Batteries; simple test to see if your alkaline AA/AAA are good.

When I was shown this a few years ago, I couldn’t believe that no one had told me this before. I grew up when batteries were mysteries and then the power meter batteries came out when I was a young adult in the late 90s (Duracell still sells a PowerCheck alkaline battery with the onboard power meter), and yet still no one told me this. This should be in some handbook for life, but nope, didn’t know until a coworker showed me. So, how can you tell if a battery was still good?

Center of Gravity, How to Find It

The center of gravity is the point where all mass is balanced for an object. If an object is standing or balancing on earth, gravity is acting upon the object with the center of gravity above a support providing an opposing force to gravity.

When the center of gravity is outside the support, then it falls over because no opposing force of a free standing object can counter the gravitational force. The lower or closer the center of gravity is to the support, the more stable the object. We had brooms standing as a magical meme a while back.

Now, let’s find the center of gravity practically. Let’s take for example a long slender object like a pole, pencil, or pen. If you support the pencil with one finger, it will rotate and fall unless your finger is under the center of gravity. Where is it?

Standard Time vs. Daylight Saving Time

This has been coming up a lot in my life lately.  I see someone try to be very specific about the time of an event:

PST is shorthand for Pacific Standard Time, but in August most areas will be observing Daylight Saving Time and the message should have been using PDT not PST to indicate Pacific Time being observed in Las Vegas/LA/San Francisco/Seattle etc.  Technically the event should begin at 2:30pm PDT, but my guess is the person is not aware of what PST means- and then I see it spelled out later in the email:

Photo by Bob Clark on Pexels.com

Apparently now they know what the letters represent, but I still don’t think they know what the actual words mean.  Would anyone provide a time zone that no one is currently using on that date as a joke to see if anyone understands the whole time zone thing?  So living in Nevada, I am betting on NO, so I will plan on attending at 3:30 PDT and will update this post if I am wrong and one hour late to the online event.