h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Why do plastic items in the dishwasher retain water on their surface, where glass, china and metal do not? Is this anything to do with electro-static charge and the way dust is attracted to plastic?

Not all of us put plastic items in our dishwashers (if we have dishwashers at all). Unfortunately for Western civilization, there is a deplorable trend in which melamine plates are displacing every other kind of dishware during the Summer months .

This is likely a very complicated issue. It involves whether various materials are hydrophilic or hydrophobic. That likely is determined by the molecular structures of the chemicals making up the dishes. Hopefully someone who knows more than I will be along shortly and enlighten us.

This reminds me of Feynman explaining why a simple "why" question can be very difficult but fascinating to try and answer.
http://youtu.be/MO0r930Sn_8

We old crocks mostly use crockery but have plastic food containers and plastic jugs

You've reminded me that I wash and reuse my plastic Tupperware-like food containers.

Lovely to see Feynman! He's the one who said "In mathematics you don't get to understand things, you just get used to them."

I love descriptive math, where you make a picture of something in mathematical terms.

The square root sign looks like a roof that I could sit under to get out of the rain.

/\

It just does, is the only answer that fits, when a persistent child keeps asking (or the answer just came to me is what an idiot savant would say, if asked how they managed to work out the square root of a number in their heads). Why is like Pi, it stretches into infinity and beyond, sometimes