Totally Blowing Stuff Up Tuesdays: We're Back!

If you have been a reader of this little slice of the Internet, you know that there are a couple of things that I like.  Well, boobs, yes, and they usually travel in a pair, so good job.  You aced the pop quiz.  Nicely done.

The other things I like are explosions and doing stuff around the house that makes me feel all handy and manly and rawr, I want to feel some boobs now.

This story begins on Valentine's Day. I was preparing to take a shower ere heading off to the grocery to get something to cook for dinner.  I turned the water on and left it run so that I could climb in and enjoy the warmth of the wet water running down my tortured and aching muscles.  However, when I stuck my hand in to check the temperature, it was like feeling ice pelting down on me. 

There's some kind of Eskimo fetish
going on out there...apparently

Huh.

So, I let it run for a little while longer.  Still cold.  Then I turned on the sink's hot water faucet.  Call Manny and Sid, cause we got another Ice Age on our hands.

At which point, I uttered many a swear word, almost all of them beginning with "fuck."

Fortunately, I have a brother who is a plumber and an electrician.  Unfortunately, my brother the plumber and electrician lives four states and approximately 13 hours away.  Fortunately, there is this website called Facebook, where you can stalk your old high school crushes AND ask your handyman siblings for assistance when needed. 

He told me to press the reset button.  Reset button?  I didn't know there was such a thing.

There is.  It's usually hidden under the top panel and it's big and bright red and you can't miss it, even if you think you can.  You will immediately hear the water heater switch on, too, upon pressing it.  Neat.  Sexy AND informative, this blog.

So, I crawled into the darkened depths of the crawlspace and pressed the reset button.  Everything was Jim Dandy, Hunky Dory...for about 36 hours.  On Tuesday, I had to reset the water heater four or five times.  All the mind-numbing cold water pouring out of the shower...numbed...my mind...and so I lost count.  But it was definitely a whole number and it was more than three and less than seventy five.

Anyway, I decided to act.  Coming home early on Wednesday afternoon, I drained the water heater and rushed off to buy a replacement kit for the water heater elements--those things which do the yeoman's work of heating the water in the tank.  It set me back about $40.  Not a problem.  The problem was, though, that I began to worry just a bit, because in order to heat all that water inside the tank, it requires electricity.  A LOT of electricity.  So, I was fearful of electrocuting myself under the house with no one around to notice that the lights went dim for a few moments and that the lovely smell coming from under the floorboards was not dinner, but it was, instead, roast Dad.

Precisely what I was trying
to avoid doing...

Spoilers:  I'm savvy enough to have found the correct switch to throw on the breaker box, AND I double-checked the flow of electricity through the machine.  Multiple times. There was none.  Cool.  Let's do this.

Switching out elements on a water heater is actually fairly easy.  I'm here to attest to this.  For real.  It took me all of fifteen minutes to get the top element switched out.  I was pretty proud of myself.  I was going to get this done in an hour and a half (an hour of the project being the draining and the shutting off of power) and we would have hot water by dinner time.

Eh, not so fast, my friend.

The bottom element...was a bitch.  To put it kindly.  I sliced the living hell out of my knuckles trying to get the beast to move.  I laid on the wrench, pushed, sprayed it with all manner of lubricant, tapped on it.  Nothing.  It would not move.

After two hours, I decided to call in professional help.  Enter Kevin, the friendly guy from Roto-Rooter some national chain who laid on the wrench, pushed, sprayed it with all manner of lubricant, tapped on it, nothing.  He even put a hex nut head on the element and stood on the wrench.  It. Would. Not. Budge.

Well, fuck me running. 

There's a little back story to fill in here, as well:  the water heater was easily 30 years old.  I'm shocked that it lasted this long.  It was not up to code, and since I'm looking to sell this money pit house in the near-ish future, I made the decision to get a new water heater installed.  Again, I relied on the professional.  Mostly because there was a SECOND fear lurking in the back of my mind while dealing with maintenance on a water heater.  Namely, that it would build up pressure and burst, shooting through my house like a rocket.

Seem far-fetched?  Again, not so fast, my friend.



I know I give Mythbusters some shit for their "scientific" claims for all their experiments, but there is some serious proof in the pudding here.  That video should set you up with another video to watch from Mythbusters where they destroy a small house by having a water heater shoot THROUGH the entire structure.  It's pretty impressive.  For real.  Watch it.

Science

Oh...the explanation.  Right!  When the pressure builds up inside the inner chamber of the water heater, the water begins to get really pissed off.  It wants to expand, to turn to steam, something--anything!--to relieve that pressure (which is why there is a pressure release valve on water heaters).  These water heaters are engineered to release out the bottom in just such a scenario (rather than rupturing and shooting shrapnel everywhere, which is actually a lot worse than what you just watched), which unfortunately turns them into rockets.  Rockets that fly 500 feet in the air, gushing superhot water, but rockets nonetheless.

