Cash reunited
Chung To Kong discovered a method, within the spirit of unboiling an egg (Feedback, 10 September 2022), to make banknotes from shredded banknote items.
Kong, on the College of Hong Kong, writes: “On the Hong Kong Financial Authority customer middle, guests should buy a paperweight memento stuffed with shredded banknotes. Despite the fact that the shredded banknotes are small, through the use of laptop imaginative and prescient, it’s potential to reconstruct the entire banknote like a jigsaw puzzle. Every paperweight memento prices $100 HKD, and it’s claimed to comprise shredded banknotes equal to 138 full $1000 HKD banknotes. In principle, $138,000 HKD may be recovered through the use of laptop imaginative and prescient.”
Kong visited the customer centre, the place he defined this to the employees. Because of this, he says: “The paperweight memento is at the moment not out there.” Anybody who desires to earn money can get particulars from Kong’s paper, “The possibility of making $138,000 from shredded banknote pieces using computer vision“.
The large chunk
Extremely educated people try to discern what occurred within the earliest moments of two momentous occasions: a chunk of chocolate and the start of the universe. Maria Charalambides at Imperial Faculty London and her group have been beavering on the chunk thriller, a lot as many physicists have been beavering at studying what occurred when the universe big-banged into existence.
Charalambides and her group’s examine, “A multiscale finite element analysis model for predicting the effect of micro-aeration on the fragmentation of chocolate during the first bite“, is printed within the European Journal of Mechanics – A/Solids. Their acknowledged purpose: to boldly go the place nobody has gone earlier than in investigating “buildings that scale back the calorific worth whereas enhancing the style notion”. They explored the ultimate second when chocolate remains to be recent, earlier than it’s harshened by an encounter with digestive fluids.
Charalambides is not any chocolate-is-the-entire-universe fanatic. She co-wrote the 1995 basic paper “A study of the influence of ageing on the mechanical properties of Cheddar cheese“. It tells how her group dropped hunks of cheese from numerous heights. This produced fractured cheese and a great deal of knowledge – two portions that, if consumed individually, deliver nourishment and pleasure to massive chunks of humanity.
Possible beer glasses
Within the UK, the place heat beer is both treasured or tolerated, a examine known as “Optimizing beer glass shapes to reduce warmth switch throughout consumption” would possibly elevate eyebrows. In Brazil, the place heat beer may be mildly dreaded, that is cool analysis. Mason Porter stoutly introduced it to Suggestions’s consideration.
The writer, Cláudio de Castro Pellegrini at Federal College of São João del-Rei in Brazil, identifies two “possible” shapes. Each, he says, “have complete volumes thought of excessive by most non-alcoholic shoppers and significantly massive radius of the opening, requiring a large foot to maintain steadiness”. However he warns that “as within the case of chopping pizzas, the mathematically optimized answer to the issue might show to be considerably difficult to implement in observe”.
237-fold gifting
For Mansi Gupta and her group, the existence of gift-giving is itself a present to be appreciated. And analysed. Gupta is lead writer on a examine known as “A bibliometric analysis on gift giving“, printed in Psychology & Advertising and marketing.
Gupta, primarily based at Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute of Administration in India, and her group say that though “shopper gift-giving habits has acquired a lot consideration from advertising students”, they determined to “conduct a bibliometric evaluation of 237 articles on gift-giving”. The acknowledged fundamental accomplishments: the paper offers readers “a state- of-the-art overview of shopper gift-giving literature and identifies alternatives for future gift-giving analysis”.
Pivotal ketchup
The dialogue of getting robots use ketchup as a non-Newtonian fluid appropriate for sprucing glass surfaces (Feedback, 16 March 2024) prompts us to recall an earlier surprising use of ketchup. A half-century in the past, ketchup turned a red-flag psychology dialogue matter. Calvin Trillin later wrote about it, within the journal The Nation.
Trillin noticed that, previous to his pressured resignation from workplace, US President Richard Nixon “was famous for lunching at his desk on cottage cheese with ketchup on it – a dish most Individuals discovered so weird that its attraction to Nixon was utilized by his enemies as a touch upon his character. Throughout his second time period, the White Home put out the phrase that the President had begun to eat his cottage cheese with out ketchup – presumably hoping that this info could be utilized by Washington commentators as proof that Nixon had, within the phrase Washington commentators have at all times beloved, grown within the presidency.
“That may have occurred, apart from one drawback: Because the info on ketchup had come from the Nixon White Home in his second time period, no one believed it.”
Suggestions would have an interest to study of different pivotal roles that ketchup has performed in science or world historical past. Ditto brown sauce.
Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the journal Annals of Inconceivable Analysis. Earlier, he labored on uncommon methods to make use of computer systems. His web site is improbable.com.
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