In the mail

Yesterday, I got two real letters! My aunt in Seattle again dreams of moving to Mexico, and my sister sent a magazine interview with Joss Whedon.

Today, however, there was only one piece of mail, and it was a junk mail for R's business. However, I'm laughing out loud and wondering how I'm going to keep from buying a bunch of this stuff. It's inexpensive too. On the cover: "Motivational Posters Don't Work. But Our Demotivational Posters Don't Work Even Better." And then we see a beautiful framed lithograph of a man gazing from a mountaintop onto a sea of clouds, with the caption: "PROCRASTINATION: Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now." Others include:

A picture of the Great Pyramids, labelled, "ACHIEVEMENT: You can do anything you set your mind to when you have the vision, determination, and an endless supply of expendable labor."

A picture of a salmon leaping upstream into the waiting mouth of a grizzly bear, labelled, "AMBITION: The journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly."

A picture of a handshake, labelled, "CONSULTING: If you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem." (There you go, keyboard_monkey.)

They also have post-it-style notepads, 5x7 "desktopper" pictures, a calendar, etc. Their on-line catalog is at www.despair.com.

What a riot.

"Shower Curtain Quirks"

Q. Why does the shower curtain blow into the bathtub, not out into the room?

A. There have been several competing theories about this, most citing the Bernoulli effect, which means that as a fluid accelerates, pressure drops, which is what happens over the wings of an airplane as it flies.

But in 2001, painstaking research was done by David Schmidt of the University of Massachusetts, using an elaborate computer model and a specialized software program from Fluent Inc. He found that such explanations neglected another phenomenon, which is the real culprit, he said.

Dr. Schmidt, a mechanical engineer who studies the computer modeling of sprays, based his calculations on the conditions in his mother-in-law's bathtub. He divided the study area into 50,000 tetrahedral cells, or pyramid-like structures, that would sense velocity and pressure in three dimensions, and simulated an 8-gallon-a-minute flow of water for 30 seconds.

According to two weeks' worth of calculations on his home computer, a shower's water droplets decelerate under the influence of aerodynamic drag, transferring energy to the bathtub's air, which begins to twist like a miniature hurricane turned on its side. As in the eye of a hurricane, or in a whirlwind, the pressure in the center of this disturbance is low, pulling the shower curtain into the bathtub.

Source: NYT 5/18/04 by C. Clayborne Ray

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