odd dinner conversation

[cellio]

The question (not mine): if you were building a thermometer (the kind that lives in your medicine cabinet at home), what range of temperatures would you support? I said the problem was insufficiently specified, but that my baseline would be 96-106 and if there's no appreciable expense in widening it, I'd go in the range of 90-110 or -120, because why not. But the problem was still insufficiently specified; I was assuming digital readout, not a column of mercury in a usually-illegibly-marked tube. In the latter case, you want the minimum useful range, because you've got limited real estate for the markings. If you could have those 10 degrees occupy 80% of the tube and have the rest be compressed that'd be different, I said.

So Dani challenged that -- why assume that the tube is uniform? I said because otherwise you're out of the price range of medicine-cabinet thermometers. This, in turn, led to speculation about how that type of thermometer is manufactured; I argued for a large uniform (hollow) rod that's cut to length with ends then treated (seal at one end, mercury + bulb at other), while he argued for individually molded. (Insert tangent about plastic vs. glass here.) Of course, neither of us actually knows anything about this; we're trying to make intelligent guesses and apply design principles from other fields.

I don't think we're the only people who have weird speculative conversations like this, but I never seem to notice stuff like this coming from other tables in restaurants. On the other hand, we haven't been kicked out of any restaurants for annoying the neighbors either. (On the third hand, it seems to take a lot to produce that result.)

Comments

Re: Restaurant Conversations

[jducoeur]

Oh, heck -- that's nothing. I just spent the weekend writing an off-the-cuff LARP (which I really ought to write up in my blog). We wound up creating a game where the players are a bunch of Nazi occultists trying to head off the fall of Berlin in April of 1945.

So there we are, having drawn a pentacle on the floor in masking tape, surrounded by candles, with people speaking loudly in bad German accents about the human sacrifice they're about to make. In the common room of a dorm. At Brandeis University (which is almost entirely Jewish).

We wound up posting guards at the entrances to the room, because we so did not want people wandering into the middle of this scenario unawares...

Re: Restaurant Conversations

[cellio]

Oh my.

Yes, a guard at the door sounds quite wise under those circumstances!