Kowalski Heat Treating News, Notes, and Valuable Information for Anyone Trying to Keep Their Metals & Alloys Hard, Flat, Straight or Sharp
My most sincere thoughts on Mother’s Day
Hope you all have a wonderful Mother’s Day weekend. I know I will.
Do You Like Ice Cream?
Yea, Me, Too!
Most of you know eating is one of my favorite pastimes. And afterwards, there’s nothing like ice cream … unless of course there’s also pie, or cake, or cookies … But I’m talking ice cream now.
For my tech/info gang, here’s some specs we uncovered:
- US industrial production of ice cream begun in 1851 in Boston, MA.
- The largest consumption of ice cream is here in the states, where one average person consumes 48 pints of ice cream per year.
- The most popular flavor of ice cream is of course vanilla, followed by chocolates, strawberry, cookies n’ cream.
- Ice cream cones were invented during 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, when large demand forced ice cream vendor to find help from nearby waffle vendor. (PIA Job for sure) – Together they made history.
- Over her entire lifetime, one daily cow can produce enough milk for 9,000 gallons of ice cream – it takes 12 gallons of milk to create one gallon of ice cream.
- Historians remember that Alexander the Great (356-323 BC) loved to eat snow flavored with nectar and honey.
- One average sized cone of ice cream can be finished off in 50 licks.
- California is the larger producer of ice cream in United States. During 2003 they alone made 121 million gallons of this cold treat.
- Ice cream “Brain Freeze” effect is triggered when cold ice touches the roof of your mouth, which causes blood vessels in the head to dilate.
- End of the World War II was celebrated by eating ice cream.
- Biggest ice cream sundae (24tons) was created in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in 1988.
- There is 273 calories in one cup of vanilla ice cream. (ok engineers – about 30K per year – plus or minus the syrup & nuts)
- Ice cream can be made in many types – ordinary ice cream, frozen custard, frozen yogurt, reduced-fat ice cream, sherbet, gelato, and others.
KHT OFFER: Email me your love of ice cream – I’ll pick “my favorites” (just like I do at the counter) and send out Mitchell’s gift certificates.
Find more info at icecreamhistory.net
Hey, Guess who turns 40 this year!
Well, besides KHT.
Erno Rubik and His Invention. Photoshop magic by Unknown
Good guess!
As you know, we’ve been all about problem solving for 40 years here at KHT, especially your PIA (Pain in the @%$) Jobs. And as it happens one of my favorite toys also shares our 40 year anniversary – the Rubik’s Cube.
In the mid-1970s, Ernő Rubik worked at the Academy of Applied Arts and Crafts in Budapest. Although it is widely reported that the ‘Cube’ was built as a teaching tool to help his students understand 3D objects, his actual purpose was working to solve the structural problem of moving the parts independently without the entire mechanism falling apart. At the time he did not realize that he had created a puzzle until the first time he scrambled his new Cube and then tried to restore it.
Rubik obtained a Hungarian patent HU170062 for his “Magic Cube” in 1975, the same year we were born. His original design has 8! (40,320) ways to arrange the corner cubes – Seven can be oriented independently, and the orientation of the eighth depends on the preceding seven, giving 37 (2,187) possibilities. With 12!/2 (239,500,800) ways to arrange the edges, the rule is that the combined arrangement of corners, edges, and centers must be an even permutation. For our mathematical friends, the formula reads: {8! \times 3^7 \times (12!/2) \times 2^{11}} = 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 – which is approximately 43 quintillion. To put this into a linear perspective, each permutation could cover the Earth’s surface 275 times.
So next time you find your Rubik’s Cube in the bottom of your toy box, think of KHT Heat and our love of problem solving – oh yea, and remember when you are trying to solve the cube, the world champion solved it in competition – in 38 seconds.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia’s page on Rubik’s Cube. You can read a whole lot more there.
