An Equation for Bacon Sandwiches

Well, well, what do we have here:

This is none other than what Britons refer to as a bacon butty! To me it's just a bacon sandwich, but it is apparently so important, that the Britons have come up with an equation just to determine how much force is required to produce how much crunch for every bite of the sandwich! Believe it or not, the research fellows at Leeds University spent more than 1000 hours testing (with their mouths and guts I presume!) dozens of such sandwiches!

And their brainchild? Haha, it amounts to no more than a mere equation:

To quote, "0.4 newtons should be applied to crunch the sandwich, creating 0.5 decibels of noise. The formula uses these values: N = force in newtons; fb is the function of the bacon type; fc is the function of the condiment or filling effect; Ts is the serving temperature; tc is cooking time; ta is the time taken to insert the condiment or filling; cm is the cooking method and C represents the breaking strain in newtons of uncooked bacon."

Well, don't take my word for it! View the original article here at The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/world/europe/11bacon.html?_r=2&ref=world&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Entropical Catharsis

If you haven't noticed, I'm sticking to a very wise mantra by posting short tidbits these few days:

"A man of few words... is a wise man!"

Very true indeed - I often find myself the butt of all jokes whenever I open my mouth too many times.

In any case, I was reading an excerpt from a Statistical Mechanics book when it occurred to me just how much I've changed in the past four or five years:

*Back then in Physics Olympiad training tutorials with Mr Daniel Khor*

YYK: ".... alright, remember this Yong Kiat, entropy change is good if it's positive! Because that's the correct answer, can get you marks!"

*Now after 4,5 years...*

YYK: "Oh man, entropy goes up again. We're screwed. This sucks. We're all going to die."

Haha, heat death of the Universe never did sound appealling to me, just that I was always too caught up in getting the right answer.

Absolute Zero Ain't Zero-Point

I was just wondering:

"Even when the temperature reaches 0 K, atoms in a solid still manage to vibrate with a zero-point energy..."

It's as if even when all of the energy has been sapped from particles, the particles are still resilient, showing us that there is some forbidden life-energy that cannot be touched no matter how low the temperature goes. It's amazing isn't it? It's as if everything around us has some fundamental life-force!

Reminds me of a verse from the bible, but too bad I can't remember it. :p