MKK

Will do. BTW, I could've sworn this post was originally on PNH's end of the blog...or was I hallucinating?

Speaking of Boskone, who's coming? And is there a regular time people are getting together outside the formal circles for drinks, etc?

(Boskone: Chad Orzel & I are greatly looking forward to being there.)

I think we all need to drink more Tia Marias. Most scientific. Quant suff.

Re Boskone: I'm arriving Wednesday night, shopping for the party Thursday. Hanging around in panels and bars and the program ops thereafter.

MKK

It turns out that I was thinking of the Gibbs-Marangoni effect, which we had somebody studying in the context of molten weld pools while I was in college, which is the Marangoni effect with liquid-solid interfaces. Be9nard-Marangoni is surface-tension-driven flow with liquid-liquid interfaces, but having a good guess made me feel better about my underachieving score on the antonym/synonym quiz.

Maybe because I used heavy cream. Anyway, it did taste good.

Pour a small amount of heavy cream into a cup, add several drops of food coloring (do not stir), then add one drop of dishwashing liquid. Within seconds you are treated to what Zoom calls "fireworks in a glass," as the dishwashing liquid breaks up the fat in the cream into various sized globules and the food coloring rushes into the vacated spaces between the globules.

I imagine it's much the same with Tia Maria.

That's still around? Cool.

(Those well over 35, well, it's a Gen X thing. Sorry.)

Neat stuff!

- Brooks, also working in computational fluid dynamics....

Zoom is around again, rather than still--it came back onto the air a year or so ago. Unfortunately, I can't find anything historical on the website (pbskids.org/zoom), so I don't know exactly when that happened.

A Zoom quiz:

Am I getting he original cast name right?

Joe
Nina
Tommy...

I can't remember anyone else.
I do remember thinking Nina was cute, and laughed my head off when Tommy ate a whole banana and then regurgitated it when they ran the footage backwards.

Jesus. As Gene Wolfe once wrote, I am cursed with memory, or memory oppresses me...or something like that.

I completely do not remember any of the original cast, and I'm very impressed that John does.

The show was revived around 5 years ago. They've had three casts, with lapover between each one as kids outgrew the show. It's the usual half-hour, though there have been some one-hour specials, (after September 11th, for instance--that was an amazing show that made me cry a lot).

My daughter is almost 7 and now watches Zoom about once a week (she doesn't watch much TV but likes variety, so she sees one episode a week of a whole bunch of different things, rather than the same thing every day). But I've been looking at it for a few years to steal ideas for games and science experiments and things like that to do with my kid. It's just as wonderful now as it was back in the day.

This is scary, things are coming back...the show's official stationery...I think maybe I must've sent a letter into the show when it was on and they sent back some kind of card or bookmark that I used...because I can remember the letters and logo.

My daughter, age 2, doesn't watch Zoom, but I should probably tape one or two episodes for her. Get her off the Wiggles for a while.

(When her mom's not around, we watch "hobbits and orcs" and sometimes "the balrog"...)

What was the name of the vaguely scientific kid detective show they had at the end of that? [Google.] Right. The Bloodhound Gang.

Not that this has much to do with Tia Mariers. Or Elvis Costello. Much. But.