Sideswipe: May 20: Gendered ready meals
19 May, 2021 05:00 PM
3 minutes to read Not the size of an actual man
How the microwave was invented The microwave oven is of the all-time great accidental discoveries of science. In the 1940s, American engineer Percy Spencer was working at Raytheon Technologies testing an active radar while he had a chocolate bar in his pocket. At some point, he noticed that the chocolate had melted into his pocket. Rather than merely changing his trousers, he realised the potential to heat food using a high-density electromagnetic field (and presumably also changed his trousers). He first experimented by getting a bag of popcorn, and attempting to heat that. It worked. He pushed his luck and tried to heat an egg, which exploded spectacularly, thus also inventing the don t put an egg in the microwave rule. Spencer next worked on putting magnetrons (which create microwave radiation) inside a Faraday cage (which blocks electromagne
Sideswipe: May 4: Hmm, which to scan first?
3 May, 2021 05:00 PM
3 minutes to read
Prisoner on a Chinese reality show In a story reminiscent of David Seymour on Dancing with the Stars, a Russian man who joined a boy band competition show on Chinese TV on a whim but quickly regretted his decision has finally been released from his three-month ordeal after making it all the way to the final. Vladislav Ivanov, a 27-year-old from Vladivostok, was working as a translator when producers reportedly noticed his good looks and asked him to sign up as a contestant. Ivanov agreed but quickly came to regret the decision. Unable to leave on his own without breaching his contract and paying a fine, he instead begged viewers to send him home and deliberately performed poorly in the hope of being voted off. His first song was a half-hearted Russian rap, in stark contrast to the high-pop of his competitors. Please don t make me go to the finals, I m tired, he said in a later
Sideswipe: April 12: Queen size typo
11 Apr, 2021 05:00 PM
2 minutes to read Phil from Birkenhead was mooching around Auckland s Downtown area, in front of Britomart over Easter and while, walking over the new squillion-dollar paving area, noticed on the corner of Quay and Queen Sts our main CBD street has been renamed Queens St (carved into the paving).
Deal friend or real friend? There is one type of friend almost everyone has: the buddy who can help you get ahead in life, the friend from whom you need or want something, writes Arthur C. Brooks in the Atlantic. You don t necessarily use this person the benefit might be mutual but the friendship s core benefit is more than camaraderie. These are what some social scientists call expedient friendships with people we might call deal friends and they are probably the most common type most of us have. The average adult has roughly 16 people they would classify as friends, according to a 2019 poll of 2000