I love this. I was put off apples for many years through my teens because all I was fed as a little kid were those weirdly chewy, vaguely apple-flavored, shitty-ass Red Delicious apples.
I have had a good Red Delicious. Once.
Most of the apples being sold under that name aren’t the original strain, and few of them are grown in the original location – soils, climate, microclimate, and management can all affect flavor and texture.
So the chances are really good that any Red Delicious apple purchased today will be flavorless sweet mush. Or even flavorless not-sweet mush. But once upon a time there was something that deserved the name, and there may be a small grower or two out there somewhere still producing them.
Personally, I’ve had the best luck with Fujis. They’re consistently both crisp and flavorful, and they don’t cost nearly as much as Honeycrisp or Cosmic Crisp (which have less flavor).
… took me a while to realise the dude down the bottom of the toon was swimming out from a beach, not underwater …
I like a Northern Spy. Or, better yet (and even harder to find, but I have friends who have one in their orchard) a Cox’s Orange Pippin.
Fujis or galas do it for me.
I saw a very similar diagram about 1960s that explained the best path for rockets to take to reach orbit. Straight up then turn versus a long spiral through the atmosphere until you reach space versus going diagonally which is the “minimizes time” option in the panel.
It’s more complicated than that in practice. For instance, rockets typically have to limit maximum aerodynamic loads (called max-Q), and alter the engine throttling and flight profile to account for that. But yes, the optimum lies between the two extremes of up-and-over vs. going horizontally from the start. Although the latter would be optimal when there’s no atmosphere, like on the Moon (just don’t hit a mountain).
…If you have some low-friction way to support your weight until you get to orbital speed.
And Gala apples can be good, but they seem to be less consistent. I’ve had some that were completely underwhelming.
Oh, so it’s more complicated than they explained in a book for ten-year-olds. I was just struck as to how similar it was. If I recall, that book from the 1960s even used the same example of trying to get to a boat that wasn’t straight across from you, where your choices were to run across the sand as much as possible, get in the water as soon as possible, or some combination. I wonder if it’s possible Randall Munroe had seen the same diagram in the same book.
I meant a horizontal trajectory, not a horizontal rocket. If you’re talking a normal rocket, you’d have to point it at an angle so that the downward component matches local gravity. As you go faster, that angle can get shallower since the acceleration goes up (due to less fuel mass), and centrifugal force plays a greater part. Eventually it flattens completely, and you can continue firing to raise your orbit to the desired amount (and then you need another firing to circularize).
Could be, but I’ve seen the same diagram–where the analogy is more exact–for explaining light refraction. Light moves more slowly in glass than air, just as swimming is slower than running. The math works out exactly the same (Snell’s law).
As I should have expected, it was Richard Feynman that gave an early (possibly the earliest) comparison between Snell’s Law and a running/swimming lifeguard situation:
(Feynman gives a nice illustration: a lifeguard on a beach spots a swimmer in trouble some distance away, in a diagonal direction. He can run three times faster than he can swim. What is the quickest path to the swimmer?)
I must have seen it in one of his lectures, though I don’t find the example in the published books.
And it was used to good effect in Ted Chiang’s The Story of Your Life …
I’ll have to re-read that. I love Chiang’s stories, but I don’t recall that particular bit.
ETA: Ok, it’s coming back now after reading the summary on Wikipedia. I’d been thinking of a different Chiang story. This is the one that got adapted into Arrival, with the alien’s strange acausal language.
Same here. And why is there a person and an ice cream stand hovering in mid-air above the water?
I think this was one instance where Munroe’s minimalist style adversely affected the strip.
no *@aol.com ?
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Why am I getting these? Please take me off!
As an aside, it seems like most email addresses are gmail these days, but most of them aren’t of the form *@gmail.com . All sorts of institutional emails nowadays are run by gmail, but with the institution’s domain name.