interesting things
Photo: John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune
How cold was it in Chicago? Let’s put it this way: it was so cold that
when firefighters fought the fire in a blazing abandoned warehouse, the
water froze while the building was still on fire!
The Chicago Tribune has the photo gallery that you simply must see: Link
– via Metafilter
The International Prototype of the Kilogram in three nested bell jars
(Photo: BIPM)
Did you gain a bit of weight after the holidays? Take heart, you’re not
the only one – even the kilogram itself has put on weight:
Using a state-of-the-art Theta-probe XPS machine — the only one of
its kind in the world — the team have shown the original kilogram is
likely to be tens of micrograms heavier than it was when the first standard
was set in 1875. […]The original kilogram — known as the International Prototype Kilogram
or the IPK — is the standard against which all other measurements of
mass are set. Stored in the International Bureau of Weights and Measures
in Paris, forty official replicas of the IPK were made in 1884 and distributed
around the world in order to standardise mass. The UK holds replica
18 at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL).But despite efforts to protect the IPK and its duplicates, industrialisation
and modern living have taken their toll on the platinum-based weights
and contaminants have built up on the surface.
ScienceDaily has more: Link
Are
there tell-tale signs that your employees are conspiring to commit fraud?
A study by consulting company Ernst & Young in collaboration with
the FBI showed that there are 3,000 words and phrases that fraudsters
commonly use in emails.
Here are the top 15:
Cover up
Write off
Illegal
Failed investment
Nobody will find out
Grey area
They owe it to me
Do not volunteer information
Not ethical
Off the books
Backdate
No inspection
Pull earnings forward
Special fees
Friendly payments
Warwick Ashford of Computer Weekly has the post: Link
– via Quartz
Photo: Andy
Ellwood
What to do when an airline passenger got drunk and become disorderly?
New York businessman Andy Ellwood posted this photo of a man who had a
wee bit too much to drink on an Icelandair flight:
Passanger drank all of his duty free liquor on the flight from Iceland
to JFK yesterday. When he became unruly, (i.e. trying to choke the woman
next to him and screaming the plane was going to crash), fellow passengers
subdued him and tie him up for the rest of the flight. He was escorted
off the flight by police when it landed.
The photos above show how a drop of water freezes on a cold surface:
by forming a sharp point at the top:
Researchers at the University of Twente, in the Netherlands, placed
water droplets on a plate chilled to -20 degrees Celsius and captured
images as a freezing front traveled up the droplet.The photos are published in the American Institute of Physics’ (AIP)
journal Physics of Fluids. The approximately 4-millimeter diameter droplets
took about 20 seconds to freeze. During the final stage of freezing,
the ice drop developed a pointy tip, as can be seen in Figure 1d. The
effect, which is not observed for most other liquids, arises because
water expands as it freezes. The vertical expansion of the ice, in combination
with the confining effect of surface tension on the spherical cap of
remaining liquid, leads to the point formation.
But that’s not all! After the water has frozen, the sharp tip of the
ice attracts water vapors in the air and grows a “tree” of ice
crystals!