I love the wordplay

See, it's chucklesome because this clearly is a ridiculous way for glass to have been invented, but it's a funny way.

Unsolved Physics Problems

 

Source - XKCD

See, today Randall explores and pokes fun at the idea of zinc whiskers, an admittedly freaky phenomenon in which some metals - including zinc, tin, cadmium, and lead - spontaneously grow tiny 'whiskers' from their surface. These whiskers can cause short circuiting in electronic devices, and the mechanism through which the whiskers form isn't well understood.

Sources to learn more about whiskering...

• Wikipedia
• ExplainXKCD
• NASA

...and a freaky photo of actual zinc whiskers from wikipedia...

Source - wikipedia

The Wrong Stuff

Source - xkcd
Rollover joke - The phantom found Edward Everett Hale a century too early; by the time we invented satellites, the specifics of his 'brick moon' proposal were dismissed as science fiction.

See, it's funny because...building a spaceship out of bricks would be an amazingly bad idea. They're not airtight. They're heavy. They're just not what you should build a spaceship out of.

Then again, a wooden airplane built for World War II wasn't necessarily a great idea either.

Nor was a pykrete aircraft carrier.

The Trojan Horse, on the other hand, was clearly a great idea.

Not-so-turbo encabulators

I've posted about the turboencabulator before.

But since then I've noticed a glut of remakes of the turbo encabulator, so I figured I would throw them into a single post here.

More coming after the jump...

"Turbo Encabulator" the Original

Classic Bud...classic Bud...

The video description posted by Dave Rondot with the above version of the Turbo Encabulator video is worth reading.

This is the first time Turbo Encabulator was recorded with picture. I shot this in the late 70's at Regan Studios in Detroit on 16mm film. The narrator and writer is Bud Haggert. He was the top voice-over talent on technical films. He wrote the script because he rarely understood the technical copy he was asked to read and felt he shouldn't be alone. We had just finished a production for GMC Trucks and Bud asked since this was the perfect setting could we film his Turbo Encabulator script. He was using an audio prompter referred to as "the ear". He was actually the pioneer of the ear. He was to deliver a live speech without a prompter. After struggling in his hotel room trying to commit to memory he went to plan B. He recorded it to a large Wollensak reel to reel recorder and placed it in the bottom of the podium. With a wired earplug he used it for the speech and the "ear" was invented. Today every on-camera spokesperson uses a variation of Bud's innovation. Dave Rondot (me) was the director and John Choate was the DP on this production. The first laugh at the end is mine. My hat's off to Bud a true talent.

Assuming all that is true - and the Wikipedia history matches the description as does a cNet article - then the above video is the first on-screen appearance of the Turbo Encabulator.

Kinda neat to see...

Styrofoam tomatoes

 

The original tweet with the above image said "We found this tribute to polymer chemistry on our honeymoon to France"

The follow-up post included the two images below and this text, "So @Tim_H pointed out that these

s look like polystyrene and now I cannot unsee it."

See, it's funny because Tim_H is correct.

The tomatoes on the vine do look like polystyrene with its benzene functional groups on a polyethylene chain.

PBF - Dick (webcomic)

From Perry Bible Fellowship - https://pbfcomics.com/comics/dick/

See, it's funny because...well, it's probably only funny in a really, really dark way.

There's this guy who seems to be captaining a whaling ship. We'll call him Ahab. 

He seems to have spotted something, a whale, we assume.

He takes a drink from the colorful bottle in his hand...then drinks from a series of very colorful, seemingly modern bottles.

We close by seeing the whale dead in an ocean littered with plastic waster.

See, it's funny because we're killing our ocean's life by polluting the water with plastics.

Get it?

As an aside, be warned that many other cartoons on PBF are less school-appropriate. Browse at your own risk. They are, however, often hilarious in very dark ways.

How to sound smart in your TEDx Talk | Will Stephen | TEDxNewYork

I've shared a bunch of TED talks over the past few months, so I thought I would tell you how to make your own TED Talk in case you were interested.

Warning: There is legitimately no material science content in this week's post. I'll be posting an actual material science video later today.

Kinetics are important

See, it's true because oxidation is just something losing electrons...and burning involves something oxidizing by combining with oxygen.

It's funny, see?

It's also relevant to material science for when we do the iron wire demo and see that oxidation happens more quickly at high temperatures.

Source - XKCD

The Big Bang Theory - internal combustion engine

That's about where I am with cars.

One of the great things about teaching material science, though, is that I find myself far more willing to admit that ignorance than I am in the chemistry classroom where I pretty much always know more than my students do.

In the material science classroom, I'm far more likely to know less than somebody in the audience does.

The history of the turbo encabulator

I'm not doing any original research here, folks, just duplicating information readily available in Wikipedia's article on the turboencabulator in case that information ever leaves the web.

From the article...

