odd dinner conversation

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.)

Shabbat

You know, I never noticed this detail about the story of Noah before: he doesn't take isolated pairs of anything. He takes seven pairs of each kosher species (which I already knew), and he takes two pairs of each non-kosher species. Not one pair. Somehow I had always read this as "two, one male and one female", but that's not what it says.

Another detail: as a kid I wondered why doves hadn't died out, given that Noah sent one out and it never returned. But, of course, he had backups. Did we just not read very carefully in CCD, I wonder?

Of course, this doesn't take into account any animal births that occurred on the ark. They were in there for close to a year, not just the 40 days of the flood, so who knows how many bunnies came out? I wonder if this is addressed in the talmud somewhere.

Comment from someone Friday: he hadn't been able to really envision anything as big as the mabul (flood) until this week's news from California. I hadn't thought about it in those terms before.

( Shabbat )