[net.physics] Wild ride and Drano

anand@utastro.UUCP (Anand Sivaramakrishnan) (12/16/85)

It's more a matter of plumbing and bath geometry.  Drainpipe
asymmetry causes any particular bath to prefer to swirl one way
even if the drain is symmetrically placed in the bath.

I have discovered that plumbing is often the root cause
of many mysterious physical phenomena ( :-) ).

Of course, there is the selection effect here that the places
on the Earth where the whirlpool effect is most noticeable are
exactly those places where baths freeze over before draining:
i.e. the North and South Poles.