CNN brings us the news: a team of British researchers have apparently discovered exactly why packaged cookies are prone to breaking and crumbling:
. . . as biscuits cool down after coming out of the oven, they pick up moisture around the rim which causes them to expand. At the same time, moisture at the center makes them contract. The difference results in a build-up of strain forces that can pull a cookie apart. Cracks appear that weaken cookies so they easily break apart when handled, moved or packaged.
I post this not just for the novelty of the subject, but because of my standing interests in instrumentation and visualization. The technique used to gather this data is called digital speckle pattern interferometry (the actual paper, in Measurement Science and Technology, is entitled “A novel application of speckle interferometry for the measurement of strain distributions in semi-sweet biscuits”).
The process apparently has something to do with using light waves to record very tiny measures of spatial displacement, with the end product being a digital image that expresses the change in graphical form. Of course such an image is “mediated,” but I’m profoundly interested in how to talk about this nexus of vision, instrumentation, and representation: is what we’re seeing still a “cookie” in any phenomenological sense?
Posted by mgk at October 2, 2003 03:55 PM