The Purbeck Broken Beds

Broken heart: Broken mind.

The increased frequency of sudden cardiac death after earthquakes and bombings has long proposed that emotional distress plays a role in acute coronary syndromes and arrhythmias. Since the 1960s, several controlled, prospective, epidemiological studies have reported emotional distress as a major risk factor for the onset and worsening of coronary heart disease (CHD) [1]. The Interheart study, a...

Flow through Packed Beds and Fluidized Beds

Chemical engineering operations commonly involve the use of packed and fluidized beds. These are devices in which a large surface area for contact between a liquid and a gas (absorption, distillation) or a solid and a gas or liquid (adsorption, catalysis) is obtained for achieving rapid mass and heat transfer, and particularly in the case of fluidized beds, catalytic chemical reactions. You wil...

The Safety of Hospital Beds

The Broken Spaghetti Noodle

A popular question in recreational mathematics is the following: If we drop a spaghetti noodle and it breaks at two random places, what is the probability that we can form a triangle with the three resulting segments? See for example [2, chap.1, sec.6], [3, p.6], [4, p.31], or [7, p.30-36]. This is an elementary problem in geometric probability. Clearly the length of the noodle (or equivalently...

The broken heart syndrome.