Assembly was remarkably fast: it took me less than 30 minutes. The kit really does just snap together – no glue, no sanding, no prep beyond peeling protective paper off each side of the plywood pieces. The peeling is necessary -- the tolerances of the laser-cut pieces are so tight that the kit’s tabs won’t go through its slots until the paper is removed – but the end result is a model without any wobble or shimmy. The trickiest part was threading the thin string through the tiny holes in the sling, and that’s more of a comment on my middle-aged eyes than anything else.
The kit comes with a pair of superballs as ammo. I used one for the inaugaral throw. Foolishly. Inside the house. I didn’t break anything, but we’re still looking for one of the balls. After that, we switched to crumpled balls of paper and were consistently shooting them 30 feet across the room. Our cat now thinks we bought the treb for her. You can order one for your very own at siegetoys.com.
Our last CSA share of the year contained a lovely surprise – three ears of popcorn, still on the cob. My kids were excited, because although our CSA also gives us a bountiful share of sweet corn in August, popcorn is much less like a vegetable. After all, most vegetables don’t explode.
Superficially, sweet corn and popcorn kernels look the same. But even if I’d taken the time to dry out some of that pile of sweet corn in my kitchen back in August, we’d only get a bunch of funny-smelling toasted kernels if we tried to pop it. Popcorn can explode because it has two things that sweet corn does not: a lot of hard starch in its center and a thick outer covering.
We can eat sweet corn kernels without breaking or grinding them first because they have a thin hull – it’s thick enough to provide a little snap when you bite through it, but not thick enough to break your teeth. You wouldn’t want to try that with popcorn. At least, my dentist doesn’t recommend it. But that tooth-cracking hull makes a dandy pressure cooker.
Put a bunch of popcorn into hot oil or air, and the starch and water inside the kernels heat up. As the temperature passes 100°C, the water starts to boil and turn to steam, but the hull keeps the steam from expanding and the pressure inside the kernel starts to climb. As superheated steam permeates starches in the kernel they soften and expand, raising the internal pressure even higher. By the time the temperature inside a kernel reachs 177°C, the liquids inside it are seething at pressures nine times higher than atmospheric pressure. If that weren’t bad enough, the heat also starts to melt and weaken the kernel wall. Soon, the kernel can’t hold back the maelstrom – its wall ruptures, releasing a tiny cloud of superheated steam and starch.
The amount of moisture in the kernel is critical: too little, and there’s not enough steam to break open the kernel. Too much, and the kernel wall melts and ruptures before the pressure climbs high enough to puff out the starch. (Those unpopped kernels at the bottom of the bowl? Probably lost too much moisture in storage.)
Once the kernel is open, the pressure of the starch cloud drops, and the rapidly expanding steam carries a film of starch outward. The type of starch inside the kernel determines how far the puff expands: hard starches stretch farther than soft ones. As the cloud expands, it cools until the starch sets into the shape of a miniature explosion – a puff that can soak up butter without collapsing or hold up a layer of hot sugar. Just the thing for a cold winter’s night.
Graph from Gökmen, 2004.
References:
Gökmen, Sabri 2004. Effects of moisture content and popping method on popping characteristics of popcorn. Journal of Food Engineering 65: 357–362
Hoseneya, R. C., K. Zeleznaka and A. Abdelrahmana 1983. Mechanism of popcorn popping. Journal of Cereal Science 1(1): 43-52.
McGee, H. 2004. On Food and Cooking, 2nd edition. Scribner: New York.
Back in the 1980s, when personal computers first appeared on the market and people began plugging them into modems to communicate with other computers, there was a lot of excited talk about what this new "Information Age" would bring to us.
Some of the ideas were stupid even at the time: I recall that a selling point for early home computers was that they could be used to organize recipes and compose shopping lists. Organize recipes? I was not aware that disorganized recipes was a problem worth $1000 in 1980s money to solve. Shopping lists had to wait for pocket devices like the iPod or Blackberry, but recipes remain unorganized to this day.
