What If?

Just read What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe. Some more of the nuggets uncovered from the book include:

• "I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive."
• If you drop superglue on cotton thread - it will catch fire.
• A version of the old joke about half-full glasses - "the engineer sees a glass that's twice as big as it needs to be, the surrealist sees a giraffe eating a necktie"
• "As a rule of thumb, you start to notice compressive heating above about Mach 2 (which is why the Concorde had heat resistant material on the leading edge of its wings)."
• "The ISS moves so quickly that if you fired a rifle bullet from one end of a football field, the International Space Station could cross the length of the field before the bullet traveled 10 yards."
• Did not know this but most modern "passenger cars have some kind of artificial speed limits imposed by the engine computer."
• "If you set out a cup of warn water on Mars, it'll try to boil, freeze, and sublimate, practically all at once. Water on Mars seems to be in any state except liquid."
• "Which brings us to wingsuits - the halfway point between parachute pants and parachutes."
• "GPS timing is incredibly precise; of all the problems in engineering, it's one of the only ones in which engineers have been forced to include both special and general relativity in their calculations."

Some of these are facts I did not know or simply just found interesting. Not sure if any of these facts will ever come into play in real life. To be honest some of the questions are so unrealistically ridiculous that sometimes it's tough to keep focused. However, having said that - it was very humorous and informative.  

What If?

Currently reading What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe. Little over a third of the way through and enjoy it very much. Some of the nuggets uncovered from the book include:

• If a pitcher threw a baseball close to the speed of light it would cause a nuclear blast but according to MLB's rule 6.08 (b) the batter would be considered "hit by pitch"
• The water in a spent nuclear fuel pool is "warmer than most pools but cooler than a hot tub."
• "You may actually receive a lower dose of radiation treading water in a spent fuel pool than walking around on a street."
• "There were no earthworms in New England when the European colonists arrived."
• Pangea's predecessor was Rodinia
• "Bromine is liquid at room temperature, a property it shares with only one other element - mercury."
• "If an unused charger isn't warm to the touch, it's using less than a penny's worth of electricity a day."
• "When Enrico Fermi built the first nuclear reactor, he suspended the control rods from a rope tied to a balcony railing. In case something went wrong, next to the railing was stationed a distinguished physicist with an axe. This led to the probably apocryphal story that SCAM stands for 'Safety Control Axe Man.'"
• "The Mars rover Curiosity, for example, is powered by the heat from a chunk of plutonium it carries in a container on the end of a stick."
• The Empire State building's spire was originally intended for mooring Zeppelins.
• "The ocean is colder than space."

Some of these are facts I did not know or simply just found interesting. Not sure if any of these facts will ever come into play in real life. You'll have to read the book to learn the context. Recommend it - especially if you're looking for a bathroom book as each Q&A is just the right length for the Irish library.