Upgrades - Hopefully Transparent

I logged in tonight and couldn't get on; the server said my CPU quota was exceeded. So I went into the hosting company site and found a bunch of my tables needed repairs. Fixed all that and then upgraded the blogging software. Hopefully, everything is working correctly. If not, leave a comment.

Clear As Glass

It seems that the expression clear as glass doesn't apply to the nature of glass. There is more than a little disagreement over what glass actually is.

"They’re the thickest and gooiest of liquids and the most disordered and structureless of rigid solids," said Peter Harrowell, a professor of chemistry at the University of Sydney in Australia, speaking of glasses, which can be formed from different raw materials. "They sit right at this really profound sort of puzzle."

Philip W. Anderson, a Nobel Prize -winning physicist at Princeton, wrote in 1995: "The deepest and most interesting unsolved problem in solid state theory is probably the theory of the nature of glass and the glass transition."

He added, "This could be the next breakthrough in the coming decade."

Thirteen years later, scientists still disagree, with some vehemence, about the nature of glass.

Peter G. Wolynes, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, thinks he essentially solved the glass problem two decades ago based on ideas of what glass would look like if cooled infinitely slowly. "I think we have a very good constructive theory of that these days," Dr. Wolynes said. "Many people tell me this is very contentious. I disagree violently with them."

(I love that quote from Wolynes.) It is a fascinating article. One of the little blurbs that intrigued me was that glass becomes more stable over a (very) long period of time. Sort of like how concrete cures.

Head Over Eels

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have long been the go-to source for cutting edge news about eels. Well, OK, we published one post about dead eels two years ago - to the day. But two years after the demise of "Conger Cuddling" in merry old England, a new use has been found for dead eels!

A Japanese firm is turning eels into a soft drink.

The beverage, which translates as "Surging Eel", is a vivid yellow liquid and contains eel extract and vitamins found in the fish.

It has been launched this month to coincide with the start of Japan's annual eel-eating season, which peaks this year on 5 August.

Many believe the fish boost energy during the summer's hot and humid conditions.

Kazunori Hayashi, spokesman for the company Japan Tobacco Inc, which produced the drink, said : "It is mainly for men who are exhausted by the summer's heat".

Of course, we'd be remiss if we didn't point out that Japan Tobacco, Inc. missed a huge opportunity. Had they made the drink with electric eels, they could have had all those vitamins plus 50,000 volts of electricity! Talk about a surging eel!