Demi, what kind of computer can still operate at 100C ? Good lord, during the tri-monthly LAN parties I throw (Empire Earth II) pc's usually go all to hell at around 135F
Order of Kilopi
Demi, what kind of computer can still operate at 100C ? Good lord, during the tri-monthly LAN parties I throw (Empire Earth II) pc's usually go all to hell at around 135F
Established Member
It is was industrial computer, designed for high temperatures and harsh environments. It was rated for 60C, but the object of a HALT test is to figure out where it really does fail. I just didn't think about the case failing before the electronics.Originally Posted by BigDon
Order of Kilopi
Your post brings back some memories of some hideous lab assignments I endured in high school and college in the mid to late 1960's. I had no quarrel for low tech approaches to get the feel of how Galileo and Newton would have worked, but the methods in vogue went beyond that to exaggerated crudeness.
My alltime unfavorite, in high school, was a demonstration of acceleration of an object by an applied force. The object in question was a roller skate with a brick on top of it, and we applied the force by pulling it with a rubber band, while attempting to keep the stretch more or less constant by measuring it with a yardstick while the contraption was in motion. The timer was a crude vibrator which made marks on a long strip of carbon paper trailing behind the skate. Needless to say we got very poor results.
A better method would have been to use a weight on a string over a pulley to give a reliable pull on the skate, and time it over various distances with a stopwatch. That would have been methodology similar to what Galileo used with his rolling balls.
In college we used a Fabry-Perot interferometer to evaluate the Zeeman effect on a mercury vapor lamp. The interferometer in question was so flimsy that the etalon plates would get out of parallel if you so much as breathed on it. To make matters worse, the lab manual instructed us to photograph the interference pattern by focusing the beam on a piece of film with a magnifying glass and trying to control the exposure by waving a card in the beam. We blew that nonsense off and used a Rolleiflex camera to take the photos. I helped fellow students align the interferometer when the teaching assistant was stumped. In spite of everything we got a good spectrum on the film.
In that same course we did the Milliken oil drop experiment, but instead of the crude methods called for in the manual, we used a modern regulated power supply with which we could set the voltage precisely without risk of electrocution. The professor considered the manual's way to be dangerous as well as needlessly crude.
Established Member
We had those old bunsen burners that plug into the gas fitting on the desktop. Someone noticed if you unplugged it and blew into the non burning end (important distinction here) it would cause a little ball of flame to pop up.
Small minds indeed, beware those who watch on. I put my finger over the non burning end on disconnecting to trap a bit of gas then blew.
Resulting fireball rose to the ceiling formed an orange donut about a metre and a half in diameter. For some strange reason we just watched the teacher do the demonstrating from some point after that.
Order of Kilopi
I hated lab.
There's just no way around that. So help me--the laws of physics would distort in my presence. I always seemed to get a different result than anyone else.
A couple of things I did as a youngling.
Once in jr. High, I whiffed a little HCl--just barely--Instant sinus-unblock. No more stuffed head then.
In my parents bathroom, I tried to turn one light off while turning the other on at the same time--and got a good shock.
I'm surprised I'm not in a group home.
I alway wondered what would happen if somebody:
coughed...laughed...sneezed...hiccuped, and broke wind---all at the same time
I seem to remember that happening to Uncle Billy-Bob, while he was changing a tire on Hi-way 79, by "gravity hill."
Due to lack of air pressure, he collapsed in on himself, forming a singularity (an apt term for him). He imploded so hard it took the bumper off his truck. To this day, there is an air pocket by the side of the road where you can still see the beer cans circle.
Once a man with huge sideburns crawled out of the wormhole, along with someone in a huge turtleneck.
"Same time tomorrow? Issac?"
"Same time tomorrow, Carl."
Go figure.
Banned
Can we get permission to quote you on this?I alway wondered what would happen if somebody:
coughed...laughed...sneezed...hiccuped, and broke wind---all at the same time
I seem to remember that happening to Uncle Billy-Bob, while he was changing a tire on Hi-way 79, by "gravity hill."
Due to lack of air pressure, he collapsed in on himself, forming a singularity (an apt term for him). He imploded so hard it took the bumper off his truck. To this day, there is an air pocket by the side of the road where you can still see the beer cans circle.
Order of Kilopi
Sure its a (cough) true story...(hack) I'm not feeling too
*
Established Member
In a chem lab, which I hated, was doing some experiment with a bunch of students. The TA was wandering through the lab, checking on experimental technique.
"What are you doing?" she asked me.
"Boiling hexane," (in an open glass beaker over a Bunsen burner).
"Boiling hexane? Okay," she said, then drifted on.
