Not-so-turbo encabulators

I've posted about the turboencabulator before.

But since then I've noticed a glut of remakes of the turbo encabulator, so I figured I would throw them into a single post here.

More coming after the jump...

"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...

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.

The Big Bang Theory - internal combustion engine

That's about where I am with cars.

One of the great things about teaching material science, though, is that I find myself far more willing to admit that ignorance than I am in the chemistry classroom where I pretty much always know more than my students do.

In the material science classroom, I'm far more likely to know less than somebody in the audience does.

The history of the turbo encabulator

I'm not doing any original research here, folks, just duplicating information readily available in Wikipedia's article on the turboencabulator in case that information ever leaves the web.

From the article...

The original technical description of the "turbo-encabulator" was written by British graduate student John Hellins Quick (1923-1991). It was published in 1944 by theBritish Institution of Electrical Engineers Students’ Quarterly Journal [in an article titled "The Turbo-Encabulator in Industry" by "J.H. Quick, Student"^[2] as also noted by consulting firm Arthur D. Little in a 1995 reprint of Quick's description, and giving Quick's full name.^[3]

The earliest written U.S. source may have been in 1946, in an Arthur D. Little Industrial Bulletin. An early popular American reference to the turbo-encabulator appeared in an article by New York lawyer Bernard Salwen in Time on April 15, 1946. Part of Salwen's job was to review technical manuscripts. He was amused by the jargon and passed on the description from the Arthur D. Little pamphlet.^[1]

Time got with the gag, featuring the device in a May 6, 1946 issue, described as "An adjunct to the turbo-encabulator, employed whenever a barescent skor motion is required."^[4] A month later a response to reader mail on the feature appeared in the June 3, 1946 issue:

If the sackful of mail we have received from you is any indication, the story of "The Turbo-Encabulator in Industry" struck many a responsive chord. Aside from those of you who wanted to be reassured that TIME hadn't been taken in, we received the customary complaints about using too much technical jargon for the layman, observations such as "My husband says it sounds like a new motor; I say it sounds like a dictionary that has been struck by lightning"; suggestions that it "might have come out of the mouth of Danny Kaye," and plaintive queries like: "Is this good?" Wrote one bemused U.S. Navyman: "It'sh poshible." To some the turbo-encabulator sounded as though it would be a "wonderful machine for changing baby's diapers." A reader from Hoboken assumed that it would be on sale soon in Manhattan department stores. Many of you wrote in to thank us for illuminating what you have long wanted to tell your scientist friends."^[5]

In 1962 a turboencabulator data sheet was created by engineers at General Electric's Instrument Department, in West Lynn, Massachusetts. It quoted from the previous sources and was inserted into the General Electric Handbook.^[6] The turboencabulator data sheet had the same format as the other pages in the G.E. Handbook. The engineers added "Shure Stat" in "Technical Features", which was peculiar only to the Instrument Department, and included the first known graphic representation of a "manufactured" Turboencabulator using parts made at the Instrument Department.

In c. 1977 Bud Haggart, an actor who appeared in many industrial training films in and around Detroit, performed in the first film realization of the description and operation of the "Turboencabulator", using a truncated script adapted from Quick's article. Bud convinced director Dave Rondot and the film crew to stay after the filming of an actual GMC Trucks project training film to realize the Turboencabulator spot.^[7]

In c. 1988 the former Chrysler Corporation "manufactured" the Turboencabulator in a video spoof.^[8] Rockwell Automation"manufactured" the renamed Retro-Encabulator in another video spoof in c. 1997.^[9] On April Fools' Day 2013, Hank Green released a SciShow episode on YouTube entitled "The Retro-Proto-Turbo-Encabulator."^[10]

Here are scans of the original Quick article...

...and the GE Handbook...

Rockwell Retro Encabulator

I miss the lab coats.

To be honest, I don't think that the swap of grey suits in favor of the more traditional lab coats gains us anything. Nor am I sure that the change from having a car engine to the trio of computer panels is better.

But, to each his or her own...

April Fools Episode - The Retro-Proto-Turbo-Encabulator

It's nice to see that the classics never die.

Here Hank Green - of SciShow, Crash Course, VlogBrothers, and many more YouTube channels - gets into the act of explaining our old friend, the 'newly-released' Retro-Proto-Turbo-Encabulator.

Mohs Scale of Hardness

The Mohs Scale of Hardness isn't my favorite thing in the world. I'm a chemistry guy, and sometimes earth science leaves me cold.

So I totally understand this slightly modified Mohs scale from the FAKE Science tumblr.

Fake science: common crystal shapes

 

The Fake Science tumblr is exactly what it says, FAKE science...

...but it's funny science - including this post about common crystal shapes.

Concrete: A slightly tongue-in-cheek look

That's a big piece of sewer pipe. It's kind of weird that it's in sharper focus than is the rest of the frame, though.

The Engineer Guy makes some concrete - apparently from quickcrete - and then waits for it to set while his sample cures.

At 1:45 he says that concrete doesn't really dry and explains what's really happening. Then, though, at 2:05 he says he's going to wait for the concrete to dry. Sheesh...

Extreme Boating

Randall Munroe - of xkcd fame - continues to explore scientifically interesting if perhaps thoroughly unpractical questions at his what if blog.

A recent post asked - and answered - "What would it be like to navigate a rowboat through a lake of mercury? What about bromine? Liquid gallium? Liquid tungsten? Liquid nitrogen? Liquid helium?"

