scot hacker's foobar blog

Buzz earlier this week about the fact that stinky kitchen sponges can be made fresh again by microwaving them for two minutes. What the widely distributed article didn’t say (originally) was that you need to make sure the sponge is wet before firing the bacterial death ray. Microwave experiments cause sponge disasters:

“Just wanted you to know that your article on microwaving sponges and scrubbers aroused my interest. However, when I put my sponge/scrubber into the microwave, it caught fire, smoked up the house, ruined my microwave, and pissed me off,” one correspondent wrote in an e-mail to Reuters.

Mark Morford, amazing/insane as always, riffs on the debacle, and on our national obsession with germs.

Wait, there’s more. What’s the most germ-clogged, festering item on your body right now (besides, of course, your body itself)? That would be your cell phone, silly. After all, it just sits there all day, simmering in the happy juices of your toasty pants pocket, churning out microbes of horror like Paris Hilton churns out intimations of death. And you put that thing up to your face without first disinfecting it with some ethyl alcohol and a flamethrower? What are you, high?

For our part, we’re just amazed that it takes so much longer for kitchen sponges to get stinky now that we’ve got that little humidity problem under control. Amazed.

Returning home from a weekend snowboard trip, got off the highway at a random exit to enjoy coffee and the sunset. Behind me, a small canal and some tall weeds. Heard some splashing, some voices. “Everything OK?” someone called out. “Just wondering what you were doing,” I answered. “Come around and check it out,” the voice responded. Walked around the fence to find three guys with a gas-powered winch, a tow-rope, and a couple of wakeboards, getting air in a 5-ft.-wide, inches-deep canal, in which they had built a trick rail out of 4x4s. By itself, the tricks were nothing special, but the idea of using a winch instead of a boat, and having the cojones to do it in such a narrow space, impressed the hell out of me (especially after one dude missed the canal entirely and landed on the bank, rolled and walked away). They invited me to give it a go. And I would have, for want of a wetsuit. Flickr images

Watching An Inconvenient Truth last night, amazed to learn about vast pockets of methane trapped under permafrost in Siberia — pockets that are increasingly being released into the atmosphere as the permafrost melts due to global warming. Since methane is a greenhouse gas, the releases are yet another “vicious cycle” contributor to global warming: more warming = more permafrost melting = more methane released = more warming.

Talking later about this cycle, Dad alerted me to theories about methane’s possible role in the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle. When methane pockets beneath the ocean floor are released (by excess pressure or the ocean floor being broken by seismic activity) they bubble up in huge columns. The column of bubbles have far less buoyancy than normal water, and a ship sitting atop one of these columns could literally plummet to the bottom of the sea (indeed, ships have been found at the bottom of the sea nestled into craters that could be explained by methane releases).

In addition, concentrations of less than 1% methane in the air has been shown to be capable of stopping piston engines in their tracks, due to oxygen starvation – which could account for the downing of airplanes in the area of a methane release (not sure how this would play out for jet engines).

There seems to be quite a bit of credible accounting for the theory out there, but also a fair bit of debunking. Not ready to call this one solved, but it is an intriguing theory.