The Bull in Full

The Gummi Bear Demonstration

Apparently, my all-time favorite in-class science demonstration has now been put on YouTube.  A site called ScienceBlogs has a post up explaining the science behind it, but I'm going to share my version of it.  The goal of the experiment is to demonstrate the effect of pure oxygen environments, particularly on combustion.  But it's a pretty unforgettable effect.

My Advanced Chemistry class at NCSSM was taught by a cool-headed woman (you'd have to be to teach sleep-deprived high schoolers how to work with rather dangerous chemicals) named Dr. Halpin.  One time after my roommate and lab partner Lee Coltrane and I sprayed copper and sulfuric acid all over a fume hood, she calmly looked on and said, "that sample's going to be a little hard to mass correctly." 

Anyway, she'd called us all out to the lab, equipped with our goggles and lab notebooks, and gathered us around one of the fume hoods, where she had a Bunsen burner heating a small colorless liquid, which was bubbling peacefully in a test tube.  She told us that what was inside was potassium perchlorate, and had us all work through what would result as the substance was heated.  Well, the potassium and the chlorine unite to form KCl, which leaves pure oxygen gas bubbling off.  Most of us worked this out, and someone eventually piped up with it.

"So," she said, "you've got a pure oxygen environment, which happens to be rather warm because of the Bunsen burner.  Now, what does this gummi bear primarily consist of?" in what seemed like non-sequitur.  I think potassium perchlorate might have been what jumped into my head at first, but fortunately someone with more sense and less of a desire to guess the punchline guessed sucrose.  "Right," she said.  "Now, what happens if I introduce it into a pure oxygen environment?" she said as she casually took the Gummi bear in a pair of forceps and dropped it into the test tube.

This is roughly what followed:

Hat tip: AS

Your minute of Muppet

Three distinguished singers (and linguists!) sing an Irish classic:

(Made tiny because of aforementioned TypePad silliness.)

The wonders of the blogosphere

In the past few months, particularly following the 2006 elections, there's been a fair bit of triumphalism bubbling up about blogs, the progressive "netroots," and the internet as a tool for activism in general.  (Jonathan Chait's TNR article and the recent WaPo bit come to mind.)  Much of it gives me a headache, and to be fair, a lot of those involved haven't been chest-beating, but rather trying to get their head around just what is going on here. 

Setting politics, fundraising, and such things aside for a moment, today I encountered a blog that reminds me of just how powerful these personal publishing tools can be, just in allowing you to hear voices you never would have heard otherwise.  Just how interersting this can be can be startling at times.  While it's true that 95% of blogs  bits about people's pet gerbils that end up being rather dull unless you know the person in question, every so often you stumble onto a site by someone you'd never think you'd be interested to hear that grabs your attention.

Today's entry comes from the Chief of Police in Lincoln, Nebraska.  I happen to be on a couple of crime, crime mapping, and policing mailing lists for work, and most of the traffic is for police analysts and captains talking about things that don't really involve me.  A recent thread erupted on the "crimemap" list recently regarding using crime analysis for preventative measures.  The thread itself was fascinating enough, touching on the debate about whether crime prevention measures actually lower crime or just push it around, but what piqued my interest was when I clicked on the blog post that started it all.  Tom Casady, the aforementioned Chief, started the discussion with a link to his post about garage burglaries.  Interesting stuff, but even better was the newer post entitled "Gary got his gun permit" about the problems with loopholes in permits for carrying concealed handguns.

My take on gun control has changed slightly over the years.  I started out in your standard progressive pro-gun control take, but I've since softened a bit (only a bit though -- I still carry quite a bit of animosity towards the NRA).  Regardless, Casady's post is the kind of anecdote which, in my mind, really should cause a shift in the gun control debate.  Whereas now we seem to be stuck in "ban asssault weapons" vs. "enforce existing laws," the story of "Gary" above, along with the VT massacre, raises a different question.   Could we talk about whether it's a good thing that "Gary" now has a concealed carry permit, and if it's not, what we should do about that?

The Gender Genie: Hours of fun

Oh, man, this is too much fun.  The Gender Genie is an engine which you feed text into, and it looks at your diction and tries to guess your gender.  Feeding blog entries in, excerpts from this post, this post, and ironically this post test pretty strongly male, while this one and this one come out slightly on the femle side.  On the other hand, the first three paragraphs of my ATHF movie post mark a rare feat: smack in the middle.  To quote Liquid Sky (which I've never seen, but which cracked me up when Rob Carter quoted it to me), "I am as androgynous as DAVID BOWIE HIMSELF!"

(Okay, so if you feed all of this into the Genie at once, I come out substantially on the male side.  Still, I like that I'm a bit unpredictable...)