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A bit of fluid mechanics from scratch not from scratch

> As everyone learns in kindergarten, the speed at which water comes out of a spout in a tank depends on the height

What kindergarten did you go to? Maybe my public kindergarten education was seriously lacking.

2 days agoNewsaHackO

Oh sorry that was a joke. (Though you could teach that in kindergarten.) When I was in undergrad I had the privilege of taking Laszlo Babai's combinatorics class. I don't recall exactly how he phrased it, but he would say things like "As everyone learns in kindergarten, the powerset of [n] has size 2^n.".

a day agotbt

Oh my bad, good article though.

a day agoNewsaHackO

> Ok, so, it’s the same as before, but the outlet of the spout is now significantly deeper / lower. So the speed of the water should be higher, right?

> Ok, but if the water is faster at the bottom of the long spout… We could view the top part of this system as an exact copy of the short-spout version. At the interface between the tank bottom and the pipe-spout, the velocity of the water should be the same as in the no-pipe version, right? But that means the water inside the pipe is accelerating inside the pipe:

No, it's not the exact same. In the top part of the long-spout system there's a lack of airpressure holding the water above it back compared to the short-spout, and quite a bit of cohesion in the water pulling the water above it down faster if the lack of air pressure isn't enough. The water in the whole system moves faster as a result.

You'd theoretically get the air (actually vacuum) bubble if you ran the experiment in a vacuum with a liquid that has no cohesion... liquids with no cohesion are otherwise known as gasses though and behave differently in other ways as well.

2 days agogpm

Ohhh, oops, good point, thanks.

a day agotbt

Really nice to see the process of thinking it through. This sort of thing gives a much better insight than just memorizing formulas.

2 days agoMarkusQ

Love the thinking but was booing there would be some enlightenment at the end…

2 hours agoBobbyTables2

Unfortunately nobody in the UK can see the images in the blog, 'cause imgur

2 days agoalienbaby

Sigh, thanks for letting me know. Ok since this is the ~third time someone has said this, I'll try to figure out a convenient solution (I guess hosting images on github?). Just FYI a VPN should let you see imgur images.

a day agotbt

Thankyou :)