I drink coffee and tea at work, and face a daily problem with sugar.
I have a cup, but no spoon ("There is no spoon!") , so stirring in the sugar is problematic at the best of times.
I tried to address this with the Tea Flake
but there is certain practical difficulties - not the least of which is using the communal pot of coffee...
Putting only a little coffee in with the sugar and swirling vigorously will work to some extent, but I am impatient.
Now if the the cup was properly designed, as the fluid is poured in, the flow could be 'turbulated'*
to maximize the dissolving rate. A lot of work has been done to minimize surface turbulence; I want the opposite.
At the very least, I think I kind of built in funnel would increase the fluid speed at the cup bottom, keeping the sugar grains tumbling in the flow until they are gone. If the bottom of the funnel is twisted to encourage a vortex, I suspect the grains would concentrate at the center of the tiny whirlpool, and merely increase the local sugar concentration would actually allowing mixing. Of course, if the vortex was sized right, the grains would dissolve locally, and then as the cup was filled, the vortex would collapse and the sugar solution would mix freely.
Of course, if the funnel was filled with the sugar and then the tea poured through, it might accomplish my desires without any vortex, even though everything is sexier with vortices.
I would post a picture to support this contention, but to the best of my knowledge, Angelica Bridges has never been photographed in a vortex, and even Leiticia Casta - despite being from Europe- has never been shot against the brooding waters of the Maelstrom.**
*'Turbulated'... I think I am only posting in order to invent new words.
** Which, of course, grumble over the bones of sad, fierce, brave Captain Nemo.
Wine De-Headachechulation.
I brew wine. I enjoy making it, but drink little - friends and family take care of the overflow.
In simple terms, brewing is a matter of using a liquid suspension of S.L. yeast cells to convert sugars to alcohols. Ideally, 100% of the sucrose, fructose and glucose is converted into ethanol : humanity's favorite poison.
Life being inherently messy, not all of the conversions are correct. Various other alcohols and aldehydes and produced as well, including methanol.
Methanol is poisonous - it is a ( the ? ) major contributor to the hangover headache (And don't whine at me about dehydration, as thats controllable with an intelligent drinking regime ).
Certain batches of my wine, while palatable, tend to give a nasty kick in the temples the morning after, and I'm prepared to blame the methanol for most of this.
Lacking magical ability's to dispel the methanol on command ( "I need a young priest and an old priest...") and also not being able to de-methylate by mental powers, it occurred to me that the wine might be treatable to remove the methanol by boiling.
As a rough rule of thumb, the various home distillation experts recommend throwing out the first 200ml of distillate when distilling spirits.*
This foreshot (assuming a 23L batch) contains the majority of the methanol. Now i don't need a still to try this. I just need to boil the wine until the volume drops by 0.009%...only a few minutes work.
A possible drawback is that the boiling temperature might alter the flavor.
Also easily dealt with - arrange a vacuum distillation rig with a pressure cooker and a scrap A/C compressor and boil the methanol off at room temperature.
I am aware that the other 'fusel oils' in the batch won't separate off this way,but as those compounds contribute heavily to the flavor, I'm willing to allow their presence.
I can't find any mention of this procedure on the Net - so the 14,530** headache question is: Does It Work?
*Obsession with distil-- prefix intentional.
**40 years of daily bingeing before hepatic failure, minus 80 days to observe sobereity on Pi Day and National Petunia Appreciation Day ***
***Walt Kelly would have really liked Talk Like A Pirate Day.
I brew wine. I enjoy making it, but drink little - friends and family take care of the overflow.
In simple terms, brewing is a matter of using a liquid suspension of S.L. yeast cells to convert sugars to alcohols. Ideally, 100% of the sucrose, fructose and glucose is converted into ethanol : humanity's favorite poison.
Life being inherently messy, not all of the conversions are correct. Various other alcohols and aldehydes and produced as well, including methanol.
Methanol is poisonous - it is a ( the ? ) major contributor to the hangover headache (And don't whine at me about dehydration, as thats controllable with an intelligent drinking regime ).
Certain batches of my wine, while palatable, tend to give a nasty kick in the temples the morning after, and I'm prepared to blame the methanol for most of this.
Lacking magical ability's to dispel the methanol on command ( "I need a young priest and an old priest...") and also not being able to de-methylate by mental powers, it occurred to me that the wine might be treatable to remove the methanol by boiling.
As a rough rule of thumb, the various home distillation experts recommend throwing out the first 200ml of distillate when distilling spirits.*
This foreshot (assuming a 23L batch) contains the majority of the methanol. Now i don't need a still to try this. I just need to boil the wine until the volume drops by 0.009%...only a few minutes work.
A possible drawback is that the boiling temperature might alter the flavor.