The original technical description of the "turbo-encabulator" was written by British graduate student John Hellins Quick (1923-1991). It was published in 1944 by theBritish Institution of Electrical Engineers Students’ Quarterly Journal [in an article titled "The Turbo-Encabulator in Industry" by "J.H. Quick, Student"^[2] as also noted by consulting firm Arthur D. Little in a 1995 reprint of Quick's description, and giving Quick's full name.^[3]

The earliest written U.S. source may have been in 1946, in an Arthur D. Little Industrial Bulletin. An early popular American reference to the turbo-encabulator appeared in an article by New York lawyer Bernard Salwen in Time on April 15, 1946. Part of Salwen's job was to review technical manuscripts. He was amused by the jargon and passed on the description from the Arthur D. Little pamphlet.^[1]

Time got with the gag, featuring the device in a May 6, 1946 issue, described as "An adjunct to the turbo-encabulator, employed whenever a barescent skor motion is required."^[4] A month later a response to reader mail on the feature appeared in the June 3, 1946 issue:

If the sackful of mail we have received from you is any indication, the story of "The Turbo-Encabulator in Industry" struck many a responsive chord. Aside from those of you who wanted to be reassured that TIME hadn't been taken in, we received the customary complaints about using too much technical jargon for the layman, observations such as "My husband says it sounds like a new motor; I say it sounds like a dictionary that has been struck by lightning"; suggestions that it "might have come out of the mouth of Danny Kaye," and plaintive queries like: "Is this good?" Wrote one bemused U.S. Navyman: "It'sh poshible." To some the turbo-encabulator sounded as though it would be a "wonderful machine for changing baby's diapers." A reader from Hoboken assumed that it would be on sale soon in Manhattan department stores. Many of you wrote in to thank us for illuminating what you have long wanted to tell your scientist friends."^[5]

In 1962 a turboencabulator data sheet was created by engineers at General Electric's Instrument Department, in West Lynn, Massachusetts. It quoted from the previous sources and was inserted into the General Electric Handbook.^[6] The turboencabulator data sheet had the same format as the other pages in the G.E. Handbook. The engineers added "Shure Stat" in "Technical Features", which was peculiar only to the Instrument Department, and included the first known graphic representation of a "manufactured" Turboencabulator using parts made at the Instrument Department.

In c. 1977 Bud Haggart, an actor who appeared in many industrial training films in and around Detroit, performed in the first film realization of the description and operation of the "Turboencabulator", using a truncated script adapted from Quick's article. Bud convinced director Dave Rondot and the film crew to stay after the filming of an actual GMC Trucks project training film to realize the Turboencabulator spot.^[7]

In c. 1988 the former Chrysler Corporation "manufactured" the Turboencabulator in a video spoof.^[8] Rockwell Automation"manufactured" the renamed Retro-Encabulator in another video spoof in c. 1997.^[9] On April Fools' Day 2013, Hank Green released a SciShow episode on YouTube entitled "The Retro-Proto-Turbo-Encabulator."^[10]

Here are scans of the original Quick article...

...and the GE Handbook...

Rockwell Retro Encabulator

I miss the lab coats.

To be honest, I don't think that the swap of grey suits in favor of the more traditional lab coats gains us anything. Nor am I sure that the change from having a car engine to the trio of computer panels is better.

But, to each his or her own...

April Fools Episode - The Retro-Proto-Turbo-Encabulator

It's nice to see that the classics never die.

Here Hank Green - of SciShow, Crash Course, VlogBrothers, and many more YouTube channels - gets into the act of explaining our old friend, the 'newly-released' Retro-Proto-Turbo-Encabulator.

Hydrogel Beads in a Frying Pan

That's just weird.

I don't have much to say here other than that it's a weird effect using some polymers.

There really isn't much material science connection. Maybe it's something to know that if you make a product out of hydrogel beads (probably a polyacrylamide) that it can cause this strange interaction if a metal as hot as a frying pan comes into contact with it.

Most of the comments on IFLScience and the YouTube video suggest that it's caused by the Leidenfrost effect, but that still doesn't make this any less weird and unexpected.

Plus, who throws these things into a frying pan in the first place?

Russians, eh?

Never let a [material scientist] read your romance novel

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Today's material science quote...

Today's material science quote from master teacher, Rebecca Heckman  (shown above moments after the quote)...

I'm betting that in the future, we'll still be using stuff made of things. 

Metamaterials...a cartoon

Admittedly, today's post isn't anything research-based or anything. It's a webcomic that mentions metamaterials. It's chucklesome but only if you look really closely at the final panel's reveal of the flowers' true colors.

Not surprisingly (if you're a regular xkcd - the source of the comic - reader) metamaterials are real. I need to do more research before I find out whether the effect shown in the comic is possible.

Here's what I've found so far in thirty seconds of research...

• History of metamaterials
• Metamaterials and the wave nature of things
• Optical metamaterials
• Weisner group's optical (meta)materials page (which is definitely over my head)
• ExplainXKCD.com where I assume a more in-depth explanation will be posted soon

Simple Golf Tip

The Turbo Encabulator is a brilliant bit of performance gibberish. It's also our standard opener at the ASM summer workshops. We use it to illustrate that technical language without context, without understanding, without meaning is useless. Yes, you can describe the marzul veins and the pre-framulated amulite, but that doesn't mean those things exist or mean anything at all.

And just because you know to snap load your power package that doesn't mean your power cumulator isn't going to break down.

Personally, I'm partial to grip it and rip it.

Turbo Encabulator - Version 2

Have you ever had someone sound like this when they are explaining something to you?  It can be frustrating.  Do you think you ever sound like this to your students???

Turbo Encabulator

The turbo encabulator has its origin in - at least according to Wikipedia - a 1944 article from British Institution of Electrical Engineers Students’ Quarterly Journal. By the time Bud Haggart - shown in the above video - got around to filming an industry video for the encabulator, the encabulator was a bit of an industry legend, having entertained engineers for more than three decades.

In our summer workshops, we include this video early to illustrate the point that many of our students view science as a bit of a foreign language, hearing our explanations the same way that we hear Bud's explanations of the turbo encabulator.

There are, of course, a number of various versions of this video. More of those are posted after the jump...