This Is Drivel

If you like to cook, you probably know that you can thicken soup with corn starch. I don’t like to cook, but I’ve seen lots of people make gravy that way, and yet somehow I’ve been completely unaware that they were creating a non-Newtonian fluid, just like this one:

Some science teachers call it “ooblek” – from what I can tell, everyone else had science teachers who were a lot more fun than mine was, because I never heard of this stuff until about a month ago. When it’s just laying there, like gravy, it’s soupy and flows like any other fluid, but hit it with some force and it resists – or tries to crawl away, as it’s doing in the video, in reaction to the steady pounding it’s getting from the sound waves coming from the speaker.

Taken to its most entertaining extreme, you could walk on it, if you filled up a pool and make sure you kept pumping your legs so your feet were stomping hard enough on the surface to make it resist. As soon as you stop moving, though …

My Darling B is trying to work out how much we should pay in sales tax for all the purchases we make on the internet. According to what she found in the tax code, we do not have to pay sales tax for the subscription to the ISP that hosts this blog because we are purchasing a service instead of an intangible product. Weirdly, we do have to pay tax for the songs I buy from Amazon – not CDs, not music downloads, just the ninety-nine cent fee they charge to let me listen to a song. No tangible product is ever handed over. They just provide me with the ability to listen to music on-line, sort of like purchasing a service. Seems like apples and apples to me.