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

'orrible stuff

I thought I'd share the snow knowledge (snowledge??) we learned today with my kids, resulting in the following exchange:

Me: Did you know that snow isn't white?
Son and Daughter in unison: Yes!!!!
Me: Oh. OK then. Well what colour is it?
Daughter: It's see through
Me: That's very impressive! Now can you tell me why it looks white?
Daughter: Because when there's so much see through all joined together it makes white

I think that's a pretty good answwer.

I'd think so too, unless your daughter is a physics professor, that is...!

I'm not snow.

Okay - so the Admiral got a (glass) bowl of sugar and I got a pair of pliers. We made sure the curtains were properly shut, went in the back of the house away from any street lights, turned off all the lights downstairs, even covered the TV and video with a sheet so we couldn't see the stand-by lights, and I started crunching.

It didn't work. We didn't see anything at all. We were really looking forward to it, too.

Maybe there's a knack to it and I haven't got it.

It's the pliers - metal against Polo provides a sort of minty lightning conductor...

will sanity ever return to bless us with its weirdness and general prune like cradlings of machine heads

I'm not sure that helped much, 2legs. I tried crushing the sugar with a - which was of course plastic - but it didn't make any difference - the had insufficient mechanical strength to crush the sugar and just bent.

I'd try a but I'd never get one in the house. Not without taking a couple of walls down, and that seems excessive - it's got to be dark, remember, so the street won't do - streetlamps.

Anyway, I don't have a . I nearly bought a fire engine once - it was only £395 and it had all the ladders and bells and hoses and everything. A 1958 Dennis, it was. Lovely.

It didn't go of course, but I'd have got it going. Only the Admiral put the block on it. 'Where will you park it?' she said. What's that got to do with it? No bloody spirit of adventure if you ask me.

Anyhow, if you've got any other suggestions...

"if like me you believe it's made from Satan's own bogeys and all extant pots of it should be dumped in a deep sea trench in a subduction zone"

Spot on, Hoovooloo! great to see you btw!

When I saw that ad for Marmite {the lifesaver one} I was almost

By the way, is anyone watching "Wife swop" on Tuesday nights?
Tomorrow night a mother of one swops lives with a mother of six.
Last week they argued over marmite.

*books tv now*

oh, and Lucky
"Me: Did you know that snow isn't white?
Son and Daughter in unison: Yes!!!!
Me: Oh. OK then. Well what colour is it?
Daughter: It's see through
Me: That's very impressive! Now can you tell me why it looks white?
Daughter: Because when there's so much see through all joined together it makes white"

You should have said
Me: Well why didn't you tell ME then?

so why does snow appear light blue? : I saw an icecream van for sale the other day, all working, and not too old, with all the ice cream machinary stuff inside only £3,000 very tempting, if parking wasn't too tricky here, I could have got it, parked it outside and had ice cream when ever I wanted

It rather depends on which side of the snow/ice you are. Standing under a glacier the light comes through a lovely pale blue. This is rather like the blue of the sky and the extra yellow sun resulting from transmission through the atmosphere. All the crystal boundaries in the ice have scattered the longer wavelengths of light around (I didn't have the right equipment with me to check its polarisation though). Standing on top of a glacier the reflected light looks white because of the scattering (if you ignore all the muddy footprints!). You can reproduce the scattering experiment using a tank of water with some milk-of-magnesia stirred into it. Shining a torch down the length, the beam will look a reddish colour at the far end and the water itself will take on a bluish hue.

I don't even want to think about standing under enough marmite to see what the effects on transmitted light are while a team of dedicated whackers works on making more discontinuities...

what an horrible thought I wonder what other food stuffs have unuseual properties such as those described here? Wonder if I could get MRC funding to resurch this at Uni for a few years?