Both of these amazing realizations occurred to me in the last couple of hours.
Which feels better, touching yourself, or being touched by somebody else? Being touched by somebody else does. This is why people like sex so much.
If you keep a two liter bottle of soda stored on its side in the fridge, it loses drastically less carbonation than when stored upright, and will keep its fizz for days longer.
What, physics-wise, would explain the second one?
I don’t know which is more frightening… that you might have just now realized point number one or that you knew it in the past and just remembered it.
Lack of empiricism would be my first guess.
Diffusion.
The liquid and air inside the bottle are in physico-chemical equilibrium. This equilibrium changes with temperature and pressure (bottles often leave the factory with “extra” pressure, which drives more gas into the liquid; this helps explain why the bottle fizzes out after you’ve opened and recapped it, but not why it behaves differently on its side).
The composition of the air inside and outside the bottle are different; the air inside has more carbon dioxide. If the bottle isn’t capped real, real, real tight, the composition of the air on both sides of it will do its best to equalize. So, the gas goes out of the bottle.
Now that some gas has left the bottle’s air, some of the gas in the liquid can leave the liquid into the bottle’s air. And then it goes through the not-so-thigt-cap, etc etc.
If the cap is tight enough to keep the liquid in the horizontal bottle from escaping, it will be tight enough to make exchange between liquid and outside air at the cap zero. (Or a differential, if you’re as much of a stickler as some of my old teachers).
Once the level of liquid is below the cap, having the bottle on its side stops making a difference. Sorry if it wasn’t very clear, it is easier to explain with diagrams and equations 
::snort::
I think we need to know just how SolGrundy found this out. 
What, this isn’t one of the activities at the “Quantum Physics in Shakespeares” symposia with all the burly naked men? What do you do with the bottle after you spin it? 
twicks dear, it ain’t bottles we’re spinning at the symposia.
:smack:
I’m buying their album!
Well, I can forgive the OP about having an epiphany about #1. See, I was single for a long time, and wasn’t having anybody touch me in ways that would be considered pleasant. When I met someone last summer, it was the first time I had been intimate with someone in about six years, and over those six years, I had forgotten how nice it is.
Perhaps some people’s minds ‘forget’ this when they are alone for extended periods of time, since constantly thinking about it just makes lonliness/rejection even worse. I didn’t spend six years constantly craving some woman to put her arms around me (and more), even though the feeling wasn’t any less pleasant for me when it happened.
Isn’t “stunning epiphanies” redundant?
I thought epiphanies were tiny elephants.
Are tiny elephants frighten by giant mice?
My recent epiphany was that haute couteur fashion design has absolutely nothing to do with clothing, it’s really a combination performance art/soft sculpture modeling thing.
Once I realized that, I was able to watch clips of runway fashion without gagging.
Nah, just by wireless mice. With scroll wheels.
I thought that was French for ‘big hair’.
I have no reason to question or accept epiphany #2, however I seem to recall reading that multiple orgasm in women is more common during masturbation than during sex with a partner. ( I’m searching for a cite, but no luck so far. Oddly, I found a bunch of clinical and pseudo- clinical sites and no porn doing a google search; none backed up my onanaphillic claims.)
Also, anecdotally, I’ve talked with women who claim that while parter oriented sex has obvious pleasures, self stimulation is usually better.
From what I’ve heard, sex is very nice, but I don’t think it is inherently true that it feels better to be touched by someone else