Another common piece of laboratory equipment is the balance. Sensitive balances can weight chemicals in the milligram amounts. Extremely sensitive balances can even detect earthquakes, or so Mettler Toledo reports. According to them, back in August of 2009, a lab in Texas noticed their balance was quickly fluctuating by +/- 1 mg, slowing down and then rapidly wavering again. There were no other noticeable disturbances. It turns out there were a series of earthquakes in the Gulf of California. Amazing that a balance could detect such disturbances from such a great distance.
1) If you want to sound smart, throw these words into your conversation: “weigh boat”, “tare”, “gram”, “spatula”.
2) To help you out, try this sentence on your friends next time this hot topic comes up in conversation: “With this being summer and all, we decided to go on a family vacation and take gram down to the Mississippi River. We took a nice tour on the weigh boat. Sure beats riding on the rye boat or the wheat boat. The bread they give you during lunch is so much better. You practically need a spatula to scoop it out of the loaf pan. Another bonus is that being on the boat instead of the water, we weren’t tared of no alligators.”
In honor of the grand accomplishment of the little balance that could, I’ve selected an appropriate earthquake song.
All Shook Up – Elvis Presley
I’m honored to be the subject of your ’smart’ story—I know you just left the Z off:),,,,,,