A daily miasma of frivolity by two wanna-be cultural critics. Or: just, like, some good links, dude.

Tag Archives: water

Oct 22 2012
Mark Twain, probably

San Francisco Proposition F seeks plan to drain Hetch Hetchy Reservoir

San Francisco Proposition F seeks plan to drain Hetch Hetchy Reservoir

John Wildermuth for the San Francisco Chronicle:

Proposition F would require [San Francisco] to put together a plan to destroy the city-owned O’Shaughnessy Dam and drain Hetch Hetchy Reservoir so that the valley, part of Yosemite National Park, can be restored to its original wild state.

…

The reservoir now is the keystone of a 160-mile-long system that serves 2.5 million people in San Francisco, the Peninsula and parts of Silicon Valley and the East Bay. While the system is made up of nine dams, Hetch Hetchy holds 85 percent of the available water.

This story has a little bit of everything: environmentalism vs. pragmatism, the right of a city to determine matters of other cities and a federal park, and politics, naturally.

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Oct 05 2012
Mark Twain, probably

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntQ7qGilqZE

I have discovered the purpose of the International Space Station. It exists so that we can do silly things in zero gravity, as shown in this NASA video.

Surface tension is awesome.

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
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Sep 15 2012
Mark Twain, probably

How to Boil Water without Bubbles

How to Boil Water without Bubbles

Katharine Sanderson in Nature magazine:

One trick to test whether a frying pan is hot enough is to sprinkle water on it. If the surface is sufficiently above the boiling point of water, droplets will skip across the pan. Those jittery beads of water are held up from the hot pan by a cushion of steam. The vapour cushion collapses as the surface falls below the ‘Leidenfrost temperature’, causing furious bubbling and spitting when the water droplet hits the surface and boils explosively.

The Leidenfrost effect lies behind the discovery, published today in Nature, that water can be made to boil without any bubbling if a surface is specially treated so that the vapour cushion does not break down. The key is to make the surface very water-repellent, according to Ivan Vakarelski, an engineer at the Clean Combustion Research Center at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, and his colleagues. The effect might be used to carefully control how metals are cooled and heated, or to reduce drag on ships.

Finally! Every time I put on a pot of water, I get bugged the hell out by all those bubbles. It’d be pretty neato if the pot were perfectly serene, without any of that pesky indication of the water’s temperature.

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