Another big idea for the Information Age was that we would have access to school and college courses, making brick and mortar academies obsolete. That took a while to manage. "Distance Learning" began early on, but those pesky schools and professors did insist on being paid for their work, so most were subscription-based, or part of college tuition. Online encyclopedias and archives also demanded money -- which is why the error-riddled Wikipedia has become the resource of choice for everyone. It may be wrong, but it's free.
Well, now the Information Age has finally realized its potential. You can now take courses at MIT online, for free. So stop reading this, go follow the link, and get educated. Build your own damned flying car.
I know we used to post a lot. Jim and I were coming back to you again and again to share our observations about science: I’d describe the journal article I’d just read, Jim would chime in with snarky comments about new tech. But lately, we’re just not stopping by as often, and when we do we’re far more likely to leave a 150-word calling card than to stay for a 1000 word visit. Do you feel abandoned? I don’t blame you.
No, it’s not you. Jim and I are as fond of you as ever. Time is just a commodity we’re short on these days, and when we actually have some to spare we’re usually too exhausted to put together a coherent string of words. You see, I’ve spent the past year doing neuroscience research on an NIH fellowship. And since I knew next to nothing about neuroscience when I started, I’ve spent a lot of time feeling like my brain was going to explode from the pressure of the new information I’m cramming into it. I’m finally getting some great data, but (and I’m sorry about this) I can’t share it with you until it goes through peer review. Early on I thought I might be able to squeeze a visit in at lunchtime, but then I got tapped for a committee and that slot vanished. I know that Jim had all sorts of good intentions about picking up the slack by stopping by to visit more often, maybe bring a cake, but he’s been writing a novel. That’s surprisingly time-consuming, too.
I can’t say that our workload is going to ease up anytime soon, but I do want to get together again regularly. There are a lot of interesting citizen science projects popping up that I want to chew over with you, and my file of journal articles to share is bulging at the seams. It may not be the newest news, but I guarantee that it’ll be interesting. So, are you free for coffee next week?
Physicists at the Italian Gran Sasso laboratory have released a study indicating that the faster-than-light neutrinos reported by the OPERA experiment at CERN must be measurement error. The study is based on the particle energy of the neutrinos, which pretty much matches what one would expect if they were traveling at normal speeds (i.e. very close to, but not over the speed of light).
So coach Einstein's team has a first down, and are within scoring distance of the CERN end zone, but the scrappy OPERA players aren't giving up yet. This is still anyone's game.
It's kind of neat to watch the process of science taking place in real time. Result is announced, result is tested, some tests confirm it while others contradict it. The tests are tested, and eventually we'll know the truth. This is how science really works.
The OPERA experiment has gotten a second faster-than-light neutrino result, even after correcting for the possibility of a timing error. This isn't quite a touchdown for the faster-than-light results yet, but it does mean Einsteinian relativity is playing defense right now.
Scientists love it when everything they know turns out to be wrong. Seriously. When a field has gotten too settled and predictable, it's time for a paradigm shift.
Back in the pioneering days of space exploration, probes launched to Mars had a shockingly high failure rate. It wasn't until the landings of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers that humans finally managed an overall 50 percent success rate.
NASA engineers in the old days used to joke rather grimly about the "Great Galactic Ghoul" lurking in space, ready to gobble up vehicles heading for Mars.
Well, the Ghoul is still on the job. The Russian Phobos-Grunt probe (I didn't name it) suffered an engine failure in orbit. Instead of blasting off for Mars it will probably wind up dropping into an ocean somewhere.
The American Curiosity rover is set to launch in two weeks, and if it gets past the Ghoul it may be the last pesky Earth machine to bother Mars for a long time. The Administration is backing away from plans to send more missions in 2016 and 2018, and any thoughts of a manned voyage seem to be permanently on hold.
Want to do some science? Now you can, even if you don't know which end of a test tube to look through. Rockethub is a "crowdsourcing" site for creative projects in a variety of fields, including science. Here's how it works: people in need of funds for a project list what they want to do, and then donors can scroll through the list and contribute whatever amounts they wish to specific projects. All the cool kids are doing it -- Kickstarter is another one, aimed at business startups.
