As a matter of fact, my gut feel on this thing is that that's kinda what they've actually come up with. A better paper cone. At least in a sense.
Ok, they tried whiskey, and it didn't work. I'm not at all sure why they thought it might. It's dilute alcohol, and if you aren't drinking it one dilute alcohol is pretty much another. Hey, I'll bet Vodka won't work either. Or gin.
Add whatever acids are in sake to whiskey and I'll bet it won't work either.
Sake is fermented rice water. Unlike a distilled alcohol it contains a lot of molecules in solution and very fine particulate matter that came from the rice.
In particular starches.
What do you want to bet that the wood has become infused with these rice starch molecules and micro particles, which act as a flexible binder for the wood fibers, creating a composite material thats kind of a wood like paper, or paper like wood?
Then that's probably a good sake to avoid, because it's expensive, and what everyone 20 years ago would have called "ruined" sake.
Sake is beer, not wine. That "rice wine" thing is a cultural misnomer that is now confusing even the Japanese. Beer does not age for more than a few months at best. Light beers, as rice beer by its very nature is, do not age at all really. They are best consumed as close to being poured from the keg as possible. One tries to keep beer if one needs to. From going bad. It is difficult in most cases.
The very link you provide notes that you can keep most sake for about 2 months. I'm not sure why you'd want to. It's like refusing to drink a Bud until it's past its sell by date. You buy it when you want it, and drink it. Like beer.
These aged sakes are being marketed because the customer has started demanding that their "wine" be properly aged, and frankly, it's driving the brewers nuts. Centuries of tradition and a lifetime of practice to produce the very best, fresh sake, and now they're being forced to put it in barrels and let it go to ruin before people will buy it. For a while they responded with a "customer education" campaign, and some of them report being verbally abused by customers who thought the brewers were trying to rip them off by insisting the fresh stuff was the good stuff.
But, they are businessmen. If that's what the customer insists upon, and is even willing to pay a premium price for, well, then I guess that's what the customer will be sold.
Maybe it will drive the price of fresh down so I can afford more of it. I like sake.
Now if I can only find a way to drive down the price of 25 year old cognac. I like that stuff too, but it's usually E&J for me.
Ah yes, the Swedish lunch box. I remember it well. I used to carry my blue jeans in one, only we didn't call them blue jeans back then. We called them "dungarees" because only shitkickers wore them. Even a shitkicker wouldn't wear dungarees into town, because then everyone would think he was a shitkicker.
That reminds me of the time I was mucking out stalls in exchange for riding time, because shitkicker is actually the sort of boot we wore to do it. And people who wore them were then shitkickers too. The whole shitkicker/dungarees thing just sort of became a package deal.
Please note that I very carefully said "a bit of sun," not "put it in the sun."
A bit of sun often means on the edge of the veranda instead of deep in it. Or early in the day for an hour or so, before it gets too hot. Nor do you leave it there. It's just to start the whole process going quickly, which can take quite a while if you start it in the conditions you're going to keep it in to maintain the process as long as possible. You can extend the period of using the sun by wrapping a wet cloth around the pot. Then it takes longer to dry. When it dries either wet it again or roll the pot to where you're going to keep it.
The degree to which you can produce cooling with the direct sun would obviously surprise you though. It certainly did me the first time I experienced it. Let's return to my evisceral example of the wet Tshirt contest. Find yourself a not too humid day about 30 C outside at noon. (If you're near me in New Holland you'll have to wait a few months to try this I'm afraid. Rather closer to Old Holland about the same?(Without Flanders I might not be here. It's where my ancestor was able to flee to to avoid extermination of herself and the child from which I am descended. It's good to be the King. It sucks to be the newly dead King's exmistress.)) Put on a wet, white Tshirt and go stand in the sun.
You will feel cooler as long as you keep the Tshirt damp. The heat from the sun really doesn't heat you all that much because the heat is being used to evaporate the water, and the water is still able to draw heat from you. If you let the Tshirt dry out you will very quickly start to feel hotter. Go ahead, the next time suitable local conditions prevail try it. Now put that Tshirt on a water jug and keep it damp (the Tshirt is the same thing as that wet cloth on the pot above). Chilled water. In direct sun. Now put the jug in your waterbottle cage and yes, the airflow will make it even colder even faster.
If, however, you have a fan, you can plug in a refridgerator, no?
The clay is wet. The sand is wet. It all has the R value of a wet paper bag, which is to say that it's "anti" insulation.
That's the whole point. It doesn't retain cold, it creates cold. Put on a wet Tshirt on a chilly day and go outside. Get it? It works by heat loss, and thus that's what you're striving to accomplish. The exact opposite of the way you think of a cooler.
The whole thing works by continuous evaporation. It lasts longer in the shade, but it actually gets colder quicker if you dampen the outside and give it a bit of sun.
When the thing goes dry it has the R value of a dry paper bag, which is to say, essentially zilch. You have to keep it wet or the whole thing goes to hell, just like when that Tshirt dries out.
And as I explain in a post above the whole thing actually works better if you use an unglazed porous outside pot. Water seeps through the pot slowly, just fast enough so that the outside always feels a liiiiittle damp, but never wet, and you get the entire surface of the outside pot as cooling area. Throw a real lid on the thing instead of the damp cloth and it'll go for quite some time before you need to add water, although just how long "some time" is is highly variable, since it depends on factors like air temperature and humidity.
No, not particularly. It's a very old trick to make cold water by putting it in an unglazed clay pot, which is porous, and allowing evaporation of the seepage to draw the heat out. I learned it from Mexican Indians 35 years ago and it was effective enough to make water cold enough to make your teeth hurt even in the tropical rainforest. It works even better in the desert where evaporation happens quicker due to the low humidity.