The first and last questions - mercury and helium - get by far the lengthiest explanations with the general conclusions being that mercury would be barely feasible and helium would be deadly but at least musically so.

Along the way, I learned a lot about why rowing on bromine would be horribly unpleasant, the melting point of tungsten, and about the reactivity of liquid nitrogen.

Thanks, Randall.

The Great Glass Taper, Part 1

Source - sci-ence.org (We're clearly waiting for part 2, Maki. See below)

The age-old 'is glass a liquid or a solid?' question shows maybe a little sign of coming to an answer this week with an article in Nature Communications about research on a 20-million-year old sample of amber. I'll readily admit that I have pretty much no idea what the article - at least the summary posted on sciencedaily's website - says or on which side of the line the article falls, but such is life.

The whole solid/liquid debate is a fun one when you get two experts, two materials scientists, two history docents, two whatevers arguing from positions of absolute certainty and knowledge going at each other with no doubts in their mind. Give it a try someday.

And check in on sci-ence.org from time to time for their typically funny, and often informative

Update: Part 2 has been posted along with Maki's commentary on the debate and new article.

How To: Forge Sterling Silver with Drac (metallurgy modding like a boss)

Debbie and I started to play 'count the mistakes' in Drac's explanations in this video.

Acetone torch? No, probably acetylene torch.

He wants the un-exposed pieces to slag with the rest of it? No, he probably doesn't want slag.

Why would he be using copper tongs? Copper conducts heat wonderfully. (Though copper does at least melt at a higher temperature, +1085C, than does silver, + 962C.)

I thought that saying he was annealing the silver and quenching it was contradictory, but the wikipedia article says otherwise "Unlike ferrous metals—which must be cooled slowly to anneal—copper, silver and brass can be cooled slowly in air, or quickly by quenching in water."

The thickness actually does not matter? I would think that it would matter.

[The silver] came out of the pickle? He put the silver in a gherkin? Oh, nevermind, he's right on that one.

I'm pretty sure they're troy ounces, not trojan ounces.

All that being said, he does end up with a few hundred bucks in his hand. Maybe he could use that to buy a better microphone so we don't hear his torch drowning out his voice.

homemade fireworks

Sometimes you just need a chuckle.

Yes, there's certainly a fair bit of oxidation and corrosion happening here, and I'm sure the energy being released is because the metals are returning to their more stable, ceramic forms, but this one's all about the deadpan delivery of the lines at 1:10.

"Holy smokes...a little too much magnesium, I guess. I won't do that again. Sorry 'bout that."

Out of curiosity, though, does anyone have any proof that this is - or is not - real? The man just seems a little too casual for me to entirely believe the veracity of the video. (other than just observational, assumptive data - like his shirt changing color)?

Simple Golf Tip

The Turbo Encabulator is a brilliant bit of performance gibberish. It's also our standard opener at the ASM summer workshops. We use it to illustrate that technical language without context, without understanding, without meaning is useless. Yes, you can describe the marzul veins and the pre-framulated amulite, but that doesn't mean those things exist or mean anything at all.

And just because you know to snap load your power package that doesn't mean your power cumulator isn't going to break down.

Personally, I'm partial to grip it and rip it.

What if: cornstarch

Randall Monroe is the creator of XKCD, a sometimes not-quite-school-appropriate cartoon that involves a mixture of computer-, engineering-, math-, and science-based humor (along with a bit of Randall's personal life mixed in here and there). Randall Munroe comes by his humor honestly as he's a former NASA roboticist and programmer.

One of Munroe's many side projects is What-If in which he answers ridiculous questions using solid science research. Most of the questions are absolutely ridiculous - how would a small plane fly in the atmosphere of Jupiter?, is it possible to create a jetpack by firing machine guns downward? - but every now and again he gives us a wonderful materials science question.

Recently we got "How much cornstarch could I rinse down the drain before unpleasant things start to happen?"

I'm absolutely thrilled that Munroe eventually makes the connection between the conrstarch and the great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919.

PS - personally, my favorite question had nothing to do with materials science.

Meet the Eutectic, St. Louis' mystery mascot

That, apparently, is what a eutectic looks like in real life.

Who knew?

My understanding was that a eutectic looked more like this...



...but apparently at St Louis College of Pharmacy, their sports teams' mascot is Mortarmer McPestle, a Eutectic. Apparently, Morty has been working out because he has a six pack under that lab coat...

I particularly appreciate the logo showing Morty hard at work compounding...

If, by the way, you'd like to get a Eutectics shirt, they are available online. Looks like they would be perfect for summer camp, day 2.

Your friendly neighborhood blogger does enjoy Morty but is partial to Wally, a Wabash College Little Giant.

Turbo Encabulator - Version 2

Have you ever had someone sound like this when they are explaining something to you?  It can be frustrating.  Do you think you ever sound like this to your students???

Zinc Oxide

A hilarious, and not so politically correct, take on the value of one metal oxide.

Big Bang Theory: So Funky

I'm assuming that this video will be un-embeddable soon. Most of the Big Bang Theory videos are - unless they're hosted by CBS itself.

Putting oobleck on a speaker can be a great, great time. I particularly recommend something with a massive, thumping bass line and little else. Most actual songs have too many other tones - maybe try a pure tone generator hooked up to an amplifier.

Surprisingly to our Princeton students, "Superbass" is awful for this.