Curious George

A fountain of material and immaterial information - Things that I spend my days wondering about... and perhaps you have been too? Check out www.figenschou.net for more curious questions (and answers to them)

Thursday, March 30, 2006

Expression of the day - Nothing Doing

Read it in a cartoon today; never heard it before in my life.
Evidently "Nothing Doing" is an expression of refusal meaning no hope of sucess.

Here's another expression I have always been wondering about.
"the situation was all but tense" - when does it mean that the situation really is tense, and when does it mean that the situation is everything BUT tense?

I am sure I have some better example written up somewhere on a chewing gum paper or something, because it has been riding me for years, but I cant come up with a better example right now - will edit back when I find the appropriate post-it.

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Noteworthy information learned from Physics

* The breadmystery: To everyone's woe (at least everyone who likes bread as much as I do-people who lived with me and my breadmachine and a loaf per day can testify that) open faced sandwiches (Us Norwegians like those best) like to fall with the spread face down. And its not just bad luck - its simply physics. With the average height of a bench, a sandwich manages to roll exactly half a round before it hits the ground - so the next time your liver-paste sandwich (or fish-roe? Mmmmmm) lands face down, don't swear yourself for bad luck. Its happens to all of us.

* When you burn the inside of your mouth on a slice of pizza - have you ever noticed that the tomatoe spread burns much worse than the meat filling? This is due to the content of water in tomato-paste, and water has a great capacity to receive and give heat.

* During fall, it is often 32F/0C around small lakes in the forest. This is because the lake will give off heat to the forest - not until it is frozen will it equal out. Thus you will often find if it is a few degrees below freezing in the forest, it will be a little bit warmer around a lake (though more humid, so percieved temperature might be colder - this last inset is just a theory of my own, so take it for what it's worth)

* Toilet and bathtub running counter-clockwise south of the equator.... though this is true on a pure statistical basis, there are many other factors that are much more important than the earth's rotation. Minute movements in the water can remain long after you got out of the bathtub or finished your business on the loo - those have a much stronger effect than the earths rotation.

* Except for Hydrogen and Helium, all the elements in and around us originally come from nuclear reactions through explosions of stars - flung across the universe and now part of us.
Now where does Hydrogen and Helium come from then? I really dont know, so if you do-please let me know.