One of the problems with Tower Heist

I can admit to having not seen the movie Tower Heist. I'm okay with that fact since the reviews generally weren't all that positive.

To give you the relevant summary, a bad Alan Alda has stolen money from lots of people including the employees of the building in which he lives via a ponzi scheme. The employees break into his apartment to steal back the money only to find the safe empty. Luckily, they happen to scratch the paint job on vintage Ferrari in the apartment and find that it's made of solid gold.

Bad science ensues.

In the above clip, nebbishy Matthew Broderick does some quick math and states that the car weighs 2000 lb at $1872 per ounce of gold which makes for about $45 million.

The math doesn't even check out as 2000 lb x 16oz/lb x $1872/oz = $59.9 million...even allowing the 'give or take ten million,' that's lazily off.

But the issue here is that a 2000lb car made of steel, rubber, and glass wouldn't translate to the same weight in gold since steel, rubber, and glass have different densities than gold.

2000 lb of gold would make for a cube roughly 14 inches on a side because gold is way more dense than steel, rubber, or glass. If the Ferrari were actually made of gold, it wouldn't be 2000 lb; it would be more like more than - according to one article I found - 10,000 lb...because gold is very dense.

Which would lead to so many problems in the subsequent scenes when the team tries to lower the Ferrari down on a rope, swing it into an apartment being renovated, and then has to pull the Ferrari back up the roof where a single person unhooks it and drops it into the rooftop pool.

Oh, spoilers...

None of that would be possible with a solid gold Ferrari weighing in excess of five tons.

Then, in the touching end scene, each of the building's employees gets a chunk of the solid gold mailed to them - a grill, a wheel, a bumper - all of which are easily delivered by a friendly UPS-type man...and each of which would weight hundreds and hundreds of pounds.

Shipping would be pricey.

3D Printing a LEGO-Style Castle: IT'S FINISHED!

I've been waiting to post this video until the construction was fully completed.

Nate From the Internet has been building a 'life-sized' Lego castle for nearly a year now. I'm pretty sure it's set 6080 - Kings Castle from 1984.

He's had to figure out how to 3d print the individual bricks which meant designing digital files for the initial 1x1 bricks and also for interlocking pieces to make each of the bricks, plates, and tiles that were too large to fit into a single 3d printer. Along the way he ran into problems with the interlocking mechanism, the fit of the pieces together, the strength of the plates on which he would hopefully be able to walk, how to 3d print the big ugly wall panels, and lots more.

The above video shows the assembly of the final castle, but Nate has a full playlist of the work in progress videos. They're all worth checking out, and I'm half tempted to look into going to Utah in August to see the final product.

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.

Using the Raku Process to Show Oxidation-Reduction

A little while ago, I went looking for a video to explain the oxidation/reduction aspects of raku so I could assign it for my students to watch while I was out of the classroom for a day.

Sadly I didn't find one, but I did come across this video from the inaugural ASM teacher camp in Butte, Montana. It doesn't explain the redox aspects of raku - though the title suggests that it might - but it does include your friendly, neighborhood blogger in his orange polo shirt (ASM-branded, natch), and jeans.

Because the video doesn't explain the science, I'll give a quick version...

• We use a clear glaze into which we mix oxidized metals (cobalt oxide, iron oxide, copper carbonate, nickel oxide, etc). Each glaze gets just one of those oxidized metals.
• The pottery is taken out of the kiln while it's hot - somewhere around 1050 ^oC. At that point the glaze is molten, allowing oxygen to leave the glaze.
• The hot pottery is placed into a metal can with something flammable. In this situation we're using torn up newspaper.
• The torn up newspaper catches fire and starts to consume the oxygen in the now-sealed can.
• The carbon and hydrogen from the paper continues to 'search' for more oxygen, so it reduces the metal in the glaze and takes the oxygen from the oxidized metals. (This only works if the pot is hot enough for the glaze to stay molten in the reduction environment.)
• The glaze cools, sealing in the now-reduced metal within it, leaving - hopefully, if everything works right - reduced, shiny metal in the glaze.
• The pottery is quenched in water to lock in the final version of the metal within the glaze - either reduced or oxidized metal.

You can see lots of versions of raku pottery on other blog posts.