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"Glass is a solid."
I assume, (and may very well be wrong) that the poster was attempting to trick the audience, as most people know that glass is actually a slow moving liquid.
At least, I thought glass was a slow-moving liquid because someone clever (I thought) told me years ago that glass is a slow moving liquid, and I've repeated it with great confidence because I am equally clever.
Well, due to the sudden and violent education I received at the hands (pages?) of a book my wife purchased me to read on a recent flight, I now know that glass is an amorphous solid-one of the many more than 3 (solid, liquid, gas) physical states of matter.
So, gentle reader-please select a moment of your own education to share with the rest of us foo-ites.
Don't worry about being shamed-given the scope of all there is to know, we're all nearly equal in ignorance.
Here's a broad one. I could cite others, but I suspect your Googling skills surpasss mine:
There is no clear answer to the question "Is glass solid or liquid?". In terms of molecular dynamics and thermodynamics it is possible to justify various different views that it is a highly viscous liquid, an amorphous solid, or simply that glass is another state of matter which is neither liquid nor solid. The difference is semantic. In terms of its material properties we can do little better. There is no clear definition of the distinction between solids and highly viscous liquids. All such phases or states of matter are idealisations of real material properties. Nevertheless, from a more common sense point of view, glass should be considered a solid since it is rigid according to everyday experience. The use of the term "supercooled liquid" to describe glass still persists, but is considered by many to be an unfortunate misnomer that should be avoided. In any case, claims that glass panes in old windows have deformed due to glass flow have never been substantiated. Examples of Roman glassware and calculations based on measurements of glass visco-properties indicate that these claims cannot be true.
HERE [math.ucr.edu] for rest of article.
Here's a forum [physicsforums.com] with some differing opinions.
It apparently is a solid, but changes form as it expands and cools with temperature. Soft metals such as copper act the same way, if you suspended a length of copper pipe across a gap, eventually it would bend in the middle, but it's clearly not a liquid.
I believe this is what is meant by an amorphous solid.
One common 'proof' of it being a liquid was that in old buildings the glass was thicker at the bottom of the pane, which I'm sure you've also heard. The explanation I got was that glass manufacture in those days couldn't produce the same thickness all the way across a sheet, so didn't it make sense to put the thick end at the bottom for stability?
Turns out both are sweet potatoes [homecooking.about.com], and I've probably never had yams.
I read about this this morning. It's a "glass" that is the world's lightest known solid, it weighs only three times that of air.
Yam tubers can grow up to 2.5 meters in length and weigh up to 70 kg (150 pounds).
I learned last year that I'd never had a yam as well. Blew me away.
Here's another one I heard awhile back and have been passing on completely unsubstantiated:
Natural gas is odor-free, and odorants are added so that a gas leak will be noticed. The chief ingredient in this odorant is garlic, and the gas industry is the largest consumer of garlic worldwide.
I assume that if they were in Alaska, they'd get along swimmingly with the polar bears.
Frozen Smoke
That stuff is COOOOOOOL, I want some! Gonna buy me a small chunk! :)
Natural gas is odor-free, and odorants are added so that a gas leak will be noticed. The chief ingredient in this odorant is garlic, and the gas industry is the largest consumer of garlic worldwide.
The first part is true. As for the second part, does gas smell like garlic? No. I doubt that bit is true.
Before it is delivered to your home, natural gas has mercaptan added which gives the gas a sulphur or “rotten egg” smell to help detect leaks.
Still feel dumb about that.
[webmasterworld.com...]
Allyl mercaptan is a major metabolite of garlic compounds
It would appear that mercaptan can be obtained from many things, including skunks. But indeed garlic too, look like that one is true after all!
CURPLE rhymes with PURPLE.
There is some conjecture about whether this is actually a word, but many, many references agree on it's meaning:
The small of the waist before the flare of the hips. Particularly used in equine terms.
[edited by: Dabrowski at 11:00 pm (utc) on Aug. 28, 2008]
That invariably leads to comments like "Yeah, I know people like that." My favorite counter to that is Ellen Degeneres: "Just imagine if people used the other 50%".
Anyway, the original mention of this idea comes from William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and he is just musing about the possibility that we have a huge portion of our brain that is untapped and could be what we tap into when we have mystical experiences (or something like that). Still, I remember readign that and thinking, "Oh, that's where that BS came from."
How about this. We know that after the Tet Offensive began, support for the Vietnam war collapsed in the United States and the war itself came to be highly unpopular. Right? So give me a guess:
% of US adults who favored withdrawal from Vietnam in January 1971 (thus three years after the start of Tet, which ran from Jan to Sept 1968) who had
- grade school education:
- high school education:
- college education:
I'll give the answer in a few hours or after at least one person dares to guess, whichever comes last.
[edited by: ergophobe at 5:16 pm (utc) on Aug. 29, 2008]
I didn't know, but I know how to find out what I don't know, +/- fudge factor for researching on the internet. Feel free to expound upon the reasoning behind these results.
I was going to say "no looking it up!". Oh well. Those are the same numbers that James W. Lowen gives in "Lies My Teacher Told Me", p. 348, based on a Jan 1971 Gallup Poll.
He asks this question and asks people to guess and by a 10 to 1 margin, people think that college-educated people were more dovish. He gives the typical response as:
- grade school education: 60%
- high school education: 75%
- college education: 90%
It's funny, because the person in my circle (i.e. family, since I was born in 1963) who opposed the war very early was my grandfather (8th grade education). People tried to tell my grandfather that he "just didn't understand." Somewhere around 1974, they quit telling him that for the most part, except a few committed hawks who still don't think we should have pulled out.
A friend who became an anti-war advocate around 1968 said his father with an eighth-grade education opposed the war as early as 1966 and he kept telling his dad he didn't understand the reasons for the war... right up until he got drafted and decided the old man was right.
^ My 8 year old daughter corrected her teacher on that. Don't ask me how that could happen in this day and age.
They sure don't taste like fruits!
A tomoatoe is a fruit
No, a tomato is a fruit. ;)
The female species are more intelligent than their male counterparts.
I didn't know that until I got divorced.
"Door hinge" rhymes with "orange"
Loosely, but it's 2 words. I guess you have found the same web page I did!
Tomatoes are fruits-but if you want to be even more accurate-they are berries.
Interesting. I knew it was a fruit, but what defines a berry?
Just asking, I don't know the answer!
Actually, I just looked up fruit, and vegetable on dictionary.com and a tomato is listed as an example of both. Seems even they don't know where to draw the line.
The female species are more intelligent than their male counterparts.I didn't know that until I got divorced.
That's just a good choice of solicitor!
Vines, which tomatoes grow on are a classified as a type of tree, hence it is a fruit.
Berries are types of fruit, like citruses are types of fruit. Berries have seeds produced from a single ovary.
Yes I was a chef before I did this and I actually took tests on this stuff.
Yes I was a chef before I did this and I actually took tests on this stuff.
And if you want more "clarification" of the tomato issue [newton.dep.anl.gov]...
[edited by: LifeinAsia at 11:09 pm (utc) on Aug. 29, 2008]
Nope. From American Heritage
Berry (def. 2): A fleshy fruit, such as grape, blueberry, or tomato, developed from a single ovary and having few or many seeds, but not a single stone.
