bubbles and beer

Analysis of how bubbles form in stout and other delightful drinks:

We review the differences between bubble formation in champagne and other carbonated drinks, and stout beers which contain a mixture of dissolved nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The presence of dissolved nitrogen in stout beers gives them a number of properties of interest to connoisseurs and physicists.

These remarkable properties come at a price: stout beers do not foam spontaneously and special technology, such as the widgets used in cans, is needed to promote foaming. Nevertheless the same mechanism, nucleation by gas pockets trapped in cellulose fibers, responsible for foaming in carbonated drinks is active in stout beers, but at an impractically slow rate.

This gentle rate of bubble nucleation makes stout beers an excellent model system for the scientific investigation of the nucleation of gas bubbles.

the telephone lady

grok this tidbit on Alexander Graham Bell’s wife.

Her name was Mabel and she often helped him with his experiments – offering suggestions, working out calculations. She was just as fascinating a woman as Bell was a man.

[click pic for more]

In fact, the village of Baddeck, NS , Canada thought so highly of her, the local municipal government gave her a vote on all civic matters in 1908. Women in Canada and the U.S. were still more than a decade away from gaining that right.

She was also completely deaf from the age of 4. She helped to establish the first Home & School Association in Canada ( the PTA in the US), the first Montessori School in Canada and she created a progressive women’s club for local villagers – still in existence.

humanity’s conflicts

Browse the history of war and conflict across the globe.

Conflict History has more then 8000 conflicts displayed, including:

  • Sino / Xiongnu war (133 BC – 89)
  • jewish / Roman wars (66 BC – 629)
  • Byzantine / Arab wars (0629-1180)
  • Gothic war (0376-0382)
  • American Revolution
  • War of 1812 (1812 – 1815)
  • Mexican War (1846 – 1848)
  • Civil War (1861 – 1865)
  • War of 1812 (1812 – 1815)
  • Indian Wars
  • American Revolution
  • World War I (1914 – 1918)
  • World War II (1939 – 1945)
  • American Revolution
  • Korean War (1950 – 1953)
  • Vietnam War (1961 – 1973)
  • Kosovo (1999)
  • Glif War (1991)
  • Afghanistan (2001 – … )
  • War of 1812 (1812 – 1815)
  • American Revolution
  • War of 1812 (1812 – 1815)
  • War of 1812 (1812 – 1815)
  • Israeli Palestinian Conflict

And thousands more…..

 

 

boiling water

And in 1971 the Atomic Energy Commission did a series of tests of Emergency Core Cooling systems. Accidents were simulated. In each case the emergency systems worked – but the water failed to fill the core. Often being forced out under pressure.

As one of the AEC scientists says in the film:

“We discovered that our theoretical calculations didn’t have a strong correlation with reality. But we just couldn’t admit to the public that all these safety systems we told you about might not do any good”

And again the warnings were ignored by senior members of the Agency and the industry.

That was the same year that the first of the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s reactors came online. Supplied by General Electric.

how to tell your story

“Write me a ‘Joseph Lieber’ letter and put it in an envelope and stick it right here.” She pointed to the labeled spot in the middle of the object. “…and bring it back to me.”

“I don’t know what a ‘Joseph Lieber’ letter is,” I told her.

She smiled and said, “I think I can remember…” She clasped her hands at her waist, tipped her head back and rolled her eyes up to the ceiling.

“It’s fifty-eight purely factual sentences, stating your case.”

our premier angst

…human life was intentionally created…

Are we emotionally predisposed to stay scientifically ignorant?

Are we merely matter?

were froth be true

Oh yes, our society is worthy of celebration, our policies are thoughtful…

Americans, constituting only 4.6% of the world’s population, have been consuming 80% of the global opioid supply, and 99% of the global hydrocodone supply, as well as two-thirds of the world’s illegal drugs. [link]

Don’t reply to your first thought. It’s likely opinionated and wrong. If we had a clue, these statistics wouldn’t reveal our errors. We know too little about this challenge.

invader of brains

In the competition for space in our brains and in the culture, the effective combatants are the messages.

The biosphere: an entity, composed of all the earth’s life-forms, simple and complex, teem­ing with information, replicating and evolving, coding from one level of abstraction to the next.

Ideas!

Memes emerge in brains and travel outward, establishing beachheads on paper and celluloid and silicon and anywhere else information can go.

They are not to be thought of as elementary particles but as organ­isms.

The number three is not a meme; nor is the color blue, nor any simple thought, any more than a single nucleotide can be a gene. Memes are complex units, distinct and memorable — units with staying power.

neural epicenters

For fifty years, we have bombarded our children with commercials disguised as programs and with endless displays of violence and sexual exploitation. We are nearly alone in the democratic world in not providing our candidates with public-service television time. Instead we make them buy it—and so money consumes and corrupts our political discourse.

the cosmonaut will die

As low-level employees crawl through waves of radiation, the execs and shareholders escape as usual. What would be different if our class system required personal consequences?