Ah, science!

So, not only was I glad to not have electrocuted myself, but I also am glad that I had the professional install the water heater so that it was up to code AND installed correctly.  Even if my $40 fix-it-yourself project suddenly turned into something that cost over $1000.  I'm up to code, and there's nothing firing off through the two floors of my house and the roof.

Oh, and the showers?  Yeah, they're nice and hot now.  And I don't have to crawl under the house in order to press the reset button on the water heater.  Now I can save all that energy for pushing better, more sexy buttons.

Yeah, I'm not sure what that means, either.

Totally Sciencing It Up: The Shot Heard 'Round the World

As if there was any doubt what explosion I'd talk about this week.  But, in case you missed it, there was an impressive meteor event in Russia last week, where a chunk of space rock came plummeting into our inner atmosphere and detonating over the Chelyabinsk region.  Since it actually flew over a fairly well-populated area in Russia, there have been dozens of videos of the event, which is pretty cool because things like this are rare enough on their own.  To give planetary scientists a chance to look at and study the event, though, was invaluable.

The event itself would have been cool enough if a big hunk of rock had simply fallen from the sky.  However, when the hunk of rock exploded in the atmosphere, well, that was something to write home about!  Here's a compilation of some of the best videos capturing the event, thanks to Russia Today's channel on the YouTube:

Pretty impressive, to say the least.  Unfortunately, thanks to the shockwave of the explosion shattering glass and throwing people to the ground, about a thousand folks sustained some kind of injury.  Fortunately, nothing seemed to be life-threatening.

So, why did this thing explode?  Well, we all know that when an object enters the Earth's atmosphere, it begins colliding with all the gas molecules that comprise our atmosphere.  The object giving us our close encounter is usually traveling at such a high rate of speed that it suffers millions of these interactions a second, and the brushing off of gas particles is enough to transfer heat via friction to the chunk of space rock.  This heats the object up until it starts to glow--think about the coils in your toaster, except imagine them traveling around 40,000 miles per hour!.  Since most space rocks have a fairly high content of iron in them, this analogy isn't too far off.  We've all seen pictures of forges and foundries where molten iron and steel are glowing hot.

The reason why iron (and most anything else that glows when heated) does that is because pumping heat into a system adds energy, and when you add energy, you excite the electrons surrounding the atom.  As the electrons get excited--like, literally quivering with anticipation--they jump, much like a corgi looking for a treat.  Unlike the corgi, the electrons have to travel into different shells surrounding the atom.  After jumping, the electrons aren't where they are supposed to be, they are excited, and they now want to go home where they are more comfortable.  The electron then falls back down to its original shell, and when it falls, it releases that energy in the form of light (and heat).  

But why the explosion?  Well, as you might expect, the heating of the space rock isn't uniform.  The composition of the rock isn't uniform, either, and so as it heats, some of the solids in the rock are vaporized--literally turned into gas form--and as we've learned, gasses expanding more rapidly than their container can withstand = explosion.  And explosions = awesome.

And what an explosion!  It was estimated that the Chelyabinsk blast was roughly equivalent to 20 atomic bombs going off at the same time!  Sensors from around the globe picked up on the shockwaves, which does, literally, make it a shot heard around the world.  Im. Press. Ive!

The difference between all these space rocks, also, involves where they are and their size.  Asteroids (literally, "star forms") are very large chunks of space rock, but they are smaller than planets, planetoids and moons, typically have no atmosphere, but they do have enough mass to exert gravitational pull on other objects.  Sometimes the definitions can get a little hinky.  Phobos and Deimos, Mars' moons, are technically captured asteroids from the asteroid belt.  Eventually, someday, they'll crash into the surface of Mars.  Talk about Fear and Dread!

Meteoroids are small chunks of space rock, like our friend who provided the spectacular aerial show over Chelyabinsk, that have not interacted with Earth's atmosphere (yet!).  Once they hit the upper atmosphere and start glowing, they are called meteors.  If, by chance, they make it to the surface of the Earth (which, despite its size, the Chelyabinsk meteor has yet to provide evidence of reaching the ground) they are called meteorites.  Or starmetal, if you're into D&D--which I'm not.  Seriously.  Stop looking at me like that.

Of course, it has to be mere coincidence that this whole thing happened but three days after the DVD release of Skyfall.  *nodding*  Well-played, MGM...well-played...

