The name of this post was shamelessly stolen from Gil Kalai’s popular series Test Your Intuition. But today’s post will be testing our physics intuition, rather than our mathematical intuition. Although this is a quantum blog, we’ll look at the behavior of a classical fluid.
The question is: what happens when you soak a washcloth with water and then ring it out… in zero gravity?
Think about it for a few minutes before watching the result of the actual experiment below.
Hack It
Warning: click here only if you like to hack and have got spare time on your hands.
A Trivia Puzzle
Lately I’ve been playing trivia at a local pub (which I highly recommend.) One of the categories they often use is a “decade” category. The answer to all of the clues are years in a particular decade (say, for example, the 80s.) Each year is used exactly one time and there are ten clues. Suppose you randomly fill in the years as answers to the ten clues, respecting the condition that every year must be used exactly once. What is the expected number of clues you will get correct?
Homer Jay Simpson Redux
After reading the comments for the Homer Jay Simpson puzzle and getting an email from Ken Brown, I realized that the real puzzle I was thinking of was “into how many pieces can one cut a torus using three planes.”
Homer Jay Simpson's Puzzle
Into how many pieces can one cut a torus using two planes?