Glass bakeware that shatters (December 2010) | Consumer Reports

How have I missed posting this in the blog? I've been using this video for a couple of years to explain that pyrex =/= Pyrex.

I would explain, but honestly, the Consumer Reports host up there does a great job explaining that consumer pyrex isn't the same as lab Pyrex and hasn't been for decades.

Tl;dr - don't take your pyrex casserole dish from the freezer to the oven or from the oven to the countertop.

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.

Fractionating column videos

Last spring - when the schools all went quarantine from Covid - we were just beginning our polymer unit in material science. 

So we went looking for videos and demonstrations that would 'teach' what we would have covered in class.

Among the better videos were these explaining how a fractionating column works to separate the various hydrocarbons found in crude oil.

Titanium - The Metal That Made The SR-71 Possible

 Hey there, Brian. Good to hear you again.

I recognize those material selection diagrams at 1:35. I've posted about similar diagrams before.

This video does a great job exploring the tradeoffs among strength, weight, cost, and properties in choosing a material. In this case, it's mostly about the tradeoffs guiding when we do - and don't - use titanium.

It also covers some of the concepts of chemical and electrolytic reduction around 5:00 - and states that we don't use either of the traditional processes to purify titanium. It's amazing that anybody ever figured out some of the more complicated metals processing...um...processes. They're so remarkably complicated.

We also get an application of accidental galvanic corrosion at 8:30 where the cadmium-plated tools were leaving trace amount of cadmium on the titanium.

Titanium really sounds like a pain in the tuchus to work with.

Piezoelectricity - why hitting crystals makes electricity

Heya, Steve. Good to see you back again.

The part of this video that I think I most appreciate is the actual look at the guts of a piezo electric safety lighter. I've used them for a long time and never quite been sure how they work on the inside.

I also appreciate Steve's comments on quarts 'healing crystals' around 1:40. "Don't know if you take it orally or..."

And then we get into the fact that piezoelectricity is dependent on the electronegativity differences in a quart crystal (admittedly simplified in Steve's peanut-butter-jar model). I'm totally duplicating this post for my chem blog because of that explanation.

Repairing broken water mains

One of our regular activities in the corrosion chapter of our material science course is to read and listen to this NPR story about our corroding water mains and the costs that would be involved in repairing or replacing the parts of the network in need. I start the lesson by watching video of one of the more spectacular water main breaks that I've seen, the 2014 break on the UCLA campus.

This year the students asked what it took to repair a water main break like that. 

In searching, I couldn't find the repair work for that specific water main, but I did find a few other videos - including one from Skoakie, IL, the same city as the NPR story linked above.

Year 1 Camp - End of Week Feedback

It goes without saying, but there are so many things that we've lost in the pandemic.

One of those things that we've lost - or at least that we didn't get for a couple of summers - is the in-person, summer, ASM teacher workshops.

The summer workshops are easily the most valuable professional development experiences I've ever been a part of, and I get a lot out of them both when I've taken them and when I've helped lead them.

The above video is the end of the week feedback from the teacher campers from the 2014 camp at Montana Tech in Butte, Montana. I'm happy to say that this was one of the camps that I helped lead with Andy Nydam, one of our lead master teachers. All of the campers were asked to give a little summary of their week to camera as recorded by Glenn Daehn - who's been on the blog before. It's the kind of feedback we ask for from all of our campers at each camp, but this week we were lucky enough to get it recorded.

This camp was one of our residential camps, and lots of the campers came from hours and hours away, stayed in the dorms of Montana Tech, ate at the university's cafeteria, and spent their evenings together touring the city of Butte. We were able to see Berkeley Pit, tour a silicon purification plant, go down into Montana Tech's teaching mine, and take an historic tour of Butte as lead by a local history teacher.

For the past two summers we've run the camps as virtual experiences, and I've been impressed with how well ASM has managed to translate the camp experience into an online world...

..but the online experience isn't the in-person experience, as we're all well aware.

When we get through this mess, come and take a camp with us if you haven't before.

And if you have taken one before, come back and take another one. We'd love to see you again, and I promise that at least some of the content will be different. We've had a couple of years of playing around in our classrooms to find new things to do.

Oh, and Dr Daehn did record slightly longer sessions with some of the campers at that Montana Tech camp. You can check out that full playlist at this link.