MYSTERY OBJECTS

[Stanley]

Good man China, let's see if anyone else knows what they are. You're right, it is a good selection.

[Big Kev]

I have a similar set

[Tizer]

Router blades, perhaps for a specific application?

[Stanley]

Good man Tiz. Exactly right. The boxed set you get with a Bosch Router.... very comprehensive and high quality.
Next for shaving?

[Stanley]

Try this one. It's a ruler of course but there is something different about it.

[Tizer]

It's for measuring old money and new money.

[chinatyke]

Especially bank notes hot off the press.

[Stanley]

China is holding back again and he's given the rest of you a good clue.....

[Stanley]

If there are no offers China, tell them what it is......

[chinatyke]

I think it is a printer's rule for setting typeface, measuring print spacing etc. I've never seen one but the indication is pts which is a typeface measurement, e.g. 12 points.

[Stanley]

Dead right China. Now set us a new object as punishment for being so clever!

[chinatyke]

My wife has just prepared 1 kilo of this. What is it?

[Gloria]

Is it jujube?

[chinatyke]

I had to look that one up and you are right. I've never heard them called that, just red dates or Chinese dates. Well done.
My wife has high cholesterol and these are supposed to be good for lowering blood pressure. She makes into a drink.
https://foodfacts.mercola.com/jujubes.html

[Stanley]

That was short and sweet Maz! Jujubes used to be the common name for soft jelly sweets here in the late 19th and early twentieth century. They must have known about the dates as well.

[Gloria]

I thought they looked like a fruit so I googled Chinese small fruit, and up it came.

[Tizer]

OK, what this?

[chinatyke]

Did it come from the Treacle Mines?

It looks like ... well, never mind about that!
When my wife was in California looking after her granddaughter, Esther, she took her out for a walk one day. A few days later Esther told her mother to mind the dog sh-t when she was walking. Her mum asked her from who she had learned that word. From Grandma! Grandma had learnt it from me and didn't realise it was a bad word and you could say poo even though she used the expression going for a poo.

[chinatyke]

The above post was written tongue-in-cheek but I've just read the Daily Mail's article about the wombat's chocolate logs!

[Tripps]

My wife has just prepared 1 kilo of this. What is it?

I thought Rambutan but wrong colour. After some intensive research I failed, but I'm now a great deal better informed than most about Chinese plums , and Loquats.

[Tizer]

Oh dear, the Daily Mail has gone and let the cat wombat out of the bag! I thought the answer might come from one of our Aussie members but China and the DM got there first. Here's the press release. Enjoy...

`Scientists Explain How Wombats Drop Cubed Poop'
Wombats, the chubby and beloved, short-legged marsupials native to Australia, are central to a biological mystery in the animal kingdom: How do they produce cube-shaped poop? Patricia Yang, a postdoctoral fellow in mechanical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, set out to investigate.

Yang studies the hydrodynamics of fluids, including blood, processed food and urine, in the bodies of animals. She was curious how the differences in wombats’ digestive processes and soft tissue structures might explain their oddly shaped scat. “The first thing that drove me to this is that I have never seen anything this weird in biology. That was a mystery,” said Yang. “I didn’t even believe it was true at the beginning. I Googled it and saw a lot about cube-shaped wombat poop, but I was skeptical.”

Yang and her co-authors studied the digestive tracts of wombats that had been euthanized following motor vehicle collisions in Tasmania, Australia. Carver, the biologist and Australian counterpart to the group of American mechanical engineers, supplied the wombat intestinal specimens. Near the end of the intestine, they found that feces changed from liquidlike states to solid states made up of small, separated cubes. The group concluded that the varying elastic properties of wombats’ intestinal walls allowed for the cube formation.

In the built world, cubic structures -- sugar cubes, sculptures, and architectural features -- are common, and produced by injection molding or extrusion. Cubes, however, are rare in the natural world. Currently, wombats are the only known species capable of producing cubes organically. “We currently have only two methods to manufacture cubes: We mold it, or we cut it. Now we have this third method,” Yang said. “It would be a cool method to apply to the manufacturing process -- how to make a cube with soft tissue instead of just molding it.”

So, why do wombats poop cubes? Wombats pile their feces to mark their home ranges and communicate with one another through scent. They pile their feces in prominent places (e.g., next to burrows, or on logs, rocks and small raises) because they have poor eye sight. The higher and more prominently placed the pile of feces, the more visually distinctive it is to attract other wombats to smell and engage in communication. Therefore, it is important that their droppings do not roll away, and cube-shaped poop solves this problem.

Yang hopes that the group’s research on wombats will contribute to current understandings of soft tissue transportation, or how the gut moves. She also emphasized that the group’s research involved mechanical engineering and biology, and their findings are valuable to both fields. “We can learn from wombats and hopefully apply this novel method to our manufacturing process,” Yang said. “We can understand how to move this stuff in a very efficient way.”

Carver added, “There is much general interest from the public, both in Australia and internationally, about how and why wombats create cube-shaped feces. Many ideas, some more entertaining than others, have been put forward to explain this, but until this study nobody had ever investigated the cause. This has been a fantastic collaboration which shows the value of interdisciplinary research for making new scientific discoveries.”
Referencec: How do wombats make cubed poo? by Patricia J. Yang, Miles Chan, Scott Carver and David L. Hu, presented Nov. 18, at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. Abstract: http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/DFD18/Session/E19.1

[StoneRoad]

I read the BBC coverage of poo-cubes and had to check the date !

PS. I've got a couple of drawers full of router bits; wonderful things, even if very noisy to use !

[Stanley]

I think that's a first, the DM getting there before us. It was a good one though Tiz. I like wombats. In Perth Zoo they have a tunnel you can go down to see them in their den during the day. They were all laid on their backs snoring and occasionally scratching their bellies with their claws......

[plaques]

I'll slip this one in during the lull in inactivity. Most locals will know where this plaque is so just hold back a bit and let the out of towners have a go. A clue is that it appears in one of today's postings.

P1080035AC.jpg

For those who do live locally can you fill me in on the background history. Its something that's bugged me for a while.

[Gloria]

From the clue I looked at today's posts, is it above Peking House?