Tertiary Source

Arguments about the safety of high-energy experiments sometimes cite the rate of high-energy few-particle collisions when cosmic rays hit the moon. What's the production rate for making transuranic elements from this process? What fraction of the universe's element 118 was made in earthbound accelerators?

Children's medicines come suspended in goopy liquids. Some part of the medicine always stays behind in the measuring spoon. Do dose estimates like "3/4 teaspoon twice daily" include a correction for the left-behind part of each dose? Do different types of dosing cups make a difference? Or do other factors introduce more uncertainty?

CSX has been advertising that they "move a ton of freight 400 miles on a gallon of fuel," or suchlike. This seems extreme, like a cherry-picked statistic. Where does it come from? (more)

My fan-driven humidifier makes my house feel colder. How much heat does it pull to vaporize the water it does?

New "open" signs at restaurants, with bright red and blue LEDs, bring out some chromatic aberration in my glasses: viewed peripherally, the different-colored parts don't line up. Quantify? Why have I only just started to notice this?

Passing traffic makes Doppler-shifted noises ("wheeee-oooom"). Useful trick: map between musical interval of the shift and the speed of the traffic? (maybe)

If you pull two connected blobs of Silly Putty apart slowly, the thread between then stretches plastically; if you pull them apart quickly, it fractures cleanly. What sets the threshold? How sharp is it?

The Economist claims that some 1200 people have died crossing from Mexico to the US since 1990, compared to about 300 killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall during the 28 years it was up. Fatalities per mile? Fatalities per legal crossing? Estimates of successful crossings?

You can't interact with a physical system without disturbing it, though you can ignore the disturbance in the limit where ħ is small. Similarly, you can't interact with a market for some product (by asking or buying or offering or selling) without affecting the "market price" seen by others, but you can neglect that change unless your exchanges comprise a large fraction of the market. There is some correspondence here. Clearly it'd be easy to take this correspondence as justification for saying some really dumb things. Are there any useful insights there?

What's the pressure inside an unopened soda bottle (or can)? What's the rate at which CO₂ comes out of solution at ambient pressure? How much does the bubbling change the temperature of the liquid?