They are contract workers getting about 9,000 yen per day [$13.90 per hour]. They move from one nuclear plant to other in medium term contracts. They had probably looked upon assignment to the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant as another routine job.

The 180 workers deployed in 2-hour shifts to get control over truant radioactivity in Fukushima’s 6 nuclear reactors have been battling for a week.

Combined with their previous work, they may well have become exposed to high radiation by now. Five have died so far from explosions, two are missing and 22 have been injured.

There are times when radiation soars, as on Tuesday, and the workers retreat into safe zones. Then they are back again.

The story begins around 1967, when Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union, decided to stage a spectacular midspace rendezvous between two Soviet spaceships.

It would be, Brezhnev hoped, a Soviet triumph on the 50th anniversary of the Communist revolution. Brezhnev made it very clear he wanted this to happen.

Senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 structural problems — serious problems that would make this machine dangerous to navigate in space.

front-line neurology

Our society has age.

Stats from one embedded non-profit say:

There are nearly 15 million Alzheimer’s and dementia caregivers.

That’s 17 billion hours of unpaid care  valued at $202 billion.

Alzheimer’s and dementia caregivers had $7.9 billion in additional health care costs in 2010.

More than 60 percent of family caregivers report high levels of stress because of the prolonged duration of caregiving and 33 percent report symptoms of depression. Try Caregiver.com

 

dozens accused

One city. Grand jury names dozens of clergymen accused of paedophilia.
Bribes of billions uncounted. City after city, country after country, blood of abuse.

I shrink to my soul.

knee-deep in chest-high

Utility bills got you down? Empathize a few moments with these off-grid kids in Alaska:

Last fall we put up several piles of firewood for the winter.

This system worked fairly well when 1) the snow on the trail wasn’t past the truck running boards, 2) we still had birch in the pile, and 3) the piles weren’t buried beneath 4 feet of snow and ice.

…chucking frozen 50 lb logs when it’s below freezing and… they honestly did not burn.

Seriously, we’re talking completely fire retardant wood. Even when we split it down into almost kindling size they never really made flame or produced any heat… leaving us cold and waiting 3+ hours for the kettle to boil

health vs healthcare

stayin’ alive by Cervantes

One reason — a very important reason, as a matter of fact — why health care costs keep rising. Instead of dying, we are being converted into permanent patients.

And as we learn to manage more diseases we learn how to manage, without curing them, the trend will continue.

This is the world we live in, where everybody is diseased.

citizens for citizens

Pictures of those killed are displayed. The 25 January Revolution. Throughout the day they came from all over Cairo to take part in cleaning up the square.

Volunteers scrubbed paint and graffiti off walls. Volunteers began laying back paving they had used as weapons. Those involved say they are proud to be rebuilding their country. [BBC]

it is not religion

The issue here is the resurrection of a spirit of pan-Arabism after several decades when a sense of Islamic identity seemed to be supplanting Arab identity.

That trend now appears to have been reversed.

This shifting balance between Arab and Islamic identities is a central feature of what is happening in the Middle East today, and it’s likely to generate some heated debate in the weeks and months to come.

He writes:

For the first time in a generation, it is not religion, nor the adventures of a single leader, nor wars with Israel that have energized the region.

Across Egypt and the Middle East, a somewhat nostalgic notion of a common Arab identity, intersecting with a visceral sense of what amounts to a decent life, is driving protests that have bound the region in a sense of a shared destiny.

He continues:

Rarely has there been a moment when the Middle East felt so interconnected, governments so unpopular and Arabs so overwhelmingly agreed on the demand for change, even as some worry about the aftermath in a place where alternatives to dictatorship have been relentlessly crushed … The Middle East is being drawn together by economic woes and a shared resentment that people have been denied dignity and respect.

True views and recent history is one more failing by the Western mainstream media. If thousands of members of secular, liberal organizations in Egypt had been regularly arrested in recent years, the names of their leaders would be household words.

Two resolute and conscientious Twitter feeds on Egypt.
1)
Parvez Sharma, New York,
2) Ramy Raoof, Cairo, Egypt.

states of superstition

Gallup Poll:

“Four in 10 Americans, slightly fewer today than in years past, believe God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago.

Thirty-eight percent believe God guided a process by which humans developed over millions of years from less advanced life forms, while 16%, up slightly from years past, believe humans developed over millions of years, without God’s involvement.”

Despite 80 years of court battles ousting creationism from public classrooms, most public high school teachers are not strong advocates for evolution. Such teachers “may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States…”

very understated problem

For the second year in a row, the U.S. military has lost more troops to suicide than it has to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Stunned.

electing the wrong

Sweepstakes here.

Which politician seeking the Presidency said this?

“…the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States….Men like John Quincy Adams, who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country.”

glass of tort

A California resident filed a class action lawsuit Tuesday against Apple Inc. alleging the iPhone 4 has a manufacturing defect that causes its glass housing to break after ‘reasonable use’.

Peeved.