About 20 seconds later...WOOOF!...the whole bench top burst into flames
Luckily, no one was injured, but the TA was seriously chagrined for failing to spot the hazard
Established Member
Nothing so spectacular (or dangerous) from me ...
Intro Physics at university: one of the first lab group experiments was
visual v aural stimuli - response times
(why this was a Physics lab, rather than a Biology lab, still escapes me)
the textbook, and the lecturer, expected a common result -
a consistently faster response to visual stimuli ...
when it was my turn to be the test subject,
the lecturer kept scratching his head ... and re-testing me ...
my responses were consistently opposite to what was expected.
(I never did get around to explaining that I spent my first ten
or so years half-blind - 6/60, legally blind, in one eye ...
and 9/60 in the other - because no one thought to properly test
the eyesight of a child born to two short-sighted parents)
2nd Year Hydrology lab: an experiment on
aquifer models and potential head
I accused the lecturer of giving my group "funny water" ...
because it was the only thing I could think of to explain
why our results seem to defy gravity ...
ie - the potential head values indicated that if unconstrained,
the water would flow uphill (reach a higher elevation than its initial level) ...
after checking the equipment, our notes, and calculations ...
and watching a repeat test, she shrugged her shoulders and said
"write it up - someone will work out what you're doing wrong" ...
Last edited by cran; 2007-Aug-28 at 02:18 AM. Reason: corrected eyesight ratios
Established Member
For some reason this cartoon struck me as strangely appropriate:
Established Member
I am so taking the Fifth on this one.
Established Member
Since neurons transmitted electrical impulses (by a mechanism more complex than I had anticipated back when I was 10), I reasoned that you should be able to stimulate a response by running current across them.
So basically, the experiment was to see whether or not I could stimulate some sort of taste by running a current across my sisters tongue. I tried a single AA battery to no effect "tastes like a metal electrode". So I figured I didn't have enough voltage. I taped together four of them in a series (maybe it was eight?). My sister went running around the house yelling that her tongue was burning.
A most memorable christmas morning...
Later, after I was done being grounded, I asked her if she tasted anything. "No! It tasted like burn!!"
Established Member
It was college chemistry. I don't even remember the lab experiment we were supposed to perform, all I remember is this:
During the experiment I had to have splashed concentrated sulphuric acid on me (my lab apron), because a week later my pants (below the apron-line) were full of holes. I don't remember splashing the acid, there were no major spills at the scene, nor were any reported, yet I still had a good pair of pants ruined.
.
Newbie
Not an experiment as such nor was it in a lab, but instead an engineering workshop.
We were working a forge that had Heat retaining stones to keep the heat in the forge. The stones not held down in any way so we poured them out and kicked them at each other. 1500°C (1800K). Not good.
We also threw greased iron filing at it. Great fireworks except the falling hot filings causing fires.
Once during 2 year (8 Grade) I was working on a centre lathe when my engineering teacher Tom Byrne (6 foot tall, over 130 kilograms/300 pounds) started screaming "swannie! Get the **** out of hear now you muppet!". I turned to see Derek "Swannie" Swan running to the door and trying to open it while Tom Sprayed him with a can of haze air freshener. That was a fairly common Event.
Tom Quotes
"Grogon Stop Touching me"
"SCREEHING MEANS STOP USING IT"
"That One Sick Puppy" (As the angle Grinder he was holding was on fire)
Established Member
No particular disasters that I remember, though in Year 7 someone thought it would be interesting to touch my arm with a spatula which had been heated for a good half a minute in a bunsen burner.
Other memories:
- The guy who took a mouthful of burner gas, then exhaled it over a lit bunsen burner, producing an effect a fire eater would've been proud of.
- The experiment of how different metals conduct heat at different speeds: the guy holding the two metal rods was getting steadily more excited as the rods heated up. Holding the two matches against the rods, I couldn't really see what the problem was.
- Getting a smack on the head from the Year 10 Geology teacher for chucking his 40 centimetre diameter globe around the classroom.
But we also had a lot of fun in the labs.
- Having to have a geography class outdoors one day after a couple of students poured some hydrogen sulphide onto the whiteboard wiper and wiped it all over the whiteboard (before the teacher turned up).
- Dropping weights off the first floor balcony, attached to ticker tape, to record the acceleration of bodies thanks to gravity (sadly, we had to have someone downstairs to ensure we didn't drop the weights onto anyone.
- Watching an impromptu post mortem on a sheep to find out why it had died. I forget what the class was, but it sure wasn't a science class. The teacher decided the sheep had been cut during shearing, then put through a poisonous dip before the cut had healed.
Order of Kilopi
Not laptops...
My GPU routinely sits at 80C during gaming, and it has a claimed heat tolerance of about 105C before bad things start happening. The CPU stays around 70C as well, and I haven't had any problems yet.
