Soda sucks. The regular sugary crap is inviting diabetes. The diet crap is asking for metabolic syndrome.

The regular crap sinks because it is essentially a crazy super dense sugar water solution, enough to overcome any little buoyancy that the can may have from trapped air. The co2 bubbles are effectively dissolved in solution until the can is opened. The diet crap floats because it isn't any where near as dense. Not enough to counteract the cans buoyancy. Again for any gas/air trapped.

The typical soda may contain around 44g of sugars. 10 teaspoons. I dare you to try to eat that straight up and not in a solution and see how you feel afterward. Nasty. Actually. These days it is mostly corn syrup. Even worse than processed granulated sugars.

Looks like it needs more buoyancy to the rear of the floats, or longer floats. Really seems like it wants to drag a wing tip in the water. Pretty nice looking.

ashes2flames, that was my initial guess as well but the poster's explanation says otherwise.

I'm trying to understand how the Leidenfrost works here, since I would expect at all times for bubbles to be forming out of the surface gas layer.The buoyancy of the gas should ensure bubble formation even if the liquid doesn't come in contact with the quarter.

upvote for impact, over buoyancy.

I love your avatar.

In reply to this comment by Crosswords:
his style was very refreshing compared to a lot of what I was seeing. Anytime i see that one of his specials is going to be on I always make sure to watch it. Very unfortunate he went, as he was truly a great comedian.

Sorry this site interacts oddly with safari such that I sometimes double post.

In reply to this comment by Crosswords:
his style was very refreshing compared to a lot of what I was seeing. Anytime i see that one of his specials is going to be on I always make sure to watch it. Very unfortunate he went, as he was truly a great comedian.

>> ^residue:
how on earth are those things keeping neutral buoyancy for so long??


I read the explanation posted in a previous comment, and it sounds like they make a rotating column of water (with their tails?), then shoot a bunch of bubbles into it - centrifugal force (from the rotating water) pushes the bubbles outward, and presumably some sort of friction where the rotating and non-rotating water meet keeps the bubbles from escaping. Even more impressive is that they're able to analyze the quality of the ring and then decide to blow another one to augment it, or if the ring is poor they'll let it go. These things are damned smart, it appears.

I don't think they sleep with half their brain at all times (as dgandhi referenced), rather that when they do sleep it's only 1/2 brain at a time. I'd love to be able to do that - shouldn't take more than 1/2 a brain to watch tv or mow the lawn or something.

how on earth are those things keeping neutral buoyancy for so long??

>> ^dag:
Probably very self-aware, but somewhere down the line from humans I think. Sentience is a very gray sliding scale IMHO. Some humans are not very sentient.


IIRC cetaceans(dolphins, whales etc) are always half asleep, one hemisphere of the brain keeping them swimming/breathing at a time. They are doing this VERY complicated activity with, as Rush Limbaugh likes to say, half their brain tied behind their back.

While their brains are no doubt wired much better then ours for complicated 3D comprehension, to be able to model and direct a complicated system of invisible hydrodynamic flows in such a way as to maintain a vortex which will hold a ring of air underwater contrary to its buoyancy, and to do it as a learned behavior is more evidence for sentience then I have seen from any human I have ever met.

From Wikipedia,
The P-791 is an experimental aerostatic/aerodynamic hybrid airship developed by Lockheed-Martin Corporation. The first flight of the P-791 was made on 31 January 2006 at the company's flight test facility on the Palmdale Air Force Plant 42. According to press reports, the designation "P-791" has no particular meaning.

Hybrid airship design

The P-791 is an example of a hybrid airship. In such designs, part of the weight of the craft and its payload are supported by aerostatic (buoyant) lift and the remainder is supported by aerodynamic lift.

The combination of aerodynamic and aerostatic lift is an attempt to create a craft that is a "best of both worlds" combination with the high speed of aerodynamic craft and the lifting capacity of aerostatic craft. Critics of the hybrid approach have labeled it as being the "worst of both worlds" in that such craft require a runway for take-off and landing, are difficult to control and protect on the ground, and have relatively poor aerodynamic performance.[citation needed]

Proponents of hybrid designs claim that these shortcomings can be overcome through advanced technologies. In particular, it has been proposed that the use of various buoyancy control mechanisms can minimize or in some cases eliminate the need for a runway. However, to date, no effective buoyancy control mechanism has ever been demonstrated on a hybrid airship.

No hybrid airship design has ever been developed past the initial experimental stages. And, in spite of the fact that many such designs have been proposed over the years, very few proposed designs have ever flown. One example of hybrid airship design that did take flight was the Aereon 26.

From Wikipedia:

In fluid dynamics, gravity waves are waves generated in a fluid medium or at the interface between two mediums (e.g. the atmosphere or ocean) which has the restoring force of gravity or buoyancy.