Gauge blocks are metal (or sometimes ceramic) blocks that are used as dimensional standards. They are very flat, smooth, and precise. They’ve been around for over a hundred years.
Gauge blocks can be stacked so that their dimensions add. This is called wringing. When wrung properly, the blocks will stick to each other.
Here’s the interesting fact: no one knows precisely why the blocks stick together when they’re wrung. We know it’s not due to Van der Waals forces, since the blocks are not close enough together for this force to operate. We also know that air pressure can’t fully account for it, since blocks can be wrung together in a vacuum. Our best guess is that it has something to do with the surface tension of the thin film of oil between the blocks, and/or “molecular attraction,” whatever that means.
Here’s a photo from a 1907 toolmaking book of 36 gauge blocks wrung together and held horizontally:
I knew. South America has a different ethnic makeup than North America, but it’s not strange at all. All crowded societies had people who emigrated (or were sold/contracted) to the New World to try their luck. It wasn’t just the U.S. and Canada.
Speaking of particular ethnic groups in far-flung places, I just saw a documentary about the large (mostly German) Jewish community in Shanghai during the 1930s and 40s. The doc pointed out that getting out of Germany during the Third Reich wasn’t the problem for Jews, but rather finding a country that would accept them. In the whole world, there was only one place you could move to without a visa or passport. Thanks to some byzantine treaties from the 19th Century, Japanese occupied Shanghai was an “open city” meaning if a Jew fleeing from Hitler could afford a ticket on the Trans Siberian Railroad or a ship, they could just show up and the small established community of Iraqi and Russian Jews in Shanghai would help them find homes and jobs. When WWII broke out in 1939 it made sea travel impossible and travel through the Soviet Union ended with Hitler’s invasion in 1941. Japan’s war with the US later that year cut off the community completely. About 16,000 Jewish expats in Shanghai were eventually confined to a ghetto by the Japanese until the war ended. Although many died of disease and famine during the war, the Jewish community fared no worse than their Chinese neighbors. When immigration to the US, Israel, and elsewhere opened up after the war, the Jewish community in Shanghai all but evaporated.
And it seems like Brazil got all sorts. I’ve had many Brazilian (college) students, and they’ve looked/acted/sounded so different from each other… even the two that unbeknownst to each other came from villages 20 km from each other.
Japan has special visas for people of Japanese decent from South America, so you can see highly educated people working on assembly lines and such because the pay is better than back home.
I saw an exhibit in a museum several years ago about other, much older communities of Jews in China. There have been several apparently. What I saw might have been about the Kaifeng Jews
The consequence is that because Spanish is fonetically very clear and Portuguese is a mess of almost slavic sounding sh’s and ommited vovels the Portuguese speakers understand the Spaniards much better than the other way around. Or, as the Portuguese put it, Spaniards are dumb.
Then there are many accents in Portuguese, as in many a language spoken by few people (same in Danish or Dutch/Flamish, for example: drives some interpreters of those languages nuts): Some Portuguese I just understand like it was Spanish, sometimes I don’t understand sh*t. Brazilian Portuguese is supposed to be more difficult for us, or so I am told.
This is absolutely correct.
This is correct too: the way to pronounce this letter in German is “Ess-Zett” (S-Z), but it is by convention a double “s”.
Hertz, the car rental company seems to misplace cars from time to time. They often report these cars as stolen by the last customer known to have had them. In an average year, they report about 8,000 cars stolen by customers. Many, or maybe most, of these cars have just not been properly logged in as returned by their system.
^And the information is coming out because Hertz is in Bankruptcy Court. They provided the information to the court, a reporter (?) asked the info be made public, Hertz disagreed but the court is releasing the information.
I can believe this. I turned in a Hertz rental car on schedule last week, and the email receipt I received yesterday showed that I had turned it in two days late. Their process has you just park the car and walk away, without ever witnessing their inspection or being handed a hardcopy receipt. I guess this is supposed to speed up your departure, but I really did not feel good about having to trust them to get that right, and it turns out my feeling was spot-on.
I had this happen with a different company, U-Haul. The van I rented was sitting in their lot. The guy had said he’d check it in after he finished checking in another vehicle. I won’t walk away from an unchecked vehicle again.
In a double rainbow, a second arc is seen outside the primary arc, and has the order of its colours reversed, with red on the inner side of the arc. This is caused by the light being reflected twice on the inside of the droplet before leaving it.
People were put in jail (out of over 700 prosecuted) when the Fujitsu software the UK PO used was read to mean the postmasters stole money:
At least 33 victims of the scandal are now dead; at least four reportedly took their own lives. But … they had done nothing wrong. They had done nothing wrong. The blame in fact lay with Horizon, a faulty computer system designed by Fujitsu and imposed on their branches by Post Office management.
The idea that blue eyes are recessive is not correct. Eye color is in fact determined by a number of different alleles located on more than one location on chromosomes. A lot of information has been discovered in the last decades to back this statement. As a biology teacher, I had to change what my high school biology teacher taught (many) years ago.
