The Forging Advantage

Sometimes in our summer workshops, things don't work exactly as we'd planned. Technology doesn't work quite as we expected. The spot plates we planned to use aren't on the shelf where we'd left them the year before. Heck, the FIERF bags with the forging cd don't show up in time for Tuesday's day of metals to show the above video in camp.

No matter what, though, we forge ahead.

2003 OSU PSA's GSD

I feel like the commercial is lacking in a dramatic arc for the guy listening to Glenn Daehn. Yes, Dr Daehn is dropping some serious knowledge, but the guy listening doesn't really respond with anything more than a slightly-glazed stare. He could yell, scream, even just saying a simple, "whut?" to earn his SAG paycheck.

My thought is that Dr Daehn has been on the weight loss kick for a lot longer than his new endeavor, LIFT, has been around. We'll get to more about LIFT in the next few posts, but for now let me just say that it's an effort to help us save money and energy by lightening up our materials a bit.

Dieting is always so hard...

3D printers print ten houses in 24 hours

Wait, what?

The 3d printing material here looks disgusting, like an grey, industrial version of pink slime. It just builds up the walls layer by layer in some kind of unholy mortar between bricks that are never to show.

I guess the efficiencies can certainly move this process well into profitability, but the manufacturers are going to have to find a way not to show the building process to the folks eventually to live in the houses.

What Manufacturing Means to America

We are what we make. If we make poor materials...if we make sub-standard products...if, heaven forbid, we don't make anything, then we have to seriously question our value as a nation.

This is one of the undercurrents that most of us teaching material science teaches through the course of a semester, a year, or - in a few cases - two years.

Along the same lines, check out this Jeep commercial.

This 1,600-Year-Old Goblet Shows that the Romans Were Nanotechnology Pioneers

The Romans were genius.

The had the baths, the vomitoria, the toga parties, the aquaducts, the fingers.

And they had goblets that change color as light went through them and as different liquids are filled into it. In fact, the science is pretty stunning...

researchers in England scrutinized broken fragments under a microscope and discovered that the Roman artisans were nanotechnology pioneers: They’d impregnated the glass with particles of silver and gold, ground down until they were as small as 50 nanometers in diameter, less than one-thousandth the size of a grain of table salt. The exact mixture of the precious metals suggests the Romans knew what they were doing—“an amazing feat,” says one of the researchers, archaeologist Ian Freestone of University College London.

...

[T]he researchers ... imprinted billions of tiny wells onto a plastic plate about the size of a postage stamp and sprayed the wells with gold or silver nanoparticles, essentially creating an array with billions of ultra-miniature Lycurgus Cups. When water, oil, sugar solutions and salt solutions were poured into the wells, they displayed a range of easy-to-distinguish colors—light green for water and red for oil, for example. The proto­type was 100 times more sensitive to altered levels of salt in solution than current commercial sensors using similar techniques.

Clearly, the lead hadn't kicked in just yet when these goblets were being made.

The SECOND Official Ultra-Ever Dry Video - Superhydrophobic coating - Repels almost any liquid!

The look on the face of the Ultra-Ever Dry shirt-wearing guy is priceless (at about 3:20 and onward).

And, honestly, if you have to wear a shirt and tie while running the risk of being mud-bombed, you might want to spray the heck out of your clothes before heading into the fields.

This video gives us some entertaining and impressive demonstrations of ultra-ever dry on notebook paper, ceramic tile, a digital stopwatch, tissue paper, tissue paper (with a thoroughly gross ketchup demo), bread (no, don't eat the bread afterwards), cotton ball, and finally an explosion of mud.

Rain works

How cool is that? It rains, and 'magically' a design appears on the cement. Maybe it's a hopscotch board (is that the right term, is it a board, Google suggests that it's a board, anyway), maybe it's a reminder to save water, maybe it's a chucklesome commentary on the weather.

In the Tacoma, Washington-area (check out the specific locations on their website), a group of guys from Peregrine Church are using Nanex's Always Dry to spray on superhydrophobic coatings in fun designs. They're calling their program rain.works. Check 'em out.

Heck, make one yourself in your town. Apparently it's legal, "as it’s temporary, which it is since the messages come and go, and isn’t commercial."