What a Crappy Project

For some Friday "fun":

There are times around here when our clients give us crappy projects to work on. Rather than being flushed with excitement, these projects leave us feeling drained. One example from years ago involved improving the ability of porcelain materials to resist staining. In order to be able to differentiate between more staining and less, a reproducible soil was needed, not only in bulk composition, but also in in rheological consistency. This is where we started using the Bristol scale:

Think of the scale as being like a melt flow index - the higher the number, the more material passed through the orifice in a given moment of time. (A further rheological connection to this subject is literary - like rheology, diarrhea is another word that is based on the Greek work "rheos", meaning flow.)

Our methods for creating such matter were much less sophisticated than what Texas A & M recently devised. But at the same time, our results were proprietary, thus preventing us from being published in the Journal of Improbable Research and/or winning a highly coveted Ig Nobel Prize.