Friday, December 05, 2003
The day before the storm, and your itinerant blogger has gone off to find the news you can use.
Dateline: Leeds, England. While we have reported previously on your tax dollars at work, here is what is keeping scientists busy in the British Isles while more heady stuff is reckoned out. And this has implications for you at home! Yes, science has now created 'perfect' toast. Stay with me on this one, because it is important.
First, what scientists do is to create something called "the befuddle." This is the argument that they use to get the grant money to proceed. In this case, the "befuddle" looks like this picture on the right:
Now you get to work, and develop experiments with names that correspond to the befuddle. In this case, the H is the thickness of the toast, Cp the specific heat, P the density, T the initial temperature of the toast, w the weight, and subscript a & b the toast and butter respectively. Now you know why it's called a befuddle, because I know I have never measured the thickness of bread or its density before I've toasted it. Maybe that's why it comes out lousy. Anyway, the scientists used the money, which was given to them by a butter company, to toast thousands of pieces of bread and buttered every one, noting which didn't melt right away and which tore the bread. And the conclusion: "the bread must be heated to at least 120 degrees Centigrade, and the butter should be used straight from the fridge, applied unevenly with two minutes of the toast coming out of the toaster. And, the amount of butter should be about one-seventeenth the thickness of the bread." Are you with me on this? Well, i'm befuddled, or more correctly, who cares?
And now from the annals of food science, the product that has taken the country (I don't know which one) by storm! Yes, its the soft drink with the alluring flavor of turkey and gravy! I'm not making this up, a company by the name of Jones Soda has come up with this drink, that kind of looks like weak gravy in the bottle. They sell it online, and they are giving the proceeds from the drink to Toys for Tots. I guess I'll have to support the Marines Toys for Tots drive in another way. By the way, this company has a pretty good web site, which must be better than the Turkey and Gravy soda. I'll take the blue bubblegum flavor please, diet.
Thanks to Dawn for the link, who thanked someone else, for the link to Astonishingtales.com. Yes, you and your web site can be the subject of a Hollywood screen play! The site is an interesting way to parse the contents of a page and insert it as commentary. So, what are you waiting for? Read the exciting bit I did with Winona Ryder and Billy Crystal!
I leave you with a thought and a prayer, my friends. Look at this day and find a blessing in it.
À bientôt!
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Dateline: Leeds, England. While we have reported previously on your tax dollars at work, here is what is keeping scientists busy in the British Isles while more heady stuff is reckoned out. And this has implications for you at home! Yes, science has now created 'perfect' toast. Stay with me on this one, because it is important.
First, what scientists do is to create something called "the befuddle." This is the argument that they use to get the grant money to proceed. In this case, the "befuddle" looks like this picture on the right:
Now you get to work, and develop experiments with names that correspond to the befuddle. In this case, the H is the thickness of the toast, Cp the specific heat, P the density, T the initial temperature of the toast, w the weight, and subscript a & b the toast and butter respectively. Now you know why it's called a befuddle, because I know I have never measured the thickness of bread or its density before I've toasted it. Maybe that's why it comes out lousy. Anyway, the scientists used the money, which was given to them by a butter company, to toast thousands of pieces of bread and buttered every one, noting which didn't melt right away and which tore the bread. And the conclusion: "the bread must be heated to at least 120 degrees Centigrade, and the butter should be used straight from the fridge, applied unevenly with two minutes of the toast coming out of the toaster. And, the amount of butter should be about one-seventeenth the thickness of the bread." Are you with me on this? Well, i'm befuddled, or more correctly, who cares?And now from the annals of food science, the product that has taken the country (I don't know which one) by storm! Yes, its the soft drink with the alluring flavor of turkey and gravy! I'm not making this up, a company by the name of Jones Soda has come up with this drink, that kind of looks like weak gravy in the bottle. They sell it online, and they are giving the proceeds from the drink to Toys for Tots. I guess I'll have to support the Marines Toys for Tots drive in another way. By the way, this company has a pretty good web site, which must be better than the Turkey and Gravy soda. I'll take the blue bubblegum flavor please, diet.
Thanks to Dawn for the link, who thanked someone else, for the link to Astonishingtales.com. Yes, you and your web site can be the subject of a Hollywood screen play! The site is an interesting way to parse the contents of a page and insert it as commentary. So, what are you waiting for? Read the exciting bit I did with Winona Ryder and Billy Crystal!
I leave you with a thought and a prayer, my friends. Look at this day and find a blessing in it.
À bientôt!
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