One does not simply shove elephants on a ballet shoe point and call it an acceptable measure of pressure A bizarre American website has come up with a new way of measuring pressure by referring to the weight of elephants delivered through the area of a ballet shoe. Frankly we're baffled. To wit: a team of Australian scientists working on ways of making artificial diamonds for industrial drill tips figured out a way of doing so …
"Are you thinking of Schubert's Seven Seas of Rhye, perhaps, or maybe Bach's Another One Bites the Dust?"
It's Tchaikovsky's "Another One Bites the Dust". But there are also the options of William Byrd's "We Are the Champions" and Beethoven's "I Want To Break Free." Neither are as good as Vaughan Williams's "Fat-Bottomed Girls."
"Where's the panama hat icon for Sir Terry"
Pfft - as any fule kno it was a wide brim fedora. And I've been asking the same question for an infinite amount of hats.
C'mon Vultures, Sir Pterry icon!
A man is not dead while his name is still spoken. GNU Terry Pratchett.
That might indeed be considered more rational and consistent, which is also why I did not suggest it. :-)
Also CD's are shinier and more modern than vinyl , but not *too* modern; and so therefore strike the correct balance between technology and tradition.
Re: 7" vinyl...additional data required.
You may need to do some more calculations. if we assume the vinyl disc actually touches the underlying surface on the peaks of it's grooves, you'll need to know the linear length of the groove and resting width of the peak to calculate the resting surface area. CDs may be inappropriate here, but the calculation for the smooth surface would be much easier. Then again, who wants easy. Oh wait, I do. : 0
There's a perfectly fine pressure unit, and possibly not trademarked-
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/51/Fig-Newtons-Box-Small.jpg
Although may be subject to shrinkflation*. So one Savanah elephant is approximately equal to 35,840 Newtons (boxed). If one needs a more precise measurement, then it needs determining how many Newtons per 8oz. For science!
Additional experiments are possible, such as determining which takes longer to clean up. An elephant's pressure exerted on 35,840 Newtons, or 1 ballet dancer. Legal advice not included.
*Ok, who ate my experiment?
This is why the Newton is so versatile. I'm betting that modern process engineering means consistency in both biscuits (cakes?*) per box, and per biscuit. And the biscuits have 3 sides of differing areas, allowing 1N to be used for 3 surface area tests.
I was also going to try and define the Newton meter, but Tescos didn't have any to aid me in my culinary metrology.
*See lengthy legal saga where HMRC tried to decide if the Jaffa snack was a biscuit, or a cake. Which possibly took so long because HMRC's lawyers realised they needed lots of evidence to 'examine'.
The Fig Newton is named after Newton, Massachusetts, United States of America, and thus is neither a biscuit nor a cake, but a cookie.
Some vandal on Wikipedia calls it a "pastry", but this is plainly heresy and not worthy of further consideration.
(Or were you talking about Jaffas? Definitely cakes, and safer than any biscuit. I imagine Fig-Newton-related injuries are probably also on the low end.)
I think there needs to be better definitions for cake, cookie and biscuit. As a Brit, I propose a beverage compatibility, or dunkability test. Perhaps surviving a minimum of 3x3s dunks into 1x British Standard mug of tea (milk, 2 sugars). I suspect Jaffas would fail this test, and thus be cake.
And in the interests of the environment, and reducing plastic waste, I propose replacing single-use plastic stirring sticks with Twiglet biscuits.
And I'm disappointed that nobody has yet to count how many Newtons per box. What's in the box? What's in the box?!?
It has been defined as an unit of force by the Register Standards Soviet, and for doubting the correctness of this you will be sent to a re-education camp well away[0] from the corrupting influences that have caused you to doubt their authority in these matters. Physical work and fresh air[1] will soon cure you of your mistaken opinions.
[0] Several tens of megalinguini
[1] At negative double-digit Hiltons
And the elephant per ballet shoe definitely isn't, as already incompletely expounded upon in the article. Tons/tonnes, and by implication badgers, rhinoceri, Aussie trams and Queen Lizzie (both variants) are an unit of weight, not force. There's gravity involved in the conversion, and an elephant on top of Mount Everest would weigh less than at sea level, although I'm under the impression that it would be somewhat unlikely to encounter an elephant there. If so, it would probably[0] be an Asian elephant anyway, which are smaller and thus one more factor in the impreciseness of the definition.
[0] Still, it's the African elephant that is migratory[1].
[1] And even able to transport an entire coconut tree.
"[0] Still, it's the African elephant that is migratory[1].
[1] And even able to transport an entire coconut tree."
