2003 February 10

Mad Scientist Time

The other night at Mary Chung's, Marek said he'd heard that if you cut a grape almost in half -- slice through everything but the skin -- and nuke it in a microwave, it will explode. This sounded foolish to me.

Today, I found myself standing in the kitchen at work, and noticed there were some grapes on the counter, across from the microwave.

So I did what I had to do.

It turns out that they don't explode as such, but damned if the little bit of grape skin joining the two bits didn't spark and flare and char itself black. Very, very weird.

I'm not sure where the original discovery was made (such as it is), but a quick search of the web turns up several references to a page by Patrick Michaud and Marc G. Frank, written in best pompous high-school lab report style. Nobody seems to have ever seriously wondered what the hell is going on, or what cutting the grape in half has to do with anything. I may have to play with this some more.

Comments
Post a comment
Yes   No   (like the Turing Test, but easier)

TrackBack Links
If you run a blog that supports TrackBack, you can link to this article with this TrackBack key.