Archive for the “science!” Category

I thought I was pretty cool, scoring seat 10A on the 757 to San Francisco. It’s a great seat because there is no 9A so there’s pretty extensive legroom but also full recline and real window. I’m all about the Seatguru thing. I figured I would stretch my legs out and get some sleep. The infants and toddlers in row 11 had other plans.

Anyway, after the plane passed over Yosemite and started the approach, I chanced to look out the window somewhere around San Jose and saw the strangest thing. I wasn’t able to take a picture but here’s Google maps’ view of the area.  If anything, the colors I saw were even brighter.

What gives?  Designer algae ponds?  Map of Canada?  Colored sand farms?  Well, my crack(ed) research team has discovered that these are just humble salt flats, evaporating away so our margarita glasses won’t be naked.

Here’s a nice shot from flickr of the same or a similar nearby area, and some notes on the whole business from the rocket scientists at NASA.

Safely settled in to San Francisco, I’m off to check out a new place called, oddly enough, the Salt House.

OK, it’s not exactly a cheese sandwich with the image of the BVM on in, but as household miracles go, I’m thinking this one is much more useful if less lucrative.  After dinner, I was looking around for a snack, and I found a nice bar of dark chocolate, but it had gone all bloomy.

As per the all-knowing wikipedia, with my emphasis:

Chocolate is very sensitive to temperature and humidity. Ideal storage temperatures are between 15 and 17 °C (59 to 63 °F), with a relative humidity of less than 50%. Chocolate should be stored away from other foods as it can absorb different aromas. Ideally, chocolates are packed or wrapped, and placed in proper storage with the correct humidity and temperature. Additionally chocolate should be stored in a dark place or protected from light by wrapping paper. Various types of “blooming” effects can occur if chocolate is stored or served improperly. If refrigerated or frozen without containment, chocolate can absorb enough moisture to cause a whitish discoloration, the result of fat or sugar crystals rising to the surface. Moving chocolate from one temperature extreme to another, such as from a refrigerator on a hot day can result in an oily texture. Although visually unappealing, these conditions are perfectly safe for consumption.

So I figured I’d suck it up, and I put a couple of pieces on a dish and sat down to do some work.  When I reached over to take a piece, I saw that the chocolates - which had been sitting on my Apple Time Capsule - had miraculously returned to their dark and luscious state!

O. M. G.

Just to make sure I wasn’t losing it, I went and got another piece of the bloomed chocolate and put it on the dish for comparison.  Check it out:

Observe the ugly, waxy, bloomed and blemished chocolate on the left, and a piece of the same bar on the right after mere minutes sitting on the Time Capsule.

Is it the heat from the drive?  The radiation from the WiFi?  Cosmic emanations from Steve J-bs?  I’m not really sure I want to know, I’m just glad my chocolate is back in shape.

From the excellent virtual pages of Strange Maps comes this ducky item.

On January 10 [1992], a container holding almost 29,000 plastic bath toys spills off a cargo ship into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and breaks open. The unsinkable toys, which were en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma (Washington), include a lot of iconic yellow rubber ducks that have since been caught up in the world’s ocean currents and continue turning up on the most improbable shores. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer, saw from the beginning how valuable the rubber duckies could be in tracing ocean currents, and correctly predicted their trip through the Northwest Passage.

Apparently these buoyant and nearly indestructible little quackers have helped scientists track ocean currents and are showing up on beaches on several continents, and have become collectors items of a weird sort.  Here’s a link to the turgid wikipedia entry on the Friendly Floatees.  Keep your eyes peeled at the beach this summer.