First, there were Pikashoes.
Then ELECTRi-FRiED.
Now, behold: ELECTRi-FRiED II!
Shoelectricity
27 November 2006 — danSparkium
20 November 2006 — danSomewhere in the world is a factory turning out ingots of mischmetal. They all look like this, one will cost you $US30 to $US50 (I paid $US31 plus delivery for mine from here, but they don't seem to have any at the moment; those international terrorists at United Nuclear have them, of course), and they're a lot of fun.
Mischmetal is a mixture of rare earth elements which, when iron and magnesium are added to the mix, is used to make lighter "flints". It's highly pyrophoric; small slivers of it burn spontaneously in air.
The added iron makes the mixture strong enough that a little peg of it won't squish or come to bits when the hard steel striker wheel in a cigarette lighter scrapes over it; that same mixture is used in a larger scale in the Ultimate Survival BlastMatch. But a chunky one pound ingot of straight mischmetal is also a fine spark source.
It doesn't spark incredibly well when you scrape it the first few times (with, in this case, a little knife blade), but once you shave off the oxide layer, away it goes.
The spectator is the same one who features in the second picture here.
Quack of the day
17 November 2006 — danSome fraudulent medical practitioners go to great lengths to look genuine.
And then there's Doctor Oludare Samuel Olomoshua, of Wisdomite Spiripathology Healing Mission & Music Ministry Inc, which is based in Nashville Tennessee but has a mailing address in Nigeria. Apparently their mailbox can be found at "Coconut Bus Stop", which may be the best address ever.
(Doesn't everything good seem to be coming out of Nigeria these days?)
"Spiripathology" has the cure for everything, just like all the best quacks. Even if you're afflicted with "parenthesis".
(Of the colon, presumably. Perhaps even of the semicolon.)
Don't worry - Dr Olomoshua is fully qualified.
A judge who doesn't see the funny side has now ordered Olomoshua to knock it off. Apparently he's "treated" several hundred people; I'm guessing poor immigrants (maybe African) with little education. This contrasts with the usual victims of scammers in his witch-doctor-ish league, who are poor local white folk with little education.
This isn't to say that intelligent and educated people don't, every day, give their money to other medical scoundrels. Smart folk just demand a bit more of that pretending-to-be-genuine stuff, such as is provided by delectable human beings like Hulda Clark and one Ryke Geerd Hamer.
Hamer's sterling work you can, if you have a strong stomach, and I am not kidding at all about this, see here.
On Oobleck
14 November 2006 — danSmall scale:
(A real scientist wouldn't have interrupted an important experiment for such a silly reason.)
Large scale:
I've made PVA/borax polymer before (I don't think you really need a lot of ventilation when dissolving PVA glue in water...), but not oobleck.
To the supermarket!
Do not be the unplugging
5 November 2006 — danThe instructions for the fire syringe I bought from Educational Innovations are quite entertaining.
I've only used the syringe (a.k.a. a "fire piston") with bits of paper or cotton so far. They work, but they're not very exciting. This page suggests match heads or flash paper (or "punk", which I'm afraid only means stuff that smoulders, not what you might think).
I, of course, have some flash paper, which I keep in the red-painted ammo-box along with my other Stuff That's A Bit Too Much Fun (it's flash cotton, actually, but that's the same stuff).
So I anticipate being struck on the chin by the rapidly rising piston of my fire syringe in the near future.
Whack! Smoke. Whack! Flame.
30 October 2006 — danMy (previously-mentioned) fire piston does not, usually, produce an actual flame.
You whack the plunger down to compress the air around the little tuft of cotton you've put in the bottom of the cylinder, and you get some smoke in the cylinder when the plunger recoils. More whacks make more smoke. That's it.
When it does manage to produce a flame, though, the flame always occurs on the second quick-succession whack of the plunger.
It took me a moment to figure out why this was, given that the first whack obviously uses up some of the oxygen in the cylinder and thus makes it harder for any combustion to happen the second time.
The reason must be that the first whack starts the cotton smouldering, and the second whack actually achieves visible ignition. Mainly, presumably, of the flammable partly burned smoke from the first whack.
If you had a smouldering coal in the cotton in the first place, you'd probably get more of a spark on the first whack.
Ideas, involving glow plugs, electric matches and dropping burning stuff into the cylinder, suggest themselves. Or you could just use a more robust cylinder that supports a higher compression ratio. Tim smacked his with a sledgehammer.
(More discussion regarding gas-compression-related fire-making widgets can be found on the site that used to be trackertrail.com. I've very little interest in actually roughing it, but a lot of the techniques and technologies involved are very interesting nonetheless. And it certainly doesn't hurt to know.)
[The fire-piston also has amusing instructions!]
Science toys!
20 October 2006 — danHello, my name's Dan, and I collect science toys.
I never really thought about it like that before. I just like science toys, so I buy (and occasionally make) them. But now I suppose I have a collection.
Apart from enough physical, chemical and (not always on purpose) biological substances and apparatus to see me put away forever as the ringleader of, um, something bad, I have, to start with, accumulated a small selection of...
...elements. Since I took that picture I've got myself some titanium (so I could do a bit of this), and a bag of nickel electrode buttons, and one of RGBco's 92 gram magnesium cylinders to go with the same-sized 1005 gram tungsten cylinder in the picture.
In a more distinctly toy-ish sense, there's my...
