Scanning Electron Micrographs

These are 5 pictures I took with a couple different scanning electron microscopes during a class a few years ago - I've taken over a hundred more of crystals I made, but those are in a weird file format. And some of these materials are cooler...

SWEET Latte art

I need to learn how to do this stuff do this kind of thing - girls like that, right?











The kid makes it. The guy makes it better.


This one is pretty educational too -

Rolla Ice Storm, '06

Here's a bunch of old photos I took on my little pocket digital (Finepix E550) 3 years ago - I cleaned them up a bit and put them on flickr.

Bruschetta bites

This is a version of a recipe I came up with several years ago, and make fairly often – these baguette bites are a tasty appetizer, or can be made with slightly larger slices as a side dish. It is based loosely on a bruschetta, and adding some diced tomatoes and fresh basil to the sauce would work, if you want something more traditional. This particular time I used a whole grain baguette, but any baguette or Italian loaf with work.


INGREDIENTS:
15 slices 2.5”-diameter baguette (toasted)
Olive oil
SAUCE:
1 packet Parma Rosa
~ 3 oz. shredded parmesan
¾ cup milk
1 tbls. Butter

Slice and toast the bread, brushing with a little bit of olive oil first to create a nice crust on top.


The Parma Rosa was prepared as described in the packet, except with only ¾ cup milk – it is important to have this reduced amount of milk to create more of a paste than a sauce.

Next, melt the parmesan into the sauce. I melted slices of parmesan on mine, but I REALLY like parmesan, and wanted to have the flavor more present – I don’t recommend this for most people. Let this cool almost to room temperature to thicken, and prevent it from soaking into the bread while hot.

Coat the slices with about 2 teaspoons of the sauce mixture. I didn’t care if it sat nicely on top, so I might have put some extra on mine…


Lastly, broil for a few minutes until nice and browned., and top with some basil and thyme. Let cool a bit, since if you take a bite while hot the sauce acts as molten lava that sticks to the roof of your mouth, creating one of the nastier burns an appetizer can make.

Experiment with the recipe. I never have measured anything when doing this recipe before, and each one is a little different.

4 patterns

Sorry, I got swamped today with emails - 14,781 to be exact. I hate it when technology doesn't work. Anyway, here's a series of four patterns I did. Some of them have stories behind them, but I'm late for a meeting, so you just get these.

Enjoy!

KMNR 1 and 2, Outmode of Transportation, and Puffs

Again, the gum wrappers I use (Orbit) can't be erased on, so all these were done in one shot. I think it's obvious on some of the wrappers I've posted in the past ....

I know it's simple, but I like this KMNR.

Almost bought one of these. But it was $1050, and
did not work. So I didn't.

I hated this when I finished it, but
it's grown on me since.

H.S.S. Misnomer, Hourglass, Primion, Lightbulb

Gum wrappers today and tomorrow while I get stuff organized.

One of my favorites - probably the wrapper
I spent the most time on. Actually, 2nd most.

I was REALLY bored in class -
felt like it was taking forever.

I spent a lot of time making the word-
frames look sufficiently '60's, then blew
through the car's drawing.

Based off the lightbulb for 'Rusty's Day Camp'

CIA and OSS Spy Tools and Magicianship

or
Further Proof Espionage is Cool

(First check out the CIA's online museum - it's only a fraction of their actual museum, most of which is apparently still classified and only accessible by agents, but it's still very cool)

I'm currently reading a book by H. Keith Melton and Robert Wallace titled "The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception." If the title seems a little far-fetched to you, that's because the CIA's program of the 50's and 60's, MKULTRA, was far-fetched - the book features the most complete copy of "The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception", written by world-renowned magician John Mulholland.

I got this book thinking it was an exact copy of the original documents - turns out that is only part of it. Firstly, nobody knows (at least, nobody PUBLICLY knows) how many treatises and guides Mulholland wrote for the CIA, and all that seems to have survived when most MKULTRA documents were ordered burned in the 1970's were two; "Some Operational Applications of the Art of Deception," and "Recognition Signals," both from the early 1950's. Mulholland continued working with the CIA for several more years, but there is no evidence, either from government sources or Mulholland's own notes and documents, that he wrote anything else for their use.

But the book isn't only a publication of these recently found and declassified documents (they were lost in desks for nearly 40 years) - it is also a highly researched book on the art and tools of deception used by OSS, CIA, and KBG agents during the cold war. Roughly half the pages are devoted to Melton and Wallace's well documented history of how secret agents avoided detection, relayed materials, and kept their secrets in a highly scrutinized and dangerous climate.