European bicycle racers have been wrapping their water bottles with a damp cloth covering to keep the water chilled for decades as well.
Until a couple of weeks ago I thought everybody knew you could keep cool by wearing a dampened T-shirt, and then I learned that the Pardy's, those paragons of sea lore and self-sufficiency without electrical power, had only just learned this trick. ..from a Mexican. (This serves as an object lesson to me. Even the experts might well overlook simple and obvious tricks that "every child" knows. Even if that expert is me). The water evaporates from the Tshirt drawing heat out of your body.
Wrap something damp around a pot, as is done with the water bottle, and the air inside the pot chills, as does anything inside the pot. Wrap a porous outer layer around the damp cloth, such as another pot, and you moderate the evaporation rate.
This "invention" seems to miss a few of the finer points of the device, thus requiring the damp cloth over the two pots. You need to use an unglazed pot for the outer one. Then you can even put a real cover on the thing and it still works. Better. Longer. Some sort of batting works better as a wick than sand, although sand will do and is certainly freely available.
I don't mean to denigrate this man's intellectual accomplishment. If he thought it up on his own from basic principles the intellectual feat is equal to the first man that did it.
But it really does amount to the reinvention of folklore that exists in one place in some other place.
And the people from Rolex think of it as a new invention because they are modern, mechanistic folk who don't know how to go about living without modern power and machines or what people who do not have such devices already know about doing so.
The Zapotec Indians I lived among for some months knew lots of tricks that had been handed down over thousands of years for surviving with nothing but what you could make with your own two hands. I've got a poncho just about eight feet from me right now that was woven by them on a backstrap loom they made themselves, with wool from sheep they had grown themselves, sheared themselves, carded themselves, spun themselves, using weaving techniques their ancestors had invented themselves (even though many people throughout the world had invented the same thing). Living with them for a few months taught me more about how to think about living than any number of survival books and hiking expeditions had ever done.
Many of the things they did appeared as magic to me, because I was just an ignorant Americano and their technology was sufficiently advanced. ..for the enviroment. Much of the mythology surrounding the "magical" abilities of the Australian aborigine come from the same source, their technology being too advanced for a European to understand. It was lost technology to them.
I was in Mexico in the late 60s (that's where I first heard Abbey Road). The Zapotecs are starting to lose it too now as they begin to sell their weaving to touristas so that they may buy Tshirts and blue jeans. Most of them buy neon colored acrylic yarn from the store now instead of using their own lovely wool, because the Americanos really like the bright "native" colors instead of the natural tones of wool.
Well, their lot will certainly improve with more money at their disposal, and I certainly won't begrudge them that. Doctors cost serious money no matter how "self-sufficient" they are, and they coul
While you're about it, and since survival, attitude and the Titanic have come up, you might also want to google on "Molly Brown."
Margeret Brown was awarded the Legion of Honor for her actions during the sinking of the Titanic combined with volunteer work in France during WWI.
She's one of those remarkable women who's myth actually diminishes her reality, and as much as I like Debbie Reynolds she was completely out of her class in being cast as the "Unsinkable" Molly Brown.
I'd love to see what someone like Jodie Foster could make of the true story as producer/director. Diane Wiest might make a great Margeret Brown, and they've worked together already on Little Man Tate.
Basically it happens because ice is a crystaline structure, and like all crystals it dosn't "form," it "grows." A seed crystal is formed, and this serves as a catalyst from which the ice formation spreads. The salt in sea water is dissolved in solution, it exits in the molecular form, not as discrete "chunks." The salt molecules don't take part in the formation of the ice crystals and basically get "pushed aside" as the crystaline structure of the water is formed. Thus they don't, for the most part, get trapped in the ice as, say, dirt particles do.
You can test this yourself by making and freezing some salt water at home in an ice cube tray. After freezing the water will taste fairly fresh, at least much fresher than it did before freezing. (Some molecules can, indeed, get trapped in the ice matrix if the ice forms around them faster than they are pushed aside. These trapped molecules actually precipitate out of the ice over time, sort of worming their way through the flaws they inherently create in the matrix. That's why we put down salt to melt ice. Perhaps that reference will make it intuitively clearer that while salt and water mix splendidly, salt and ice reject each other. Since sea water freezes in massive quatities at a time quite a bit of molecular salt gets trapped. It takes about three years for such huge chunks of ice to go completely fresh. Have I set a world record for a parenthetical yet?)
Yes, many icebergs do actually come from fresh water glacial ice, (and it's this glacial ice that some Japanese and Americans actually pay ridiculous amounts of money for, generally "harvested" in Alaska), but as you point out yourself, some of them are broken pack ice.
Remember that there is no land under the Arctic ice cap. What precipitation there is acumulates on a thick bed of frozen sea water. In the summer large chunks of the edge of the ice cap break off and form icebergs.
Look at a map of Antarctica. Notice that there is a rather large "fringe" of ice around the land mass. Some of them so large and of such age as be named "ice shelves." Some of these ice shelves are fed by glaciers, but they all consist mostly of pack ice, frozen sea water. Which is fresh.
The Ross ice shelf has been much in the news of late. Very old and larger than France it has started breaking up, creating icebergs measuring tens, and even hundreds, of miles in extent.
Google on "Ross ice shelf" and you'll come up with lots of sites talking about pack ice, glacial ice, the creation of icebergs from both glacial ice and pack ice and the phenomenon of salt water turning fresh when frozen. The fact has ecological import with the breaking up of the Ross shelf since the bergs drift northward and melt over period of years, diluting the ocean.
One of the sites on the first page of hits has lots of pretty pictures, including stages of sea water freezing to create pack ice, including "grease" ice.
