All respect to warnings which don’t mince words.
“GLUE WILL BURN FLESH”
Noted.
Warning
Note (Yellow)
Oh, right. Some days, you might forget that we share one of our storage spaces with the Theater & Dance department.
Alligator Clip
Sometimes you stumble across a delightful artifact. One with an unknown, perhaps unknowable history. Clearly, at one point, it was necessary to hold an object in a particular place, and none of the available clips, clamps, or clasps were up to the task.
A steel rod, an alligator clip, and some electrical tape to the rescue!
What’s fascinating about this isn’t the specifics of the object, but the way that these temporary, stopgap solutions can linger. After enough time and use, they become ordinary and unremarkable. Familiar.
Until, some indefinite period of years later, a fresh set of eyes spots them in an old drawer. Look at what’s in here!
Optical Discs
It really wasn’t that long ago that computers came equipped with optical disc drives, and they were effective means of data storage, and the density you could store on a DVD instead of a CD was pretty exciting. Now? They’re not only borderline-useless, but the features that we used to reference as a cultural touchstone are no longer obvious to our students.
It’s not that they don’t know what these are. It’s that they haven’t handled a million of them to know their dimensions, to understand the diffraction rainbow they make. The physicists around here remember using the inescapable AOL discs as cheap, readily available diffraction gratings back in grad school. The astronomers use their proportions to illustrate the shape of the Milky Way Galaxy. Students now need to physically hold one of these to get the idea, because they don’t have a mental image ready to go.
Our Galaxy, if you were wondering, is roughly proportioned as a CD, only instead of being a millimeter and a half thick, is more like 1,000 light years. Very roughly, anyway.
Carbonized
Strange things come through the shop doors some days. This one perfumed the shop for a time, a bamboo cutting board which had been resting on a hot electric coil. Everything smelled like burnt corn husk.
Everything. It was a pervasive scent, intriguing at first and overwhelming after a time.
Scraped, chiseled, sanded, and… well, not exactly like brand new, but in usable shape once again!
Blue Dot
These are not flashbulbs, merely incandescent A-lamps, but check out the sweet vintage ad!
So the “blue dot” thing was a quality indicator that Sylvania used in their classic flashbulbs. A magnesium filament inside an oxygen environment within the bulb produced a bright flash of light, assuming the envelope hadn’t been compromised. A dot of anhydrous cobalt (II) chloride inside that zero-moisture bulb would remain blue. If there was a leak, atmospheric moisture would react with the cobalt chloride to turn it pink, an indicator that this bulb might not work.
What’s less clear is how, exactly, one wee flashbulb is going to effectively illuminate that whale – flash photography being not super effective at distance – but whatever.
Apollo 13
Fifty-five years ago saw the launch of the Apollo 13 lunar mission, on 11 April 1970. It didn’t go to plan, of course. Things took a bad turn, could have been worse, but who can blame them for optimism in the weeks leading up to it all? Moon science is cool!
Maps, plans, a pretty tight itinerary. It’s expensive and difficult to go to the Moon, so you don’t waste time. But don’t those hand-drawn maps just make it so inviting? Presumably the astronauts carried maps which were much more detailed and useful, if less likely to get the kid inside all of us super-excited.
Apollo 14 would reach the Fra Mauro highlands in early 1971, though Lovell, Swigert, and Haise never flew into space again.
Spider
Spring is here, and everything is coming back to life. That means our little basement visitors are back, too!
Both Ends
This is what happens when you burn a candle at both ends!
Make a pivot, light both ends, and the burning and dripping wax creates oscillations. In our limited experience, pretty irregular and chaotic. It’s really quite cool.
More Sodium
Here, our more modern sodium light sources, using a clever design that enabled a reduction from the minimum 35W to as little as 18W in 1977. Cool, yeah?
Unfortunately, Philips finally bowed out of the low pressure sodium lamp game in 2019, mean we’ve got these dinosaurs running for as long as we can scour spare lamps online. Once the supply’s gone, it’s gone.
Hey, look! Sodium metal! Highly reactive, so it’s inside with a mixture of 99% neon and 1% argon, neither of which deigns to react with, well, anything. That’s why, when it starts up, we see a purplish glow from the noble gases before tube reaches 260°C and vaporizes the sodium. After that, it’s an intense monochromatic yellow-orange that’s hard to look at.