Totally Blowing Shit Up Tuesdays: This Is Why It's So Effing Hot

I probably should not be whining about this, since it's not three million degrees in North By God Carolina...yet. Or again. Or however you'd like to put it. However, I've said it before and I'll say it again: the coinpurse is hanging mighty low.

I guess the price to pay for one very nice weekend is that we'll soon be thrust deep into the bowels of a very certain fiery hell. Some people (Texans, mostly) call it "summer". It's summer, so let's crank the motherfucking heat all the way to 11, right Mother Nature?

Who knew Mother Nature was such a fan of Nigel Tufnel?

Anyway, this whole ungodly heat wave that has been melting butter all across the Midwest and Great Lakes region--and which is headed straight for the east coast--is just more fuel for the fire for the global warming crowd. Any stretch of hot weather causes them to scream about carbon footprints and cow farts and such. Just like balls-deep snow causes the extremists on the other side to squawk just as loudly against global warming. Whatever it is, global warming or not, I know that I have to wring my pillow out around 4:20 every morning, and that's just not good eats.

I need to slow down my typing: my knuckles are sweating.

Anyway, global warming, celestial alignment, God's hot little prank on all of us--whichever reason you can come up with for this ball-saggingly hot streak, there's no denying that the temperatures are cranked up. Grab yourself a cool glass of ice tea or iced water or scotch on the rocks and check this shit out:

By the way, when I hit 45, scotch on the rocks is all I'll be drinking. You've been given ten year's warning, Scotland! Time to up the manufacturing process!

As you can see in the video, the sun doesn't get along too well with Thai food, either. That big, galactic fart was a solar flare coupled with a massive ejection of charged plasma particles. Fortunately, that was pointed anywhere but toward the Earth. If it had been pointed here, well, we wouldn't be having the conversation, now, would we?

Here's another clip, a closer view but also viewed at a slightly different wavelength of light so you can see the shit falling back into the sun. It's pretty awesome to see the light flaring when the sun's own ejecta lands back on its surface.



Now, run that back and pay special attention to the place where the flare originates and watch it as the flare erupts. Did you see that dark circle running away from the epicenter of the explosion? That's a blast wave. On the surface of the sun. From where part of it blew out.

*takes hat off head and fans self*

Pardon me. I need to catch my breath.

Here's something cool, though. If you look at your keyboard right now, everything you see--the carbon that makes up your flesh and bones and the plastic keys to your keyboard, the aluminum that forms the frame, the hydrogen and oxygen that makes up most of that delicious cup of coffee sitting on your desk, even the calcium and phosphorus that makes up the ceramic of your coffee mug--all came from shit like this. The sun--or any star--burps out the atoms that make up pretty much everything (elements heavier than iron, though are made when the sun truly gets surly and goes supernova) when it ejects material out of itself like this. Most of that stuff fell back to the sun's surface, it's true, but some of it went floating off into the deep, dark nether regions of space and may, someday, turn into the coffee mug or ballpoint pen of some future denizen of Earth. Or it could go further out and be incorporated into some alien life form's civilization.

That's pretty fucking beautiful, if you ask me (and I know you did...why else would you be here if you didn't want to know?), even if the sun could, tomorrow, point one of those blasts directly at the Earth. If it happened, we'd have about eight minutes to call our loved ones and hurry to the shelters where we can bend over and kiss our asses good-bye.

Kind of warms the heart a little, right? Well, good. Now that your heart is warm, it matches the rest of this hellish weather, doesn't it?

Where's my damned scotch and water?

Totally Blowing Stuff Up Tuesdays: Liquid Nitrogen

You know what's funny? When someone says they want to try to get back to posting everyday, and then don't post for three consecutive days. Hilarity. I have good excuses (they involve spending "time" with "family" and "being a father" and "cleaning up a nasty virus that was eating my computer on Sunday"), but I won't spend them here. I'll save them for another day.

So, I thought I would try to make it up to you by posting videos of explosions. Everyone loves blowing shit up, right? I thought so!

Anyway, as we've gone over here before (oh, look at that, the "imperial we"...not too full of ourselves now, are we?) an explosion is simply an expansion of gases more rapid and forceful than the container that is holding them can withstand. So, if there's too much pressure too fast, then boom. And giggling, though that's more a side effect, at least so long as everyone still has all their fingers, toes, eyes, balls...what have you.

It would, therefore, make sense that, if you have the liquid form of something that prefers to be a gas at room temperature, and you warm it up quickly, there's a good chance there could be some of that rapid expansion of the gas with cataclysmic results.

Like, say, a plastic bottle full of liquid nitrogen thrown into a warm pool...

That's short, sweet, and to the point. I like it, especially since the lights of the pool look green.