I've spent most of my life living in places where I could look out a window and see either the Hudson river or its major tributary the Mohawk (the other day I wrote about the Mohawk being my "backyard." Right now it is literally. That's what you get for living on a river flood plain). I distinctly remember the first time in my extreme youth that I looked at the river and suddenly realized that I could tell it was about to freeze because it had an odd sort of "greasy" look about it. Some four decades later I still like to go out and watch the grease ice form on the river. There's just something about it that fascinates.
Also google on "oceanic conveyor belt" to learn why even a fairly minor dilution of the ocean's waters north of the Ross Shelf might be of some concern.
I havn't forgotten you. The holder of the key to auxiliary library #2 has been out of town and won't be back until early next week.
However, I've follow my hopes and suspicions and discovered that, indeed, now that the major political map redrawing has settled down for a bit atlas publication enjoyed a brief spurt of renewal in 1999-2000.
The Times Atlas of the World has undergone it's first full revision since it was first published in 1967. This is the uberreference atlas. If you want to know where East Bumfuck is and its precise official latitude and longitude this is the puppy for you.
Pricey even at discount, $175 at Amazon, $200 at B&N, this is a serious book. So large and heavy that it not only doesn't qualify for Amazon's free shipping, they tack an extra $2.50 surcharge onto the deal. This is a coffee table book. That is to say if you open it up on your coffee table it'll take up the entire surface area, or more if you have a modern, wussy coffee table. You'll want 2x4 feet for this thing to leave some margin around the edges. Just enough for a coffee cup if you scooch the book all the way over, but not enough for a coffee cup with any sort of safty for the book.
The National Geographic World Atlas has also been revised. This one looks to be about the equivilent of my old Time-Life. Maybe a bit better volume for just looking at all the pretty pictures than the Times, and you can get by with a 2X3 foot table to open it. $105 plus change at Amazon.
Hammond has also revised their atlas. $52 plus change at Amazon. Cheap enough, and good enough, to be the one you give your kids as their own to carry them from grade school through high school.
And not a bad edition to just keep near your desk for a quick lookup of something. 11X14 format, so the maps are at least large enough to be far more readable then the common desk reference maps.
A spate of work has just dumped in my lap, now I have a sneaking suspicion where some of the procedes are going.
If I only knew where I was going to put them. I seriously need to build more shelves, and as I've already written all of my interior walls are already made up out of bookcases. I guess I'll also need to build a 2X4 foot bookstand.
So I guess I'll need to build a home addition too.
When my permanent home becomes a 22' boat, as it is quite likely to do for at least some years, I'm hosed. Well, my mother reads. I have that going for me. I don't think she'll have any particular objection to "storing" them for me.
The wisest kfg makes enough mistakes that this is not the first time, nor the twentieth even, that he has had to mention that he produces an almost continuous stream of minor brainos.
Clearly I meant Europa.
One of the leading factors in my braino production is the fact that I type at 50ish wpm, but think in hundreds to thousands of wps. Thus what I type lags far behind what I'm thinking at the time I type it, sort of on autopilot.
Since I also tend to think in broad swaths, any reference bringing to mind any and all related items, my autopilot often types what I'm actually thinking at the time, rather than what I meant, producing an annoying tendency to actually write the complete opposite of what I mean, since the opposite argument/fact is the most likely to spring to mind for consideration. On one occasion I actually literally typed that white was black and black white when writing about Japanese clothing.
And Europa and Io stand in marked contrast to each other. Thinking about Europa lead to thinking about Io which is what "leaked" out of my fingers when my typing almost, but not quite, caught up to my thoughts.
Note also that on the first occasion I typed "Vista" instead of "Vida." I have no idea whatever what I might have been thinking about when I did that.
I'm even fully capable of producing the most egregious brainos, such as the time I carelessly picked up a hot soldering iron by the wrong end (I'll note, however, that I'm wise enough not to have done that twice . . . so far).
The greatest wisdom, perhaps, lies in recognizing the extent to which one is fallible, and taking that fallibility into account. Where I am called upon to submit writings at some later date I always put the document aside for review the next day, since one tends to read what one meant and not the actual words that are staring one in the face, when one does so "in the heat of the moment."
I also, in such cases, have the luxury of employing proofreaders and relying on the fact that my writings will undergo some sort of editorial review, and perhaps even submission to a fact finder, before publication.
Editors are under no illusions as to the fallibility of authors. Any author.
When writing on Slashdot I just pound away at the keyboard, only rarely even employing a spell checker. Such is the nature of the essentially evanescent forum medium (although, perhaps, not spell checking is just a bit of laziness on my part). One must post now, or forever hold one's piece.
I have yet to acquire sufficient wisdom to refrain from posting on Slashdot, although visits to usenet seem to have become rare.
In future I hope to achieve the wisdom of Lao Tzu in his later years and just shut the hell up. I have the capacity (you'll find gaps of weeks, and even months, in my posting history, for example), but as yet lack the wisdom.
The story also hints at a bit of "survivalist" lore that no longer appears to be common knowledge even among sailors venturing into subarctic climes, and lives have actually been lost because of this lack of knowledge.
The ocean, in human terms, is in many ways a desert , despite representing an immense quantity of water, because it is salt.
"Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink."
Salt water turns fresh when frozen.
If you have a means to freeze salt water, like, oh, say, the air temperature ( salt water in a motionless gallon jug will freeze at a much higher air temperature than the moving, heat retaining ocean) you have a means of obtaining water that is at least fresh enough to drink.
Mariners these days have been imbued with such a strong aversion to icebergs as to appear almost instinctual. They'd as soon intentionally stick their fingers in an electrical socket as approach an iceberg. And yet an iceberg represents the oases of the oceanic desert. An iceberg represents enough fresh water to fill your vessel to the gunwales with the stuff. Approach with caution (insert your Titanic joke here).
