Science: the God of Small Things (with apologies to Arundhati Roy)

From this moment on, I will be featuring a new sort of blog entry, one that celebrates the little observations that keep you on the thin and narrow ridge line of Sanity, the joyful little discoveries that make you sit up for a moment and go 'wow,' and thank your preferred deity that but for the whim of Science, we might all still be sitting in caves and scratching our armpits and watching the Simpsons.

1. 

Put a watermelon in the refrigerator for a few hours. Take it out, cut it into small chunks and eat it. 90%  of the pieces will be colder on one side. This happens because the outside of the watermelon is the first to lose heat to the cooling effect of the refrigerator - common sense really, but in the days of Phlogiston and liquid heat (scientists actually believed heat was a liquid until alarmingly recently) there would have been a considerable lot more confusion. I think it is actually beautiful that the same laws that govern the motion of the heavenly bodies and the rise and fall of the tides could actually make chilled watermelon pieces cold only on one side. If there is a God, he truly is a joker.