As usual, xkcd is there ahead of us.
Your post about James Lipton jogged a vague memory in my head that there was some bizarre factoid about him, but I couldn’t remember what it was, so I hit his Wikipedia page, which reminded me that he worked as a pimp in Paris back in the '50s.
JFK’s funeral - November 25, 1963. It was John Junior’s third birthday. Cardinal Cushing did the service…he had married them ten years earlier in Newport RI.
“Black Jack” - the riderless horse - would perform the same duty at the funerals of Herbert Hoover, Douglas MacArthur, LBJ, and over a thousand other military funerals. He was crematwd at the age of 30, and his ashes were carried to the burial site on the same caisson which had been used for those Presidential funerals. Buried with full military honors…only the second horse (who was the first?) to receive such honors.
Comanche? (Custer’s horse, the only US survivor of the battle of Little Big Horn.)
What about Jack Crabb?
Nevermind
At least four horses have been buried with full military honors in the US.
- Comanche (1891 - preserved at the U of Kansas).
- Black Jack (1976 - Fort Myer VA) - see previous posts.
- Chief (1968 - Fort Riley KS) - Last cavalry horse.
- “Sergeant” Reckless (1968 - Camp Pendleton CA) - wounded twice in Korea.
Hanukkah began on the same day as (US) Thanksgiving in 1888 and 2013. Due to calendar variations, it won’t happen again until the year 79,811. The Jewish holidays will gradually move through the year (eventually - Hanukkah in the summer; Passover in the winter, etc.) until the full year cycle is complete around 79,811.
I know that Comanche is on display at KU’s Natural History Museum. So how exactly was he “buried”?
About a year before the Spanish Armada sailed, Sir Francis Drake led a raid on Spain. Among other things, he seized thousands of barrel staves and burned them.
This was a major factor in defeating the the armada the next year.
Why?
Without the staves, barrels had to be made with unseasoned wood with a higher water content. The green wood causes food to rot and water to go bad, causing major issues provisioning the ships, and sickening the crew.
Today I learned that “soccer” was originally old timey slang amongst Oxford university students for “association” football, as distinguished from Rugby football.
There was a habit amongst the students of shortening words and then adding “er” at the end (e.g. exercise was “ekker”; breakfast was “brekker”). So association football - which is to say, the game of football that was not rugby - became “assoc” football, which became “soc” - “er”.
So, the term soccer was originally British.
Comanche was not exactly “buried”…
From Wikipedia:
" His remains were not buried but instead were sent to the University of Kansas and preserved, where the taxidermy mount can still be seen today in the university’s Natural History Museum.[7] Comanche was restored by museum conservator Terry Brown in 2005."
There was an actual Little Big Man, who fought in the battle of The Greasy Grass. But he was not caucasian and did not wear a cavalry uniform.
Today I learned that clocks started out as a mechanical device to ring bells, and they had no face or hands.
Comanche wasn’t Custer’s horse. He belonged to Myles Keogh.
Today I learned that hagfish slime is a non-Newtonian fluid.
The main subject of the article is ketchup splatter at the end of the squeeze bottle in an apparently serious physics paper. To me it looks like a bid for an ig Nobel prize but what do I know (IANAP).
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In summary (I could have told them), it’s best to take the spout off and pour/scoop the ketchup out.
Hmmm… the article says so:
Ketchup is a non-Newtonian fluid. Blood, yogurt, gravy, mud, pudding, and thickened pie fillings are other examples, along with hagfish slime.
OK, this is a bugbear of mine. Please don’t be offended @smithsb, that’s not at all my intention .
The term “Non-Newtonian Fluid” just means that it isn’t a Newtonian Fluid (better expressed as “does not approximate to”) - it doesn’t tell you what it is.
A Newtonian liquid is one which (more-or-less, in the real world) follows Newton’s law of viscosity; loosely speaking, if ketchup was a Newtonian liquid, then the harder you squeezed the bottle, the faster the ketchup would flow - with a linear relationship between applied force and flow rate.
The real world liquids you’ll come across day-to-day are rarely like that. Some have properties that are very well known: everyone knows that with ketchup, If you do not shake the bottle, none’ll come and then a lot’ll*; and I guess most everyone has heard the old saw that you can walk on custard (it works better if you run, because that applies higher force). My point is that Non-Newtonian liquids are far from uncommon. Most biological liquids are Non-Newtonian - I would have been astonished to find that hagfish slime was Newtonian.
There’s a nice summary table on Wikipedia describing some of the variants.
The majority of liquids that you’ll come across are, to a greater or lesser degree, Shear Thinning (like ketchup); or, much more rarely, Shear Thickening (like custard); in either case, this may be with or without a time dependency.
I know about this because…? A career in the pharma industry. The most common example of this sort of thing is, I guess, oral liquids (like syrups) which are powder suspensions. For reproducible dosing, you don’t want the suspension to quickly settle (ie, it should act like a solid); but you do have to re-suspend the solid component (so it has to act like a liquid) and you have to pour it (liquid). these properties have to be designed in**. And such issues can be important in processing as well as in the products themselves.
Incidentally, ALL the heavy lifting so far as theory and understanding of what we were doing and how it all works came from …the paint industry. Consider non-drip paints:
They do not settle or separate (solid)
They flow onto your brush (liquid)
They do not drip (solid)
They can be applied to a wall (liquid)
The stay on the surface and do not soak in (solid)
We used to joke about rocket scientists saying, Hey, c’mon, it ain’t paint science.
j
* - Variant of “Shake and shake / the catsup bottle / none will come / and then a lot’ll.” (Richard Armour)
** - Tedious aside - there are other, more technical, considerations: solid-like properties retard Ostwald ripening
ETA - I can’r explain the placing of Custard in that wiki table, especially as the article on custard notes that it is thixotropic
ETA 2 - I meant to mention, an example of a shear thickening liquid from earlier today - my sourdough starters are notably dilatant
I heard it as “Ketchup, ketchup, in a bottle, first a little then a lot’ll”
Are you saying that shaking the ketchup bottle first will make it come out more easily, or less?
More easily - shear thinning. (“Shear” refers to “layers” of liquid shearing as they flow over each other. As this shear occurs, the liquid thins.)
Hey, c’mon, I didn’t invent the terminology!
j
According to data collected by security company ADT, 34% of burglars enter through the front door and 22% use a first-floor window.