gifugill
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Posts posted by gifugill
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Pretty wet here too
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Lots of shindo 1, 2 and 3 quakes border of Gifu and Nagano since yesterday.
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I might take a trip over there make it more of a sightseeing thing.
Will let you know how it goes if I do end up going.
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Here's the 'Kokusai's listed on SJ, can we see any link?!
Hidaka Kokusai
Kamisunagawadake Kokusai
Geihoku Kokusai
Kusatsu Kokusai
Joetsu Kokusai
Niseko Annupuri Kokusai
Sapporo Kokusai
Shirakaba Kogen Kokusai
Hyonosen Kokusai
Kuriko Kokusai
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It doesn't cope
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Seems to me you should perhaps check out recent ones and update your opinion!
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I have access and drive both a car with a Carrozeria and one with a phone connected. You can certainly get by with the phone if a little finnicky it being small etc, but there's no question I much prefer the full navi system. It may not be worth the big chunk of dough, but it's the better solution by far.
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I think lots of places did well last week, but that was the last of the decent snowfall.
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...but to be honest I'd need a snowblower anyway for our approach and car park. Luckily we have plenty of room around the house to chuck the snow.
Can't you recoup some by charging for your car park?
500 yen a day should make it more attractive than the usual 1000 yen!
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Though her voice sounds a bit too much like Mao.
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That really does sound uber-daft.
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I'd love to have a day like that in Niseko.
After snowfall overnight of course.
Cheers for the pics and info Mike.
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Can you cook fries in space?
Think reaching Mars is a challenge, how about cooking a decent meal on the way? Enter the weird science of cooking in space, starting with the humble chip.
If humans ever voyage to a planet far bigger than Earth, the journey is sure to be arduous and full of danger. But there’s a consolation: french fries cooked at the planet’s surface will be crispier.
That’s one way of interpreting new research investigating how unusual gravity changes the physics of deep-frying. It may be a slightly glib way of reading the results, but the gastronomic preferences of future astronauts are the genuine motivation for experiments conducted by chemists John Lioumbas and Thodoris Karapantsios of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. That’s why their work is supported by the European Space Agency.
Preparing food in space presents unique challenges. Apart from the obvious difficulties of floating crumbs, liquids and peelings, the basic physics of cooking is different. For example, in zero gravity there’s no convection in hot fluids to redistribute the heat, so they experience highly localised heating unless you stir. Preparing drinks like percolated coffee is a challenge, because there’s no gravity to pull the water down through the granules. And if you wanted to cook with a naked flame – perhaps unlikely inside a space station – the shape of the flame would be compact and round, rather than elongated and tear-shaped.
Given the constraints, plenty of thought has already gone into methods of improving food preparation in space, to enhance tastiness and healthiness while keeping fuss and waste to a minimum. Fully sealed food preparation units have been proposed that dispense with the need for a human chef to do any chopping or squirting altogether.
Still, astronauts sometimes lament the drabness of their pre-prepared space meals, and have even expressed cravings for fries.
That’s part of the reason why Lioumbas and Karapantsios decided to study deep-frying in space. In their initial experiments, they decided to cook in increased gravity rather than zero gravity, because they want to map out the whole landscape of how gravity influences the cooking process to get some idea of the overall trends and patterns as the tug of gravity changes. They are now working on the same questions in microgravity experiments – gravity much weaker than that of the Earth.
For frying and boiling, convection is an essential part of the process. The rate at which foods heat up in water or oil is affected by the way hot liquid circulates. On Earth, the hot liquid at the base of a pan rises because it’s less dense than the cooler liquid above. Yet this convection won’t happen in zero gravity. Conversely, in increased gravity convective effects should be more pronounced.
Gravity simulation
The researchers wanted to know how these differences affect the way chips fry. While achieving low gravity is difficult unless you go into space (or want to brave the free-falling Vomit Comet aircraft used by space agencies, which is enough to put anyone off their fries), artificially increasing the force of gravity is relatively easy. You simply attach the apparatus to the arm of a rapidly spinning centrifuge.
Lioumbas and Karapantsios fixed a deep-fryer containing potato sticks in half a litre of hot oil onto the end of the 8m-long arms of the Large Diameter Centrifuge at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. This device could generate the equivalent of a gravitational force of up to 9g – nine times that at the Earth’s surface.
The researchers monitored the temperature just below the surface of the potatoes, where the crust of the chip forms, and also examined the thickness and profile of the crust under the microscope. Convection currents are created both within the pan as a whole and from the rising of bubbles that grow on the potato surface as the oil begins to boil. As the g-force rises, these bubbles become smaller and more numerous and they rise faster. However, when it reaches 3g, the bubbles are so small that they get stuck to the potato by capillary forces, and so further increases in gravity make little difference.
Good to know.
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That joint with the buddha?!
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If you have a wart, saliva on it first thing in the morning gets rid of it.
Oh, not really on topic that.
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No, it's just shite.
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If we're talking lift serviced skijo, for me 47 too.
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I don't watch many of these but do videos of other countries also do the "getting there/culture" bit? Or is it just Japan because it's "so different"?
Tokyo - busy! Temples - culture!
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The coming typhoon(s) will give us more helmet wearing warnings, that's for sure.
I hope the thing blows off course to the east.
Zenkoji (Nagano City) - 10th May 2014
in General off-topic discussions
Posted
Still haven't got myself over there.