Oh, this is just awesome, from a geeky reference frame: The case of the 500-mile email
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,” the chairman explained.
I choked on my latte. “Come again?”
“We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles from here,” he repeated. “A
little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther.”
(There’s a factor of two that’s not explained in the story, for round-trip vs. one-way, but still …)
Typically seen in polar regions, the vertical columns of light have been appearing along with frigid temperatures at lower latitudes this winter.
Light pillars appear when artificial light or natural light bounces off the facets of flat ice crystals wafting relatively close to the ground.
[P]olymers in a solution that isn’t at a uniform temperature behaved in an unexpected way, with the longer molecules drifting toward the coldest region and the very shortest ones drifting toward the warmest region.
Reminiscent of the Brazil Nut sorting problem