Also easily dealt with - arrange a vacuum distillation rig with a pressure cooker and a scrap A/C compressor and boil the methanol off at room temperature.
I am aware that the other 'fusel oils' in the batch won't separate off this way,but as those compounds contribute heavily to the flavor, I'm willing to allow their presence.
I can't find any mention of this procedure on the Net - so the 14,530** headache question is: Does It Work?
*Obsession with distil-- prefix intentional.
**40 years of daily bingeing before hepatic failure, minus 80 days to observe sobereity on Pi Day and National Petunia Appreciation Day ***
***Walt Kelly would have really liked Talk Like A Pirate Day.
Spent a few hours browsing through the deeper recesses of RenegadeMime's digital libraries today.
I love to read, and as a result have read an enormous quantity of books: somewhat in excess of twenty thousand. I've read a little of everything, and an awful lot of science fiction.
( Does it show?)
I realized today that I've read a lot of philes as well.
Most of them are weird documents, a kind of surrealistic folk art. the information value is largely useless, and what is accurate is outdated.
But as a art form, they are quite fascinating.
They contain the strangest blend of naivety , hostility, and laziness that I have ever encountered. Are they the teleological cousins of the text porn stories that flood Alt.Sex.Stories and its ilk?
Are they going to be collected in some future date, archived and sorted, arranged by author and subject.
Is elderly versions of ACFST-X or Vortex going to interviewed by earnest Ph.D students?
I love to read, and as a result have read an enormous quantity of books: somewhat in excess of twenty thousand. I've read a little of everything, and an awful lot of science fiction.
( Does it show?)
I realized today that I've read a lot of philes as well.
Most of them are weird documents, a kind of surrealistic folk art. the information value is largely useless, and what is accurate is outdated.
But as a art form, they are quite fascinating.
They contain the strangest blend of naivety , hostility, and laziness that I have ever encountered. Are they the teleological cousins of the text porn stories that flood Alt.Sex.Stories and its ilk?
Are they going to be collected in some future date, archived and sorted, arranged by author and subject.
Is elderly versions of ACFST-X or Vortex going to interviewed by earnest Ph.D students?
Getting my first tractor bizarrely has a similar feel to dating my first girlfriend.
A previously unsuspected Rite of Passage, I guess.
This is a 65 year old Farmall A, equipped with a homemade pusher blade, and a accessory hydraulic pump that is rusted onto the PTO, and has its inlets & exits capped off.
It needs some tender repairs, but it does run!
Interesting to think that this was state-of-the-art for tractors when Doc Savage was being written.
Voyager 2 talks in code! Scientists need Enigma Machine to decode science
data!
Voyager 2 is sending back garbled data. The current hypothesis is that a bit has been flipped somewhere in its tiny computer memory by a passing cosmic ray. Hopefully its a reversible failure.
I've encountered bit flip errors under more mundane situations - we all have had a PC crash through 'Memory Parity Error' at one time or another.
( I used to have a PC that when overheated would die due to RAM errors ( A 386-SX at ambient temperatures of >30C (In a little shop with no air conditioning )))
However I ran into this problem one day with a cheap ($1 Cdn) calculator.
We were adding up long columns of numbers. My assistant was using the calculator, and I was doing it with a pencil. There were (legal) reasons for getting a accurate answer. I came up with one total, and she got another.
So we did it again.
Again the totals disagreed,but her total also disagreed with her previous
total!
I took the calculator this time, and we tried several more times.
The manual addition came to the same total every time, but it wasn't the same as the calculator offered.
What was happening was that if we added this column:
24
30
55
37
23
--
159
we would get 139 if we entered it as 24 + 30 + 55 + 37 + 23
But if we mentally grouped figures as we worked, to speed things up:
54 + 55 + 60 we would get, say 142
And of course, 24 + 30 + 55 + 60 would get 146.
A pocket calculator has a very small chunk of RAM that is divided into registers. I doubt very much that any kind of parity check is run on them at boot.
These registers are used to store the intermediate values of each calculation.
Somewhere in one of the registers there was a stuck bit ( Chances favor that it was stuck on binary 0 )which served to mutate each value when it was entered into the register. 11111111 (255) would become 11111101 (253), perhaps, 00011000 (24) would stay unchanged, but 00011110 (30) would become 00011100 (28), 00110111(55) would become 00110101 (53), and so on.
If the damaged register was being used for the sum total, then the answer would be wrong by the same amount (in binary) every time, no matter how the parts were added up.
It was sobering to realize I was holding a calculator that appeared to give correct answers , but was wrong. We take those little machine's accuracy for granted.
I regret not keeping the calculator: it was a novelty then, but philosophically the event has stayed with me.
data!
