Rob wrote:
I know this is going to sound freakin' weird, but in addition to
being a bbq
nut, I'm a math geek. I know just enough about each of them to get in

trouble. Regardless, whenever I smoke a butt, I track cooking times
in
minutes per pound for various stages in the cooking process - 100
deg, 110
deg, 120 deg, etc. It helps me monitor whether I'm cooking too fast
or too
slow, compared to previous "good" results. After looking at the info
for
several cookings, a pattern seemed to evolve. Crunching the numbers a

little, it was amazing how well "minutes per pound" vs. "food
temperature"
could be described by a quadratic curve. R-squared values for
individual
cookings are usually .99+, and even when combining multiple cookings,

R-squared is above .97. My question - are there any actual
mathematicians/statisticians out there who can help me understand why
a
quadratic equation does such a great job of predicting the results -
luck,
coincidence, something real going on?
Thanks,
Rob


Just to be clear, this post wasn't by me!

Rob (who would much rather drink beer, have a tooth pulled or anything
other than crunch numbers)
Q for all!