Spinor Info

My success story of the day involves two cups.

A few days ago, I heard my wife grumbling loudly in the kitchen. I went downstairs to see what was wrong. She showed me a pair of cups, a teacup, inside which there was one of our brand new espresso cups.

And when I say inside, I mean wedged inside. Firmly and utterly stuck, quite impossible to remove.

We tried to separate them using force, but they wouldn’t budge. We obviously didn’t want to break either cup. Not that they are terribly expensive but the teacup, well, we’re quite fond of these teacups and as for the espresso cup, it was brand new, I only just purchased the set off Amazon a few days earlier.

Force failed to do the trick so we tried to be clever. Use some oil to make it slick? Nope. Dishwasher detergent? That didn’t work either. I tried holding the outer cup, upside down, under hot water in the hope that thermal expansion might loosen the smaller cup inside; nope.

Nonetheless we thought that a temperature difference might help, so we filled the cups with water and put them in the freezer. Once the water was frozen solid, we took them out and placed them in a pot of boiling water. Again, the hope was that the high heat would cause the larger cup to expand, while the ice keeps the smaller cup cold, allowing it to fall out. Nope.

After this experiment failed for the third time earlier this afternoon, I sat down with the cups in hand and once again, tried brute force. The outer cup was still quite hot to the touch, the inner cup still quite cold and this may have helped; suddenly, I felt them budge, and after one more pull, they were separated, completely undamaged.

I was… absolutely delighted. Later I remarked to my wife that we humans are creatures of simple pleasures. Never mind the animations I completed just today using gravitational lenses of arbitrary shape. Never mind the work I am doing on another project on payment processor integration, or yet another project involving Microsoft Teams. (Yes, I multitask. Virtual desktops can be quite handy.) All of that is fun, sure, but it’s having been able to separate these poor cups without breaking or damaging them that really made my day.

A great many years ago, my uncle Jóska once played a joke on the family. He found a large utility scrub brush somewhere, and at the most unexpected moments, he held it under your nose and said, “Come, give a kiss to grandpa!”

What he really meant, of course, is that the scrub brush looked like the grandfather of all toothbrushes. Even so, “give a kiss to grandpa” became kind of an inside joke in our family whenever we encountered something that was unusually oversized.

Like an oversized piece of caramel candy.

When I was a child, one of our favorite candies was the “cow caramel” candy, a Polish product, a caramel candy that, unlike most caramel candies, was neither sticky nor chewy; rather, it just crumbled in your mouth without sticking to your teeth or palate. Oh, and it was very tasty, too.

This “cow candy” is still manufactured, and it is routinely available even in Canada at European deli shops. Although we try to keep our candy consumption at a minimum for all the obvious reasons, my wife and I remain regular buyers.

So imagine my surprise when the other day, my wife comes home with the grandfather of cow candies: a giant, mega-size (it says so on the label) cow candy that looks just like the regular cow candy, except that it’s much bigger.

But, I can attest, just as tasty. We cut this one in half and enjoyed it earlier tonight, but not before I snapped a picture, showing the “regular” cow candy and a Canadian quarter for size comparison.