One morning I decided that I wanted to learn a new thing every day. So I decided to share my experience with everyone.

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Jiminy Cricket was a weatherman

Did you know that cricket can tell you what the current temperature is? According to the Dolbear’s Law, the number of cricket chirps by minute is in direct relation with the ambient temperature.

The formula is Temperature in Fahrenheit = 50 + (Number of chirps per minutes – 40) / 4.

In Celsius the formula is Temperature in Celsius = 10 + (Number of chirps per minutes – 40) / 7.

But don’t throw your thermometer away just yet, this formula only apply to snowy tree cricket which is not the most common one. The formula may apply to others of the 900 species of crickets, but may not be as accurate.

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

States of Matter : How many are they ?

A common answer would be 3: Solids, Liquids and Gases. This answer would not only be wrong but only cover a small part of the universe matter. Plasma is the type of matter that is the most common among the universe. A plasma is typically a gas at a very high temperature (think about a star). A candle flame would be called a cold plasma (because of the small fraction of the gas molecules that are ionized, but this is maybe too much detail).

So there’s a 4 states of matter. WRONG!!!! There’s also Quark-Gluon plasma (which as only existed for about 30 microseconds during the big-bang), Bose-Einstein condensate and Fermionic condensate (both states are near absolute zero), Strange Matter (the name is almost self explanatory; a mater composed from three types of quarks: up, down and strange) supersolid and superliquid (both can be flow without friction … I wonder if that also apply to superman) and finally string-net liquids.

Now where up to 11 states. But wait there is more !!! There’s also Quantum Hall and Quantum Spin Hall, Degenerate matter, Weakly symmetric matter, Strongly symmetric matter, Neutronium, Electron-degenerate matter, Colloid, Supercritical fluid, Liquid Crystal, Crystaline Solid, Amophous Sold and Gravitational Singularity.

So the answer would be 24 … lets see what Jack Bauer can do about this.


Most of the articles on these pages are taken from different site. Since I tend to strip the article to only keep the essential, I don’t use quote because it would (to keep it simple). Link to the used resources are kept in the link section. If you want to know the sources for any particular article, just ask the question in the comment form.