Posts tagged ‘mechanics’
Crumpled
January 15th, 2012 at 3:28 pm by Dr. Drang
I found a link to this article in New Scientist the other day, and it’s been driving me crazy. The article is entitled “Scrunch time: The peculiar physics of crumpled paper” and it’s crap from start to finish. The article—unsigned, and for good reason—focuses on the work of two physicists at the University of Massachussetts…
Vibrating strings, aliasing, and the iPhone
July 17th, 2011 at 6:01 pm by Dr. Drang
You’ve seen this video on YouTube, right? The guitarist, Kyle Jones, put his iPhone in the body of his guitar and recorded a video of the strings vibrating as he played. The patterns produced are interesting and fun to watch. As he says in the notes to the video, [T]his effect is due to the…
Friction
June 30th, 2011 at 9:30 am by Dr. Drang
I stopped into one of the few remaining Borders stores in the area the other day, mainly to see whether the insides looked more like a bookstore or a fire sale. I ended up buying a book and relearning what a picky pain in the ass I am. I saw the book The Way We…
Pendulum patterns
May 13th, 2011 at 10:47 pm by Dr. Drang
It was on Boing Boing and Kottke, so I’m sure you’ve seen this video of 15 tuned pendulums. The pendulum lengths are set so longest pendulum swings through 51 cycles per minute, the second-longest 52 cycles per minute, and so on up through 65 cycles per minute. As we showed in this post a couple…
Soil liquefaction
March 11th, 2011 at 9:33 am by Dr. Drang
Several days ago, Cory Doctorow posted this video on Boing Boing. It’s a cute demonstration of soil liquefaction in a wheelbarrow. Not so cute is what soil liquefaction can do. The maker of the video got the soil from his garden in Christchurch, New Zealand, where last month’s earthquake did a lot of damage through…
Oil canning and coffee makers
February 24th, 2011 at 7:26 am by Dr. Drang
Electric drip coffee makers for the home got popular in the ’70s. The Engineer Guy, Bill Hammack, has a nice video describing how the pump works. In this post, I’m going to talk about the engineering behind another part of the coffeemaker, the hot plate that keeps the carafe warm. In the process, we’ll revisit…
Oil can what?
February 12th, 2011 at 3:38 pm by Dr. Drang
I’ve been working on a nonlinear finite element program for the past week or so, and to shake out the bugs, I run it on a few test problems. One of my favorites is an example of snap-through buckling. It’s a simple little toggle structure with surprisingly rich behavior. The toggle looks like this: Two…
Daniel Bernoulli is in your toilet
February 1st, 2011 at 11:55 pm by Dr. Drang
With the Chicagoland Snowpocalype ’11 in full swing, and the wind howling outside my window, my thoughts have turned to the effect of Bernoulli’s principle on my toilet. Wind is so strong the water in the toilet bowls is rising and falling from the pressure changes in the vent pipe. #yesimanengineer8:41 PM Tue Feb 1,…
My curtain calls
January 28th, 2011 at 7:58 am by Dr. Drang
To me, the greatest piece of technology to hit hotel rooms in the past decade isn’t WiFi,1 it’s the curved shower curtain rod. This week I came across—for the first time—a minor failure of this wonderful innovation. You know what I’m talking about, right? The standard hotel tub/shower combo is kind of narrow, and in…
Coke cans, pull-tabs, and the class struggle
January 8th, 2011 at 3:45 pm by Dr. Drang
Yesterday, my wife sent me a link to this video. Bill Hammack, the self-styled Engineer Guy, has several cute videos like this posted on his web site, his YouTube channel, and his Facebook page. I think I saw one of them—the one where he takes a copier apart—on Boing Boing many months ago. Hammack’s an…
