This is not a terribly important post.

I would like to start this post by saying that this has nothing to do with finance. Essentially, I was bored a couple of days ago and delivery of meat came in from Hawaii. Two things came in that box, meat, and some dry ice. To be perfectly honest, I am not sure exactly what the purpose of the meat was, but if you would like to read about that checkout Vale Tudo, my dad’s blog concerning working out and other subjects. However, what concerned me more was the second thing in the box, the dry ice.

Now, I could go on some long rant about dry ice, how it’s made and what it does. But that would be boring to read about. To summarize, dry ice is basically ice on steroids, and it’s made out of carbon dioxide. Another important thing to know about it is that it is cool to mess around with.

Dry ice is surprisingly easy to source, being commonly used in ice packs and for transporting perishable goods. It’s used for this because of how long it can stay really cold when contained without access to air.

Once you take dry ice out of a package it will begin smoking as the dry ice slowly returns to its gaseous state. However, this can be exponentially sped up by taking advantage of Newton’s law of heat transfer, which states that the rate of heat loss of a body is directly proportional to the difference in the temperatures between the body and its environment. In other words, putting the ice in something like say, boiling water would rapidly speed up the evaporation of the dry ice. This causes all of the CO2 gas in the dry ice to be suddenly released. Which sounds dull until you realize how much it affects the reaction visually. For example, the reaction will go from something like this:

To this.

Another cool thing you can do with dry ice is to make bubbles out of CO2 gas. For this wet a dishcloth with a soapy solution and rim the container holding your water and dry ice with the mixture. Next, pull the dishcloth across the container and watch as a bubble appears, filled with CO2 gas until it pops, releasing a flood of gas.

Overall, dry ice is a fun way to spend some free time and a cool trick to show others.

If people are interested and want to read more content like this, make sure to vote on the poll below. If you don’t, still make sure to vote so I don’t waste everyone’s time.

I also want to take a minute here to clear up some confusion about my upload schedule. It isn’t very strict but I will typically post around once a week unless something time-related pops up. As a rule of thumb, if it is posted during the weekend, it’s not about finance, and during the workweek, it will be. You will never see a non-market related post during the week, but if it’s important I might post a market-related post during the weekend. To avoid confusion I will make sure to put something in the title if it is a market-related post during the weekend.

Generally, my market posts can be classified into two groups, time-related/event-based ones, or posts that are not as important to be posted right away. An example of a time-related post is my writing about Amazon acquiring iRobot, while an example of a non-time-related post is my ongoing series about asset diversification. Since time-related posts are important to be read as soon as possible, they will be posted as soon as there are ready, or a bit before the market opens. Since non-time-related events can wait a bit and not lose value in the information, they will post at 4:30 pm eastern time for convenience. I hope that this clears up any confusion on my upload schedule