While reading the Wikipeidia page on adhesive I came across this nugget of wisdom on food decomposition:
Another example is when someone tries to pull apart Oreo cookies and all the filling remains on one side. The goal in this case is an adhesive failure, rather than a cohesive failure.
Apparently, when you’re trying to break apart an Oreo and get all the filling to stay on one side, say, to make a quad-stuf (yep, only one ‘f’) Oreo, you are hoping for an adhesive or interfacial failure, that is, a failure of the adhesive (white, corn-syrupy goodness) where it meets the adherent (black cookie piece).
Also, for another barely-related angle is this page from a UFC forum discussing the caloric content of foods someone mentions their method of making Oreos less bad for you:
i just want everyone to know this lil diet trick i use to cut calories out of my double stuff oreos, if you take 2 of them apart and make 1 quad stuff oreo you eliminate 2 of the chocholat cookies there for cutting out calories while you enjoy a nice diet quad stuff oreo
Though I’d say the perfect ratio of filling to cookie is somewhere between 2 and 3 to one, I often make quad-stuf monsters.
Mediawiki got a new feature recently, pages shown on your watchlist or the recent changes page now show the number of bytes added (green) or removed (red) from the page.
Wikipedia has an amazingly large and varied database of information, including numerous lists, such as a list of ridiculous highway intersections. There are some really screwed up intersections shown on that page most notably I-40 meeting I-295 in Knoxville, I-96 with highway 39 in Detroit, and the local-to-me Springfield Mixing Bowl. None of these intersections, however, can shake a stick at Swindon’s Magic Roundabout which is a single large central roundabout with 5 feeder roundabouts.
While reading about capsaicin and the Scoville scale on my favorite website, I noticed the Shmidt Sting Pain Index was listed. Like so often happens when browsing Wikipedia, this led me to read about other pain indices. Other than the Wong-Baker scale shown at the top of the page, I didn’t know that there were such defined scales.
I was browsing around my favorite interwebsite and I noticed this page . Ok, so maybe not everything on Wikipedia is useful…
Last night in #2600 there was talk about illwill, who frequents the channel and is going to jail soon for selling the source code to Windows. This was a big enough story that it has been in the news recently, yet there wasn’t a Wikipedia article for him. I created a quick one (only a couple of sentances and a link) yet within the hour it had gone from a simple stub linking to his site, to a full-fledged article. Today, there are nearly 20 edits.
Have I said how much I love Wikipedia?
I was reading a Wikipedia article on GPS which made a very good point: given their immense speed, the clocks GPS satellites are affected by relativity. GPS satellites reside in an intermediate earth orbit such that the difference in the speed versus that of the surface of the Earth is quite significant. Due to this great speed difference, the clocks on-board GPS satellites are affected by special (as well as general) relativity and as such differ from a clock on Earth’s surface by about 38 microseconds per day. For anyone who has ever been interested in relativity or quantum theory, this is an amazing example of relativity in a real-life and thoroughly used system.