October 25 marks the 254th anniversary of the death of Dom Antoine Augustine Calmet, a theologian and historian who inadvertently spawned the entire cultural phenomenon of vampires. Sparkly Edward, sexy Lestat, scary Dracula -- they owe it all to him.
Dom Calmet was a Benedictine monk who devoted his life to Biblical scholarship, and if you look in the Catholic Encyclopedia, that's what he's best known for. But in 1746 he tossed off a little treatise called "The Phantom World" about spirits, apparitions, and other cool Halloween-themed topics. It was a best-seller in its day -- because, let's face it, if given the choice between reading a thick tome of Biblical exegisis or some cool stories about ghosts and demons, which are you going to pick?
In Part II of his treatise, Dom Calmet collects a number of legends from eastern Europe about . . . vampires. This was apparently the first major exposure western European readers had to the rich vampire lore of the east. And Calmet's creepy anecdotes hit the memetic jackpot with the birth of the Gothic novel. John Polidori's Byronic bloodsucker Lord Ruthven made the vampire a mainstay of Gothic fiction, and a century later Bram Stoker's Dracula made vampires one of the Big Three monsters of the horror world (along with the Werewolf and the Ghost).
Scientists and scholars are often best-remembered for what they consider minor work. I've written before about how Johannes Kepler was really excited about his "Mysterium Cosmographicum" theory of nested Platonic solids, while the Laws of Planetary Motion were just a bit of data analysis. But poor Dom Calmet has it even worse: a Godly man who accidentally inspired a fictional subgenre which has become outright glorification of accursed bloodsucking monsters.
In honor of Dom Antoine Calmet, have a sip of Benedictine this Halloween, and get the stakes sharpened.
Mark McMenamin is not a crazy guy. His sanity (and excellent taste) is proved by the fact that he was among the first people to buy a copy of BONE WARS. So when he (and his dynamic spouse Dianna Schulte McMenamin) start talking about ancient giant icthyosaur-killing squids, people pay attention. Lots of people: the story is all over the Web today.
Here's the scoop. Out in Nevada there's a fossil bed with the remains of at least nine great big shonisaurs, a type of icthyosaur. Those were fish-shaped air-breathing reptiles of the Triassic era, and based on their teeth modern scientists believe they ate Triassic squid, much as sperm whales do today.
The mystery about these remains is how come there are nine dead icthyosaurs, all at least forty feet long, all in one place, and all laid out in the same direction?
There have been several suggestions: a mass stranding in shallow water (but the surrounding rock looks like old ocean bottom, not beach); or mass poisoning by some kind of aquatic plant toxin (but that wouldn't normally make the animals all drop dead at the same place).
Mark McMenamin has decided that this is murder, and someone's responsible. His candidate for the killer: Cthulhu.
Well, not quite Cthulhu, but pretty darn close. His theory is that the remains are a deep water garbage midden, left by a very very big cephalopod (100 feet long) which preyed on shonisaurs. This kind of preying on each other relationship exists in modern oceans between sperm whales and giant squids. If you're a sperm whale, sometimes you eat the squid and sometimes the squid eats you.*
For extra creep factor, McMenamin noticed that the disarticulated vertebrae of the shonisaurs seemed to be arranged in neat lines, like pieces of a puzzle. He thinks the cephalopod did that, too.
Cast your mind back to the black abyss of the ancient Triassic seas, where a giant tentacled monster sits atop the bodies of the foolish vertebrates that dove too deep in search of food and fell victim to something greater. The monster rasps the meat off the bones with its beak, and then plays with the left over bits, lining them up and caressing them with its arms in the dark.
Good thing there's nothing like that around today, right? Right?
*Or not. As our reader Danna Staaf points out, the squids may sometimes make the whales fight for their meals, but they don't eat them. At least not on a regular basis. Presumably because the giant Triassic super-cephalopods lurking on the seafloor chase them away.
Diane A. Kelly Diane Kelly is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she studies the neural wiring and mechanical engineering of reproductive systems.
James L. Cambias Jim Cambias writes science fiction and designs games in the lonely wilderness of Western Massachusetts.
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