Showing posts with label chemistry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chemistry. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Entropy - it doesn't just happen

Axe Whatever Paste

originally uploaded by theimpulsivebuy.
What fools we were in the 1970s when we did not know that we needed a product like this to ensure that our hair looked messy, trusting instead to literal winds of chance, inadvertent bed-head (before that was a scientific term), and desperate self-barbering upon occasion. For if science has taught us anything, it's that one cannot trust nature to revert to disorder when one's (fashion) life might depend on it. I imagine that the Axe people have incorporated nanomachinery into their product to make sure that no two strands parallel one another over a significant distance, and perhaps a dab of adaptive optics to befuddle the hapless viewer's eye to see more of a fractal Medusa's nest than is practically possible to engineer in reality. Back in those days the mathematics of strange attractors was regrettably unavailable to describe the chaotic hair dynamics that is now understood to be essential to sustain modern standards of presentability.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Stylized

my new (and first) tattoo
my new (and first) tattoo,
originally uploaded by megpi.
Good job on counting up the electrons and the ordering of the Bohr atomic shells in this tattoo, but to me the image suggests a valence bond relation, rather than an ionic bond appropriate for a compound of such widely varying electronegativities. That last electron does not want to have anything much to do with the sodium and is firmly in the camp of the chlorine ion.

If I were the wearer, which I'm not, it would bother me.