The Japanese will pay you eighty bucks a gallon for the stuff, and certain American afficianados of the bean insist it's the only fitting solvent for infusing the product of Blue Mountain.
So if you're ever stranded in a survial raft off the coast of Greenland somewhere with only iceberg water to drink, take comfort in the fact that you're living higher than most people safe on land can possibly afford and feel smug about it. Attitude is the single greatest known factor in survival.
Even in such inhospitable, arid and unhuman wastelands such as London, Tokyo or New York City.
This lake is not so rare as the story might suggest. There are now more than 70 such Antarctic lakes known, Lake Vostok being the largest of them by a good margin.
This lake is rare in the sense of largish perfect diamond, and thus notable, but it is not rare in the sense of unique, and thus truly breaking news.
The contamination of any of these lakes could amount to something of a scientific tragedy, as each may have unique enviromental qualities, but on the other hand, if we restrict our early experiments to the smaller and less significant lakes, if we make a mistake or two learning our way about the process major tragedy might be avoided.
And we're likely to make a mistake or two despite our best efforts. We only learn by making these mistakes. It's called "trial and error," not "trial and continued success."
See the early Bill Cosby routine entitled, "Oops."
So the real scientific import of Vista and her sisters is that we can explore them before we tackle Vostok, and ultimately Io. If we accidentally contaminate Vida it's a possible tragedy. If we contaminate Io it's an unmitigated disaster.
Yeah, I get the joke, but it's the same thing really. What Einstein meant by this statement is that God doesn't gamble with the fate of the universe. The universe follows rules such that God always knows the outcome in advance.
I'm afraid I'm of the opinion that Einstein was partially incorrect in this matter. God does, indeed, not gamble with the fate of the universe, but he may well play dice/roulette with it. The universe is a macro object, even if it made up of an, ummmmmm, unGodly number of small "dice."
God is the house, and thus has house odds. The number of dice, and thus the sample size, at every instant, is always equal to that unGodly number of dice.
Thus God himself may lack omniscience in that he never knows what the outcome of any particular roll of a die is going to be, but on the scale that's relevant to anyone who isn't an atom or smaller ( and few of us are) things are perfectly mechanistic nontheless.
The idea that God is perfectly omniscient is a matter of religious dogma, even when applied to a sectarian pursuit such as science. Maybe God ( or whatever) made it that way on purpose because he isn't omnicontent and likes a bit of entertainment now and again. Just as he made that rock that's too heavey for he himself to lift for the challange of it. He'll be the judge of that, not the Pope or scientific theory. Empirical data always trumps dogma.
None of this has anything to do with the Copenhagen "Interpretation" or other such wishy-washy, quasi-mystical philosophies that have grown up around quantum theory. It's simply straight statistical analysis, such as is applied in the kinetic theory of gases.
I may well be disappointed in my expectations. You, clearly, are and shall remain so, there being no actual grammatical restriction on spliting infinitives in the English language.
Perhaps you would care to boldly go to the provided link.
Interesting interpretation of how to be a good HOST. Sometimes, in civilized countries that is, the word "Honored" is often prepended to GUEST. Especially if they come bearing gifts that you depend upon for your well being.
Ya know, there were things I didn't like about being behind the Iron Curtain during the hight of the cold war, military officers armed with automatic weapons boarding the train at the border crossing and such, and I vowed not to go back until the curtain lifted, but at least, In Soviet Russia, they didn't strip search me and they didn't photograph and print me. They checked my passport. That's what a passport is for. You should read the fine print on your own American issued passport.
Mine goes something like this:
"The Secretary of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen(s) of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hinderence and in case of need to give said citizen(s) all lawful aid and protection."
Clearly that must have been written by some former Secretary of State who had read his Homer.
As I might commend you to do.
The Odyssey is an allegory of how to treat guests in a civil manner, especially those of a foreign land.
Reading with careful attention might increase the turnout at your next soiree.
Civility breeds civility, and this step will do nothing to further the cause of our self-appointed leadership of the civilized world.
It will also do nothing to combat terrorism, thus making the injury even more insulting.
Well, when dealing with RMS one must keep one's terms technically straight. After all, that's why we're here in this thread. So if it isn't (lin)en (t)ow it isn't really lint at all. Just one of those modern fiberous residues that call themselves lint.
If you're wearing hemp it's actually "hemt."
Ramie would be "ramt," rather close to "rant", so perhaps a favorite of the man himself.
Nettle (yes, nettle) would be "nett," or perhaps ".Nett(tm)" if it's from your MS employee polo shirt residue. Perhaps that's why they can be so toxically stinging at times.
Is it from your blue jeans? Perhaps it's "dent."
Of course your jeans are actually cotton (although jean was actually wool fustian, go figure) which comes from the Arabic qutn, which would come out to. . . no, I don't think I'll go there.
Slashdot Mirror
As a matter of fact, my gut feel on this thing is that that's kinda what they've actually come up with. A better paper cone. At least in a sense.
Ok, they tried whiskey, and it didn't work. I'm not at all sure why they thought it might. It's dilute alcohol, and if you aren't drinking it one dilute alcohol is pretty much another. Hey, I'll bet Vodka won't work either. Or gin.
Add whatever acids are in sake to whiskey and I'll bet it won't work either.
Sake is fermented rice water. Unlike a distilled alcohol it contains a lot of molecules in solution and very fine particulate matter that came from the rice.
In particular starches.
What do you want to bet that the wood has become infused with these rice starch molecules and micro particles, which act as a flexible binder for the wood fibers, creating a composite material thats kind of a wood like paper, or paper like wood?
