Swans on Tea

Using NMR to check the fitness of wines (Don’t bother with this, for multiple reasons, if they have a bottlecap instead of a cork)
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy Makes Sure Wine is Fit For the Queen of England
When wine hits 1.4 grams of acetic acid per liter it is considered bad. Although the average bottle of [...]

Whoop Ass
How many ounces in a proverbial?

Find the amount you’d have to drink of your favorite beverages and/or eat foods to get a lethal dose of caffeine.
Death by Caffeine
473.96 cans of Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi + You = Death.
Whew! For a moment, I thought I was in trouble.
via Physics Geek

Zapperz has a short post on an article that appeared in the NY Times, chumming the waters of fear about radiation from granite countertops. I see that Chad has promised and delivered a bit of a rant, pointing out that popular media could and should do science. The problem is that they don’t [...]

Western Spaghetti. Neat stop-action stuff.
You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video
via Madame Lamb

Fourteen Passive-Aggressive Appetizers by Yoni Brenner in The New Yorker
Top thick slices of country bread with fresh goat cheese. Sprinkle with herbs and bake until crusty; serve to everyone but Jeff
OK, don’t read it. See if I care.

What’s he doing?
Drowning!
The Gin & Titonic
Ice cubes in the shape of ocean liners and icebergs
via the Amateur Economist

Survival of the Sudsiest, or George Will happens upon the fifth law of thermodynamics.
“The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health [...]

The top ten home cooking mistakes.
Not so much mistakes as tips and hints. The author assumes you’re actually cooking, though.
MSG has a nasty reputation and can trigger a fatal reaction in a person allergic to it (a close friend of our maid of honor’s sister died of anaphylaxis after eating MSG), so it’s not [...]

Do grocery stores give us the right mix of nuts?
Does anyone like Brazil nuts? Anyone?
Taking a look at the data from the other direction, we can ask another question. Is there anyone who likes Brazil nuts and doesn’t like any other nut? In other words, how many people might not find any nuts at all [...]

Commentary on Lego fun snacks
excerpt
You can’t tell me that this isn’t a lawsuit just waiting to happen. I can only assume that their next product is fruit flavored thumbtacks.
via Daring Fireball

Evaporative (Swamp) Coolers
I was discussing this with our resident mechanical systems guru just a few days ago — really hot, humid weather had some of the HVAC systems gasping, and if you can’t reject heat anymore, the system stops cooling (a basic bit of thermodynamics lost on some people). He was reminiscing about [...]