"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...

Electric Vehicles' Battery Problem

"To replace the UK (not the UK) 31.5 million gasoline cars will require 236,000 tons of lithium carbonate." ~ quote from about 1:00 in the above video.

That would - again, according to the video - require all the world's output for 9 months.

And that metal comes from some countries with awful human rights records and workers' protections.

Then, if we mine the US's lithium, we have to use up water and leach arsenic into the water supply of Nevada...and dig into land holy to Native Americans...and destroy habitat for endangered animals.

It's the frickin' Kobayashi Maru, man.

Then we have to look at the cobalt mining.

To quote a magnet I got from the University of Utah, "what's your is mined," but clearly what's mined is bad for the planet and people.

Why SpaceX Cares About Concrete

Grady is back to school us about those tiny 'sparks' that flew away from the launch pad when SpaceX's rocket launched in November 2020.

Apparently the concrete that SpaceX uses for their launch pad isn't quite the same as the concrete that sits as the walkway outside my classroom window.

Grady explains what concrete is (hydrated crystals) and then tests two types of concrete exposed to three heat environments (room temp, home oven, and propane torch) under compression strength tests.

Not shockingly, the heated concretes broke at way less force.

He then goes on to explain how most of this weakness is caused by our old nemesis: thermal expansion.

Crystals: Building patterns with randomness

At this point, I'm fully in any time AlphaPhoenix releases a video. He explains material science beautifully.

In today's video he explains the differences between crystalline and amorphous (2:30), shows crystalline aluminum under an SEM (3:45), shows how 2-d magnetic discs when agitated spontaneously produce order (5:00-10:30 - the real money portion of the video), and uses a computer simulation to extend this into the third dimension (11:45).

This is a wonderful exploration of how crystals grow - whether they're our copper (II) sulfate crystals in class or cooling aluminum crystals or any other crystals.

Wonderful stuff, man.