KFG
. . .mysterious far east, ritual, tradition. . .
So how come none of this cachet rubs off on the rubber zori I got at K-Mart?
Maybe I should I should pour some sake over them or something. Bet it'll drive the chicks wild.
KFG
Then that's probably a good sake to avoid, because it's expensive, and what everyone 20 years ago would have called "ruined" sake.
Sake is beer, not wine. That "rice wine" thing is a cultural misnomer that is now confusing even the Japanese. Beer does not age for more than a few months at best. Light beers, as rice beer by its very nature is, do not age at all really. They are best consumed as close to being poured from the keg as possible. One tries to keep beer if one needs to. From going bad. It is difficult in most cases.
The very link you provide notes that you can keep most sake for about 2 months. I'm not sure why you'd want to. It's like refusing to drink a Bud until it's past its sell by date. You buy it when you want it, and drink it. Like beer.
These aged sakes are being marketed because the customer has started demanding that their "wine" be properly aged, and frankly, it's driving the brewers nuts. Centuries of tradition and a lifetime of practice to produce the very best, fresh sake, and now they're being forced to put it in barrels and let it go to ruin before people will buy it. For a while they responded with a "customer education" campaign, and some of them report being verbally abused by customers who thought the brewers were trying to rip them off by insisting the fresh stuff was the good stuff.
But, they are businessmen. If that's what the customer insists upon, and is even willing to pay a premium price for, well, then I guess that's what the customer will be sold.
Maybe it will drive the price of fresh down so I can afford more of it. I like sake.
Now if I can only find a way to drive down the price of 25 year old cognac. I like that stuff too, but it's usually E&J for me.
KFG
Hey man, like, get a load of the curves on that rack!
KFG
Ah yes, the Swedish lunch box. I remember it well. I used to carry my blue jeans in one, only we didn't call them blue jeans back then. We called them "dungarees" because only shitkickers wore them. Even a shitkicker wouldn't wear dungarees into town, because then everyone would think he was a shitkicker.
.now there's a phrase whose origins are. . . Zzzzzzzzzz
That reminds me of the time I was mucking out stalls in exchange for riding time, because shitkicker is actually the sort of boot we wore to do it. And people who wore them were then shitkickers too. The whole shitkicker/dungarees thing just sort of became a package deal.
Package deal. .
KFG
Exactly.
KFG
You wouldn't be that drunken coed refered to above, would you?
KFG
So long as you can keep the cloth damp for that long, no problemo.
KFG
Please note that I very carefully said "a bit of sun," not "put it in the sun."
A bit of sun often means on the edge of the veranda instead of deep in it. Or early in the day for an hour or so, before it gets too hot. Nor do you leave it there. It's just to start the whole process going quickly, which can take quite a while if you start it in the conditions you're going to keep it in to maintain the process as long as possible. You can extend the period of using the sun by wrapping a wet cloth around the pot. Then it takes longer to dry. When it dries either wet it again or roll the pot to where you're going to keep it.
The degree to which you can produce cooling with the direct sun would obviously surprise you though. It certainly did me the first time I experienced it. Let's return to my evisceral example of the wet Tshirt contest. Find yourself a not too humid day about 30 C outside at noon. (If you're near me in New Holland you'll have to wait a few months to try this I'm afraid. Rather closer to Old Holland about the same?(Without Flanders I might not be here. It's where my ancestor was able to flee to to avoid extermination of herself and the child from which I am descended. It's good to be the King. It sucks to be the newly dead King's exmistress.)) Put on a wet, white Tshirt and go stand in the sun.
You will feel cooler as long as you keep the Tshirt damp. The heat from the sun really doesn't heat you all that much because the heat is being used to evaporate the water, and the water is still able to draw heat from you. If you let the Tshirt dry out you will very quickly start to feel hotter. Go ahead, the next time suitable local conditions prevail try it. Now put that Tshirt on a water jug and keep it damp (the Tshirt is the same thing as that wet cloth on the pot above). Chilled water. In direct sun. Now put the jug in your waterbottle cage and yes, the airflow will make it even colder even faster.
If, however, you have a fan, you can plug in a refridgerator, no?
KFG
The clay is wet. The sand is wet. It all has the R value of a wet paper bag, which is to say that it's "anti" insulation.
That's the whole point. It doesn't retain cold, it creates cold. Put on a wet Tshirt on a chilly day and go outside. Get it? It works by heat loss, and thus that's what you're striving to accomplish. The exact opposite of the way you think of a cooler.
The whole thing works by continuous evaporation. It lasts longer in the shade, but it actually gets colder quicker if you dampen the outside and give it a bit of sun.
When the thing goes dry it has the R value of a dry paper bag, which is to say, essentially zilch. You have to keep it wet or the whole thing goes to hell, just like when that Tshirt dries out.
And as I explain in a post above the whole thing actually works better if you use an unglazed porous outside pot. Water seeps through the pot slowly, just fast enough so that the outside always feels a liiiiittle damp, but never wet, and you get the entire surface of the outside pot as cooling area. Throw a real lid on the thing instead of the damp cloth and it'll go for quite some time before you need to add water, although just how long "some time" is is highly variable, since it depends on factors like air temperature and humidity.
KFG
Why the hell don't I frickin' preview for God's sake?
It's common folk lore.
KFG
This is New?
.from a Mexican. (This serves as an object lesson to me. Even the experts might well overlook simple and obvious tricks that "every child" knows. Even if that expert is me). The water evaporates from the Tshirt drawing heat out of your body.
.for the enviroment. Much of the mythology surrounding the "magical" abilities of the Australian aborigine come from the same source, their technology being too advanced for a European to understand. It was lost technology to them.
