Things I learned lately - 15 Sep

• Every server at the Piano Cafe in Port Ontario, Ontario wears a t-shirt reading Employee of the Month.
• There is no such thing as medical grade pot.
• By 2019, Mazda will introduce its new Skyactiv-X engine, which they say will be the world's first commercial gas engine to use compression ignition, where the fuel-air mixture ignites spontaneously when compressed by the piston. The engine operates like a diesel but runs on regular gas. No spark plug required. Torque is increased. The engine also requires less fuel in the fuel-air mixture, enabling it to run lean. Engine efficiency could improve 35-45%.
• In 1667, the phlogiston theory attempted to explain burning processes. Phlogisticated substances contain phlogiston and dephlogisticate when burned. Dephlogisticating is when the substance simply releases the phlogiston inside of it and that phlogiston is absorbed by the air. Growing plants then absorb this phlogiston, which is why air does not spontaneously combust, and also why plant matter burns. Thus phlogiston theory described combustion as a process that was opposite to oxygen theory. Substances that burned in air were said to be rich in phlogiston. That combustion soon ceased in an enclosed space, was taken as clear-cut evidence that air could only absorb a finite amount of phlogiston. When air had become completely phlogisticated it would no longer serve to support combustion of any material, nor could phlogisticated air support life. Breathing was thought to take phlogiston out of the body. Joseph Black's student Daniel Rutherford discovered nitrogen in 1772 and the pair used the theory to explain his results. The residue of air left after burning, in fact a mixture of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, was sometimes referred to as phlogisticated air, having taken up all of the phlogiston. Conversely, when oxygen was first discovered, it was thought to be dephlogisticated air, capable of combining with more phlogiston and thus supporting combustion for longer than ordinary air. The theory lost followers by the 1780's.