...Wimshurst machine, the little steam and Stirling engines that have a cameo in this piece, the trebuchet, various office toys of inconsistent educational value, a bunch of those fibre-optic synthetic-tiger-eye spheres, some prism glasses (which aren't actually very useful, but if you had to wear things like these you'd probably be glad of them), and some lasers and diffraction gratings and big Fresnel lenses (only this big, not this big).
(I'd love a pseudoscope, but I think I might just have to make my own rather than buy one...)
Oh, and tons of magnets (including three... large... ones that I store in different rooms), decorative discharge lamps large and small, and a giant lighter flint, and a recently acquired ingot of straight mischmetal, and my faithful little radiometer.
(I broke my Klein bottle. I must get another.)
And a couple of Slinkies. The little 35mm-diameter ones are excellent fiddle-toys. Only the steel ones, obviously; the plastic ones are rubbish.
I must get a decent gyroscope some time.
Mm.
Oh, you're still here. Anyway, if this list sounds fun to you, then head on over to Educational Innovations and try not to spend too much money.
Educational Innovations, you see, sell things for science teachers. Fun things for science teachers. Things for science teachers most of which I want in my own house.
I ordered some stuff from them a little while ago. They're in the USA and I'm in Australia, so shipping rates for bulkier contraptions are pretty steep, and I thus had an attack of sanity and pruned my order down to only two items. But their within-USA postage is quite cheap, and their actual prices are quite reasonable. They resell quite a lot of items that I've seen on sale elsewhere - including that RLT trebuchet kit - but they don't crank up the prices, as many educational suppliers seem happy to do.
Educational Innovations are enthusiastic about the "Super, Wow, Neat!" concept, in which teachers are apparently meant to improve the self-esteem of their students by showing them that no matter how dorky they may think themselves to be, the teacher is a thousand times worse. If you manage to control your urge to hit them, though, their site is quite plain sailing - and their paper catalogue is outstanding.
And no, I do not have an affiliate deal with them.
(The two things I bought, by the way, were the fire syringe and the smashing spheres. It occurs to me now that a set of boules might be just as good for the second demo. You can also get ball bearings in a variety of huge sizes.)
More about the fire syringe, also known as a fire piston. (It has funny instructions!)
Essential viewing
18 October 2006 — dan
Tim Hunkin is something of a legend.
I could crap on about why I think he's a legend, but you'd do better to look at his site, and The Rudiments of Wisdom, which is unquestionably the finest collection of pictorially presented facts ever assembled by a man who can't actually draw worth beans.
I bought the book.
In conjunction with Sheddi Knight Rex Garrod (the uk.rec.sheds FAQ spells neither Rex's name nor, I suspect, his title correctly; they're not really into spelling), Hunkin produced a series of documentaries called The Secret Life Of Machines (SLOM). There were two six-episode series of SLOM, followed by a six-episode series called The Secret Life of the Office. Hunkin's own site for the series, with accompanying, um, documentation, is here.
The SLO-whatever documentaries were all made pretty much when Tim and Rex had a spare moment and shot on small format film with few to no re-takes, so they look a lot older than they are. They also contain some of the ropiest animation ever committed to film, and large chunks of archival footage that I fervently hope Tim got for free. Parts of them are also a bit outdated now, but never mind; the innards of VCRs are still interesting.
All three series are, if you're any kind of self-respecting nerd, completely fascinating.
I would go so far as to say delightful.
Why are old washing machines so heavy? What the hell actually happens in a sewing machine, anyway? Can you really record sound using sticky tape and rust? What happens if you stand on a car's accelerator and brake at the same time? Will either Tim or Rex survive the demonstrations they do in the "Electric Light" episode?
All this and more, as they say.
Here's Tim's page for Series 1, here's Series 2, here's Series 3.
All three series are now available on DVD, from Team Video Pacific, who used to sell them only on sticky tape and rust VHS.
Back then, I pitched in with some friends and bought the first two series.
We all needed to pitch in, because Team Video charge through the freakin' nose. The two-series set cost $AU236.25, ex postage.
You got six tapes with two episodes per tape, but the episodes are only 25 minutes each. The high tape count is because Team Video expect to be selling to schools, who don't like to put all of their video eggs in one basket.
The price I paid then is the same as the price you'll pay today for the DVD version of those same first two series. You're looking at another $AU198.45 for the third series. The whole lot together, including shipping, will cost an American buyer more than $US400.
You could get seven LOTR boxed sets for that kind of money.
And yet my friends and I still bought the first couple of series. One of us even made DVDs out of 'em.
SLOM is that good, or we are that mad. Take your pick.
Anyway, if you read the pages I linked to above, you'll have noticed that Tim is not exactly clamouring for people to pay the hefty Team Video prices.
In fact, he's openly inviting anybody who's interested to download his work for free.
He provides handy-dandy BitTorrent links for that purpose.
(...although they're currently broken - when I posted this, the optimal links for the three series were here, here and here, and Tim updated his pages accordingly, but now they've moved on again.)
So, you know what? Go ahead and do that, with Tim's blessing and with mine.
The rips in the downloadable versions are not great. Video and audio glitches, aspect ratio problems (so you'll want to use a player like Media Player Classic or VLC that lets you fix that), and one of the filenames invents a thing called the "Internal Bustion Engine".
But they are free. And the guy who made them wants them to be free. And they are totally excellent. And if you do not like them, then I do not like you.
Go to it, people. I'll help seed, and I wanna see those "Peer" numbers rise.
Those download links again:
OK, this time for sure. This (magnet link) is my very own torrent of a good-quality rip; if nobody else is seeding it to you, I will.