This brought a huge grin to my face. I think I'll be smiling for the rest of the day, just thinking about it. It's wonderful to see people tinker and explo(r|d)e stuff!
Er, it's a bit arbitrary; if many of them have grown up drinking tea with milk, they'll probably tend to keep drinking tea with milk.
Also, my observation (from ~5 years living in Britain, but YMMV, etc, etc) is that most people just use fairly cheap tea, in teabags, brewed fairly strong. If you don't add milk, it can be a bit nasty.
[Sure there's plenty of nicer tea available, and people who care about that sort of thing, but it's not what the average Joe is using.]
I drink (black) tea with milk. So here's a _very_ anecdotal/hypothetical thought: my brother switched to drinking black tea without milk. A couple of years later, he had a kidney stone; and the doctor claimed it was the tea.
Some of the tannins that give the tea its color are small enough to get into the blood stream, but get caught in the kidney, possibly leading to stones. So if you add milk, the big fat molecules of milk trap these, which prevents them from getting caught in the kidney; hence no stones.
You could be right. I've been drinking black tea no milk/sugar for 10+ years, no kidney stones yet. Which would make me superhuman, and I'd like that possibility even if it is quite slim.
You're scaring me. I drink a LOT of tea. I usually go through 8-10 tea bags in a day (always black, no sugar or milk). I've always worried about the tannins and the kidney stones. No problems so far!
I was hoping this would involve some sort of crazy energy transfer like cavitation heating or something. Still a neat project, but I'm sure there are better things to do with a functional pulse-jet.
This led me to wonder: what's the fastest (and at least hypothetically non-widespread-destructive[1]) method of boiling a kettle-sized volume (say, 1.5l or so) of water[4].
[4] Trickery involving reduced pressure to achieve low-temp boiling are considered cheating. I"m not sure what the benchmark pressure would be though, since you'd probably want a high-pressure heating vessel in case you overshoot and vaporise it.
The trick is to maximize surface area. Taking this to it's logical conclusion, the fastest way to boil that much water probably involves aerosolizing it into a rather large and hot flame. Perhaps that LO2/charcoal flame. ;)
If that is cheating, then the solution is probably somewhere in the middle I suppose.
He specifically addresses this on his website. He doesn't have good tools or much space either. He used to do these things in his bedroom at his parents house because his dad wouldn't let him use the garage.
A pulse jet is an incredibly simple kind of jet engine, usually with no moving parts. They were used on the V1 flying bomb in WWII. Wikipedia probably explains it better than I can http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_jet_engine . The version in this video is a valveless pulsejet.
Basically, he put the combustion chamber of the pulse jet in a tea kettle, so instead of just glowing red hot when it's running, it heats water. Also, it's awesome.
Also, google "jam jar pulse jet." I made one in about 5 minutes last summer. Lot of fun, but scary when you realize it's a hot flame contained in a glass jar.
A pulse jet is basically the predecessor to jet engines as we usually think of them, but they work more like the internal combustion engines we have in cars. They are basically combustion Chambers that are set up to emit the exhaust in one direction for thrust and reset for the next explosion.
The rapid fire explosions create a buzzing noise, and a decent amount of heat.
"Looking at Goble's video and photos, I became, as an American, all choked up with gratitude at the fact that I do not live anywhere near the engineers' picnic site." - http://www.davebarry.com/misccol/charcoal.htm
Does my heart good to see there are still some hardcore tinkerers out there, though.
