Slashdot Mirror
Pancake Physics to Cut Batter Splatter
Anonymous Coward writes "The headline just about says it all on this one. A physics grad student in the UK has come up with the mathematical formula for how to flip a pancake and have it land correctly back in the pan. The BBC
has the details."
Americans should bear in mind that what are called "pancakes" in England are called "crepes" in America. What are called "pancakes" in America are called "Scotch pancakes" in the south of England, and "drop scones" in Scotland and the north of England. Meanwhile, "flapjacks" are a kind of oaty biscuit. Confused yet?
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
Not sure about other countries but last Tuesday (4th) was Shrove Tuesday in the UK when we all make pancakes. For the religious amongst you the word 'Shrove' refers to the practice of confessing of sins, then afterwards the fast of Lent could be considered a penance of faults committed. Thats why the BBC ran the story on Tuesday. However, most of us just love eating the pancakes!
-- "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!"
AFAIUI it simply means that the pancake needs to spin at such a rate that it will flip 180 degrees between leaving the pan and returning. Given that it will not fall back flat unless the flip is 180n degrees, n integral, this is pretty blindingly obvious.
Unfortunately, the equation is just that and doesn't tell you how to achieve flip rate nirvana. So here is my guide:
- First, use a nonstick pan with a gently sloping edge.
- Second, use just enough oil to ensure the crepe can slide around smoothly.
- Third, in order to flip, start by lowering the far edge of the pan so the crepe starts to slide towards the edge.
- Then, as the crepe reaches the edge, rotate the elbow upwards so that the crepe slides off the edge in an upward direction. This provides the spin. The speed doesn't need to be too high. As the crepe flips over, catch it with the pan horizontal.
- Start with small crepes and build up.
- When I was first shown this technique in a creperie in Normandy, by the end of the evening I could flip them up to ceiling height and still recover them.
Creperies that use precooked crepes made on industrial conveyor belts are of course beyond the pale.Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
...although less spectacular
l
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/1995/40409.htm
Ever heard of RISC OS It's been around for about ten years now. It was used widely in schools (until Blair started getting chummy with a certain Mr Gates) on British designed hardware by Acorn. Now-a-days the Brits contribute a lot to the open source community. Alan Cox and Russell King are two notable personalities.
I for one definitely don't say give me microsoft and probably use more european software than american software. My hardware is mainly Taiwanese, Korean or Japanese except for the SGIs. The US is definitely not the fount of all knowledge and technology.
But when it comes to making an Operating System or even choosing one for their schools, they simply turn to America and say, "Give us Microsoft". Amazing.
It was not always the way. After all, business computing began here with the Lyons Electronic Office, and in the 80's schools used the BBC Micro, developed by Acorn in Cambridge.
The rot didn't set in until the 90s, and a once thriving British computer industry went down the pan. For shame.
I blame the government. It doesn't help when we have a PM keen to lick arse, whether that arse be Bill Gates' or Dubya Bush's.
"Information wants to be paid"
Oh yes, and if you look in your history books you'll find that C owes a lot to a certain language called BCPL developed by Martin Richards at Cambridge University in the 60's ...
Well, where I come from, we don't use no spatulas to toss pancakes... (Although some more cautious people do slip them out of the pan onto a plate, then drop them back in upside down.) English pancakes are so wide and thin that a spatula's likely to just tear them. Instead you have to use the showing-off-method.
;-)
First you make a circular movement with the pan to ensure that the pancake hasn't stuck and overcome static friction.
Then you tilt the end of the pan down slightly and make a short, sharp inward movement, to get the pancake sliding outwards.
Then you sharply flick the pan up, so that the pancake goes between one and two feet in the air (more if you're feeling cocky) and also spins enough that it lands in the pan the other way up.
I'll be very impressed if they invent a machine which can repeatably toss pancakes. There are an awful lot of variables, which he seems to ignore. But then he is a physicist, not an engineer.
I know this is really off topic, but it is on, if the topic is "reasonibly absurd science". In Nature last December, they decided to publish a short note about an Austrailian matehmatician's work on The Best Way To Lace Your Shoelaces
No joke.
In problems driven solely by gravity, the mass typically drops out. Thank you, Equivalence Principle.
A pancake is a nicely simple and symmetric object. Indeed, the symmetry means that whenever you flip it, you're doing so about a stable axis. Other shapes, not so nice... your turkey might tumble wildly. Also, while the mass drops out of the angular velocity, it does not drop out of the formula for the needed force -- and a turkey tends to be quite a bit more massive than a crepe.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
And parlimentary democracy was instituted in the 13th Century with the signing of the Magna Carta. By the 17th Century we'd had a civil war during which the King was removed from power and only parliment ruled the country. So Britain was a democracy at least a century before the American Revolution
I think the Athenians have prior art. You can have credit for the court system, with seperate judge, jury, and executioner, though. That, in my opinion, is as or more important.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Pancake Algebra
not quite the same, but thoroughly enjoyable !
Francis.