No, not particularly. It's a very old trick to make cold water by putting it in an unglazed clay pot, which is porous, and allowing evaporation of the seepage to draw the heat out. I learned it from Mexican Indians 35 years ago and it was effective enough to make water cold enough to make your teeth hurt even in the tropical rainforest. It works even better in the desert where evaporation happens quicker due to the low humidity.
European bicycle racers have been wrapping their water bottles with a damp cloth covering to keep the water chilled for decades as well.
Until a couple of weeks ago I thought everybody knew you could keep cool by wearing a dampened T-shirt, and then I learned that the Pardy's, those paragons of sea lore and self-sufficiency without electrical power, had only just learned this trick. .
Wrap something damp around a pot, as is done with the water bottle, and the air inside the pot chills, as does anything inside the pot. Wrap a porous outer layer around the damp cloth, such as another pot, and you moderate the evaporation rate.
This "invention" seems to miss a few of the finer points of the device, thus requiring the damp cloth over the two pots. You need to use an unglazed pot for the outer one. Then you can even put a real cover on the thing and it still works. Better. Longer. Some sort of batting works better as a wick than sand, although sand will do and is certainly freely available.
I don't mean to denigrate this man's intellectual accomplishment. If he thought it up on his own from basic principles the intellectual feat is equal to the first man that did it.
But it really does amount to the reinvention of folklore that exists in one place in some other place.
And the people from Rolex think of it as a new invention because they are modern, mechanistic folk who don't know how to go about living without modern power and machines or what people who do not have such devices already know about doing so.
The Zapotec Indians I lived among for some months knew lots of tricks that had been handed down over thousands of years for surviving with nothing but what you could make with your own two hands. I've got a poncho just about eight feet from me right now that was woven by them on a backstrap loom they made themselves, with wool from sheep they had grown themselves, sheared themselves, carded themselves, spun themselves, using weaving techniques their ancestors had invented themselves (even though many people throughout the world had invented the same thing). Living with them for a few months taught me more about how to think about living than any number of survival books and hiking expeditions had ever done.
Many of the things they did appeared as magic to me, because I was just an ignorant Americano and their technology was sufficiently advanced. .
I was in Mexico in the late 60s (that's where I first heard Abbey Road). The Zapotecs are starting to lose it too now as they begin to sell their weaving to touristas so that they may buy Tshirts and blue jeans. Most of them buy neon colored acrylic yarn from the store now instead of using their own lovely wool, because the Americanos really like the bright "native" colors instead of the natural tones of wool.
Well, their lot will certainly improve with more money at their disposal, and I certainly won't begrudge them that. Doctors cost serious money no matter how "self-sufficient" they are, and they coul
While you're about it, and since survival, attitude and the Titanic have come up, you might also want to google on "Molly Brown."
Margeret Brown was awarded the Legion of Honor for her actions during the sinking of the Titanic combined with volunteer work in France during WWI.
She's one of those remarkable women who's myth actually diminishes her reality, and as much as I like Debbie Reynolds she was completely out of her class in being cast as the "Unsinkable" Molly Brown.
I'd love to see what someone like Jodie Foster could make of the true story as producer/director. Diane Wiest might make a great Margeret Brown, and they've worked together already on Little Man Tate.
KFG
Basically it happens because ice is a crystaline structure, and like all crystals it dosn't "form," it "grows." A seed crystal is formed, and this serves as a catalyst from which the ice formation spreads. The salt in sea water is dissolved in solution, it exits in the molecular form, not as discrete "chunks." The salt molecules don't take part in the formation of the ice crystals and basically get "pushed aside" as the crystaline structure of the water is formed. Thus they don't, for the most part, get trapped in the ice as, say, dirt particles do.
You can test this yourself by making and freezing some salt water at home in an ice cube tray. After freezing the water will taste fairly fresh, at least much fresher than it did before freezing. (Some molecules can, indeed, get trapped in the ice matrix if the ice forms around them faster than they are pushed aside. These trapped molecules actually precipitate out of the ice over time, sort of worming their way through the flaws they inherently create in the matrix. That's why we put down salt to melt ice. Perhaps that reference will make it intuitively clearer that while salt and water mix splendidly, salt and ice reject each other. Since sea water freezes in massive quatities at a time quite a bit of molecular salt gets trapped. It takes about three years for such huge chunks of ice to go completely fresh. Have I set a world record for a parenthetical yet?)
Yes, many icebergs do actually come from fresh water glacial ice, (and it's this glacial ice that some Japanese and Americans actually pay ridiculous amounts of money for, generally "harvested" in Alaska), but as you point out yourself, some of them are broken pack ice.
Remember that there is no land under the Arctic ice cap. What precipitation there is acumulates on a thick bed of frozen sea water. In the summer large chunks of the edge of the ice cap break off and form icebergs.
Look at a map of Antarctica. Notice that there is a rather large "fringe" of ice around the land mass. Some of them so large and of such age as be named "ice shelves." Some of these ice shelves are fed by glaciers, but they all consist mostly of pack ice, frozen sea water. Which is fresh.
The Ross ice shelf has been much in the news of late. Very old and larger than France it has started breaking up, creating icebergs measuring tens, and even hundreds, of miles in extent.
Google on "Ross ice shelf" and you'll come up with lots of sites talking about pack ice, glacial ice, the creation of icebergs from both glacial ice and pack ice and the phenomenon of salt water turning fresh when frozen. The fact has ecological import with the breaking up of the Ross shelf since the bergs drift northward and melt over period of years, diluting the ocean.
One of the sites on the first page of hits has lots of pretty pictures, including stages of sea water freezing to create pack ice, including "grease" ice.
