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.
Both Ends
Tag: science
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.
Lissajous Figures
Take two function generators, an old CRT oscilloscope, a couple of power and BNC cables, and look! Whirling, dancing lissajous figures!
Chunky knobs! Clicky buttons! Drifty outputs! Squiggly curves!
Bespoke Breadboard
Need a thing, but can’t get it in the right size, right shape, right odd set of dimensions? That’s one reason to keep a workshop in the basement. If we can possibly make it, we’ll certainly try.
Pictured: a custom optics breadboard, for a very specific apparatus, with many, many drilled, tapped, and cleaned 1/4″-20 mounting holes. It’s big, and shiny, and has a bright future ahead!
Probably with lasers or something. Lots of lasers around here.
Extremely Fragile
No kidding. Bright red indicator to proceed with caution.
Bouncy Balls
It’s July, and that means it’s the time of year for restocking on toys! Bouncy balls, suction cup blowdart guns, silicone poppers, the works.
This is all for advanced scientific education, mind you. Important stuff, building a better tomorrow, etc.
News Release: Space Frogs
We’re all relieved to hear that. While the American bullfrog enjoys a large natural range throughout eastern North America, and are celebrated jumpers, they are not typically encountered at heights above the earth that one would consider “in orbit.”
Whatever it’s like to think like a frog, we can safely assume that the rocket launch and orbital microgravity experiences were weird by any frog standards.
News Release: Balloon Survival
Science: if we can learn something from sending a 1,200 lb. payload over Saskatchewan via (a very large) balloon, by golly we’re going to try.
Doppler Ball
An electronic buzzer buried inside a foam ball, on a long cable with a switch and handle at the end. Flick the switch, and a piercing 2,500 Hz signal begins. Whirled in a big circle around your own head, the tone persists. For everyone else in the room, it creates a cyclic Doppler shift, a repeating weeee-oooo, weeee-oooo that sticks in the brain even after it’s done, like when you see phosphene images behind your eyelids after catching a glimpse of something way too bright.
We can’t overstate the wonderful modifications to the original object, back in 2010, which added the cable and switch. Your bog-standard Doppler ball – available from several scientific apparatus purveyors – requires one to open up the ball, turn on the buzzer, then close it back up. Tossing it back and forth between students illustrates the concept.
Then, when you’ve had quite enough and just want it to stop, you have to pry it open and shut the whole thing off. (This vintage version, pre-mod, required full-on battery removal.) The Doppler ball: it teaches us all kinds of new lessons!
Camping Equipment
Camping. For science!
The enormous beige box is a “Basecamp Kitchen Kit,” in case you’re wondering. It’s half as heavy as it looks.