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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.
A Smith & Wesson beats four aces.
(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_