Teapot technology is largely ignored by mainstream media (some say unfairly). But today, scientists in France unveil a technique that should breath hi-tech life into a new generation of bespouted objects.
The problem with teapots is their annoying habit of dribbling, particularly at low rates of flow. The phenomenon has achieved such notoriety that it has been imaginatively dubbed the “teapot effect”.
Previous studies have shown that dribbling is the result of flow separation where the layer of fluid closest to the boundary becomes detached from it. When that happens, the fluid flows smoothly over the lip. But as the flow rate decreases, the boundary layer re-attaches to the surface causing dribbling.
Previous studies have shown that a number of factors effect this process such as the radius of curvature of the teapot lip, the speed of the flow and the “wettability” of the teapot material. But a full understanding of what’s going on has so far eluded scientists.
Now Cyril Duez at the University of Lyon in France and a few amis, have identified the single factor at the heart of the problem and shown how to tackle it. They say that the culprit is a “hydro-capillary” effect that keeps the liquid in contact with the material as it leaves the lip. The previously identified factors all determine the strength of this hydro-cappillary effect.
{ A Dallas woman has filed a lawsuit seeking six figures from a former neighbor and landlord for damage she says was caused by cigarette smoke wafting through adjoining walls of her high-end townhome. Cary Daniel and her mother Chris Daniel no longer live in the townhome, and said they need to wear respirators and goggles when they return to the townhome to retreive their belongings. | Dallas News | full story }
We can’t quantify a wine by trying to listen to our tongue. This is because what we experience is not what we sense. Rather, experience is what happens when our senses are interpreted by our subjective brain, which brings to the moment its entire library of personal memories and idiosyncratic desires. As the philosopher Donald Davidson argued, it is ultimately impossible to distinguish between a subjective contribution to knowledge that comes from our selves (what he calls our “scheme”) and an objective contribution that comes from the outside world (”the content”). Instead, in Davidson’s influential epistemology, the “organizing system and something waiting to be organized” are hopelessly interdependent. Without our subjectivity we could never decipher our sensations, and without our sensations we would have nothing to be subjective about.
There are many, many things to be upset about regarding the financial sector — but bonuses are not one of them. Or, at least not the most important thing to be enraged over.
We live in a capitalist system, where there are going to be winners and losers. Its not fair, but it is how it is. (…) What should you be upset about?
• Paying people in year one for risks that last years or decades;
• The “privatized gains, socialized losses” of the current system;
• Dramatically reduced competition in the Banking sector;
• The idea that “Too Big To Fail” is now an official policy of the United States;
• The “gifting” of $100s of billions of dollars to mismanaged banks that should have been allowed to fail in a controlled fashion;
• Bank lobbyists preventing any sort of credible regulation from passing…
Mathematical models and computer simulations usually begin as aids to understanding, introduced when some aspect of natural science proves too knotty for direct analysis. (…) Then the model itself becomes an object of scientific inquiry—a puzzle to be solved.
A good example is the Ising model in solid-state physics, which attempts to explain the nature of magnetism in materials such as iron. (…) One step up from the Ising model—in terms of realism and complexity—is something called the Hubbard model. (…)
Except in the special case of a one-dimensional lattice, the Hubbard model has defied exact mathematical analysis. And computer simulations of Hubbard systems become painfully slow with any more than a few dozen electrons. Calculations are so difficult that no one knows for sure whether various Hubbard systems are conductive or insulating, or what their magnetic properties might be. This situation has led to an extraordinary new strategy for solving the model: putting it to the test of experiment.
YouTube may pay less to be online than you do, a new report on internet connectivity suggests, calling into question a recent analysis arguing Google’s popular video service is bleeding money and demonstrating how the internet has continued to morph to fit user’s behavior.
In fact, with YouTube’s help, Google is now responsible for at least 6 percent of the internet’s traffic, and likely more — and may not be paying an ISP at all to serve up all that content and attached ads.
Credit Suisse made headlines this summer when it estimated that YouTube was binging on bandwidth, losing Google a half a billion dollars in 2009 as it streams 75 billion videos. But a new report from Arbor Networks suggests that Google’s traffic is approaching 10 percent of the net’s traffic, and that it’s got so much fiber optic cable, it is simply trading traffic, with no payment involved, with the net’s largest ISPs.
The new research suggests we are more skilled at “reading faces” than we knew. People are surprisingly adept at assessing sexual orientation from headshots. Five-year-olds can predict election outcomes based on photos of the candidates. We can even guess whether a face belongs to a Democrat or a Republican at a rate better than chance, according to a forthcoming study out of Princeton.
Physiognomy (inferring personality traits from facial features) was outlawed by King George II in 1743, and has for many years been dismissed as a pseudoscience. However, modern research is showing not only that observers readily make inferences about other people’s traits based on their facial appearance, but that these inferences are often highly accurate. For example, people can use facial appearance to judge a man or woman’s sexual orientation and to predict the success of chief executives.