Not to be confused with the Hermit Elephant, possibly the strangest and saddest species on the Disc. This creature, lacking the thick hide of its near relatives, lives in huts, moving up and building extensions as its size increases. It’s not unknown for a traveller on the plains of Howondaland to wake up in the morning in the middle of a village that wasn’t there the night before.
GNU Sir Pterry
As a physiologist I measure pressures in mmHg of course. Though knowledge of what that means physically is in danger of being lost on the young, along with how to use a dial telephone. News reaches me of a nursing course where the mercury sphygmomanometers were deemed ‘too dangerous for the students’ by some jobsworth who saw ‘mercury’ and went Aaaarrgghh!
I demonstrated physiology labs during my PhD and we had class sets of sphygmomanometers, housed in sturdy metal boxes with the columns set well within the boxes as is standard design. In Blood Pressure week they were in constant use and never one got broken.
Liquid mercury is not very dangerous unless you spread it over a wide area and get thin amounts on your fingers. If you were say a Victorian hatter using it to soften felt. Hence the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland. Powdered sulphur is good for cleaning up spilt mercury btw. I have done that, I was a chemistry monitor in school back in the early ‘80s.
Not sure if it is still the case, but just before you got to Barons Court on the Piccadilly line, going eastbound, there used to be a gantry with "U" shaped glass tubes filled with mercury, suspended from a gantry. The idea was that if a District line train actially took that route it would break the tubes to set the signals to red to prevent it from going into the tube tunnel, where it would not fit.
The signal department also used mercury to generate flashing lights in places such as Amersham signal cabin. The way it worked IIRC was that the gaseous void in a small U-tube was heated up. This caused the mercury to move down one side of the tube and up the other. Contacts dipped into mercury in the tube would connect/disconnect the heating element, causing the mercury to oscillate. This was before the advent of the 555 timer chip, but other forms of timer would have done the trick. However, even though the indications were not directly safety-critical, I presume the importance of correct indications to the signalman was considered critical to be "fail-safe" if, for example, manual station-to-station working were necessary.
This light at Cragside appears to have no electricity supply.
https://i2.wp.com/heritagecalling.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/cragside-lamp.jpg?resize=358%2C361&ssl=1
In fact one of the contacts is the copper base it stands on (the body is cloisonné enamel on copper) and the other is a wire dipping into a small bowl of mercury. Lifting the lamp turns it off, setting back in its correct position turns it on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq2G4JIWbEw
"the mercury sphygmomanometers were deemed ‘too dangerous for the students’"
A few years ago I was recalled to my GP. They'd taken my blood pressure on their electronic gubbins which was subsequently found to have been out of calibration so they had to redo it the old-fashioned way. There's a lot to be said for instruments where you can see exactly what it is you're measuring against (e.g. the traditional chemical balance) but the lure of a number (so it must be right) on a display is too strong for some people.
"Liquid mercury is not very dangerous unless you spread it over a wide area "
The second carbon-dating system in QUB used a chemistry based on acetylene. As it tends to explode at pressures of about one and a half atmospheres the entire gas processing line was run at below atmospheric with a mercury manometer at each step so that if the pressure got too great the manometer acted as a pressure release valve. IIRC the surface of the mercury in the pots was covered with oil.
has to be said, not done a TITSUP for a while, SO
T - rouble
I - s
T - his
S - ite
U - tilises
P - achyderms
so whilst I WOULD normally push for the more Narwhal comparison, we would require a new acronym, and I DO seem to recall that here, elephants have been used to express many different comparisons
May be a local thing here in Holland, but the standard example for that particular aspect of physics has been the "Supermodel on Spike Heels" for yonks.
This may be because the weight/height ratio for your standard anorexic walking coat-rack and the floor area of spike heels have been pretty much well-defined and relatively stable over decades.
Plus that in any given highschool class there's always at least one female victim volunteer wearing the torture devices available for a practical demonstration.
I would not call that person the victim, as it is she who is wearing the devices and does the stepping. And I would refrain from such an action when said girl is in earshot. Those shoes hurt. A lot. As a former ballroom dancer (standard and latin) I know how much. And that's only on the arch of the foot. And accidentally, but with quite some energy behind it.
So mind your manners...
"The team applied pressure equal to 640 African elephants on the tip of a ballet shoe, doing so in a way that caused an unexpected reaction among the carbon atoms in the device."
They got diamonds... were they expecting something different like turning coal into gold or some other alchemy?
I'm not sure why it's totally unexpected given that using pressure is one of ways of making diamonds for some time now. The effort to make them has only been matched by the diamond industry (De Beers) in trying to identify manufactured diamonds and to dissuade people from making them in the first place.
