Viva Las Vegas

So, I’ve been in Las Vegas all week at a conference. I’ve got quite a few thoughts, but didn’t want to bombard you all at once. I figure I’ll post a few here and there over the next few weeks.

By far, the most interesting aspect of the conference was the water coolers. I don’t know if that is a statement on the coolers, or the conference, or just that I’m fascinated by really stupid things.

The tops of the water coolers were your normal, plastic, office-type water cooler. The bottoms, however, were made of some kind of ceramic. They kind of looked like this. Nothing special, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how they kept the water so cold. They don’t plug in, so it couldn’t have been electrical. Maybe they just filled the ceramic base with ice, but by golly, those suckers stayed cold all day long. I kept trying to figure out some really cool law of physics it was taking advantage of, like those little woodpecker toys, or those very cool potato clocks. Who knows what kind of whacky science could have been going on inside that ceramic belly? Bill Nye, maybe.

But even if i was just ice, my brain was stimulated more by thinking of that water cooler than any other aspect of the conference…