I’ve seen a lot of episodes of How It’s Made, but none triggered quite the WTF? response as the episode last night about transformers.  (You know, those gray canisters on power poles that occasionally blow up.)

Inside those boxes are a series of coils made out of paper and aluminum.  They get wrapped up, and then wrapped again with copper wire a few times, and then put in the oven to bake.  When it’s all done they fill the box with mineral oil.

I can’t really do the whole process justice, so try to catch the episode if you can.  I admit that I never really gave any thought to what exactly was in those canisters, but I certainly didn’t expect what I saw.  The whole thing was really low-tech and looked kind of like something Rube Goldberg would dream up.

A mix of Beaver, Rabbit, and Wild Hare, to be exact.

The fur is chopped up, mixed with water, and formed into a hat.  They add Shellac (a resin secreted by the female lac bug) at the end to stiffen things up.

Source: Science Channel

The Science Channel told me that Glass is a liquid the other day.

Now obviously, anyone who has ever seen glass knows that for all intents and purposes it is solid. So this can only be a technical minutiae kind of claim.

But the world wide web leads me to believe that the Science Channel has led me astray. At best, the question of whether or not glass is technically a liquid is unsettled science dripping with nuance*. At worst it’s a persistent urban legend.

(*Pun not intended but appreciated.)

Here’s the crux of the matter: With water/ice, the liquid/solid thing is straightforward. When water cools down enough it crystallizes and forms ice.

Glass, on the other hand, doesn’t crystallize. So depending on how you characterize “liquid” and “solid” you may get into a semantic battle about in which state to classify our friend the window pane.

If you’re not interested in the gritty details of science, glass is a solid. If you are, you can check out this highly technical article, or this less technical article and decide for yourself.

This article centers around a guy whose life work has been to study “squishy” materials that defy classification like Peanut Butter, toothpaste, shaving cream, and glass.

On a semi-related note, I had a real life moment that paralleled the Microsoft Bing commercials. In the middle of my Google search results for “Glass is a Liquid” (38,200,000 results) was a link to Amazon for the Philip Glass album Songs from Liquid Days. There were, however, no ads on the results page.

For the record, Bing gave me several Liquid Glass automotive polish links, a few links related to my actual search topic, and 2 ads. One was for “Buy Liquid Glass at eBay you may be eligible for 8% off with PayPal” and the other was for “Glass Liquid” from Target.com.

So, based on this one very limited experience, don’t buy the “decision engine” hype.

It has to do with the speed of sound.

Normally, your voice travels through regular air, which produces the sound that your voice usually makes.

When you replace the air in your lungs with helium, the distance your voice has to travel stays the same, but the material it has to travel through changes. Because sound travels through helium twice as fast as through regular air, your voice sounds higher.

Source: My new favorite show Brink.

The Navy is getting a few new ships, and they are awesomely awesome.

LPD stands for Landing Platform Dock. The ships are really ATDs or Amphibious Transport Docks, but the old acronym stuck. These ships are also referred to as San Antonio class ships, named after the U.S.S. San Antonio, which was the first ship of this type.

Part of what makes these new ships so cool is that each one new ship can replace the functions of 3 old ships. This allows the Navy to decrease the number of ships they need to operate, while also increasing capability.

These ships are support ships. Their primary mission is to transport Marines and their gear to where they need to go. As such, the ships contain several large transport hovercrafts, 4 helicopters, and a crap load of Humvees. They also contain over 800 Marines.

As I mentioned in the Radar Post, the LPDs are also very stealthy. They don’t have a right angle anyhwere on the deck. The result of this is that the huge war ship looks like a small fishing boat to radar.

The New York (which isn’t quite finished yet) is an LPD. Part of the bow of the New York was made from salvaged steel from the World Trade Center.

We were supposed to get 12 of these new ships, which would replace 41 older ships that are being retired. However, since the world loves us now and we don’t have any need for a Navy, they will only be making 9 of the 12 ships that were originally planned.

Source: Science Channel, US Navy

Radar used to be an acronym for “Radio Detection and Ranging,” but now has entered the language as a real word, and therefore has lost its capitalization.

Radar works by shooting either radio waves or microwaves at an object. A small part of the energy from the wave is reflected back to the antenna. The amount of time it takes for the wave to return allows a calculation to be made to determine the object’s distance.

In the nifty little graphic, the green line is the original wave. The object, which is round, bounces a small portion of the original wave back to the antenna. The returning energy is the blue line.

Based on how long it takes for the blue line to return, the radar’s computer can calculate how far away the blue ball is.

If the blue ball were moving, the radar could find out how fast it is moving by taking several measurements in a row and then calculating the rate of change in the distance over time. Because distance equals rate times time of course.

The same basic principle applies to radar used for weather detection, speed detection (boo!) and ship or airplane detection.

The use of radar for weather detection was actually discovered by accident during WWII. Radar operators noticed that they were getting a lot of interference to their signals when there was rain or snow in the air.

After the war, the scientists who worked on military radar focused on how to interpret this interference to detect weather, leading to the use of radar for weather detection.

Stealth Technology
Most of the time, the same radar antenna acts as both the sender and the receiver. As you saw in the graphic above, a round object reflects only a little bit of the energy back to the antenna. However, if, instead of a ball, the target were flat, more energy would bounce back and the returning signal would be more reliable.

Normal airplanes and ships know this, and include intentional flat features to allow radar to reflect reliably. If you are a passenger airliner, it’s important for the Air Traffic Control radars to be able to find you. So there are specially angled parts added to the airplane to facilitate this. Same goes for trade ships. You want the coast guard to be able to locate you when you send your distress signal.

If you are a stealth military vessel, however, being found by radar is not a good thing. That’s why the stealth bomber looks so odd. It was designed specifically not to reflect radio waves.

The Navy’s new LPD warships (the subject of a future post) do not have a single 90 degree angle on deck. Even the rungs on the ladders are angled so as to not reflect waves.

The military also uses special paints and other materials to absorb rather than reflect radio waves.

Source: Science Channel and wiki

The Spanish Flu that killed 70-100 million people in 1918 came in two waves. The first wave happened in March, and was relatively mild. Not very many people died.

The second wave happened in September, and that’s when it got really deadly.

So like I said, no need to panic, yet.

We still have a few months.

Source: Science Channel

China had compasses in about 200 B.C.

They used something called a Lodestone.

The compasses were kind of like modern compasses, except that they pointed south.

Source: Science Channel

The earthquake that hit the San Francisco Bay Area in October 1989 and collapsed part of the San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge was the first earthquake that received major live television coverage.

The reason- the quake hit right before game 3 of the World Series. The two teams that were playing- San Francisco and Oakland.

The Goodyear Blimp was on the scene, and provided live coverage of the earthquake and it’s immediate aftermath.

Source: Science Channel

Niagara Falls moves 12 inches backwards every year, toward Lake Erie.

Source: The Science Channel show about the Great Lakes