Day 72

Title: Dream of Flying

I didn't take any pictures today until about an hour ago, and they were lame, so I tried to do something to jazz them up. I originally was trying to turn myself into a silhouette against a washed-out overexposed background, but it was a laughable attempt. So I went crazy and tried something new instead. I'm usually not a fan of photoshop's brash "artistic" filters, but I have to admit that I liked this color negative. I guess sometimes it's nice to have fun with your pictures. Sometimes I get too wrapped up in how "artsy" I'm being and I forget to have fun with the images.

I'm going to try something lame. Sorry if this spams popups and crap at you. But please answer if you have an oppinion.




SIDE NOTE: I added this stupid poll about half an hour ago and clicked one of the answers just to see how well it would work. I haven't even officially published this post to my blog yet, and there are somehow 4 votes cast now. I'm confused. Maybe the website I got this from publishes some of the polls created there.



Does lightning strike water? More specifically, does it strike the ocean? I have always thought that it doesn't, but a girl at work tonight was saying that she believes otherwise. My rationale has something to do with water not being able to hold a certain charge in a specific area for long since it's a good conductor and would spread that charge around quickly. I just read a NASA article that's pretty interesting, but it doesn't give me my exact answer. It shows that lightning does, however infrequently, occur over the oceans, but it also says that it's far more common to have lighting strike cloud-to-cloud or intracloud (thank you Diane) rather than cloud-to-ground, therefore suggesting that perhaps the over ocean strikes never actually hit the water. Although that picture at the top of the article does show lightning hitting the ocean, so maybe my theory has been debunked.

Earlier today I was pondering the mixing of a liquid when shaken within its container. Now I don't know much about fluid dynamics, so I'm having a hard time drawing up a hypothesis for this one. We had a bottle of V8 Splash Fusion that was unopened, and it says to shake before use. I started to shake but then noticed that not a lot of sloshing was going on. I turned the bottle over and looked at the bottom (now at the top), and there was only a pea-sized bubble of air. According to this wikipedia page, the average volume of a pea is 200 µL, and the bottle contained about 1.36 x 10^6 µL, giving a ratio of approximately 1/6800. That means that only 1/6800th of the liquid can actually move to occupy a new space when being shaken, so is that sufficient movement to mix the liquid? Do small density variations within the liquid possibly give certain pockets more inertia thereby moving them around within the bottle, or am I just making that up? Suppose an ideal situation in which the bottle has zero air in it. Would shaking it do anything under those circumstances? Since this situation is considered to be ideal, I am considering any heat variations due to your hands or friction between the liquid and the bottle to be negligible (if you DID include heat into the equation, all that you'd have to do is put the bottle on a hot enough surface that wouldn't melt the plastic and the liquid would probably begin churning...slowly at least).

Any thoughts?