Voyager 2 is sending back garbled data. The current hypothesis is that a bit has been flipped somewhere in its tiny computer memory by a passing cosmic ray. Hopefully its a reversible failure.
I've encountered bit flip errors under more mundane situations - we all have had a PC crash through 'Memory Parity Error' at one time or another.
( I used to have a PC that when overheated would die due to RAM errors ( A 386-SX at ambient temperatures of >30C (In a little shop with no air conditioning )))
However I ran into this problem one day with a cheap ($1 Cdn) calculator.
We were adding up long columns of numbers. My assistant was using the calculator, and I was doing it with a pencil. There were (legal) reasons for getting a accurate answer. I came up with one total, and she got another.
So we did it again.
Again the totals disagreed,but her total also disagreed with her previous
total!
I took the calculator this time, and we tried several more times.
The manual addition came to the same total every time, but it wasn't the same as the calculator offered.
What was happening was that if we added this column:
24
30
55
37
23
--
159
we would get 139 if we entered it as 24 + 30 + 55 + 37 + 23
But if we mentally grouped figures as we worked, to speed things up:
54 + 55 + 60 we would get, say 142
And of course, 24 + 30 + 55 + 60 would get 146.
A pocket calculator has a very small chunk of RAM that is divided into registers. I doubt very much that any kind of parity check is run on them at boot.
These registers are used to store the intermediate values of each calculation.
Somewhere in one of the registers there was a stuck bit ( Chances favor that it was stuck on binary 0 )which served to mutate each value when it was entered into the register. 11111111 (255) would become 11111101 (253), perhaps, 00011000 (24) would stay unchanged, but 00011110 (30) would become 00011100 (28), 00110111(55) would become 00110101 (53), and so on.
If the damaged register was being used for the sum total, then the answer would be wrong by the same amount (in binary) every time, no matter how the parts were added up.
It was sobering to realize I was holding a calculator that appeared to give correct answers , but was wrong. We take those little machine's accuracy for granted.
I regret not keeping the calculator: it was a novelty then, but philosophically the event has stayed with me.
I observed something odd about a month ago, and I can't find anything to verify it.
I try to be a careful observer, and there were witnesses, so I'm not talking about a hallucination or a dream.
I was driving to Moncton from Sussex along the four-lane highway, in the afternoon.
I was the passenger, and my wife was driving. We were just short of Petitcodiac...perhaps a kilometer away from the offramp. The highway is divided by a strip of land about a hundred feet wide, with small trees and shrubs.
An aircraft was flying down the strip of land towards us. It was a white aircraft, driven by a single propeller, with a Tee-tail configuration and no apparent markings or identification numbers.
The skin had the glossy sheen of fiberglass gelcoat.
I can't remember if I could see landing gear or not. There was no windows, and it carried a black
pod on its back. The pod was quite large, perhaps 1/3rd the volume of the fuselage.
It was flying within a hundred feet of the ground. Speed was difficult to judge, as were were traveling at 110km/h towards it, but it didn't seem to approach any faster than traffic in the opposite lane would. I would judge its velocity to be no less than 80 km/h and no more than 130.
It could see its wingtips rock back and forth through a few degrees as it flew - the day was quite gusty.
I have never seen a picture of an RPV like it, but I am quite sure that it was not a small plane. The legality of its actions seem dubious, flying that close and low to the highway and town.
A mystery, all the more irritating in the way I can find nothing to refer to.
I try to be a careful observer, and there were witnesses, so I'm not talking about a hallucination or a dream.
I was driving to Moncton from Sussex along the four-lane highway, in the afternoon.
I was the passenger, and my wife was driving. We were just short of Petitcodiac...perhaps a kilometer away from the offramp. The highway is divided by a strip of land about a hundred feet wide, with small trees and shrubs.
An aircraft was flying down the strip of land towards us. It was a white aircraft, driven by a single propeller, with a Tee-tail configuration and no apparent markings or identification numbers.
The skin had the glossy sheen of fiberglass gelcoat.
I can't remember if I could see landing gear or not. There was no windows, and it carried a black
pod on its back. The pod was quite large, perhaps 1/3rd the volume of the fuselage.
It was flying within a hundred feet of the ground. Speed was difficult to judge, as were were traveling at 110km/h towards it, but it didn't seem to approach any faster than traffic in the opposite lane would. I would judge its velocity to be no less than 80 km/h and no more than 130.
It could see its wingtips rock back and forth through a few degrees as it flew - the day was quite gusty.
I have never seen a picture of an RPV like it, but I am quite sure that it was not a small plane. The legality of its actions seem dubious, flying that close and low to the highway and town.
A mystery, all the more irritating in the way I can find nothing to refer to.
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