I am here in Rio de Janeiro in a hotel on the Copacabana. The trip was much easier than I expected; on the way out the airline showed The Terminal and I tried to write some comments on a paper by Julie Cohen, and then slept. Immigration and customs let me through immediately (without fingerprinting or photographing me!) and my biggest problem is that I'm unable to try to use my Portuguese because the radio taxi drivers and hotel employees all speak English and switch immediately when I try to speak Portuguese to them. ("Quero copiar meu passaporte ... e comprar um cartao do Internete ..." "All right, let me have your passport, and what's your room number?")
Of course, I've been asleep in my hotel room all day and I haven't tried to get any food yet...
I was looking forward to seeing whether water really does go down the drain the other way in the Southern Hemisphere, but Seth Finkelstein told me that the effect is too small to observe easily by yourself in a bathroom. Apparently pre-existing currents in the sink or bathtub will dominate the Coriolis effect and cause a stable vortex in one direction or another in a way that is somewhat random and not very dependent on which hemisphere you're in.
Seth also says that a particular sink or bathtub may tend to favor a particular direction because of random details of its construction. Sure enough, I tried this today and found that the bathroom sink here tends to drain one way but can easily be induced to drain the other way just by stirring up a little appropriate turbulence. Oh well, I guess I won't get to convince myself that I'm really in the Southern Hemisphere that way...
