sun bop a loo bop

Embarrass de richesse

• Fud
  
• Il Timpano [R] a variant on Macaroni de Lampedusa
• Il Timpano reconstructed by Babish
• Scallops: less destructive fishing of -- via MeFi
  
• ♬ ♫ ♩ ♪
  
• Covering Daydream believer.
• Grace Petrie - They Shall Not Pass
• Les Mis flashmobbed  
• Mascagni - Cavalleria rusticana: Intermezzo
• Tu Jhoom Naseebo Lal x Abida Parveen
  
• Eng
  
• Language of screws
• Microballistics with the SloMo Guys
  
• AI applied to streetscapes
• Irish Liebherr cranes 40cm clearance under NYC - NJ bridge
• Building the Dohyo 
  
• Law
• Swedish dog tax rebate  
• Card sharps. 
• Markobi
• Lennart Green - [bloboprev]
  

Anything goes

I've given tribs to Gavin and Dan the SloMo Guys, who have a super-high-speed camera which can capture the detail of fast changing events and crank them down in speed so that we can really see what's happening. It's interesting to note, therefore, that their latest video is about as exciting as watching a bath fill up. The story is interesting nevertheless: Dan is laid out on a trampoline, an empty monster balloon is placed upon þe coddes and gradually filled with water.

Trampolines are dangerous things to have about the place:

• My niece sustained a horrible compound fracture to her arm 13 years ago by compounding the bounce a trampoline and a space-hopper [pic], taking flight and landing badly.
• My boss's neighbour's boy otoh leapt off the roof of a garden shed onto a trampoline, flew briefly, and broke his neck landing in a heap
• Our trampoline took off in a storm and flew 40m up-hill and broke its back against a pine tree. I was glad to see it gone

The danger for SloMo Dan is that, as the balloon fills with 400kg of water, the weight pushes his knees in the wrong direction because the trampoline provides only elastic support.  It is part of the design that human hips bend in the other direction, so Dan's are okay under the weight. As the pain in his counter-flexed knees builds he reflects that it might have been better to carry out the experiment directly on the lawn. The slomo part, when the balloon is burst with a screwdriver, is almost an anti-climax.  All good fun.

Less good fun was a crushing accident sustained by singer song-writer Cole Porter in October 1937 when his horse fell and rolled over his legs crushing them both in a bloody mess. Porter was at the top of his game and his maternal grandfather was 'the richest man in Indiana', so he could afford the best medical treatment then available but spent the rest of his life in pain and undergoing a series of surgical interventions because osteomyelitis set in. That is an infection of the fabric of the bone, often prosecuted by Staphylococcus aureus - the SA in MRSA. Even today, bone infections are the very divil to cure because the density of the fabric of bone hinders perfusion by the antibiotics. 1937 was pre-penicillin, although sulphanilamide and other Sulpha drugs were available. Eventually, in 1958, the doctors amputated Porter's right leg at mid-thigh in a desperate attempt to control the infection. "Miraculously, through physical anguish, drastic surgical procedures, and the grip of addiction, he could still trip the light fantastic in his mind and reliably inspire the rest of us to do so as well. Such stories remind patients and doctors alike that regardless of the outcome, the human spirit remains the most formidable foe of illness." (Howard Merkel)  Porter died in 1964 at the age of 71 vacillating between terrible pain and a haze of alcohol and analgesics. A case has been made that 'I've got you under my skin' is all about heroin addiction.

But enough, already. Today is Cole Porter's birthday 9th June 1891 and I'm sure you'll want to sing along with some classics as you use both legs to go to work:

• Anything goes in Indiana Jones
• Night And Day, from The Gay Divorcée with Fred and Ginger
• That's quite ahead of its time: gays divorcing 80 years before the marriage referendum
• Just One of Those Things - As Dorothy Parker once said To her boyfriend, "fare thee well"
• Dorothy "quotable" Parker that is
• Begin the beguine
• I get a kick out of you - Peggy Lee
• Let's do it, let's fall in love.

Chapeau bas!

Sciency filmlets 280517

Berluddy 'ell, isn't yer man's blog called Science Matters? Doesn't he go drifting off-topic into song and dance a bit too often. Okay, okay, leave me alone. But I take your point. Some neat recent science stuff on youtube

• Steve Mould [prev on dyslexia] on why crystals (including metals) are imperfect and so likely to fail.
• Which led to a recent SloMo Guys doing something silly with mousetraps and a trampoline.
• Blowing up oobleck - non-Newtonian fluids [bloboprev]. Shooting oobleck.
• Oxidation doesn't have to be explosive.
• Don't do this at home - wear three pairs of gloves
• Crossing Antarctica more efficiently than Shackleton. Backstory.
• This Spring I read and commented upon Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. One of his key themes is that thinking is hard: decision making required energy. A whole school built up, dozens of PhD theses were submitted about Ego Depletion. This is the idea that denying yourself a treat requires will-power and that consumes enough energy to compromise your thinking about a subsequent cognitive task. This whole field is probably nonsense - can't be replicated - on stilts a farrago of wishful thinking, publication bias and flabby statistics.
• Did someone mention statistics? Let's try Simpson's Paradox explained. Playing card probability till minute 7; then five minutes relating that to quantum entanglement. The last half of the 35 mins is about the peculiar penis of the red-footed tortoise Chelonoidis carbonaria.

Blow yer ';ead orf, why don't you?

