Leftover tea pic

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I may be English, but I’m not a huge fan of tea. Sure, I’ll drink it if I’m thirsty and the only other option is battery acid, but it has to be said that thankfully, this is not a situation I’ve ever found myself in. Yet.

Michael Davis, a Canadian resident, had some leftover tea and, rather than pouring it into the sink like any sensible person would have done, he flung it dramatically into the freezing air with this rather spectacular result:

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Yes. That’s impressive.

Other images on Michael’s Flickr which didn’t quite manage the same level of sheer wonder (this one and this one) suggest that he had been drinking a lot of tea that morning, which, given that he apparently ended up chucking away the last fifty (or more) percent of each brew, seems both foolish and wasteful. Silly boy.

So why does tea do this? Wired knows.

A pot of boiling water can be thrown into the air on a cold winter day, and it freezes in mid air creating a shower of ice crystals. Whereas a pot of cold water thrown into the air comes down as large blobs of water. This happens because the hot water is so close to being steam, that the act of throwing it into the air causes it to break up into tiny droplets (hot water is less viscous than cold water, listen to the sound it makes when you pour it in the sink). The small water droplets have a large surface area which allows for a great deal of evaporation, this removes heat quickly. And finally, the cooled droplets are so small, that they can be easily frozen by the winter air.

Michael tells us that it was -40 degrees when he took the photo. He doesn’t say if that’s Fahrenheit or Celsius, but THAT DOESN’T MATTER! because -40 is the magic number at which these two temperature scales magically cross, in a magical manner.

40 degrees (Celsius) like it’s likely to be in the Western Cape today is equal to 104 degrees Fahrenheit. I wouldn’t advise throwing boiling water into the air above your head (or to be honest, throwing boiling water anywhere) in those sort of temperatures (or to be honest, in any sort of temperatures).

The results are unlikely to be as pretty as Michael’s.

Goo-d Stuff

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I love this amazing Sheffield-themed design and digital art stuff from Steel City-based designer and digital artist Matt Cockayne, t/a Goo Design.

I freely admit that most of the mugs, t-shirts etc will probably mean a limited amount to anyone from outside Sheffield, but I was toying with doing this post when the man himself tweeted this, which swung it immediately.

r2d2

That is, of course, R2-D2, clearly displaying amorous feelings for a Bessemer Converter – one of the staples of steel production in Sheffield since the mid-1800s. However, given the size difference (here’s my daughter standing underneath a reasonably sized model)…


…this probably “in’t t’droid he were lookin’ fer”.

Click here to have a look at Matt’s work and the products available on his shopify site.

P.S. Having been brought up around both the initial Star Wars franchise and the Kelham Island Industrial Museum, I am astounded, somewhat incredulous and somewhat disappointed that I had never spotted this now strikingly obvious R2D2/Bessemer Converter similarity before.

Stevie’s Positive Thoughts

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Happy stuff from robot-voiced super scientist Steven “Happy Happy Joy Joy” Hawking this week:

Professor Stephen Hawking says a disaster on Earth within the next 1000 or 10,000 years is a “near certainty”.

Oh good.

“We face a number of threats: nuclear war, global warming and genetically engineered viruses,” Hawking told the Radio Times ahead of his BBC Reith Lecture.

“Although the chance of a disaster on planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, to a near certainty in the next 1000 or 10,000 years.”

The first sad thing about Professor Hawking’s warning is that he tends to be correct on the stuff that he shares with us, his work on the wave function of the universe, singularities of gravitational collapse and cosmology, and the development of irregularities in a single bubble inflationary universe springing immediately to mind.

The second sad thing about his warning is that it was an answer to a question posed by a schoolboy who wanted to know whether the world was likely to end at the hand of humans or from a natural disaster.

Is it just me, or should schoolboys rather not be thinking about that sort of thing? They should be thinking about whose side they’re going to be on in the break time footy match, or – if they’re older – Katie* Chapman in the Lower Sixth. Not impending doom. Not the end of civilisation.
No man – something’s up there. This schoolboy needs some sort of assessment before he goes postal on his classmates, especially now he’s had this sort of answer from the world’s leading genius.

* Or Keith Chapman. Or both. Each to their own. 

Return to the Oos Kaap

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Last year’s journey to the Wild Coast of the Eastern Cape apparently proved to be such a success with the kids that having offered them the opportunity to return, it looks like we’re going to head back there this winter.

Last time was memorable in many ways: some good, some not. Even the journey there gave us two road related blog posts. This time around, we’ll know which activities we need to book in advance, how the resort works and have the opportunity to catch up on the stuff we missed out on last time.

The birdlife round there is spectacular – hence this quota photo of a Giant (it’s not actually that big) Kingfisher* (which has the excellent Linnean name of Megaceryle maxima – half Roman Emperor, half Transformer robot villain) – and with the new camera, I’m already looking forward to some pointing and shooting.

Anyway, that’s something positive to think about (if not the drive), albeit a loooong way off right now.

* Other kingfishers on show last time around included the Pied and the Brown-hooded.

Coincidence?

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DA leader Mmusi Maimane makes “a keynote speech” on Race and Identity in his party and in South Africa, and suddenly Twitter is “mysteriously” unavailable?

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Could it be that the ANC have blocked access so that no-one was able to hear or engage with this landmark address?

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Probably not, to be honest.

UPDATE: Still, the fact that this was a worldwide outage hasn’t stopped some people (namely Mmusi’s wife) from thinking the worst:

Do you really think they’re that bothered? Really?
Eish. Bit of a stretch.