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People, trucks and even military tanks have tried and failed the task of pulling apart two phone books lying face up with their pages interleaved, like a shuffled deck of cards. While physicists have long known that this must be due to enormous frictional forces, exactly how these forces are generated has been an enigma – until now.
A team of physicists from France and Canada has discovered that it is the layout of the books coupled with the act of pulling that is producing the force.
http://phys.org/news/2015-08-mystery-impossible-interleaved.html
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The Mystery of Why It's Impossible to Pull Apart Interleaved Phone Books - Solved
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Nadia Comaneci, simple perfection.
-- '76 Olympics
(Score: 3, Funny) by skullz on Thursday August 27 2015, @09:49PM
15 years after they were obsolete and 5 years after people got mad about all the dead trees to produce, the answer is solved! Thank you, Science People!
One less thing to fret about at 2 am.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2015, @10:06PM
This is being driven by the need to understand the structure and behaviour of new micro and nano-engineered materials, which have impact on many aspects of life from medical applications to solar cells. Besides, chinese finger-traps are still just as relevant as ever.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by edIII on Friday August 28 2015, @12:36AM
Amazingly, they're not obsolete.
Three years ago I went into a sales meeting to discuss the placement of the company in the Yellow Pages. At the time they were heavily trying to upsell their SEO services. Ended up getting a couple of dedicated phone numbers to track any calls that may have come from the Yellow Pages. You would be surprised. There were indeed phone calls coming in from the number dedicated to the printed ad.
Not obsolete yet, or at least, I've still had to deal with it in business. If your demographic is over 50, then you may actually *need* an ad in the Yellow Pages.
I suspect that fact that they're freely delivered to residences and businesses has something to do with it.
I'm still surprised sitting here writing this comment. *scratches head*
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by martyb on Friday August 28 2015, @01:56AM
Besides working even when you don't have an internet connection, there is another often overlooked advantage of looking up information in dead-tree format: no tracking.
I can scan through the 'Yellow Page' listings and get an idea of what is out there, where they are located, which names I may recognize based on others sharing their experience, and then, and only then, need I make a call to them. Were I to try and do the same online, each one of those queries would be dutifully logged and cross-referenced with all the other personal info they could possibly glean directly from me and/or from an information broker.
Same idea with reading a dead-tree newspaper... I can read however much or little I want to read without having all of that activity tracked and logged.
And once again with a using a paper map versus something online like mapquest or googlemaps.
I just remind myself that whatever I am looking at, they are almost guaranteed to be tracking my looking at it. TANSTAAFL.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2015, @02:26AM
> I just remind myself that whatever I am looking at, they are almost guaranteed to be tracking my looking at it.
"When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Totally out of context, but sounds good anyway.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by edIII on Friday August 28 2015, @02:59AM
It does, but the abyss represents an abstract concept of infinity and an endless void with just you in it, IMHO. It stares back is a reference to the fact that it affects you.
To say this is to attribute this idea of the infinite somehow tainting our lives with its presence, and being of such intimidating power. Doesn't sit well with me, since those people are just flawed men and women, with very finite power that we have given them and a temporary existence.
I would prefer this:
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it."
-- George Bernard Shaw
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2015, @05:13AM
"Besides working even when you don't have an internet connection, there is another often overlooked advantage of looking up information in dead-tree format: no tracking."
If you download a book onto a computer with software containing search functions you might be able to search through it without being tracked.
Then again you are still making assumptions. You assume the software you are using to search for something isn't tracking you. Lets assume it's open source and you are confident it's not. You assume the operating system isn't tracking you. Lets assume it, too, is open source and you can be confident it isn't. These days you assume the hardware isn't tracking you as well. I suppose you can put it on a device that's not connected to the Internet in any way. Inconvenient but possible.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Friday August 28 2015, @11:29AM
I specifically referred to "looking up information in a dead-tree format."
In your reply, I see an introduction of the concept of downloading a book onto a computer and then performing a search upon that, whereupon you list a number of (valid) concerns for doing so. This seemingly culminates in suggesting that the whole thing is a 'bad idea.' As I posited strictly a dead-tree version of the document, only the strawmen that you introduced would be subject to those concerns. So, you raised valid concerns but none of them are applicable to the original post.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2015, @03:44PM
I never said that what you said was subject to those concerns. I was just listing some alternatives that could provide similar privacy to your suggestion of using a book and listed some possible shortcomings in those suggestions as well.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Saturday August 29 2015, @08:29AM
I suspect we may be running into a purely verbal disagreement coming from the use of the word "you".
In this case, as *I* read it, "you" is referring to *me*. This statement reads to me that you are accusing me of making assumptions; ones that I did not make at all. I gather (now) this was unintentional and that a choice of a different non-specific pronoun would have avoided the confusion.
If you had used the word "one" instead of the word "you" in your original comment [soylentnews.org], then we are in general agreement.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by JeanCroix on Friday August 28 2015, @03:10PM
And yet, despite me not even having a land line, the phone company still plops a new one on my porch every year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2015, @07:33PM
Uses that immediately came to mind:
Shread it and add it to a compost heap as brown content (like dead leaves).
This page also suggests using it as weed-defeating mulch. [thriftyfun.com][1]
Broadsheet-sized grocery ads seem like a better material for that--unless your garden is really tiny.
Using zero-cost phone book pages (or newsprint) to clean windows in place of non-gratis paper towels is a trick my mom adopted many decades ago.
(Mentioned by a commenter on the linked page.)
[1] Really awful HTML. [w3.org]
-- gewg_