NYC: Day2

We started the day by taking a stroll through Central Park.

Notice how well Ben and I match? He wore that shirt just for me.


Hanneke was able to join us! We usually manage to miss each other over Christmas, so it was really nice to be able to see her again.
We took a whirlwind tour through the American Museum of History. I'd love to come back with more time.

I'm kind of proud as how I managed to get us in this photo on the glass.

In the evening we saw Blue Man Group. It was great. It was much more of a comedy routine than I was expecting, but there was still a lot of percussion.

(Image courtesy BlueManGroup)

NYC: Day1

We started out the day with a delicious strawberry pie for breakfast.

Phew! We made it to NYC without too many issues.

After some walking around to see the sights near our hotel, we finally found something the guys would get their pictures taken with.

We went to a Brazilian steakhouse for dinner. It was a lot of fun, and really interesting to try all sorts of meat. My least favorite was the chicken, and my most favorite was the flank steak. I also loved the sides - mashed potatoes, fried bananas, and a salad bar that had more than lettuce. Laura amazed us all by eating a ton of food; her favorite were the ribs.

We ended the day by going up 30 Rock and seeing the skyline at night.

Monday: dragons

We made it back from NYC! Pictures and such to follow, probably tomorrow. It was a good trip.

I'm currently reading Joust by Mercedes Lackey. I've read it a few times before, but it always makes me want a dragon. I think I want a white one because Flurry is white. I've asked her a few times if she wants to become a dragon, but the answer always seems to be "no."

Floating subs

Why do submarines float (and sink)? It's all a matter of controlling the sub's density. If the submarine is less dense than water, it will float. If it is more dense, it will sink. So let's start by looking at density. In words, density is how much stuff is in a certain amount of volume. Mathematically, density is as follows:

(Side note: if you were to measure density on the Moon, another planet, or deep in the ocean, you'd have to worry about the difference between weight and mass. Fortunately, for most people reading this post weight and mass are approximatively equivalent. For more information, check out this link.)

We're also in luck...water has a very easy density to remember: 1000 kg/m^3. Ocean water is slightly different due to it's salt content, but for our purposes we're just going to ignore some of those subtle nuisances.

When a submarine is floating on the water, its ballast tanks are filled with air. So let's pretend the bottle below is a submarine with air-filled ballast tanks and measure it's weight.

Next the volume of the bottle needs to be deterimed. Normally this would be done by sticking the whole bottle into a graduated cylinder filled with water, but I do not have one. So I estimated the number of teaspoons that the bottle held with a measuring cup. There were about 78 teaspoons.

So now that we've found the weight and volume (and converted them to practical units), we can find the density of the empty bottle.

So here's the big question...will the bottle float?? Do you remember what we said about density up above?

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It floats!

It floats because the density of the bottle (601.5 kg/m^3) is less than water (1000 kg/m^3).

Next let's fill the bottle with blue water and see what happens. We already know the volume, but we need to find the new weight.

With the new weight we can find the density of the bottle filled with blue water:

So, is the bottle with water going to float?

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No!

The bottle sank because its density of 1573 kg/m^3 is more than that of water.

Can you figure out how full the bottle should be so that it will hover in the water?

Here are some more interesting links:

How Stuff Works

MSI learning lab

Friday: scavengers

Today I felt like a scavenger. Ben and I went to Laura's for dinner as she was trying to get rid of some food. It was delicious. Then we got to empty her refrigerator and ended up taking home two coolers worth of food. It was very good timing because we haven't gone to the grocery store for a while and so had lots of room for more food.

I think I'm most excited about the frozen precut chicken. I have realized several times in the past few years that I enjoy eating smaller sized foods more than larger sized foods. If something fits into my mouth without needing a knife (or a bite) that makes my life much happier. (A good example of this is tortilla chips. I enjoy the crumbs and Scoops better than large triangles.)

Thursday: lunch

I had lunch with Jess today. It was really the highlight of my day because work was so busy...it was nice to have a break. It's really nice to just get outside, away from the cold air conditioning, and spend some time relaxing with a friend.

Tuesday: a few more upsides to working a long day

Today was a long day at work. However, there were two good things that happened:

1) I was able to pass off fixing some WIPs to someone else because I'm too busy. SCORE!!!

2) Around 6:45 all the phones started ringing. I was out on the manufacturing floor...a phone was ringing. That phone stopped and a different phone started. I went to my office. Two phones were ringing. They stopped. Another phone rang and someone picked it up - no one was on the line. The fax machine buzzed. My phone rang (there was no one there). Another office phone rang. I went back to the manufacturing floor and the phones were still ringing. When I left 20 minutes later the phones were still all abuzz. Interesting.

What was also interesting is how we all have the same type of phone and yet they all sounded different.