Blog › May 2007 Archives

A few things I wonder about
Continuing the line of thought from a previous blog post, here's some more things I wonder about, complete with answers that I have helpfully researched for you:

How many ants live in an ants' nest?
An ant colony can range in size from a few 10s of individuals to over a million, depending on species and age of the colony.

Can a swan really break your arm?
Yes, but only in exceptional cases.

How do the screens at London bus stops calculate when buses are due?
Currently, they use a tag and beacon system, which records the location of the bus when it passes roadside beacons along the route. However, Transport for London has been trialling a GPS system where a GPS device on each bus would update a central computer every 30 seconds. They plan eventually to be able to send SMS updates to passengers' mobile phones, which would be pretty cool.

[What is RFID and] when will it appear in supermarkets?
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an automatic identification method; tiny electronic tags are attached to an item, and these tags can be read remotely, within a range of a few metres. In Japan, the government wanted consumers to be able to track food right back to the producer, so tags are applied to the packaging of fruit and vegetables right after they have been picked and packed. RFID readers attached to mobile phones allow consumers to view information about the produce. Bring it on! Although I suspect the British government will cripple the technology in some way; I'm not particularly cynical about our government, but there's simply too many Sun and Daily Mail readers to let any technology that exciting into the country.

How many countries are there in the world?
According to a Wikipedia entry, there are 245 entities that are considered countries. Of the countries eligible to be members of the United Nations (i.e. sovereign states), all but one or two are. I say one or two, because it depends on how you define Taiwan's status as a country (in 1971 it was replaced in the United Nations by the People's Republic of China, but since 1991 has been actively trying to rejoin) . The other one is Vatican City which has chosen not to join.
19 May, 2007 at 22:40 0 Comments
Milky Way + Andromedia = Milkomeda
Astronomers have calculated that, in five billion years, the Milky Way and our closest neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda, will violently collide, creating a new merged galaxy, which has been dubbed Milkomeda. The two galaxies will (apparently) swing past each other in less than 2 billion years, then again 1.5 billion years after that, before merging 5 million years from now. Scientists have calculated that there is a 3% chance that the sun will defect to Andromeda during the second close pass, in which case viewers on Earth (assuming there's any left by that point) would see the Milky Way as a spiral in the night sky.

If you'd like to see what the "merger" might look like, watch this video. I find it oddly beautiful, given how cataclysmically destructive the whole thing is. It's funny to think that each of the two spirals of white contains hundreds of billions of stars.

19 May, 2007 at 00:01 0 Comments
Depressible buttons on drink carton lids


If you're anything like me (and God help you if you are), you'll have wondered why those little buttons on the plastic lids of soft drink cartons, such as you get from McDonalds, are never actually pressed by the fast food operative. I don't remember ever seeing them used.

However, while enjoying a nutritional* dinner at a Burger King "restaurant", I noticed that the "diet" button on one of my friend's drinks had, in fact, been pressed. After recovering from the initial feeling of jealousy that my button had never been pressed, so to speak, I realised it might have something to do with never ordering diet drinks. That said, some fast food chains have a more advanced drink lid configuration which allows for the flavour to be selected as well, and I've also never seen that used.

But apparently I've been living in the dark, and it's quite common in some countries, such as the United States, to have these buttons used on a regular basis. I can only dream.

If you think depressible buttons on plastic lids are boring, then check this out.

*Burger King helpfully provide a colour-coded table listing all the Good Things contained in each burger, so it must be nutritional.
10 May, 2007 at 23:22 3 Comments