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josephdunphy

Last seen: 26 hours ago

Joseph is a guy from Chicago, Illinois, USA

Politically Moderate, Underemployed Jewish Applied Mathematician / Electrical Engineer tutoring all knowing freshmen in Mathematics. This profile, like most of the Web, is optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, and must be viewed in Internet Explorer. A more complete listing of posts, including archived ones, can be found on the introduction page for this site, and is backed up on this page at Googlegroups, with occasional commentary found on Stumbling into the Void on Tribe.

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  • josephdunphys blog - StumbleUpon

    Rated Dec 14 2008 • 7 reviews • stumblers • stumbleupon.com






    Hi, again. I'm in the process of turning this profile into something that will be more of a blog. A recurring theme will be my attempts to build on what I've seen on some of the sites I've reviewed; what did I learn from visiting them, what subjects did they touch on, etc. You might have noticed the continued post format I was playing around with on the Draka and Steak Porn Video reviews; expect to see more of that, with some of the short, one-liner reviews moved into the spaces between the essays. What I'm trying to get away from is the idea of Stumbleupon as a bookmarking site, as I move toward making this into a site that one can simply sit down and feel comfortable reading; more like a magazine and less like a phonebook, or something like that.

    Comments about Stumbleupon related drama, past and present, can be found elsewhere, if you really want to read about that for some reason.




    Browser selection - Please pardon the imperious tone in my comments above, but Stumbleupon surprised us by changing the background color on our pages. In IE, my blog has a black background, and you can see the links. In Firefox and Chrome, the background is white, so you can't, unless you have logged into Stumbleupon, in which case you might see a black background even after you log out, again. Very silly. I can't imagine what they were thinking about, when they did this. It definitely damages the functionality of our pages, and causes a needless headache for visitors to SU.

    I regret any inconvenience, but would point out that this wasn't my idea or doing, and that unlike the SU staff, I have no say in it. If you'd like to know when this will be fixed, they're the ones to ask. I wouldn't have the faintest idea, myself.


  • Created Dec 14 2008 •




    "Kids, don't try this at home" ... or anywhere else, either. I'm skimming a promising looking fun with science site when I see this: Liquid Nitrogen. Yes, the man stuck his hand into it - and why not?




    You know you're soaking in it! Link available for anybody too young to understand.


    "Where did I get the name 'Lefty' from? That's a long story ... if at first you don't succeed and all that ... where are you going?"









    Oh, yes - that's why not. The author writes, following the appropriate (?) photo, which you're seeing a thumbnail of above, if you're reading this on my blog:



    "I'm not sure I should show this photo but here is me (carefully) throwing all the safety precautions to the wind and putting my hand in liquid N2 (for about 0.5 secs).



    When you're sticking your hand into a liquid that is just barely warmer than the surface of one of the moons of Neptune, I'm not sure that "carefully" is an adverb that you get to use. Just a thought.



    The gas generation keeps a gas layer between you and the liquid and reduces the rate of freezing.



    Yes, the concept is simple enough - your flesh is so much hotter than the boiling point of liquid nitrogen that the liquid will explosively evaporate on contact, briefly blowing much of the liquid away. Drop a bead of water onto a hot dry skillet and as you watch it dance, you'll see the same physical principle at work. Without having done the calculations, though, would I know offhand if the liquid N2 would be blown off one's hand quickly enough to prevent tissue damage? No. Would I care to risk my fingers on a guess, or more to the point, on the claims I just saw on the website of somebody I had never heard of before? Definitely not.

    An even more enjoyable thought is this: the boiling point of liquid nitrogen is lower than the boiling point of liquid oxygen. Any container of liquid nitrogen will begin to accumulate a layer of liquid oxygen on its surface from condensation, just as moisture will collect on a glass containing a cold beverage. Owing to the greatly increased density of oxygen, post-liquification, even with the reduction in the rate of chemical activity induced by the great cold, liquid oxygen is a very potent oxidant, potent enough to have served for the burning of rocket fuel in the apollo program.



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