{"id":16,"date":"2006-01-04T11:05:56","date_gmt":"2006-01-04T18:05:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/?p=16"},"modified":"2006-01-04T11:05:56","modified_gmt":"2006-01-04T18:05:56","slug":"coffee-cups-and-space-shuttles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/2006\/01\/04\/coffee-cups-and-space-shuttles\/","title":{"rendered":"Coffee Cups and Space Shuttles"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have a nice insulated coffee cup that has a screw-on cap with a rubber O-ring seal.   Putting the cap on has been very frustrating for me over the two years I have owned it.  Sometimes I gently screw the cap on, and the seal is good, no coffee leaks.  Other times no matter how hard I twist it on, the lid leaks.  I can remove and replace it several times, and it still leaks.  I thought the problem had gone away around last April, but it came back again a couple of months ago.<\/p>\n<p>I have been putting up with this all this time, and then the other day I happened to remember the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, and a simple demonstration that Richard Feymann did to show what had caused it.  He placed a piece of the shuttle O-ring into a glass of ice water and when he pulled it out, the O-ring was brittle and hard.  The cold morning of the Challenger flight had made the O-rings inflexible, thus allowing gases to leak and ignite, causing the explosion.<\/p>\n<p>The same thing was happening to my coffee cup.  If the lid (and O-ring) was warm, which usually was the case in the summer, the seal was good.  But on these cold winter mornings the O-ring is inflexible and doesn&#8217;t seal well.  I&#8217;ve gone to running hot water over the lid, especially over the O-ring, and now I get a good seal every time.<\/p>\n<p>Physics at work in every day life!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have a nice insulated coffee cup that has a screw-on cap with a rubber O-ring seal. Putting the cap on has been very frustrating for me over the two years I have owned it. Sometimes I gently screw the cap on, and the seal is good, no coffee leaks. Other times no matter how [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}