I've spent most of my life living in places where I could look out a window and see either the Hudson river or its major tributary the Mohawk (the other day I wrote about the Mohawk being my "backyard." Right now it is literally. That's what you get for living on a river flood plain). I distinctly remember the first time in my extreme youth that I looked at the river and suddenly realized that I could tell it was about to freeze because it had an odd sort of "greasy" look about it. Some four decades later I still like to go out and watch the grease ice form on the river. There's just something about it that fascinates.
Also google on "oceanic conveyor belt" to learn why even a fairly minor dilution of the ocean's waters north of the Ross Shelf might be of some concern.
KFG
Still out there? Got your ears on?
I havn't forgotten you. The holder of the key to auxiliary library #2 has been out of town and won't be back until early next week.
However, I've follow my hopes and suspicions and discovered that, indeed, now that the major political map redrawing has settled down for a bit atlas publication enjoyed a brief spurt of renewal in 1999-2000.
The Times Atlas of the World has undergone it's first full revision since it was first published in 1967. This is the uberreference atlas. If you want to know where East Bumfuck is and its precise official latitude and longitude this is the puppy for you.
Pricey even at discount, $175 at Amazon, $200 at B&N, this is a serious book. So large and heavy that it not only doesn't qualify for Amazon's free shipping, they tack an extra $2.50 surcharge onto the deal. This is a coffee table book. That is to say if you open it up on your coffee table it'll take up the entire surface area, or more if you have a modern, wussy coffee table. You'll want 2x4 feet for this thing to leave some margin around the edges. Just enough for a coffee cup if you scooch the book all the way over, but not enough for a coffee cup with any sort of safty for the book.
The National Geographic World Atlas has also been revised. This one looks to be about the equivilent of my old Time-Life. Maybe a bit better volume for just looking at all the pretty pictures than the Times, and you can get by with a 2X3 foot table to open it. $105 plus change at Amazon.
Hammond has also revised their atlas. $52 plus change at Amazon. Cheap enough, and good enough, to be the one you give your kids as their own to carry them from grade school through high school.
And not a bad edition to just keep near your desk for a quick lookup of something. 11X14 format, so the maps are at least large enough to be far more readable then the common desk reference maps.
A spate of work has just dumped in my lap, now I have a sneaking suspicion where some of the procedes are going.
If I only knew where I was going to put them. I seriously need to build more shelves, and as I've already written all of my interior walls are already made up out of bookcases. I guess I'll also need to build a 2X4 foot bookstand.
So I guess I'll need to build a home addition too.
When my permanent home becomes a 22' boat, as it is quite likely to do for at least some years, I'm hosed. Well, my mother reads. I have that going for me. I don't think she'll have any particular objection to "storing" them for me.
KFG
As Ogden Nash noted:
."
"Candy is dandy, but. .
Well, you obviously know the rest.
KFG
The wisest kfg makes enough mistakes that this is not the first time, nor the twentieth even, that he has had to mention that he produces an almost continuous stream of minor brainos.
Clearly I meant Europa.
One of the leading factors in my braino production is the fact that I type at 50ish wpm, but think in hundreds to thousands of wps. Thus what I type lags far behind what I'm thinking at the time I type it, sort of on autopilot.
Since I also tend to think in broad swaths, any reference bringing to mind any and all related items, my autopilot often types what I'm actually thinking at the time, rather than what I meant, producing an annoying tendency to actually write the complete opposite of what I mean, since the opposite argument/fact is the most likely to spring to mind for consideration. On one occasion I actually literally typed that white was black and black white when writing about Japanese clothing.
And Europa and Io stand in marked contrast to each other. Thinking about Europa lead to thinking about Io which is what "leaked" out of my fingers when my typing almost, but not quite, caught up to my thoughts.
Note also that on the first occasion I typed "Vista" instead of "Vida." I have no idea whatever what I might have been thinking about when I did that.
I'm even fully capable of producing the most egregious brainos, such as the time I carelessly picked up a hot soldering iron by the wrong end (I'll note, however, that I'm wise enough not to have done that twice . . . so far).
The greatest wisdom, perhaps, lies in recognizing the extent to which one is fallible, and taking that fallibility into account. Where I am called upon to submit writings at some later date I always put the document aside for review the next day, since one tends to read what one meant and not the actual words that are staring one in the face, when one does so "in the heat of the moment."
I also, in such cases, have the luxury of employing proofreaders and relying on the fact that my writings will undergo some sort of editorial review, and perhaps even submission to a fact finder, before publication.
Editors are under no illusions as to the fallibility of authors. Any author.
When writing on Slashdot I just pound away at the keyboard, only rarely even employing a spell checker. Such is the nature of the essentially evanescent forum medium (although, perhaps, not spell checking is just a bit of laziness on my part). One must post now, or forever hold one's piece.
I have yet to acquire sufficient wisdom to refrain from posting on Slashdot, although visits to usenet seem to have become rare.
In future I hope to achieve the wisdom of Lao Tzu in his later years and just shut the hell up. I have the capacity (you'll find gaps of weeks, and even months, in my posting history, for example), but as yet lack the wisdom.
KFG
The story also hints at a bit of "survivalist" lore that no longer appears to be common knowledge even among sailors venturing into subarctic climes, and lives have actually been lost because of this lack of knowledge.
The ocean, in human terms, is in many ways a desert , despite representing an immense quantity of water, because it is salt.
"Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink."
Salt water turns fresh when frozen.
If you have a means to freeze salt water, like, oh, say, the air temperature ( salt water in a motionless gallon jug will freeze at a much higher air temperature than the moving, heat retaining ocean) you have a means of obtaining water that is at least fresh enough to drink.
