The giant chainmail box that stops a house dissolving

Coincidentally, I'm going to be in Helensburgh, Scotland in about a month and a week (from when this posts on 4/25/22, anyway). My wife and I are hiking the John Muir Way, a 134-mile path from west to east across the narrow 'waist' of Scotland. Maybe I'll check out the house from the video.

I find myself in an odd little focus on conservation videos of late. In the above video, Tom Scott looks at the efforts to 'dry' out a cement house from from 1902 designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Mackintosh's design used Portland cement for the outside, and while it's a fascinating house, it's made from a material that is absolutely not appropriate for the damp Scottish environment. 

In trying to dry out the house, they have to dry it slowly. So they have built a giant, roofed box over the house and made the walls from chainmail which keeps raindrops off the house but allows the water vapor to leave and the air and bees to come through for the 'fifteen years it'll take to dry out and repair" the house. Plus they've put in walkways and gantries that turn the house into a tourist attraction. Brilliant plan there, National Trust.

Maybe I'll extend my walk a little bit.

ASM Summer Camps - 2022

And, we're back!

And you should sign up!

Not that we ever entirely went away, but the in-person versions of the ASM Materials Science camp for teachers in back for the summer of 2022. 

If you need a little convincing that the summer camps are awesome - easily the best professional development that I've ever taken - check out the stories and testimonials that I've posted on the blog in the past.

The camps start in early June and run through August. 

They cost nothing...not a single dime...not a cent.

You'll get to do thirty labs that fit into physical science, life science, material science, middle school science, elementary science, math, English, or even art courses. I can personally say that I've had teacher campers from all of those disciplines.

You'll get to see another thirty or so demonstrations.

You'll get take-home materials to do quite a few of the labs back in your classroom.

You'll get lunch and snacks provided for all five days of camp.

You'll get to visit a local material science either university or industry location and connect with university and industry professionals in your area.

You'll get the opportunity to complete two grad credit hours for $250 at the end of the week.

And if you sign up for the Salt Lake City camp or the Princeton camp or the virtual camp from July 11-15, you'll get to hang out with me either in person or virtually.

If you're interested in the camps, check out the ASM Foundation website to sign up.

Are solid objects really solid?

I am coming to love Alpha Phoenix's videos more and more with each video. He explores concepts that are often ridiculously subtle until you think about them a little more deeply, and he uses them to explain the details of the materials around us.

In this video he asks how long it would take for a force - a hammer hit in this case - on one end of a bar of steel to be felt on the opposite end of the bar. It's something that seems obvious at first because a push on one end of a steel bar is 'immediately' felt at the other end of the bar. That's true on the scale of a bar a couple of feet long and with the time scale that you and I notice things, but Alpha Phoenix uses far faster measurements than his eyes and proves that the force isn't felt 'immediately' on the other end.

And then he explains why this happens using magnets and springs representing the particles within a solid and does it brilliantly.

Now I just want him to make more of his videos. At his current pace, he's putting out a video a month or so which leads to high quality videos, but I just want more of them.

3 Easy Recycled Plastic Projects | Recycling for Beginners

Last week I posted a couple of videos from these guys and commented that their set-up looked a little advanced for me.

The above video is a lot more my speed, true beginner stuff there. That's closer to the skills and tools that I have.

And if I scale this up, here's a video on how I might want to organize things...if...

Beginners' Guide to Melting HDPE - How to Make a Recycled Plastic Pen

I love this process...melting (technically it's softening not melting) HDPE on a panini press between parchment paper (they call it greaseproof, but that's parchment in the US)  and pressing it into a mold looks like something I could maybe actually do.

So I started collecting lids since the beginning of the year. I don't have nearly enough, though, so I'm going to have to expand my collecting efforts.

Clearly their processing has gotten much, much fancier as the jewelry making video shows. They're on to injection molding, oven melting, and machined aluminum molds.

I'm thinking I'm a ways away from that, but I want to try this next year with my students.