Year: 2004

Follow-up to the Poser Question:

Chancellor the Wise has pointed out to me that cylindrical tanker cars have more structural strength than rectangular boxcar shapes. I suppose efficiency of structure is more important than efficiency of volume, at least in this case…

Today’s Poser Question is this:

Why are tanker cars on trains, and tanker trucks, cylindrical? This shape is certainly less space-efficient than a box… why not use a boxcar-like shape instead, which would hold more liquid?

Taken from a funny (in a satirical sort of way) “anti-valentine’s day” site…

Every now and then my e-mail goes nuts. See the screenshot below, showing my mail program downloading messages at a furious pace. It’s not spam– at least, most of it isn’t spam– because it’s from a client sending out thousands of messages to people. Lucky me, as the server administrator I get all the bounce messages.

Thank goodness for mail filters. I never see any of these messages; they get dumped into a folder somewhere…

Sometimes it seems like being a researcher could be a lot of fun.

Take today’s announcement from a group of scientists at Princeton: they recently completed experiments that show the “packing density” of M&M candy is higher than that of similarly-sized spheres (in this case, small ball bearings).

Imagine, first, the guy who thought up this experiment. You can almost picture a group of white-coated guys lounging around the lab, just having finished their latest foray into nuclear physics or something, tossing down some M&M’s and Pepsi. One of them– probably the one drinking Bud instead of Pepsi– suddenly laughs and says, “You know, I wonder how many M&M’s would fit into this keg.”

From there the experiment is born, and they spend weeks filling containers with M&M’s and ball bearings, counting them, eating them (the M&M’s, not the ball bearings), and scratching everything down on graph paper. They know they’ll never get published if they describe such an experiment, so they decide to– get this– create a computer simulation of a keg filled with M&M’s.

Then, after they’ve finished all the experiments and computer runs, they need to somehow justify this whole project. So they come up with a justification; in the words of one article, “The scientists say their work is important to anyone involved in the study of particle packing.”

Thank goodness those particle-packing people will have this landmark new research!

Pass the M&M’s.

You can file this under Funny Because It’s True.

Yesterday I downloaded and installed a new game for Linux– I’m always on the lookout because Alex and Kyra have a Linux computer and they like new games. It’s called Armagetron, which basically means it’s the light-cycle game from the movie “Tron”. But rather than the typical lots-of-colored-lines version, this is a fully three-dimensional game, where the viewpoint follows the light-cycles and can be adjusted through three dimensions. The sound is sweet, because it uses volume changes and even Doppler shifting to simulate the light-cycles whizzing past each other.

Although it will only run on my computer (theirs doesn’t have a 3D accelerated graphics card), they were thrilled to sit and watch me play for a good half hour. Then Laralee got in on the action, and she and I played a team game where it was us against the AI… with split-screen display. Sweet.

Who says free can’t be good?

Talk about great neighbors! There are several people on our block (well, okay, technically it’s a “circle”) who are really interesting and fun. And today one of them sent Laralee a fabulous bouquet of flowers.

One would expect me to do that perhaps, but a neighbor? Now I’ve got to think of something… especially considering that Valentine’s Day fast approaches…

Kyra already has the “look at me, I know I’m cute” look…

The boys are going to be in trouble as soon as they get over their cootie problems.

Multiple choice:

1) Zack with a Hot Wheels race track.
2) Comically colorful phallic symbol.