The Most Interesting Thing I Learned This Week: Five Phases of Matter and BW3

For most of the week, I didn't learn anything that was that interesting at all. I thought after two weeks, my series was already in jeopardy of being canceled. That was until I had some man-time doing some welding with my buddy, Cory. As we were repairing some metal chairs in my back courtyard and drinking a couple of High Life tall boys, I began to wonder as to the history of welding.

As I began researching welding, I came across something I had never been informed of before in my life. There are not three states, or phases, of matter as we all have grown up believing. There are in fact five! We all know about solid, liquid and gas, but actually the most prevalent state of matter in the entire universe is plasma. That's right, plasma. It's pretty close to a gas, but has too many unique qualities to be considered a gas, so it is, in fact, it's own state of matter. It's what stars consist of, mostly.

The fifth phase is called Bose-Einstein Condensate. Feel free to click the link and try to understand that particular state of matter. I read it twice and still am baffled.

All you need to take away from this is that when I have a kid, and the teacher begins to teach my kid about the three states of matter, my child will raise his or her tiny little hand and say, "But my daddy told me there were five states of matter: sowid, wiquid, gas, pwasma and Bose-Einstein Condensate." And that will be the proudest moment of my life.

Bonus Most Interesting Thing:

While we're on numbers, I asked the right man a question last night that has bugged me for years. Why do people call Buffalo Wild Wings "BW3"? I only see two W's there. My friend Patrick happened to work there at one time and knew the answer that I'm willing to bet only one of the four of you at most knows. The third W comes from Buffalo Wild Wings and Weck - the original name of the restaurant chain. The nickname stuck despite the name change.

So, what the heck is weck then? (See what I did there.) Weck is German for "roll" and the short way to say Kummelweck, which is a type of roll that BW3 served sandwiches on at the time.

Food and science this week. How am I ever going to top that?