Now, the memory and chipset have never exceeded 60C (nor do I want them to).
Order of Kilopi
Ugh. Grade 11 chemistry class.
The experiment was a simple one - take a strip of magnesium, roll it up, drop it in a crucible, weigh the crucible, heat it over a burner, then weigh it again. Find the mass of the oxygen within the now-magnesium oxide. Then do some math and figure out some thing or another.
Fine. So we get the thing weighed, and start to heat it. Let it go for a good ten-fifteen minutes, then weigh it. Nothing. Heat it another twenty-five minutes. Still nothing. The teacher tells us to crush the magnesium and heat more (larger surface area). Fine. We do so, then weigh it. Nothing - no increase in mass. So then the teacher tells us to turn the heat up, and let it heat for quite a long time.
The bottom of the crucible turns cherry red. Then bright red. Then orange. Then - *Plink!*
The bottom breaks off the crucible over the bunsen burner. Ever see powdered magnesium fall into an open flame?
Bad scene, all 'round.
Order of Kilopi
Sometime around age 5 (still lived in the little house) I have a vague memory of not believing that the bone in my finger was actually a lot smaller than my finger. I confirmed the bone was narrow enough to fit between the points of a small home office staple. It bled a lot.
I'm Not Evil.
An evil person would do the things that pop into my head.
Established Member
This is degenerating into classroom antics, but anyway:
Sixth form (18 year olds), chemistry class.
Pupil stands up, shouts about his angst and suicidal intent, and swigs from the bottle of nitric acid that every bench had on it. Teacher grabs an acid spill kit, pursues him around the room and out into the quad.
Of course it was a carefully chosen, gullible teacher and a prepared (and labelled) bottle of dilute orange squash.
The headmaster was NOT pleased.
John
Established Member
Here's a pretty bad experiment from secondary school. Boyle's Law, proving pressure of a gas is inversely proportional to its volume. We had an apparatus with a column of oil in a glass tube trapping a short column of gas at the tube's closed top end, accompanied by a pressure gauge and a bike pump which pumped air at the bottom end of the column, so as to push the oil up and compress the fixed mass of gas at the top. Unfortunately, the connection between the pump and the tube was not evenremotely insulated. You had to keep pumping in air at a steady (unachievable) rate to compensate for the escaping air. So there was us trying to measure the height of the gas collumn while the boundary was oscillating more than a seismograph during an earthquake. Then again,there's always result engineering....
In the same class, the physics teacher also wanted me to tune a rusty sonometer wire by ear to the frequency of low E guitar string of my guitar (which was lying at home at the time). That didn't go that well either. We also did the length and frequency proportionality on the same experimental setup and a small piece of paper on the sonometer that was supposed to fall off once the wire resonated to a tuning fork, which ended up with me slumped on the desk giving the paper a bit of 'assistance' by blowing at it.
Moderator
This was one I heard about my brother...
When he was at what we call primary school in the UK, in Wheathampstead at the church school, my brother came across the details of the experiment, "Pharoah's Serpent" and asked if he could do it. The teachers did not like the idea, but did not want to hurt his feeling by saying "NO!", instead they thought they would be clever and say "Only if you can get the ingredients"
Not a good idea!
Our father was in exactly the right position to get all of the ingredients and they were duely supplied
Because of what they had said, they had to let him prepare it, but the headmaster thought it should be him that set it off. Apparently it started smoking a lot and the Whole school was evacuated.
Afterwards the teachers told my father that whenever they say "Only if you can get the ingredients", that means "NO WAY!"
Incidentally some years later at High School, after I recounted this cheery tale someone gave me a pre-prepared Pharoah's Serpent pellet, and I was allowed to set it off, provided it was in a proper working fume hood, which I did. The experment worked without incident and no evacuations were needed
Newbie
Ahh. Boyle's law. Every secondry school in ireland as the equipment for that damaged in a unique way, almost as if it was the school ID.
In Kevin's (St kevin's College) it sprayed the oil out if a certain pressure was applied. the oil was over 15 years old and smelled nasty. Roll on one of the worst illnesses of my life. For me to say that is Very bad indeed.
I have been of the reciving end of some nasty electric shocks in my life.
One off a arc welder in engineering (115v) which my arm refused to work for a while. the worst of all involved a 50v transformer, not a bad shock by comparison but it caused me to slam the back of my head off the wall behind me. I woke up 20 minutes lated shaking.
Another Random accident was when a friend of mine stuck his pen in to a power socket in the labs. Bright flash, Pen on fire, power cut and the most priceless look on his face.
