I saw this picture tweeted by drskyskull, and I must point out that the “powerballs” are indeed, quanta in this paradigm. Not every use of the word implies that quantum mechanics is involved or being invoked.
Quantum means “discrete.” A liquid would represent a continuum.
What it really means.
h/t to ewmon
Penultimate means “second to last.” It does not mean “better/cooler than ultimate,” in the opposite way that you might use infamous instead of famous. (It doesn’t mean an arbitrary one in a group, either)
Google on penultimate guide and you’ll see a plethora of piñatas of misuses.
The Oatmeal: When to use i.e. in a sentence
The lesson from Get Shorty is still funnier and more succinct.
At first I thought the World Cup had been overrun by swarms of bees, and we had solved the colony collapse conundrum. (and just didn’t notice the tiny Gone to the World Cup signs)
This may prove useful in in the event you absolutely must open a bottle of wine but have no corkscrew.
How to open a wine bottle with a shoe.
Technically a shoe and a wall. My French is pretty much limited* to Je ne parle pas Français (and croissant, so I would never say Je ne parle pas croissant) so I assume the narrator is telling you that pressure is force/area, and so any force you exert on the liquid at the base by whacking the bottom of the bottle will result in a much larger force being transmitted to the cork owing to the reduction in area.
What he is probably not telling you is that this is a poor technique for ketchup, and not because French cuisine and ketchup are incompatible or that it won’t work on screw tops (both true) but that ketchup is a non-Newtonian fluid, and when the ketchup clogs the neck of the bottle it prevents air from entering, which is necessary to let the ketchup flow. Don’t invert and bang on the bottom (this holds true for more than ketchup, but I digress). Hold it with the open end down at 45º and tap the neck to induce the shear-thinning.
(*My limited vocabulary also allows me to get the following joke: Why do French omelettes have only one egg? Because in France one egg is un oeuf.)
A couple of weeks ago, an apparently totally made-up new word seemed to set the land-speed record for the jump from “early use” to “inclusion in a dictionary.” On May 12, the word malamanteau showed up in the Web comic xkcd, where it was defined as “a neologism for a portmanteau created by incorrectly combining a malapropism with a neologism.”
It’s not the clearest definition ever written, but the idea is that a malamanteau blends one or more not-quite-right words to create a completely new one. Examples include the classic misunderestimated, bewilderness (as in “lost in the bewilderness”), and insinuendos (innuendo + insinuation)
I think the author missed an opportunity by not asking the titular question.
I have never particularly liked the word meme as it is used throughout the intertubes. Which is probably why I like the definition of it at WolframAlpha
QUT physicist corrects Oxford English Dictionary
Dr Hughes said the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) since 1911 had incorrectly stated that atmospheric pressure was the operating force in a siphon when in fact it was gravity.
“It is gravity that moves the fluid in a siphon, with the water in the longer downward arm pulling the water up the shorter arm,” he said.
Now the illustrious Oxford English Dictionary’s editors are moving to have the definition corrected, after receiving an email from Dr Hughes.
Atmospheric pressure is actually smaller at the short end of the siphon, so it should be obvious that pressure is not the main effect. When the liquid in the long arm drops due to gravity, the cohesion of the particles pulling the remaining water along, and while this is the main effect it isn’t the only one that is present. If the pressure in the tube drops low enough, you would form low-pressure voids, but these are prevented by the atmospheric pressure on the fluid. Siphons have been shown to work in vacuum, but I would guess this is under some limited set of circumstances. Fill a tube, then turn it upside-down and put the end in a pool of the same fluid, and you will get a void at the closed end if the tube is tall enough — you’ve made a barometer. A siphon is going to run into this problem, and the height at which any given fluid will do so depends on the atmospheric pressure.
