Recent Googlettes
Herewith a few more gogglettes, all from the same 6-hour period (of 23 October 2007), as it turns out.
1. "Will liquids freeze at the same time?"
This is a perennial favorite, and I'm only too happy to have provided at least a partial answer in my posting "Not All Things Freeze". Now, there is some ambiguity in the phrase "at the same time", which I take to mean actually "at the same temperature". The answer is no, all liquids do not freeze at the same temperature, otherwise cars would stop running as soon as the roads became icy.
2. "Raman spectroscopy on ramen noodles"
This struck me as so funny when I read it. "Raman spectroscopy" is a spectroscopic technique (duh!) that relies on inelastic scattering from phonons (sound excitations in a fluid) and very high precision wavelength measurement* All that matters, really, is that one could do Raman spectroscopy on ramen noodles — well, on the liquid soup-part, really. I don't know whether anyone has, but I wouldn't be at all surprised.# For some reason, that makes it sound very funny.
3. "Write a riddle about the water moccasin."
I have no idea what was on the googler's mind, really, but I liked the poetry of this one. It sounds almost Zen-like. It made me think of the Little Prince saying "draw me a sheep" ("dessine-moi un mouton"). Alas, I have no riddle about the water moccasin, except to ask "when is a water moccasin a cottonmouth?" (The answer.)
Bonus googlette for Bill, from the same 6-hour period:
4. "I ran into Tammy Faye at the mall"
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* The details aren't really the point right now. The Wikipedia article on Raman spectroscopy is fine, but not much more understandable except to people who already understand spectroscopy. Maybe we'll talk all about it another time.
# I don't know who did the experiment, but every graduate student in physics is probably told, sooner or later, that a laser can be made from a martini.