just in case
This is one of those things a person should know, you know, just in case your out 'n about and happen upon some quicksand and Short-Round can't get you out and the idiot blonde girl just starts screaming and screaming and you also can't reach your whip.
DROWNING IN QUICKSAND IS IMPOSSIBLE, according to a new study,
relegating this popular plot device in adventure stories to the
category of pure folklore. Consisting of a mixture of sand, salt
water, and clay, quicksand captured the attention of University of
Amsterdam physicist Daniel Bonn when he went on a family trip to
Iran, the birthplace of his wife. Collecting a sample of quicksand
near a body of water in Iran, and bringing it to his laboratory for
study, Bonn and his colleagues showed that shaking aluminum beads,
designed to have the same density as human beings, would partially,
but never fully, submerge them. Since quicksand is twice as dense
as water, the beads (and humans) only sink about halfway. Shaking
or otherwise disturbing the quicksand liquefies it, increasing the
downward flow of the beads by a factor of a million. This is how
humans can get stuck in it. Since quicksand is often located near
bodies of water, Bonn speculates that high tidal floods passing over
individuals stuck in quicksand may have caused casualties
incorrectly ascribed to sinking fully in it. Bonn says his
conclusions apply to all kinds of quicksand. Nonetheless, the force
required to lift a foot out of quicksand can be equal to that
required to raise a car. His solution: wiggling the stuck foot will
cause water to trickle down, allowing the hapless adventurer to get
out of it. (Khaldoun et al., Nature, September 29, 2005)
PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE
The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News
Number 753 November 9, 2005 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein
4 comments:
All this time I have been telling my students to beware of quicksand! The hours of avoidance tactics and rescue procedures simply wasted...my life's work! In one foul swoop you have caused me to rethink my entire career path...I need a drink.
You see, you should have experimineted first. Actually throw the child in first to see if he needs saving, or his equivalent in aluminum balls if no child is available. (aluminum is expensive and hard to machine) Then the avoidance tactics should be implemented if necessary. This is why the world needs physicists.
I thought the world needed love, sweet love, it's the only thing, that there's just too little of...I guess I was wrong, my mistake
Yeah, people tend to make that mistake sometimes. It's ok. What the world needs now,is love, sweet love. No, not just for some but for everyone. And physicists too. For everyone.
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