Mariners these days have been imbued with such a strong aversion to icebergs as to appear almost instinctual. They'd as soon intentionally stick their fingers in an electrical socket as approach an iceberg. And yet an iceberg represents the oases of the oceanic desert. An iceberg represents enough fresh water to fill your vessel to the gunwales with the stuff. Approach with caution (insert your Titanic joke here).
The Japanese will pay you eighty bucks a gallon for the stuff, and certain American afficianados of the bean insist it's the only fitting solvent for infusing the product of Blue Mountain.
So if you're ever stranded in a survial raft off the coast of Greenland somewhere with only iceberg water to drink, take comfort in the fact that you're living higher than most people safe on land can possibly afford and feel smug about it. Attitude is the single greatest known factor in survival.
Even in such inhospitable, arid and unhuman wastelands such as London, Tokyo or New York City.
KFG
This lake is not so rare as the story might suggest. There are now more than 70 such Antarctic lakes known, Lake Vostok being the largest of them by a good margin.
This lake is rare in the sense of largish perfect diamond, and thus notable, but it is not rare in the sense of unique, and thus truly breaking news.
The contamination of any of these lakes could amount to something of a scientific tragedy, as each may have unique enviromental qualities, but on the other hand, if we restrict our early experiments to the smaller and less significant lakes, if we make a mistake or two learning our way about the process major tragedy might be avoided.
And we're likely to make a mistake or two despite our best efforts. We only learn by making these mistakes. It's called "trial and error," not "trial and continued success."
See the early Bill Cosby routine entitled, "Oops."
So the real scientific import of Vista and her sisters is that we can explore them before we tackle Vostok, and ultimately Io. If we accidentally contaminate Vida it's a possible tragedy. If we contaminate Io it's an unmitigated disaster.
KFG
Yeah, I get the joke, but it's the same thing really. What Einstein meant by this statement is that God doesn't gamble with the fate of the universe. The universe follows rules such that God always knows the outcome in advance.
I'm afraid I'm of the opinion that Einstein was partially incorrect in this matter. God does, indeed, not gamble with the fate of the universe, but he may well play dice/roulette with it. The universe is a macro object, even if it made up of an, ummmmmm, unGodly number of small "dice."
God is the house, and thus has house odds. The number of dice, and thus the sample size, at every instant, is always equal to that unGodly number of dice.
Thus God himself may lack omniscience in that he never knows what the outcome of any particular roll of a die is going to be, but on the scale that's relevant to anyone who isn't an atom or smaller ( and few of us are) things are perfectly mechanistic nontheless.
The idea that God is perfectly omniscient is a matter of religious dogma, even when applied to a sectarian pursuit such as science. Maybe God ( or whatever) made it that way on purpose because he isn't omnicontent and likes a bit of entertainment now and again. Just as he made that rock that's too heavey for he himself to lift for the challange of it. He'll be the judge of that, not the Pope or scientific theory. Empirical data always trumps dogma.
None of this has anything to do with the Copenhagen "Interpretation" or other such wishy-washy, quasi-mystical philosophies that have grown up around quantum theory. It's simply straight statistical analysis, such as is applied in the kinetic theory of gases.
KFG
I may well be disappointed in my expectations. You, clearly, are and shall remain so, there being no actual grammatical restriction on spliting infinitives in the English language.
Perhaps you would care to boldly go to the provided link.
Cloven infinitives are not a sign of the Devil
KFG
Interesting interpretation of how to be a good HOST. Sometimes, in civilized countries that is, the word "Honored" is often prepended to GUEST. Especially if they come bearing gifts that you depend upon for your well being.
Ya know, there were things I didn't like about being behind the Iron Curtain during the hight of the cold war, military officers armed with automatic weapons boarding the train at the border crossing and such, and I vowed not to go back until the curtain lifted, but at least, In Soviet Russia, they didn't strip search me and they didn't photograph and print me. They checked my passport. That's what a passport is for. You should read the fine print on your own American issued passport.
Mine goes something like this:
"The Secretary of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen(s) of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hinderence and in case of need to give said citizen(s) all lawful aid and protection."
Clearly that must have been written by some former Secretary of State who had read his Homer.
As I might commend you to do.
The Odyssey is an allegory of how to treat guests in a civil manner, especially those of a foreign land.
Reading with careful attention might increase the turnout at your next soiree.
Civility breeds civility, and this step will do nothing to further the cause of our self-appointed leadership of the civilized world.
It will also do nothing to combat terrorism, thus making the injury even more insulting.
I fully expect people to not visit in droves.
KFG
Well, when dealing with RMS one must keep one's terms technically straight. After all, that's why we're here in this thread. So if it isn't (lin)en (t)ow it isn't really lint at all. Just one of those modern fiberous residues that call themselves lint.
If you're wearing hemp it's actually "hemt."
Ramie would be "ramt," rather close to "rant", so perhaps a favorite of the man himself.
Nettle (yes, nettle) would be "nett," or perhaps ".Nett(tm)" if it's from your MS employee polo shirt residue. Perhaps that's why they can be so toxically stinging at times.
Is it from your blue jeans? Perhaps it's "dent."
Of course your jeans are actually cotton (although jean was actually wool fustian, go figure) which comes from the Arabic qutn, which would come out to. . . no, I don't think I'll go there.
KFG
. . .always a pile of freshly killed feathers on the road.
Which makes a nice counterpoint to the armadillos. That curl up in a ball defence don't work so hot when your adversary is a Peterbuilt.
Do you guys arrange to hit them every quarter mile so you can use them as milage markers, or is that just something the 'dillos do on their own?
KFG
Yeah, my French sucks.
I think it has something to do with being so close to Quebec.
KFG