The Engineering of the Drinking Bird

I would make a Darkman reference, but I'm guessing nobody would get it.

Maybe a Simpsons reference would be better.

This video goes through the liquid evaporating on the head of the bird...causing cooling in the head...causing a decrease in pressure in the head...causing the lower bulb's greater pressure to push the liquid into the head...causing the center of gravity of the bird to shift slightly forward...causing the liquid in the base to drop below the level of the inner tube...causing the vapor from the bottom bulb to flow through the tube and equalize pressure between the two bulbs and liquid to shift back down...the process repeats as long as the bird'd beak can 'drink' to stay wet and - as Bill points out - the humidity is low enough to allow evaporation.

This is also how hand boilers work.

I'd never heard the temperature difference's connection to heat engines (referenced previously on the blog). That's a nice connection there, Bill.

Small Bottle, HUGE Fireball (How Flame Jetting Works)

I've mentioned the dangers of methanol before, often before.

This video isn't specifically about methanol, but it is about flame jetting, a situation similar to the accidental ignition of methanol in many of those lab accidents. In many of those accidents, a bottle of flammable liquid (usually methanol) is poured onto or near an open flame. The fumes from that liquid catch fire and push the rest of the now burning vapors out of the bottle....violently out of the bottle. 

Don't squirt lighter fluid onto an already burning fire.

Don't pour alcohol - drinkable alcohol - onto a burning drink.

Don't mess with methanol at all.

The rainbow flame demonstration

Repeat after me, folks, "don't mess with methanol."

This demo (procedure here) is done using ethanol which would be way safer - but not totally safe, of course. The colors aren't quite as brilliant and clean as those done with methanol, but as I've said before, methanol isn't remotely safe to use here.

I do wish that I had access to the CLEAPSS document, however, but it's behind a login wall. It's apparently free for schools in Great Britain but not 'round here.

I promise this story about microwaves is interesting.

"By a strange twist of fate, the microwave was invented to meet a need to heat hamsters humanely in 1950s laboratories."

Seriously, that quote was the initial spark that lead Tom Scott down the rabbit hole to eventually create this video.

And I'm thrilled that it did, because the quote is kind of true. 

It wasn't the need that eventually lead the first person to create a commercially viable microwave oven, but it certainly was a need that a British scientist had when he and his colleagues were experimenting on cryogenic freezing of mammals and then bringing them back to life.

The story - and the interview with James Lovelock himself - is brilliant and incredibly weird.

Restoring Rothko | Tate

I don't have a clue what the vandal wanted to say about art or Rothko by defacing this painting. I've read an interview with him soon after the incident, and I still don't know. It looks like he was given two years in jail for the crime. That's appropriate because that's about the same length of time it took conservators to restore the painting.

The amount of science that goes on behind the scenes at art museums is amazing to me. I was lucky enough to tour the conservation lab at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and it was one of the more impressive 'factory' tours that I've been on, just fabulous stuff going on there.

This video goes through the process that the conservators went through in trying to restore the damaged Rothko. At a very base level, the technique is nothing more than a solubility question. Find something (we can see at 8:39 that the chosen solvent for the black areas was "1 pt (10 mls) EL / 1 pt (10 mls) BA", but I have no ideal what EL and BA are) that dissolves the vandalizing ink but doesn't dissolve the original painting. Apply that solvent carefully, repeat and proceed.

But the art that's involved in that is - to me - as impressive as the original art making. 

Restoration can be horribly done when the materials aren't understood, but clearly these conservators are brilliant at their job.

By the by, if you want to learn about the paintings themselves, you could do a lot worse than this video.

Flesh-Destroying Chromic Acid - Periodic Table of Videos

In posting this video, I went looking for the original video that I was sure I had posted on the blog. Turns out I hadn't, so I'll go ahead and post that below. Might be worth watching it first, though you will get the general gist by watching the above video.

I remember chromic acid being around the stock room of Wabash's chem department - and also around Pru Phillips's stock room when I student taught for her. Pru kept the chromic acid around for when her glassware got too stained for acceptable use.

I'm passingly familiar with the dangers of chromic acid, however, so I don't have it around, and Flinn Scientific doesn't even sell it anymore.

After watching this video, I think that's a good choice on their part.

The Difference Between High Explosives and Low Explosives

I never considered that high explosive was a technical term and that consequently there must be low explosives.

To quote Stephen Miller, the explosive expert from the video...

• Explosives are a mixture a fuel and an oxidizer.
• With low explosives these are roughly mixed together...when a low explosive reacts, it's a thermal reaction
• A high explosive is also a mixture of a fuel and an oxidizer...down on the molecular level, the atoms [?] of the materials are in such close proximity that they are linked together within the molecule and...they can react a whole lot faster...It's actually a shockwave reaction.

I didn't know those distinctions, and I really didn't know that high explosives can be safer for transportation because they're more stable, requiring a shockwave to set them off.