What are they wearing under the cloak?

My dad was working as a parish priest.  In Denmark that means wearing a somewhat silly cloak like this:

I remember him telling me that people often jokingly asked if they were wearing trousers under the cloak.

This weekend I was invited for a catholic wedding in Malacca Malaysia.  Some Australian guy marrying a local Malaysian girl (obviously from Malacca).  The church from the 18th century was actually quite nice and I managed to shoot this picture from my cam phone:

Now - let me try to zoom in a bit on this picture:

Well, trousers perhaps, but it would appear that catholic priests in Malaysia don't really bother with shoes.

Now, please don't get me wrong.  Personally I actually think this is very very cool, but I am willing to bet almost anything that the Aussie guy - as far as I know first time in Malaysia - did NOT expect to be married by a barefoot priest :)

Google

It's a Mad Mad World

I walk into a cafe and pull out my trusty netbook.  It is actually rather small, it is light weight, it's got a very very nice almost full-size keyboard (we're talking Lenovo quality here - which they didn't invent but inherited from IBM), it can run for ages without a charge, it is hugely quick and I can do just about anything on it that I can on my desktop (albeit on a slightly more cramped display), can run flash, can run java - can run anything I choose.  Two years back that was the hottest thing, now people actually stare at me like "why the fuck is he carrying around that antique" (no, the pic is the same model - it's not mine - I wouldn't dream of running Windows).

All around me people are sitting with their iPads, Samsung Notes, Galaxy Tabs and what have you not, awkwardly trying to hold the device while typing on the screen, joggling around a cup of latte and a cigarette - not an easy task apparently. Inevitably some of these get fed up trying to joggle all this at the same time and put the damn thing on the table with some stand containing a bluetooth keyboard.  And they got what?  Two devices that combined together still haven't got half the functionality that my netbook have, cost about 4 times more and is a hell of a lot more awkward than my netbook - that has been designed quite well to stand unaided on a table in front of me leaving my hands free to do whatever I want.

It's a mad mad world.

I Give Up

I was supposed to help a 9yo with her science homework.  Being an engineer (albeit the electronics kind) I felt pretty confident that I would be able to handle this task.

The homework was all exercises from this book:

More particular, it was about springs

Springs essentially work according to Hooke's Law, that, according to Wikipedia, states:

As long as they are not stretched or compressed beyond their elastic limit, most springs obey Hooke's law, which states that the force with which the spring pushes back is linearly proportional to the distance from its equilibrium length:

where

x is the displacement vector – the distance and direction the spring is deformed from its equilibrium length.

F is the resulting force vector – the magnitude and direction of the restoring force the spring exerts

k is the rate, spring constant or force constant of the spring, a constant that depends on the spring's material and construction.

Coil springs and other common springs typically obey Hooke's law. There are useful springs that don't: springs based on beam bending can for example produce forces that vary nonlinearly with displacement.

Now, it's been 25 years since I studied these things, and I am ready to admit I forgot the name of Mr. Hooke and the exact wording of his law.  However, I did actually remember  that springs essentially work in a linear fashion.

So let us look at the actual questions.  The overall question is:

Question one:

Excuse me, it is as far as I can see absolutely impossible to answer that question based on the information given.  One would have to make some serious assumptions in order to answer. If we assume that those two springs have the same spring constant, that they are shown in equilibrium and that none of the "weights applied" will stretch the spring beyond it's elastic limit, then the correct answer would be that they will stretch exactly the same.

Even forgetting everything I know about forces I would find this one hard to answer.

The same goes for the rest of the questions.  Since there is absolutely no information about the spring constant, one would have to assume it's the same.

In other words it is as far as I can see impossible to answer any of these questions, or it would require some serious assumptions to do so.