Established Member
A somewhat amusing unofficial experiment was testing the conservation of momentum in college using an office chair and a secondary school victim, I mean boy, on a visit to be 'mentored' by a girl in our year. So yes, in the end we ended up with a nautiously green-faced and shaken high school kid lying on the floor of the lab and a better understanding of centripetal force, rather than conservation of momentum.
Newbie
That was shadow kid yeah. I came in 20 mins late and saw him there. I nearly walked out thinking their was somthing esle was on in there. poor kid he ended up in the same group as me and some other bad influences. one even offered him heroine. i am sure you know which one pilgrim.
Established Member
I have two, both from the lab class associated with General Chemistry.
1. A pretty blonde student accidentally spills a beaker full of concentrated nitric acid into a lab sink. She runs to ask the TA what to do. He comes over, reaches for the faucet. I got out "Don't add water to . . . ", when he turned the faucet on full-blast.
Luckily everyone in range was wearing lab goggles and lab coats. We had quite a few holes in coats and other clothing, and some minor chemical burns. The TA got the worst of it. He showed up for the next lab with major red areas all over his face and arms, with a raccoon-like undisturbed area around the eyes.
2. This lab class met once a week, and each session was 3 hours long, so most labs could easily be conducted within the confines of a single lab session. However, the final lab involved several steps, and required things like overnight drying in lab ovens, so it took up 3 full lab sessions. The final step of the lab was to get a weight of some dried residue to compare it to the predicted value.
With less than 5 minutes left in the third and final lab session, I give my lab partner the petrie dish full of residue to take it over to the lab balances. On his way, he trips over a lab stool, and spills the contentents of the dish over a wide area, breaking the dish. We hastily scooped up what we could of the residue and weighed it. Our lab reports included some fast talking about why we had such a large experimental error.
Order of Kilopi
Off topic, and not an experiment, but I had a similar thing happen at the grocery store where I worked. I was off the clock and talking to the bakery-girl when I happened to glance over and see the chicken fryer with flames coming up about 4 feet out of it. This is a large drum filled with hot oil. I make the comment, "Oh, look. The deli's on fire" The bakery-girl and I rush over to pull the fire suppression thingie on the wall. when we got to about 6 feet from the thing, deli-girl #1 steps out of the prep room on the other side of the fryer from us with a 1/2 gallon pitcher of water and pulls back like she's about to throw the water in the flaming oil drum. Bakery-girl (22) and I (21) both scream "NO!" when deli-girl #2 (30s) grabs deli-girl #1 (also 30s), pushes her aside and closes the lid on the fryer to suffocate the fire.
Looking back on my life, and all the horrible things I've managed to avoid, I don't think anything scares me worse than this one. We were about 6 feet away and closing, in a confined walkway behind a counter. There was nowhere to dodge or hide. If deli-girl #2 hadn't stopped her, Bakery-girl and I would have had a very bad day.
Side note to those who may be offended at my descriptions of co-workers as "bakery-girl" and "deli-girl". This was back when the store was a fun place to work. Names like this were common. I was the "lobby-guy" most of the time, but often ended up being the "booth-girl". Anyone working in the meat department or the night stockers was a "guy" regardless of gender, just as anyone in the booth was a "girl". We had two checkers that everyone called "grandma-<name>".
I'm Not Evil.
An evil person would do the things that pop into my head.
Banned
As teenagers, a friend and I decided to make out own "throw-downs" because the shops stopped selling them. They contain an explosive substance and something that makes a spark when thrown down so they go "bang" when you throw them down. We had the explosive OK, but not the right thing to make a spark. We needed to be sure which was the faulty component, and so hit one with the hammer. The hammer spent about 3 seconds in the air, enough time for us to get well clear before it came down. We were able to hear again about 3 hours later.
Order of Kilopi
Sometimes, for fun, I crumple up about a centimeter of paper napkin and throw it in a candle, just to watch it catch fire. So, one day I threw in about two inches, uncrumpled, just to see what would happen. Big fire. Big smoke. I could never use that candle again, and it lost it's scent.
Order of Kilopi
That reminds me of the time I burnt down my parents living room couch. When I was little I asked my Mother if the very thin black layer of material covering the bottom of the couch was a fire-proofing material. She dismissed me with a "yes". Late that night I snuck in and tested her claim. She failed! Unfortunately, we could not save the couch even after the bellowing [billowing] smoke awoke my parents to assist me and my brother's valiant and noble efforts to save the couch.
It took me quite a while to figure out why I was not severly punished for that. Finally, while reclining on my Mother's beautiful new couch, it dawned on me.
Last edited by George; 2007-Sep-14 at 01:02 PM.
Order of Kilopi
Just how loud did that smoke bellow?
Was it dense enough to be billowing?
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
