Flat3D

FAQ

Questions regarding Flat3D:

Why aren’t my comments showing up?
Comments from first time commenters are not displayed immediately, but instead are held for moderation. Once a comment from an author has been approved, the author will be free to comment from then on and their comments will appear immediately unless they contain something that sets off the spam filtering jobby.
No longer!
I have added a reCAPTCHA to the comment system, this (hopefully) makes the holding in moderation redundant as spam is rarely a person doing the work! Comments have slowed to a managable amount and I now just get an email when one is posted…. giving it a go anyways

Question from Ruth:
Why is 3D flat?
Ah! A good question!
I could make something clever up about stereo imaging or depth perception or something, but I won’t. In fact the answer is not as exciting. During my time at university I spent much of my time living in a flat (or apartment). And that flat was flat number 3D. So my address began as such:
John Orme
Flat 3D
etc
Now being a bit of a geek (or nerd) I thought this was quite amusing (due to the whole oxymoron thing that you have already noticed) and when it came to making the Flat3D website for the first time (see Old Flat3D) I thought it would be a suitably clever name…

General questions of life, the universe and everything (to which the answer is not 42):

Question from Mel:
Why is the sky blue?
Well, young Mel… (hey! that rhymes!) :ponder_tb:
White light, as we know it, isn’t actually white… No really! It isn’t! It is in fact made up of a whole host of different wavelengths of light, each wavelength is a different colour. The longest wavelengths are red and the shortest are violet when included with the inbetweens you get a spectrum of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet and all the colours inbetween.
Now the sky, while appearing to be nothing is, for several miles over your head, made up of air! Yes, the very same air that we breathe and that aeroplanes and birds fly in! Now this air is made up of various gases, and these gases are made up of lots of little particles whizzing about with plenty of lovely brownian motion. This is called the atmosphere.
Now the interesting bit is when the light from the sun and atmosphere meet! Usually light moves nice and straight, and this is the case in the space between the earth and the sun and to some extent in the atmosphere. but in the atmosphere there are bits of dirt and dust and moisture which will reflect the white light in another direction. However… the big difference between the atmosphere and space are all these particles we talked about in lovely brownian motion. The gas particles don’t reflect the light so much as the dust, water and dirt does, but infact they absorb them, then in a little moment they radiate them out in another direction, the same colour as the light absorbed. But why is the sky blue? All the light is getting reflected or absorbed and re-radiated! Ah, but the particles in the gas are considerably smaller than the bigger bits of guff floating about. So they are harder to hit. And seeing as shorter wavelengths of light (such as blue indigo and violet) oscillate way faster than longer wavelengths, they cover the space inbetween the extremities of their oscillations many more times in the same distance moved in the straight line than the longer wavelengths do. And so they get more opportunity to hit the gas particles and be absorbed and re-radiated. So they do!
So when we look at the sky away from the direct path of the sun, we see blue as some of this redirected light reaches our eyes. When we look towards the sun (don’t try this at home kids) it appears to be yellow rather than the white like the light it radiates. This is because the light getting through has lost more of its higher frequency/shorter wavelength rays than the lower frequency/longer wavelength ones.
Also in the evening or morning when the sun is low in the sky, there is more of the atmosphere (think about a sphere and how much of it would need to be travelled through) between the sun and your eyes. This means more of the higher frequencies get diffused (the sciency term for the redirection we talked about earlier) and the light that reaches us appears to be redder. and all the colours inbetween can be explained by this phenomenon.
So that tells us what makes the sky blue… or red… or that purply colour you get sometimes… And what makes the sun appear yellow… or red…
But as for why? Well I guess God thought it would be nice that way! :grin_ee:
I hope that was a suitably informative, yet condescending, answer to your question. Particularly as I had to edit it cos I got it wrong the first time…:blush_tb:

Question from atj:
how do they get the fig in fig rolls?
Well my old chap, Margaret Spellings, Assistant to the President of the United States of America for Domestic Policy, when asked the very same question puts forward:
I bet they boil the figs, make a paste, roll out the dough, put the paste on the dough, slice it into cookies and bake. Does that sound right to you?
And while I cannot for a moment imagine that she would know, it does sound impressive.
But I see a problem here. We are no longer looking to the fig roll, but to the manufacturing process by which it was created. This very question thus robs the roll of our attention. Does one ask whether Michelangelo used a step-ladder or scaffold to paint the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel? Do we ponder whether DaVinci used a medium-small or small-medium grade brush to garnish the Mona Lisa with her enigmatic smile? Do we question whether Brunel used slide rule or abacus in calculating loads to be borne by the Clifton Suspension bridge?
“Nay” says I!
We must seek to savour the figginess of the rolls and admire their shape and longevity in dunking.
So please, do it thus!.
Besides I have heard a lot of Zen Buddhists are pinning their meditative but sadly misplaced hopes on that unanswerable question.

Question from Nats
What happens if you take a trolley past the ‘no trolleys beyond this point’ sign at Tesco’s?
This depends on which Tescos you are at. If you are at a regular run of the mill Tescos you will go home with a trolley of your very own for the princely sum of one british pound sterling (assuming you are in the UK). If it is a high-tech-no-nonsense-anti-trolley-crime Tescos you’ll find, on crossing the special line, one of the wheels on your trolley will lock thus rendering it useless to the unskilled trolley thief. To the skilled trolley thief, however, this poses little problem… But as Flat3D can not endorse such activity or promote it, we are not at liberty to divulge the fact that taking it off with a few common-or-garage tools from Homebase and putting on a new wheel from a second “donor” trolley will work just fine.

Questions from Ally:
If nothing ever sticks to TEFLON, how do they make TEFLON stick to the pan?
Well Teflon^® is a trademark of Dupont^®, so to avoid trademark based lawsuits and nasty letters (as though it’d happen!) I’m going to refer to aforesaid surfacing and others like it as “non-stick.”
Non-stick surfaces, like a lot of modern materials, are polymer based materials. These, according to my memories of GCSE chemistry, are constructed using long chains of molecules in various arrangements and configurations. With non-sticks it is a config that encourages other materials not to become attached to it, as you may have guessed.
Now, with a little ingenuity I was able to reverse engineer my mum’s frying pan and determine the nature of the method used to encourage bonding between the surface and the pan (ok ok, I googled). It seems the most common modern method is to introduce a sticky molecular structure into a batch of the non-stick and make a sticky non-stick material. This is then spread onto the surface to be non-stuck and a layer of non-sticky non-stick material is applied to the sticky non-stick surface. The sticky non-stick, due to it’s very nature sticks to the non-sticky non-stick as well as to the metal of the pan. Thus adhering the non-stick surface to the frying pan.

If knowledge is power and power corrupts, doesn’t knowledge corrupt?
To the best of my knowledge, “Power corrupts” is a misquote of Lord Acton’s observation that “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
Further to that knowledge alone, despite Sir Francis Bacon’s assertations, does not guarentee power in any shape or form. Rather it is the correct application and manipulation of knowledge that brings power. Which in turn, if not applied and manipulated using sufficient wisdom and without the checks and balances of a proper morality may well bring corrupting power. But I would say that in these cases that it is the corrupting desire for power that is encouraging the quest for knowledge in the first place. In other words, the person has been coorrupted by the very desire for power before knowledge becomes part of the equation.

If the Universe is infinite, does that mean that everything we think and dream exists somewhere?
No. No it doesn’t.

May i ask what the significance of “42″ is, in reference to general q’s of life, the universe and everything?
this

Got a question for the FAQ?
Add it in a comment down below!