Now Justin Carre and colleagues have added to this burgeoning literature by showing that observers are able to predict the aggressiveness of a man by the look of his face.
It began March 17 when Bear Stearns was forced into a marriage with J.P. Morgan Chase, with the Fed and Treasury as matchmaker. Basics: Bear Stearns complicated creature. What does an investment bank like that do? How does it make its money and where does it get its funding from? Investment banks are in a surprising number of businesses, like most complicated, big companies. Asset management business–managing people’s wealth; small brokerage business; investment banking business, meaning they raised capital for corporate clients, debt or equity capital; provided advice on mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Had very large business called fixed income sales and trading business, trade, underwrite, and sell securities, debt securities, among them being mortgage-backed securities–aggregation of people’s home mortgages. Wall Street innovation in the middle 1980s that in the past decade became huge and profitable. Hedge funds. Added up to a 14,000 person firm, fifth largest on Wall Street. Mysterious: market clearing; role as intermediary for other firms. Opacity, complicated world, a lot of argot, language; disclosure minimal; can’t figure out how they make money; not like selling soap and toothpaste. Other Wall Street firms enmeshed in long term trades on their books, firms on a global basis, interconnected. At the end, Bear Stearns was very short-term oriented in their financing of themselves–the very nature of banking in general. Banks borrow short, depositors’ money which costs nothing to accumulate; risk for the bank is that when you want it, you can go to the ATM machine and get it. They count on the fact that not everybody does that at once. Occasionally everybody does want their money at once. In effect that’s what happened to Bear Stearns, except at an institutional level, borrow short and lend long. They are not a commercial bank, so they borrow in the commercial paper market; but in the end because of their own credit problems, couldn’t do that; so they borrowed in the secured lending market. Needed to borrow about $75 billion a night from firms like Federated Investments, Fidelity Investments, etc.–about 25 firms. In the end they said they weren’t going to make those loans to Bear Stearns any more. Securing those overnight loans with the mortgage backed securities they were manufacturing and in the business of trying to sell, but by March of 2008, they could no longer sell those securities and had to keep them as inventory on its own balance sheet; and then in turn use those assets to secure the overnight lending it needed. Cycle fell apart.
{ William Cohan, author of House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Steet, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the life and death of Bear Stearns. | EconTalk | Continue reading | mp3 }
What do Mao Zedong and Howard Hughes have in common? In maturity, especially later in life, neither one brushed his teeth. Ever.
Hughes—inventor of one of the largest planes in history, owner of Trans-World Airlines, blockbusting director, millionaire (for a while the world’s wealthiest man), and aviation pioneer (a transcontinental airspeed record-holder)—was also a lifelong obsessive-compulsive germaphobe. (…) His aversion to the toothbrush stemmed from its ability to carry invisible contaminants.
The mastermind of China’s Communist revolution and the author of the “Little Red Book,” on the other hand, simply preferred not to brush. Instead, Chairman Mao rubbed his teeth with green tea leaves, giving them a well-documented jade tinge. “A tiger,” he reasoned, “never brushes his teeth.”
The two men may have exposed themselves to health and hygiene problems, but they also—no doubt unintentionally—avoided injury. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates that 2,953 Americans were treated in 2007 for toothbrush-related injuries. The odds a person will visit an emergency department due to an accident involving a toothbrush in a year are 1 in 99,340, making a toothbrush slightly more dangerous on average than a garage door.
By the time I reached my senior year in 1997, my experience with the internet was limited to poking around on AOL while I was home for Christmas. (…)
Seven and a half years ago, Benjamin Palmer (CEO of The Barbarian Group) approached me and asked if I would be interested in starting a company with him. (…)
Our first job was for Nike (through Wieden + Kennedy). Our second, Volkswagen (through Arnold Worldwide). Not too shabby for a start-up working out of Benjamin’s apartment. Ever since then, its been success after success. We received a ton of press, a ton of awards, and never had to go searching for clients.
If I had to pick a year for hip-hop’s demise, though, I would choose 2009. (…) Jay-Z’s new album, “The Blueprint 3,” and some self-released mixtapes by Freddie Gibbs are demonstrating, in almost opposite ways, that hip-hop is no longer the avant-garde, or even the timekeeper, for pop music.
Critics of zoos usually compare them to prisons. Ralph R. Acampora, an associate professor of philosophy at Hofstra University, thinks zoo confinement is closer to pornography. “Both participants in pornography and inhabitants of zoos are slaves to other people’s desire for viewing, for sight,” he explains. All “have their real nature concealed through their exposure,” with zoo animals “reduced to their shapes or colors or stereotypical behaviors.”
