Slashdot Mirror
To Boldly Go Where No Mento Has Gone Before
rjwoodhead writes "This past weekend, my entire family learned what it's like to float in freefall aboard G-Force One (recently featured on the Mythbusters' Moon Hoax show). Being science-lovers, we wanted to do some kind of original experiment. So we decided to test whether the Diet Coke & Mentos reaction was affected by the lack of bubble convection in microgravity. At the link you can find the story of how the experiment evolved and how we talked Space Adventures into letting us fool around with sticky and corrosive cola and candy inside their nice clean airplane, as well as high-speed video of the results."
...and more fun too, or so I'm told.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
He says 4 grand in the blog - and over at the zero g site it says 5200 when taxes are included, so it looks like prices have been bumped up. I'm still going to start saving up for it though.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
If "Mentos" is "the freshmaker" and not "the freshmakers" then yes, the singular form is "Mentos". I suppose that the plural would then me "Mentot".
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I really, really should know this but...what's the music in the video?
In the comments of TFA it links to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carnival_of_the_Animals
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
From problems with the camera to issues getting a mento and coke together. Add in some residual gravity, and it was a complete failure.
It was experimentation - not a failure. The blog says they're working on improving the design for next time - this is exactly what scientific experimentation should show. Initial postulate, experimentation, refinement based on results.
Far from a failure, and I certainly enjoyed reading about it and watching the videos.
Cheers,
Ian
As in, the Harry Potter movies ripped it off from Camille Saint-Saens.
More specifically it's the 7th movement (Aquarium) of The Carnival of the Animals.
Whatever you may think about the rules that the TSA enforces (and I agree with Bruce Schneier in that regard), the fact of the matter is that the frontline staff that you deal with have little or no freedom to apply common-sense discretion, and are often placed in situations where they don't have the time, or the background knowledge, to make an informed decision, which means that the default answer is "no". When you couple that with the fact that anyone can be having a horrible day, and some small percentage of people are jerks to begin with (a smaller percentage than most people assume), and multiply by hundreds of thousands of people going through security a day, it's a recipe for horror stories.
...and then he describes how they were pre-briefed and OK with everything...except some clay. Yeah, you heard that right. They were briefed ahead of time, there was no terrorist risk, and these asshats objected to clay because it looked like plastic explosive.
This has nothing to do with the people going through security, and it's only partly the rules. It is absolutely not okay for a TSA agent to "have a bad day" and do anything except apply TSA policies in a humane but consistent manner. If they can't do so on a "bad day", they need to find a different job.
TSA screeners and management absolutely LOVE the fact that despite being badly paid, undereducated, and almost always minorities- being a TSA agent places them at the top of the food-chain in an airport. Their words and decisions are that of god, and with a word they can transform anyone's business trip or vacation into sheer hell. Like the case where TSA screeners forced a new mother to drink her own breastmilk to prove it wasn't an explosive or poison.
They're also, in many cases, dumber than fenceposts. The guy whose Audi key was confiscated because it was a "switchblade", the Macbook Air fiasco...I'm sure there are thousands of similar incidents we never hear about.
For chrissakes, these people banned NAIL CLIPPERS and thought liquid binary explosives were possible to deploy on a plane because they'd seen in the movies that the baddies had these scary devices that mixed different colored liquids...
Please help metamoderate.
I've nothing to contribute, but will do so anyway.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Yet I'm still curious why didn't they just use a glass filled with coke?
Or a tiny scrap of plastic wrapped around the coke, which they could unwind and then add the mentos using their stick.
Your point may be technically accurate, but it's misleading. The only difference between a parabolic flight and an elliptical orbit is that one intersects the Earth, and one does not. Of course, that whole hitting the Earth part kinda sucks, so that's why the airplane pulls out of its dive.
In orbit, the acceleration due to gravity is still substantial. The only difference is, the velocity tangent to that vector is sufficient that you're always falling towards Earth, but you always miss hitting it. You're falling over the horizon.
"(Note that "in orbit" is still inside the event horizon of Earth's gravitational well.) "
Event horizon has a specific meaning, and none whatsoever when not talking about black holes. There is no "event horizon" of Earth's gravitational well. It simply gets arbitrarily small with increasing distance.
"Where experiments would become fascinating is in a satellite in an orbit above Earth that matches the angle and period of the moon's, at a distance that would cause an equal gravitational pull from both Earth and the Moon, and see what happens with two equal but opposite gravity sources effecting the experiment!"
That's not really an orbit, that's a Lagrange point. The effects will be indistinguishable from orbit. Inertial frames of reference are indistinguishable.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
As a nice, bright and shiny illustration of just how safe you are with these people being given free reign is illustrated by the story of how the TSA grounded 9 planes. My favorite quote: "TSA agents are now doing things to our aircraft that may put our lives, and the lives of our passengers at risk".
I am yet to be convinced there is a measurable return on investment for the money wasted on TSA, investment in HUMINT would have been a better use of the budget. and THAT annoys me most when those morons do their usual.
I guess the use of room temperature IQs is essential to stop anyone from thinking about what they're doing, but the result is that they give the impression of being people rejected for writing parking tickets because they were too stupid.
I always thought the people take diet coke instead of normal coke precisely because it is not sticky, because it does not contain sugar. And I also used to believe that most of the corrosive behaviour of coke also comes from the sugar. But that's just me.