Thermo-vacuum-crushing plastic jars

If you pour a little boiling water into an empty plastic jar (instant coffee jars work great), then pour it out and close the lid, and wait a few seconds for it to cool, the jar will collapse in on itself. When you poured the boiling water in it, the air inside the jar got very hot and expanded, but pouring the water out prevents it from remaining hot, so it will cool quickly and contract, so the jar will collapse in on itself, especially at weak points like the large areas around the side as opposed to the stronger points like the neck.

Plastic coffee jar sucked in
Plastic coffee jar lost some weight.

The Brazil Nut Coffee-Ground Effect


Dr. Hanson made a video about the Brazil Nut Effect, but called it the Raisin Bran Effect. To me, it will always be the “Brazil Nut Effect” because that’s the term that Jay Ingram used when discussing it 15 years ago on an episode of Discovery Channel’s “Daily Planet”.

That said, even then, I was already familiar with the effect from having noticed that upon shaking a cup of instant coffee grounds and sugar, the sugar would sink and the coffee grounds would rise. Simple observation (and slow shaking) revealed that the difference in size and shape of the grounds and sugar crystals was the reason for the “granular convection”.

Sorry Joe, but it I don’t know if the Raisin Bran Effect will take.

Osseo High School Screwed the (cisgendered?) Pooch


Some staff at Osseo high-school in Minnesota physically forced open the door to a bathroom stall while a transgender student was going to the bathroom. There’s a few salient points about this:

  1. Despite what the student said, they didn’t “violate” him (her?). That is a loaded word that implies something akin to abuse or rape. 🙄
  2. Couldn’t they have just waited a minute for him to come out on his own and then send him to the office to sort out the matter? What was the friggin’ rush? 😒
  3. Regardless of how anyone feels about (trans-)gender issues in general, nobody can argue that the student was harming anyone by going to the bathroom in a stall. For decades, sometimes girls used the men’s bathroom when the ladies’ was full, and sometimes guys used the ladies’ room when the men’s was out of order, and nobody got hurt. I’d like to believe that (most) people are (still) mature enough to take a leak or wash their hands without causing anyone to die. ¬_¬ (Even before bathrooms were invented, people of all genders took dumps in the same grass and woods as each other for millennia without problem. This is “progress” for you. 🤦)

I heard that freezing a hard-drive can let you recover it from the click-of-death

Last time I had a drive with the click-of-death, I froze it in the freezer and was able to recover everything. I tried the freezing trick again with this drive.

Hard-drive covered in snow outside on window-sill


(For clarity, the hard-drive was outside of the house, between the window and the screen. I left it out for a week or so.)

NB: While freezing a click-of-death drive can indeed help get it to work long enough to copy the files, this is not how you’re supposed to do it; it will get moisture in it which will freeze into sharp ice-crystals and drastically reduce your chances of recovering your files. Put it in a sealed bag (preferably vacuum the air out of it) and put it in the freezer. This drive and whatever was on it wasn’t important, so I was just messing around.