (talk) 02:53, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

Not really. It's four examples that happen to be two-by-two, no reason to need to keep/restore the row-neighbours and column-neighbours. It'd just potentially look messy.

(If you're suggesting table of "Name | Description | ... ", with four rows within, then it would be consistent with other explanations, but unnecessarily white-space heavy compared to the current minor-header and explanatory paragraph(s) format.) 172.70.85.177 07:36, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

A comment was misplaced below this discussion form. I tried to delete it but ended up deleting the whole discussion section for a moment. Would someone take care of that? 172.70.110.209 03:24, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

If anyone is curious about what the demon core event looked like, the movie "Fat Man and Little Boy" (1989) while (hilariously) bad, has a fairly accurate scene depicting the second experiment, which can be found on YouTube. 172.70.130.91 14:23, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

I think something could be added about why the Demon Core is so famous at the moment. 141.101.76.193 16:24, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

Is this referencing recent events that have brought the Cherynobyl nuclear complex (and its Chernobyl disaster/criticality incident) into the headlines? Mwarren (talk) 17:16, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

Kyle Hill created a documentary on the Demon Core. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFlromB6SnU 172.70.230.63 18:57, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Is demon egg a pun on demon and devil being synonymous? 2a02:1810:2f04:1d00:5dfb:d515:b384:91a3 11:33, 08 Jun 2022 (UTC)

Well, yes and no. And they're loosely synonymous, at best, with classically the Devil may have many demons doing his bidding (you may have many devils, as subordinate mischief-makers, but there is rarely but one Demon in existence within a mythology, except insofar as a Demon King, overload of the various demonic substrata by whatever names) but enough for it to be an easy (or understandable) switch in terminology. Clearly a relationship, but too broad to be a full-on pun, IMO. 162.158.22.175 12:32, 8 June 2022 (UTC)