A research study about lights, food, a rotating chair, and earmuffs is featured the “May We Recommend” column in the special Rotation and Spinning issue (volume 28, number 5) of the magazine. You can read that article free online. Better still, buy a copy of the issue (it’s in PDF form). Or better better still, subscribe […]
Tag: rotation
Modeling What Happens to Frozen Rotating Lasagna
Things take a turn in this roundabout technical study of lasagna: “Multiphysics modeling of microwave heating of a frozen heterogeneous meal rotating on a turntable,” Krishnamoorthy Pitchai, Jiajia Chen, Sohan Birla, David Jones, Ric Gonzalez, and Jeyamkondan Subbiah, Journal of Food Science, vol. 80, no. 12, 2015, pp. E2803-E2814. (Thanks to Mason Porter for bringing […]
Counter-Rotation Inside a Glass of Beer Shaken Stirringly
A round of surprise appears in a glass of beer—or a glass of coffee or tea—when you shake it stirringly. Details are in this study: “Counter-Rotation in an Orbitally Shaken Glass of Beer,” Frédéric Moisy, J. Bouvard, and Wietze Herreman [pictured below], EPL [Europhysics Letters], vol. 122, no. 3, no. 34002, 2018. The authors, at Université […]
Hunting upside-down ‘N’s
If you’re not a professional typographic practitioner, you might fall into the trap of thinking that certain upper-case letters (such as H, I, N and O) will look exactly the same upside down (i.e. when rotated 180 degrees about their z* axis). But subtle complications can, and do arise when there are serifs involved. One […]

