Stockholm, conversations, factoids
Stockholm is bone-freezing cold. And rainy. My friend and I, since we both love long walks, walked around downtown, visited the Royal Castle and Skansen, a historical / ethnographic theme park. But that's common tourist stuff. More unusally, perhaps, I got to visit The Tackiest House In Sweden. It belongs to a certain electronic music composer and an all-around New Age'y person, who has a celebrity status in Sweden. More about the house later. My friend and I still need to sort out the pictures we took of his house, and then I'll post assorted pictures.
I also had some conversations with my friend's husband, a freelance science journalist, technical writer and translator, on such topics as nuclear reactor design. He has investigate it among millions of other technical subjects he investigates as a technical journalist. Sooo, it's not good to use graphite as a moderator for nuclear reaction because of what he called a positive void coefficient. I got an impression that it means that graphite in a nuclear reactor is heated to a really high temperature, and since water is used to cool it, if there's a crack in something-something, water will be exposed to the super-high heat and will dissociate into oxygen and hydrogen, and will result in a fierce explosion. That's what happened in Chernobyl.
I think that's what he said.
Chernobyl accident wasn't a nuclear accident, he said. It wasn't a runaway nuclear reaction. It was more like dirty bomb.
I'm remembering an interesting factoid I learned from my mom. In Lithuania, unlike in the US, if you pay with a card at a restaurant, you can't add the tip to your credit card bill. Why? My mom thinks, it's because after you add the tip, the waiter takes the credit card back to the cash register, and then it's up to the waiter to enter the correct sum. You don't see what exactly he or she punches in. And Lithuanian people would not trust the waiter to enter the correct sum. They would semi-expect that the waiter would inflate the amount of the tip. I pointed out that there are some safeguards against it: the customer has a copy of the receipt, and later if the customer sees that the amount on his/her credit card statement is different from that on the receipt, he or she can conctact the credit card company about the fraud. My mom said very few people actually keep credit card receipts and try to reconcile them with their statements. So there is much leeway for fraud. I think her concerns are valid. I only wonder why aren't Americans concerned about this? Is it because Americans in general are more trusting/naive, or am I missing something here?
I also had some conversations with my friend's husband, a freelance science journalist, technical writer and translator, on such topics as nuclear reactor design. He has investigate it among millions of other technical subjects he investigates as a technical journalist. Sooo, it's not good to use graphite as a moderator for nuclear reaction because of what he called a positive void coefficient. I got an impression that it means that graphite in a nuclear reactor is heated to a really high temperature, and since water is used to cool it, if there's a crack in something-something, water will be exposed to the super-high heat and will dissociate into oxygen and hydrogen, and will result in a fierce explosion. That's what happened in Chernobyl.
I think that's what he said.
Chernobyl accident wasn't a nuclear accident, he said. It wasn't a runaway nuclear reaction. It was more like dirty bomb.
I'm remembering an interesting factoid I learned from my mom. In Lithuania, unlike in the US, if you pay with a card at a restaurant, you can't add the tip to your credit card bill. Why? My mom thinks, it's because after you add the tip, the waiter takes the credit card back to the cash register, and then it's up to the waiter to enter the correct sum. You don't see what exactly he or she punches in. And Lithuanian people would not trust the waiter to enter the correct sum. They would semi-expect that the waiter would inflate the amount of the tip. I pointed out that there are some safeguards against it: the customer has a copy of the receipt, and later if the customer sees that the amount on his/her credit card statement is different from that on the receipt, he or she can conctact the credit card company about the fraud. My mom said very few people actually keep credit card receipts and try to reconcile them with their statements. So there is much leeway for fraud. I think her concerns are valid. I only wonder why aren't Americans concerned about this? Is it because Americans in general are more trusting/naive, or am I missing something here?