My impression from the article was that they weren't expecting crystalization at that particular temperature-pressure point, since the article mentions "room temperature". The original GE diamond-manufacturing commercial process uses high temperature (via electrification) as well as pressure. But I didn't bother reading the paper.
There's plenty of commercial diamond manufacturing already. Early on GE reached an agreement with De Beers to not produce "gem quality" diamonds, according to The New Alchemists. GE's really interested in the small diamonds that are used in saw blades and that sort of thing anyway.
I am intrigued by the downvote.
It's a simple statement of fact re many many billions of dollars of trade each year.
The downvoter typed the downvote on a machine entirely built from raw materials sold&bought entirely in MT-- metric tons.
.
ElReg Commentards' downvotes appear to be increasingly meaningless.
www.japanesetools.com.au/products/diamond-sandpaper
Industrial grade diamonds are so cheap these days there's no reason not to use them in sandpaper. (Don't get me started on the De Beers Cartel, but, basically, all diamonds are ridiculously cheap to produce these days.)
As a second-declension Latin noun, the (nominative) plural of hippopotamus is hippopotami. As an English noun, there is a choice of plurals — either “hippopotamus”, “hippopotamuses”, “hippopotamusses”, or “hippopotami”.
Regarding the chosen mammal, see https://www.astepahead.es/elephant-ballet/ , though no shoes were worn by that performer.
Latin? Ο ιπποπόταμος, nominative plural οι ιπποπόταμοι ("oh, hippopotamus" sounds like a great clean curse, I may start using it). Although it's interesting to see my Oxford Greek/English dictionary in the English section still gives -muses or -mi, so I guess Greek speakers are not too worried about what we do to their words.
Spare a thought for those having to deal with neurology. The hippocampus (seahorse) is the small structure responsible for memory (shaped like a seahorse, because 16th century anatomists largely named structures based on what they'd had for lunch, see also "fornix" and be glad there isn't a part of your brain called "calamari"). What is the plural? If you tend to prefer following the Greek form you get hippocampoi, and everyone thinks you're weird, you can do the funny-foreign-word-into-pseudo-latin that we tend to use in English and get hippocampi, or you can take the bite-the-bullet-it's-an-English-word-now approach and arrive at hippocampuses, to which my only objection is it's just too long. The everyday get-out clause is to do what many do and shorten it to "hippo" and then you've got "hippos", but they wont let you get away with this in journal articles sadly.
Yes, Latin — Latin got hippopotamus from Ancient Greek ῐ̔πποπότᾰμος, but English got “hippopotamus” directly from Latin, not directly from Ancient Greek. Similarly, English “elephant” came from Old French elefant (the Old French spelling was also the Middle English spelling), which got it from Latin elephantus, which got it from Ancient Greek ἐλέφᾱς. (The -ντ- is found in most of the other Ancient Greek declensions, but it’s not in the nominative singular; the Latin word probably came from the genitive singular ἐλέφᾰντος.)
English words of ultimately Ancient Greek origin often arrive through a Latin intermediary, which is why the Latinate “hippopotami” is one of the English plurals, but the Hellenic “hippopotamoi” isn’t. Similarly, “hippocampus” came directly from Late Latin hippocampus, and is also a second declension noun, which is why “hippocampi” is its English plural rather than “hippocampoi”.
They did an article on something old, aka synthetic diamonds. That required a 'hook' to be interesting. Elephants in ballerina shoes conjures up an image in journalists minds that makes it article worthy.
Given the subjective size of the tip of a ballerina's shoe, why did they choose 640??
640 elephants should be enough elephants for anyone!
Almost as if the entire thing was designed as click bait to promote synthetic diamonds.
First wikipedia date for synthetic diamonds is 2008, by Slashme, with kinkyturnip adding more detail:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Synthetic_diamond&dir=prev&limit=500&action=history
While the Reg prefers to measure in skateboarding rhinoceri, it is worth pointing out that there are 5 species of that particular group still turning tricks upon the Earth, with a considerable range between the Black Rhinoceros (adult males ranging from 850-1600kg) and the Sumatran variety (about 700kg).
I was under the impression that the London bus was an acceptable unit for almost any physical quantity. Length, height, weight, redness, lateness, etc.
The ballet shoe is not an acceptable measure of area in these or any other circumstances (with the exception perhaps of ballet related issues) however I do remember the tip of a stiletto heel being used in this sort of context. Having heard in the past and employer justifying banning stiletto heels from a parquet floored board room by comparing the pressure exerted by a woman in stilettos being to that exerted upon a horses hoof.
As such I think it would be reasonable to measure extreme pressure in London buses on a stiletto heel.
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