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The most interesting fact you know


hogmaw

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Some really good points raised there even one from a guy that visited the same place i did and confirms that there is no slight of hand, funny shaped bolws or any other dodgy business going on,

 

i suppose what would be useful now is for one of the Aussies to run a sink and let that drain and i do the same and if the both go the same way then fine case closed.

 

However i still stand by what i saw and they never had specially designed basins it was a bucket and funnel and match.

 

richie

 

In the notorious Project Alpha scam, James Randi paid two young proteges to infiltrate the University of ??? (Washington??) paranormal research unit - funded with a bidget of several hundred thousand dollars. They kept the scientists convinced for several years.

 

The point being that even a team of sceptical, highly intelligent and educated scientists can be mistaken about what they are seeing - if you don't know exactly what you're looking for you don't have a hope in hell of figuring it out.

 

It's difficult to discount the evidence of your own eyes, but magicians regularly do things in front of street audiences, often with the minimum of equipment, that we know must be impossible. I suggest that this is the same thing.

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I would think permanent bowls would be even easier to tamper with, but never mind. The fact is the coriolis effect is caused because (in simple terms) the equator is travelling east at just over 1000mph, and the north pole is travelling east at 0mph, so the further north you go the slower you are travelling eastwards. Therefore a large body such as a hurricane will begin to spin in an anti-clockwise rotation in the northern hemisphere because it's southernmost point is travelling eastwards quicker than it's northernmost point is.

the difference in easterly velocity of a 2 litre jug of water will have such a tiny effect that it is FAR outweighed by other factors, such as the shape of the bowl and forces exerted on it by humans.

 

Sorry.

 

I've just had a quick go at calculating this. Anyone with decent maths/physics will probably take apart my shonky methods/assumptions, but here goes.

 

The question is, how much slower would the most northerly part of the water in a plughole vortex be travelling than the most southerly part, due to the Earth's rotation (if you're in the northern hemisphere)?

 

OK, the Earth is 40,000km in circumference. Therefore it is 10,000 km from equator to axis of rotation (i.e. north pole, or thereabouts). The equator is moving at 40,000km/day = 462m/s, whereas at the pole, you're simply spinning like a top = 0 m/s.

 

So for every 1 km travelled North, you are travelling 462/10,000 m/s = 0.0462m/s more slowly.

 

The most northerly section of a 100km hurricane would be travelling at 4.62m/s slower than the southern part.

 

How about some water just above a 5cm plughole? The difference between how quickly the northern side and southern side are rotating is presumably 0.00005km * 0.0462 = 0.0000023m/s. That's a difference of two millionths of a metre a second (= two thousandths of a millimetre per second).

 

Without knowing much about it, on the surface this sounds pretty insignificant to me and, as Trev says, not really enough to cause any sort of effect.

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I've just had a quick go at calculating this. Anyone with decent maths/physics will probably take apart my shonky methods/assumptions, but here goes.

 

The question is, how much slower would the most northerly part of the water in a plughole vortex be travelling than the most southerly part, due to the Earth's rotation (if you're in the northern hemisphere)?

 

OK, the Earth is 40,000km in circumference. Therefore it is 10,000 km from equator to axis of rotation (i.e. north pole, or thereabouts). The equator is moving at 40,000km/day = 462m/s, whereas at the pole, you're simply spinning like a top = 0 m/s.

 

So for every 1 km travelled North, you are travelling 462/10,000 m/s = 0.0462m/s more slowly.

 

The most northerly section of a 100km hurricane would be travelling at 4.62m/s slower than the southern part.

 

How about some water just above a 5cm plughole? The difference between how quickly the northern side and southern side are rotating is presumably 0.00005km * 0.0462 = 0.0000023m/s. That's a difference of two millionths of a metre a second (= two thousandths of a millimetre per second).

 

Without knowing much about it, on the surface this sounds pretty insignificant to me and, as Trev says, not really enough to cause any sort of effect.

 

 

That's all very well, but will the plane take off?!

 

(Very interesting stuff though) :)

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WD-40 literally stands for Water Displacement, 40th attempt. That's the name straight out of the lab book used by the chemist who developed WD-40 back in 1953. The chemist, Norm Larsen, was attempting to concoct a formula to prevent corrosion -- a task which is done by displacing water. Norm's persistence paid off when he perfected the formula on his 40th try.

 

The opposite of a Vacuum is a Plenum.

 

Alexander Graham bell never phoned his wife or mother as they (His Wife and Mother) were both Deaf.

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Boiling water freezes quicker than cold water.

 

 

Actually, I need to look into this one cos I heard it and assumed it was true, it might be one of those things that's bandied around as fact and is actually hogwash!

 

Yeh, it's true, something to do with the density of it I think?

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Boiling water freezes quicker than cold water.

 

Yeh, it's true, something to do with the density of it I think?

 

I've heard that too, I would offer to try it out, but I've just filled my freezer up and it took me ages to pack it all into place... All a part of living on less than a million pounds a year, else I'd have paid some other f**ker to load my freezer for me :)

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