I did not know that the book would feature anything of this sort - and I am pleasantly surprised. Having read about and researched some specific covert agents and operations, I always found the minutia of the spy game incredibly interesting. But the thing about books and essays on people and events are that they often devolve into character studies of the people involved. That's not a bad thing, if you're doing history papers (which I was at the time), but the reason I first became interested in these events was because of characters like Q from the Bond series - I wanted to see the stealth devices and tactics that seemed to surround the spies.

The more I researched for these history papers and for my own curiosity, the less it seemed like spies used such devices regularly - that's why I am enjoying Melton and Wallace's book so much. It is teeming with Bond-like devices and anecdotes of their usage in actual cases. The manual itself is more like a practical guide to magic, and is interesting on it's own as both a guide to amateur magicianship and a unusual piece of history, but the real value in this book is the first half's history of deception and spies.

I would highly recommend it to anyone, especially kids like me, who grew up watching Sean Connery's bond, while also building our own repertoire of amateur magic tricks on the side (I still have all my books, coins and cards).

BUY THE BOOK ON AMAZON

Science Addendum

I ran my experiment with a slight modification – I placed an unbent and a bent staple under a glass bowl in my microwave. The glass bowl is mostly transparent to the microwaves at the wavelength used in the ovens, but it would insulate the charges and prevent damage to my microwave.

I placed the staples in for 3.5 minutes, about the maximum length of time it would take for popcorn to fully cook.

RESULTS:
Inconclusive. I heard a faint pop every 15-30 seconds, something that didn’t happen with just the bent staple used in the popcorn run, but I couldn’t see any discharge. It could have just been running between the ends of the staple, or grounding itself out some other way. The glass did get much hotter than when I ran it by itself in a second run, but I didn’t measure the temperature specifically.

To ensure the glass cover wasn’t having an effect, I run the unbent paperclip by itself without a cover. The same pop occurred, but in both cases it was so faint I don’t want to assign it to any specific cause.

CONCLUSIONS:
I could be right with my initial hypothesis. But I don’t know. A high-speed camera focused on the staple would tell me for sure, but I don’t have the resources.

I could be wrong, and the staples don’t posses enough metal to build sufficient charge. Using larger, staple-gun staples of varying sizes would tell me, but I don’t want to put my own oven at risk testing that.

So. Again. Anybody have a microwave they are willing to risk for science?

Microwave Popcorn leads to SCIENCE!

Or
“Why Staples Don’t Spark in the Microwave”

The other day I made homemade microwave popcorn, a little trick that people have known about for a while and made more popular by Alton Brown on Good Eats. It’s particularly cheap, costing only about 10 cents compared to $2.50 for pre-made microwave popcorn. The recipe is all over the internet, and is usually a variation of the traditional stove top recipe - the particular one I used worked well, and was as follows:

¼ cup popcorn kernels
1 tsp. popcorn or fine salt
a splash of peanut or olive oil

Place ingredients in a brown paper bag (like the ones you can get cheap for sack lunches), fold over, staple, shake well, push air out and place on a plate in the microwave for 2 ½ to 3 minutes, or until popping occurs only once every 2-3 seconds. Pour into bowl and top with spices of your choosing – I used and recommend a dash of garlic powder, a half teaspoon of chili powder, and about 3 tablespoons of that powdery parmesan.

Notice the instructions call to ‘staple the bag and then microwave it’. Some recipes say to omit the staples, as they might catch the bag on fire, others say that the staples won’t spark, “despite popular belief.”

That caught my eye. I used staples on my bag, and it’s true – they didn’t spark. My bag didn’t catch fire either, another bonus. But I wanted to know why the staples didn’t spark. I know that metal sparks in microwaves – I’ve not only seen it on Mythbusters and Bill Nye, I have also witnessed the effects myself (on accident, I promise), with mugs that contain metal strips and with CD’s that somehow made it into my microwave. I had to find out what was going on. So I went all SCIENCE up in here!

I knew that microwave ovens used microwaves (duh) specifically tuned to a frequency that makes water molecules vibrate, which is how the food you place in them actually gets hot. What I didn’t know was how this led to metal actually releasing electrons as a spark. I hypothesized that either the shape or the type of metal used in a staple prevented it from sparking.

I did some quick web searches to see if anybody else had solved the problem. In short, no. Most of the sites trying to answer the question simply stated that the staples didn’t have sufficient amounts of metal to be able to spark, but this didn’t make any sense to me, and nobody provided any scientific reasons to back up this claim.

I dug deeper. Several physics and chemistry forums talked in fairly complex terms about why metal sparks, but these basically boiled down to ‘the metal blocks the microwaves from passing through, and this eventually leads to a spark.’ I couldn’t find the something that connected the two.

Indiana Public Media put it all into place. They reminded me that microwaves are electromagnetic waves – part of the energy they carry is an electric wave (in addition to, of course, magnetic). Both parts of the wave lead to electrons in a metal becoming mobile, either directly or through induction, and this builds up at specific points on the metal.

