Miscellaneous

Hi! Here you'll find a fun/useful science snippet and a physics tip, followed by a brief note about my name.

(Click here for the archive of past material)

A science snippet (helpful for all subjects): Caring for a new book

I recently encountered some tips to condition a new book, to help prevent the spine from cracking. This was too late for one book (note the spine of the orange book below), but in time for another (see the spine of the blue book). A cracked spine can cause pages to come loose and fall out, but if instead the spine bends, the pages stay in place. In mathematical terms, we want the slope of the spine to remain continuous, rather than at some location be discontinuous. 

The conditioning process takes about ten to fifteen minutes, which is much less than the time I'll spend reading a book. I suggest the following approach:
-- Do this before opening the book wide.
-- Ensure the book is warm, at the temperature of a cozy room or warmer, so the spine is malleable.
-- The general strategy is to gently push along the inside of the spine (being neither too firm nor hasty), with the spine kept concave from below, as shown in the videos here and here.
-- I personally start near the middle of the book, gently opening half the book down towards the desk with the other half held about 45° above the horizonal, and I then lift 4-5 pages each time up from horizontal, sliding my hand along the inside of the spine, until all pages have been lifted.
-- I then repeat this process for the other half of the book.
It is important that the spine, when seen end-on, bends smoothly, with a continuous slope.
Good luck!

A physics note: Boiling water with or without added salt...

Predicting the outcome of an experiment can sometimes be challenging, and this often happens when different effects oppose each other. Consider adding salt to a fixed amount of water, and wondering whether this decreases or increases the time it takes to bring it to a boil.

If we treat the container to be closed (so with negligible evaporation), then three effects occur due to adding the salt: Effect 1 - we are adding some mass to the system, and this alone would increase the time taken to boil. Effect II - we are raising the boiling point of the water, and this would also increase the time taken to boil. Effect III - we are changing the heat capacity of the liquid (of slightly-increased mass), and in fact we decrease the heat capacity such that this would decrease the time taken to boil.

To see which of these effects: 1 & 2 together, or 3, wins, we need to know the size of each effect. The parameters of interest can be found in Question 4 of the 2023-2024 Thermal Physics midterm posted here. In this case we explore a fairly high-salinity solution - that of salt water - but the general conclusion applies also to less concentrated solutions akin to those used in cooking.

Finally, a note about Rayf

I generally adopt the spelling Rayf, which is consistent with the pronunciation I prefer, and used by family and friends (/reɪf/). The legal spelling of my name remains 'Ralph', yet this can be confusing in a manner similar to the Stroop effect. Some background to the name, from Ralph Wedgewood at the University of Southern California, can be found here.