Sitting in a deli the other day, having lunch, I was battling with the thixotropic brattiness of a new bottle of Heinz ketchup. I’d shaken it vigorously, and was whacking the bottom, to little effect. A girl from a couple of tables away leaned across and gave some advice. Tap on the ’57’ with the side of my hand, she advised sagely. ‘Que?’, I said, falling into Manuel for a moment. Tap on the ’57’ with the side of my hand, she gently insisted. So I tipped the bottle almost directly downwards, held it steady, and then jogged my hand against the label by the neck of the bottle, right where it says ’57’. Sure enough, a steady stream of ketchup emerged, neither too fast nor too slow.<\/p>\n
Now, obviously, no matter how runny the stuff is in the bottle, it has to be replaced by air as it comes out, otherwise it’s not going to move. So perhaps where brute-force whacking of the bottom fails to allow a channel for air to move into the bottle, nudging the ketchup to one side of the neck makes such a channel? I notice that the problem has also taxed readers of New Scientist<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sitting in a deli the other day, having lunch, I was battling with the thixotropic brattiness of a new bottle of Heinz ketchup. I’d shaken it vigorously, and was whacking the bottom, to little effect. A girl from a couple of tables away leaned across and gave some advice. Tap on the ’57’ with the … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":971,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209\/revisions\/971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}