The Barwis Effect

December 31st, 2010 at 2:29 AM ^

Is water really wet?
A stupid question, quite a few of you will now say. Of course water is wet. But try to explain to a small child what "wet" actually is. In order to answer the question as to why water is wet we need to start by looking into the meaning of "wet". Follow us on a little experiment.

Take one bowl of water and one of flour. Now dip one finger into the bowl of water and one into the one with flour in it. What do you feel? The water swirls and flows around your finger. When you take your finger out of the water, both the water in the bowl and the water on your finger move. It trickles down your finger and drops form on your fingertip. If you now move your dry finger through the flour you notice that the flour around this finger trickles too. But when you take your finger out again, nothing carries on moving. There is another difference that you only notice after a while. With the finger that was in the flour you do not notice any significant change in temperature but the one that was in the water starts to feel cooler shortly afterwards. Physicists call this evaporation cooling "adiabatic cooling". And so in fact water is only wet because we associate these two sensations with it: evaporation cooling and movement. In other words, "wet" simply describes a very particular combination of sensations. If you really want to split hairs, it is actually not the water that is wet but our fingers, the towel we dry ourselves on or the flannel we use to wash with.

http://www.brita.net/glossary9.html?no_cache=1&range=&lex=Is+water+real…

thethirdcoast

December 31st, 2010 at 11:37 AM ^

...stoked for the next season of Justified! Easily one of the best shows on TV right now.

Love the revisionist "Eastern Western" setting in Lexington, KY and the way they've integrated a lot of current issues into the show's plots.

The casting is also great, particularly Olyphant, and his ex-wife Winona is white hot.