Take aluminum foil – if you crumple some around your dinner, there are naturally going to be some sharp points. The electrons migrate to these points and begin to build up. Eventually, the build up of electrons grows quite dense, and this creates an electric field in the air nearby. This electric field eventually breaks through the air, creating a spark.

That makes perfect sense. So, really, anything that is highly electrically conductive and can lead electrons to a point should spark in a microwave. This disproves part of my theory, since staples are usually galvanized steel, a conductive metal.

So, why don’t they? Based off my hypothesis, my conclusion is that it is the shape of the staple that prevents this - if you look at a staple, it is a straight backbone that loops onto itself at the ends. If electrons were to build up, they would transfer down towards the two ends, but this just creates a loop as it touches against the backbone – the electrons flow in two circles at the ends of the staple.

This also explains why the staples might cause the bag to catch fire. As the electrons build and have no place to go, they get more and more excited. Excitation of molecules or electrons is what causes heat – again, this is the principle behind microwave ovens. The excited electrons would eventually cause the staple to get quite hot, and paper’s combustion point is only 451 degrees Fahrenheit. Also, if the staple’s ends don’t quite touch, they might create very small, unnoticeably small sparks back to the backbone , which could ignite paper if there was any in the way.

Further experiments will prove (or disprove) this – if an unbent staple sparks, given enough time in a microwave, while a bent staple next to it does nothing, I would feel fully confident in my theory.

So - anybody want to donate a microwave to science?

Elemental Man and the Crumpled Wrappers

Elemental Man even has goggles, the lanthanides, AND the actinides!

The other ones (with the exception of Sputnik) were made first by crumpling up the gum wrapper, then coloring the outside of the resultant ball with black ink, unfolding it, and sketching the first thing I see outlined on the wrapper. These were a lot of fun, and nice to do when I didn't know what to draw.

Sputnik was planned, unlike the other crumpled wrappers. I just liked the idea, and thought crumpling would look good with it.

These are in order of when I drew them, first to last.

'Mouse'

'Rabbit'

'Dragonfly'

'Sputnik'
Silver Sharpie used on the hull, except
for the dull gray 'sheen'

Bush Alaska Photos (circa 'o6)

Here are pictures from my first trip to rural Alaska - most are from around Nunapitchuk, a few are from Kasigluk-Akula, and only a couple are from Bethel. As always, click for larger.

First - SNOW MACHINES!

^ This is a dogsled I got to use. It was awesome.

She caught over a dozen fish while ice fishing
on the tundra - I got frostbite on my leg.

I also froze my eyebrows while ice fishing.

This is what the tundra looks like out away
from the village.

This isn't tundra - it's Nunapitchuk's airport.
A landing strip.

Snow drifts outside a building in Nunap.
Buildings are on stilts to keep them from
thawing the permafrost beneath them and
causing them to sink.

Dog houses connected to the main house to
keep them warm. Most dog houses aren't.

This is Nunap's power plant. Kasigluk's is similar,
but, surprisingly, has brand new wind turbines
as part of the power station.

An elder at Nunapitchuk teaching how to make
a traditional black fish trap. I made the cone of one!

"Fresh Produce" section of Kasigluk's grocery store.
Even when stocked, the fruits cost up to 10 times what
they do in the lower 48.

Kasigluk-Akula from the bush-plane flight back
to Bethel. this is pretty much the altitude we stay at.

A mountain range on the jet flight back to
Anchorage from Bethel.

Some old photos

I'm working on getting some major improvements done on The Sounding Post, so today's post is just some old photos I took and a sketch I did.

I know this is up elsewhere on the site, but it's
worth repeating. My friend Maggie and I did this to a
couch in the on-air booth at 89.7FM, KMNR-Rolla.

A pie I made two thanksgivings ago. Pacman, FTW

A weird mushroom I saw hiking
a couple years ago outside of Anchorage, AK.

A teacup I quickly sketched in GIMP
for a group I was in.

Bird's Eye 1-5, Box Test, codfish

The Bird's Eye gum wrappers are a set where the first was done about 6 months before the others. The box was a test of line and shadow for a larger sketch, and the last is a codfish of sorts. If you need more explanation on any of these, please let me know - I won't give you any, since this should suffice, but the feedback is nice regardless.

Paintings, Summer '09

These are a couple of paintings I did last summer. The rocks were for a lady, the whale is a colored, painted version of my absolute favorite gum wrapper I've done - it's the header of this page!

Puppies!

PUPPIES!

These are two litters of puppies my family rescued from Alaskan villages a couple years ago. They are adorable. The first four pictures are puppies from Goodnews Bay (we still have their mother), and the rest are from Nunapitchuk (I think?)

We called this guy 'Tubbs'^

The one on the right is my dog, Chevak,
no relation to the puppies.