enthalpy

Thursday, September 29, 2005


Sandcastle building gets complicated? Not really. It's called the angle of repose.
A lesson learned by centuries of beachcombers has been distilled to a physicist's formula: to make the perfect sandcastle, use eight parts sand to one part water.

The physicists' study, released on Wednesday before publication in the journal Nature Physics, is entitled, rather grandly, "Maximum angle of stability of a wet granular pile."

And while it deals with sandcastles, it could also help determine the stability of retaining walls and the material they hold back, one of its authors said.
Maybe, if he's a totally idiot that can't read. This is nothing new. Actually, it's the name of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, and the concept of stacking wet mud on top of itself is hardly new, either.



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