February 08, 2016 at 04:39AM

Today I Learned: 1) For all of the advantages of doing work in a Mathematica notebook, they can come out *really* ugly when converted to PDF. 2) Apparently power plants that use water as a liquid medium *actually boil and condense that water*. At least, so says Wikipedia. I find this hard to believe. A little bit of explanation may be in order here. Virtually all power plants (with the exception of some kinds of solar) work by the same basic mechanism -- they spin a really big magnet inside a coil of metal wire, which generates electricity. Moreover, almost all of the power plants that we use* work by heating a liquid or gas, which rises through a turbine, causing it to spin. Usually water is what's used as the liquid/gas. A coal plant, for example, consists of a giant coal-fed fire that heats a giant vat of water, causing it to boil, which makes a whole bunch of steam that drives a turbine. That seems ridiculous to me. Boiling water is one of the easiest ways to lose a ton of energy without really doing much. Why not use something that doesn't take as much energy to boil, like ethanol? Actually, ethanol is a terrible idea, it would probably just catch on fire and/or explode, but surely there's some relatively cheap liquid that is easier to boil and doesn't ignite at power plant temperatures. Surely? Thanks Anders Knight for teaching me this *utterly incomprehensible* "fact". *Exceptions: wind plants spin their turbines directly from the wind; hydroelectric and tidal, which spin their turbines using flowing water. Off the top of my head I can't think of other exceptions. 3) Brown mustard works surprisingly well in lo-mein-like noodles. I was hoping for a cheap immitation of chinese mustard, but I got a really tasty, unexpectedly spicy noodle topping. I may have to try mustard with other noodles now.