Category Archives: Weird

How Much Would A Death Star Really Cost?

To the disappointment of thousands who signed the petition, the Obama administration recently informed us that it has, and will have no plans to build a Star-Wars-style death star. Now, there may indeed be good reasons to forgo this addition to the nation’s defense, but the first one listed, that it would cost 850 quadrillion dollars, was based on an extremely flawed estimate. Which isn’t surprising, because among the people doing the estimating, only one has any experience in aerospace engineering (and probably none in costing of such projects). Continue reading How Much Would A Death Star Really Cost?

A Novel Means Of Cooking A Steak

Not a very effective one, though:

To break the sound barrier, you’ll need to drop the steak from about 50 kilometers. But this isn’t enough to cook it.

We need to go higher.

If dropped from 70 kilometers, the steak will go fast enough to be briefly blasted by 350°F air. Unfortunately, this blast of thin, wispy air barely lasts a minute—and anyone with some basic kitchen experience can tell you that a steak placed in the oven at 350 for 60 seconds isn’t going to be cooked.

From 100 kilometers—the formally defined edge of space—the picture’s not much better. The steak spends a minute and a half over Mach 2, and the outer surface will likely be singed, but the heat is too quickly replaced by the icy stratospheric blast for it to actually be cooked.

I think I’ll stick to my IR grill. Though it might be fun to apply for a NASA grant as a suborbital research payload.

Coconut Pineapple

D’oh!

Australian scientists have created a pineapple that tastes like a coconut. It took them ten years to develop, but the fruit dubbed as the “piña colada pineapple” wasn’t exactly what they were trying to create.

Scientists, from a government agency in Queensland, were initially trying to develop a new variety of a sweeter, juicier pineapple but instead, created a coconut flavored one and now call it the AusFestival.

I just noticed that both words in the title are combinations of two types of vegetation. Sort of like Palmolive™.