Toy Boat Research Articles

The Quarrel

THE QUARREL / Frederick Turner When the Lord and Lady of the island quarreled, it thundered in the fiords and the clouds' bronze shadows slid across the glittering sea and up swiftly over the mountainsides. Being great magicians it was easy for them to call forth calamities without forethought, and damage in their play dear things not easily remembered and reconstituted in detail afterwards. And they had their cold planet Trilight almost to themselves, but for a small scared city at their antipodes, and a deserted matterferry in the treeless and boggy mountains across the sound. Few thoughts of others disturbed the absolute music of their joint reality. The ice-capped mountain Gaspeth at the head of the deepest mainland fiord had changed its shape gradually month by month until it resembled the head of a heroic and exhausted horse, by their habitual and unconscious revisions. The bay, too, had once been a cold salt marsh where the children had played with their toy boats and fishing-bows. But for now the Magician Zeoderich and his Lady Milksnake were sweet friends, and the three Suns of Trilight shone for hundreds of hours out of the blue sky filled with lesser stars. There was even a drought in the island's uplands, and its small lake ringed with granite stones and heather shrank and turned a deep clear brown. The baby Nachiketas, fat and golden, played in the pebbles of the stream by the high tide mark; the house swam with the warm smell of the herbs that Milksnake brought in from the kitchen garden. They did not use their magic, and so did not trouble the Meditators, for when a magician puts forth his power those monadic thinkers, constructed two millennia ago by the Omnicracy, are wakened and vexed. The Meditators know all that will happen and do not tell; but Magicians can pick up their mystical leakage and by it amplify their own already formidable holographic memory of the future. Now, as far as Milksnake and Zeoderich were concerned, the Meditators slept; the superspheroidal geometry of time showed no inclination to become a supertoroid, as it does when a magician plies his craft—no timereversals , no mnemonic feedback, no centripetal wavefront activity. Almost it seemed that the planet had dived a little toward the distant center of its system: the brightest sun, violet Rhadamanthus, showed a visible disk, though the ochre secondary and the saffron tertiary remained points only. After every sleeptime (Trilight has no night, but a perpetual evening/morning; nor winter, but a perpetual early spring) Zeoderich put on his boots and took the boys Perseidon and Eliazar up in the hills to steal honey from the heather-bees or out in the boat to catch silcod and spackerel in the teeming sound. The Missouri Review · 207 Once they found Milksnake gloomy on their return; she seemed sallow in color and the baby cried at the breast. 'Let us pay a visit to Shutterpack,' said the Magician, perceiving her mood. But this was a mistake: Trilight's only town, whose inhabitants feared to use the matterferry and who watched the tridee beamed from the Omnicracy, was not what Milksnake wanted. 'Panathens, then,' he said conciliating. But even the glittering Galactic capital had no charms. 'There's going to be a High Tide,' she said. A High Tide on Trilight is a rare calamity: the three suns line up on one side, the close Galactic Center with its gigantic invisible Black Hole on the other, and a freak tide sweeps around the waterworld. Since Trilight has no spin the normal tides are aperiodic and shallow, despite variations in the planet's gravitational neighborhood that can change the weight of a man by over a pound in a few days. ? High Tide? Nonsense,' said the Magician. 'How do you know?' ? asked.' 'You asked the Meditators?' 'Why shouldn't I ask them?' said Milksnake provokingly, snatching a pan of plover's eggs out of Zeoderich's nerveless hand. 'We need to get away,' said the Magician. 'Or have some friends come here to see how we live. We're neglecting the children's social education. Let's go to Panathens. Or...

Physics in a Toy Boat

A method of propulsion commonly used in toy boats consists of a shallow chamber, covered by a thin diaphragm, which is connected to the water astern of the boat by pipes. Filling the chamber with water and then heating it's base leads to vigorous self-induced vibration of the diaphragm and water column in the pipes with resulting forward motion of the boat. The paper describes the mechanisms of self-induced vibration and of propulsion. It is shown that this inexpensive toy demonstrates a number of physical principles and provides opportunities for further research.

Physics in a Toy Boat

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Credit Lines: A Digest of Diversified Health Interests

CONCERNING LITERATURE DISTRIBUTION Annual reports of health and welfare agencies come to our desk by the score and one item which always catches our eye is that having to do with the amount of literature distributed. Distribution figures in these reports often run into truly staggering sums, and with furrowed brows we are led to ponder this question: how much of this health literature was wisely distributed according to a well conceived plan, and how much of it was distributed haphazardly? Everyone will admit that a great amount of health literature goes to waste. Evidence of it is fairly common. For instance, we have seen adults pick up a number of booklets at random, thumb through them, and quickly cast them aside as waste basket fodder. Perhaps such individuals should not be criticised too much for this disregard of printed materials inasmuch as great stacks of literature usually adorn reception room tables on which a Help Yourself to These Booklets sign is displayed. If fewer booklets were placed within reach of the. public, one might be less inclined to raid the pamphlet supply. Moreover, we have seen children-mere tots at that-walk off with an assortment of pamphlets having no more relation to child health than a toy boat has to the Queen Mary. Of course, a child cannot be expected to exercise discrimination in such matters, but an attendant might be on hand to prevent such waste of literature. (On second thought, perhaps these youngsters were taking the booklets home to daddy!) Certainly our health literature accomplishes far more good when it is distributed along carefully supervised lines or given out by an attendant only in response to specific requests. And it would be well to remember that distribution figures running into hundreds of thousands do not necessarily imply that a good health education job has been done. It strikes us that the safety officials of Wayne County, Mich., have made an interesting experiment in pamphlet distribution. In the August issue of Public Safety this new and effective method of distribution is summarized. Here is a description of the distribution project:

Pilgrim Trust Lecture, Molecular layers

If fragments of camphor are placed upon a clean water surface they move about vigorously and may even be made to propel toy boats. The late Lord Rayleigh (1890 a, 1890 c) found that these movements stopped rather abruptly if the surface tension of the water was lowered by 21 dynes/cm. by oily contamination of the surface. The amount of olive oil needed for this purpose was surprisingly small, corresponding to a thickness of only 16 A (16 x 10 -8 cm.). Miss Pockels (1891) proved that any amount of olive oil less than enough to give a critical thickness of about 10 A had no effect whatever on the surface tension of water, but above this limit the surface tension decreased rapidly as the amount of oil was increased. Only 5 g. of olive oil would be needed to cover an acre of water surface with a film of this critical thickness. Miss Pockels also showed that accidental contamination of the surface, which had previously complicated nearly all observations of surface-tension phenomena, could be eliminated by using a trough filled to the brim with water, and sweeping impurities off the surface by the motion of barriers which rested on the edges of the trough. This use of movable barriers to confine films, to compress them or to remove them from the surface, laid the foundation for nearly all the modern work with films on water. The early theories of surface tension had been developed by physicists (Thomas Young 1805; Laplace, Gauss, etc.) who either treated liquids as continuous fluids between whose elements of volume forces acted, or considered only spherical molecules which exerted upon one another forces that varied as a function of the distance between molecular centres. Such theories naturally could not take into account the wealth of knowledge that had been accumulated by organic chemists regarding the structures of organic molecules.