soapbox

I’m competing for the geekiest post of the week prize, but this is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while.

When you take a cold can of soda out of the fridge and put it on a table on a warm humid day, it obviously heats up. Heat enters the can through conduction from the table, conduction to the surrounding air, and by giving absorbing energy from the latent heat of water condensing on the can surface.

The question is this, how much of the warming of the can is due to that latent heat? Is it significant or insignificant?

Michael raised an interesting issue yesterday that a large number of spam comments were ended up in moderation.

There’s actually more to it than that. Yesterday was actually a record spam harvest. In fact, if we could can it, we’d be rivaling Hormel.

On a typical day, we get 80-120 attempted spams that get eaten and then go into the little counter at the bottom of the blog. Yesterday however, we got over 860 not including the 70 that ended up in moderation.

I don’t know if this is something to be afraid of, since we’re getting lots of spam, or happy about, since none of it is actually making it to the blog.