I love a bang as much as the next man but municipal fireworks on St.Patrick's night is as near as we get to such things in Ireland. Obviously it's a lot more 'exciting' in Syria, with complete strangers raining bombs down on towns until they look like Coventry or Dresden in the 1940s. I was waxing lyrical about allowing smart young people to blow things up, the better to understand how dangerous they can be; rather than watching the SloMo guys do an oil-fire BLEVE for you at one remove from reality.  Two removes from reality, playing violent video-games is just for saddos.  Explosives are dangerous, and I've seen the damage they can do, but that's not to say that we should forbid kids to try things out for themselves.

I did say ". . .allowing smart young people . . ." because they can be counted on to think things through.  If they fail, then it's like the Darwin Awards: sad but the race is fitter. We should, however, do something to protect the less able: those who can't read the label for example. Last month in Georgia (the US state, not the country) a young chap blew off his leg by loading a ride-on mower with 3lb = 1.4kg of Tannerite and then shooting at it until it exploded. The manufacturers caution against using more than 0.5lb and then only from a sensible distance - which gets bigger as the quantity of explosive increases. The gossoon from Georgia was only 10m (and closing) when the stuff did what it says on the tin.  YoungTurks, the leftie TV channel used the incident to label all gun owners, and especially the National Rifle Association NRA, as mad, bad and dangerous to know. If you're not from the rural Republican core of middle USA, chances are you won't have heard of Tannerite.

But, if you know much about the violent history of WWI, you will have heard of Ammonal, which is the base on which Tannerite is a development. In 1916, Ammonal didn't say anything on the tin because it was a top secret wheeze by the British but the name betrayed its table of contents - Ammonium and Aluminium. In particular, it consists of ammonium nitrate as an oxidant and particles of aluminium as fuel; a bit of milled charcoal is usually added as well. Anyone who thinks that aluminium doesn't burn should check out HMS Sir Galahad during the Falkland'sWar. Amatol is similar but has a proportion of  TNT [prev] for added 'brisance'.  Ammonium nitrate is used as a fertiliser and aluminium is cheap enough to produce.  More to the point both compounds are quite stable and the mixture can be dropped from a great height and not go off.  It can also be shipped across the country and sold to anyone with <$100.

Ammonal was first used in anger [or cold-blooded malice] on 1st July 1916 as the opening act of the Battle of the Somme. The bang went up nicely, the earth moved and people died but the explosion wasn't properly integrated into a coherent attack and the Somme developed into a costly and drawn out debacle that killed 20,000 British soldiers on that day alone. Nevertheless, large explosions under enemy lines before an attack became part of the unholy writ of war.  The British used the next 11 months to snake mines out from Ypres towards and under the German front line on the Messines Ridge. They then loaded each of 26 tunnel-ends with between 9 and 15 tonnes of Ammonal (something like 500 tonnes in all) and in the small hours of 7th June 1917 sent the whole thing, and 10,000 German soldiers, sky high.  They didn't detonate the four mines at the South end of the ridge because the ground above had been captured and two other mines were beyond reach because the service tunnel had [been] collapsed.  After the war, the British army went home and left those time-bombs in place.  One took a lightning strike in 1955, which made a big bang, a big hole and killed a cow.

That was then, Tannerite is now. The Tannerite company is serving their community: We will do anything with in our power to assist in making any transaction with you fast, affordable and righteous. Righteous?  That's a funny word to use in your marketing. Sorry Canucks: "We Can Not ship to CANADA Unless you have an Explosive Importation Permit from Canada National Resources" And I daresay that restriction applies to Ukraine, Brazil and Japan.  But you can order your binary rifle targets from Tannerite Inc.  Try the 6-pack starter box for $35? Binary rifle targets? You have to mix the two ingredients yourself.  A mixing bowl for the recommended 0.5lb dose; a large bucket if you want to do something spectacular.  Binary rifle targets? You can't set ammonal off by kicking it, or even blasting it with a shot-gun. No, it needs to take a high-velocity round to overcome the energy of activation and make the explosion take hold. Binary rifle targets? The product is marketed so that you can determine if your rifle has hit the target even when it's on the other side of the valley.  Only bad-boys put large quantities together to scale up.

Whoomph!

The Institute can be exciting if you make the effort.  My Human Physiology class meets of Tuesday lunchtime on the outer reaches of the campus in the stand of the GAA pitch which has a number of classrooms in the back over the t'ilets and changing rooms. They were complaining that their timetable didn't allow for lunch, I countered with the fact that you get two walks in the sunshine to get to class.  On the way back to base, I caught the tail-end of the visit of the local fire-brigade to Campus with two fire-trucks, the County Fire-Safety Officer FSO and a load of kit.  They have a little trailer than opens up at the back to demonstrate various fires and how to put them out. As I approached, there was a saucepan of oil burning away.  One of the fire-fighters dressed up with face-mask and fire-retardant hood approached the pan with a half-cupful of water on the end of a very long stick.  Tip it over and WHOOOMMPH! it's a BLEVE [boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion] as the water sinks to the bottom and vaporises to fling the over-burden of boiling oil up and out. It only lasted a fraction of a second but it would have filled half our modest kitchen . . . and the fire was not extinguished,  So they could give the demo another go round.  Until you've been there, you can't quite believe what happens.

Afterwards, I chatted for a while with the young FSO about whether I'd missed anything else interesting because they had examples of the jaws-of-life for forcing crushed cars apart to abstract the humanity within. They do those car-cutting demonstrations, but not today. I was glad that about 20 students had seen the BLEVE, and others had seen earlier examples during the day: they won't hold the chip-pan under the kitchen tap. I was on about BLEVEs in June with the SloMo guys filming it in its roaring detail.  It's not quite the same without feeling the heat at a distance of 6 m.