Obviously, the liquid nitrogen would warm to the temperature of the air--albeit slowly(-ish)...plastic is an insulator, after all--and the bottle would explode. However, with the water jacketing the bottle and helping transfer heat more efficiently, the bottle goes off faster and, presumably, harder (there's not as much time for excess gas to leak out). And, since it's underwater, you get sexy wave action.

But what happens when you really heat the living shit out of liquid nitrogen? Oh, it's time to call in some thermite:


Perhaps not as satisfying as other thermite reactions shown on here, but it was still kind of fun watching the liquid nitrogen boil away and the pool of molten metal piling up on the cinder blocks.

Plus, thermite is always cool. Heh. Explosion humor.

Paging Doctor Science

Oh, what a lovely morning! Am I right or am I right?

It's lovely because I'm not really here. Instead, I'm at my kids' school, talking with my daughter's class about what sort of shit I do on a daily basis. Instead of telling the truth, I put together a brief presentation on chemistry and then made a gentle segue into the discovery and development of medicines to treat neglected diseases.

See, my problem is, other parents have already been there, talking about what they do. Their jobs have to be infinitely more exciting than "I dump shit into a flask and watch it stir". And those other parents have handed out all sorts of sweet schwag, which I can't exactly hand out. What am I going to give? Here kids, free magnesium sulfate powder for everyone! Dry your organic solutions with it! Here's some officially-licensed filter paper to pour it through! Awesome!

So, I'm already starting out at a disadvantage. Normally, in order to level the playing field in something like this, I'd just do the talk without pants. However, the judge was pretty specific about my public speaking attire and third graders. Check that. Very specific.

And because this is me we're talking about, I didn't really start planning any of this shit until Friday afternoon, when I dug through the first aid kits that they were planning on throwing out at work and said, "Hey, expired cold packs! These will be awesome!" Only thing was, I couldn't find 24 of them, so I had to make due with what I had. Instead of sending them home with everyone, I'll just illustrate endothermicity with them.

Here, touch this. Warm, huh? Now--SMACK!--hold it. Pretty fucking cold, right? Right? What do you mean your flesh is turning black?

So, I sat down at my computer yesterday and spent the morning making kickass periodic tables. On one side, there's a very lovely periodic table, with the usual spread, and all the elements and what they can be used for. On the back side, I made a list of all the elements, their symbols, their atomic numbers, and their atomic weights. I even worked in Roentgenium, which is element 111 and the most recent addition to the table.

Suck that, parent who brought the red, seizure-inducing strobe light! And a pencil.

Anyone can bring a pencil. But can anyone bring glowing water[1]? Yeah, I thought not! That's the other part of my talk. I'll tell them about chemistry, how fucking awesome it is--Chemistry! Fuck yeah! And then I'll throw up some devil horns--and I'll tell them a little about my job and how I'm saving the world.

And then? We bust into some demonstrations.

Chemistry! Fuck yeah!

Fortunately, I'm not slated to talk on a Tuesday, because then I'd feel compelled to blow some shit up. Instead, I'm doing the glowing water, the cold packs, a little something called "hot ice" to illustrate exothermicity and reactions, and then, the piece de resistance of the entire show, a baking soda fountain.

I was going to show them how to light a dollar bill but keep it from burning...but then I realized that teachers and administrators and such probably frown on bringing a canister of flammable materials and a book of matches to an elementary school these days. Plus, the flames weren't really bright enough to be seen, so I scrapped the idea.

Plus, I can burn through dollar bills on amateur night at Club Gold a lot faster...if you know what I mean.

Hey, pretty lady, that's not a test tube in my pocket. I am, in fact, happy to see you.

Chemistry! Fuck yeah!

Who knows how to ensure that there will be 24 children signing up for business classes when they get to college? Right here, baby.

So, if there's some story on the news tonight about how some jackass suffocated a classroom full of 8- and 9-year olds with a baking soda and vinegar experiment gone horribly awry, you'll know who to blame. I'm personally just hoping that I don't get escorted from the premises after swearing violently when my "hot ice" experiment goes woefully wrong.

Chemistry! Fuck Yeah!


[1] Actually, anyone can bring in glowing water. They sell it in grocery stores. I bought mine for 59 cents.

Meeting Inspiration

A quick chemistry lesson:

This little guy is a benzene.



This one is called a tetrahydropyran.


If you take a benzene and a tetrahydropyran and fuse them together, you get a chromane (pronounced "crow-man").


If you oxidize the chromane, you get a chromanone ("crow-man-own").



If you draw primitive art on the wall of a cave around it, it's a Cro Magnon.



Chemistry and archaeology jokes: two great tastes that taste great together!