Chloroform for Kids

I've embarked on a new writing project. I'm don't want to give away too much yet but I think it is a real marketable idea that I'm going to try to get published as a book. The book in part features some chemistry experiments and so I've been going through old chemistry books looking for good experiments no one does anymore. There are often good reasons they aren't done anymore. Check out this gem from a 1960s era book for kids.

"Sniff carefully" indeed. Chloroform is now considered to be a carcinogen and OSHA considers it "immediately dangerous to health and life." It can apparently cause fatal cardiac arrhythmia. Still, I'm not sure how much this would make and I'm not sure this experiment would produce enough to be of any danger. It would be interesting to know if it actually makes a dangerous amount.

Please don't use this information to trap-door-spider "chloroform sandwich" any of your friends.

~Kirk

Fixing annoying "delete to go back" in Firefox

One of the most popular posts here on my blog was where I explained how to get click -hold contextual menus back in Firefox 2.0 Why on earth they thought Mac users would enjoy having to hold the control key whenever they want to see a contextual menu is beyond me.

I love firefox but another hugely annoying feature is that hitting the delete key jumps you backwards though the browser history. Who thought that was a good idea? If you think your cursor is in a text field and it isn't then you're in for a nasty surprise when you hit the delete key to edit your text and you navigate away from your current page. What kind of power user is in such a hurry they can't take the two seconds to hit the back button? Who needs to rapidly speed backwards though their history like that. Even if such users do exist, why the delete key? (that's the Backspace key for you PC users)

There are lots of instructions online about how to disable this feature using the config menu. It is easy and anyone can do it if you can follow directions.

1. Open a new Firefox tab (apple+T) so you can work in one window and read these direction in the original.
   
2. Type "about:config" into the address field of the new window. Hit return and the config page appears.
   
3. Enter "browser.b" into the "filter" field at the top.
   
4. Click-hold the "Browser.backspace_action" Value column, and choose Modify from the pop-up menu. Type 2 for the new value.
5. Click OK.

You're done! Annoying problem solved.

~kirk

Improve Blogger

Here's an excellent script that makes your blogger edit box much bigger. The box used to edit posts in Blogger is way too small but this Greasemonkey script fixes that.

Get Firefox, Install Greasemonkey, Install this script, be happy.

Rinse lather, repeat.

~Kirk

End of an Era

I was really saddened this weekend to hear that Don Herbert passed away. For those not as geeky as me, that's Mr. Wizard. I used to watch Mr. Wizard's World on Nickelodeon as a child and he seemed old then! Don Herbert taught science to so many people and got so many kids excited about science it boggles the mind. I remember so many things I learned from that show. He taught concepts in such fun ways. Here are a few highlights I remember off the top of my head.

I remember he taught how flour mills explode by putting a birthday candle in a paint can, feeding a tube into the side of the can, putting a small pile of flour just inside the hole, lighting the candle and then putting on the lid. When he blew into the tube it filled the air in the can with tiny particles of flour which caused the top of the can to explosively blow off when the candle lit them on fire.

I remember him demonstrating air pressure by filling a large can with hot air and then submerging it in cold water. The change in air pressure as the air inside cooled crushed the can.

I remember him picking up a bolt off the bottom of a fish tank and not getting his hand wet because he dusted the surface of the water with yellow powder (I think from a butterfly's wings.)

I remember him seeing how large a column of water could be sucked up a tube strung up the side of an apartment building(again to demonstrate air pressure.)

I remember him cutting a banana without peeling it.

I remember him showing how to play a record with a foam cup and a straight pin.

I remember him showing how to measure the height of a tree with a pie tin and water. (and algebra)

I remember him drawing the space shuttle on a computer with very early computer graphics.

I remember him teaching about fiber optics by putting a flashlight into a black paint can and punching a hole in the side. The water arched out and acted like fiber optics bending the light from the flashlight onto the spot where the water hit.

I remember him showing air flow from cold to warm with some dry ice, regular ice, a lamp and an aquarium.

I remember him calculating the speed of sound with a starter pistol, a stop watch and a walkie talkie.

I remember him teaching about nerves with pins taped to a meter stick.

I remember him making a come-back can.

I remember him cutting a small piece of paper so that you could walk through it.

I remember him challenging someone to fold a piece of paper in half eight times. ( I can't be done, go ahead and try it.)

I remember him breaking a meter stick by putting a piece of newspaper on top and hitting the end, the air pressure on the paper is so great the stick snaps.

I remember the challenge to blow over a little folded piece of paper.

I remember the turning window optical illusion.

I remember him playing music on the rim of glasses.

I remember him getting an egg or ball or something into a cup by knocking a block out between them with a broom.

I remember him keeping water in an inverted glass with a playing card.

i remember him making a mobius strip.

I remember him lighting steel wool on fire.

I remember him showing how a siren works.

I remember him making secret writing with lemon juice.

I remember him showing how to tell if an egg is raw or hard boiled by spinning it.

I remember him showing how to flip a spoon into a glass.

I remember him teaching about adhesion and cohesion in water by pouring water along a string.

Most of all I remember him as a man who was always willing to teach kids about science and make it fun. He explained it in a way that everyone could understand and he didn't have to resort to fancy computer graphics and the like. He used simple language, simple drawings and everyday objects. It is a lesson that sticks with me to this day and I try to teach like him every chance I get.

When I was in elementary school, a teacher asked me to write about a hero of mine. I didn't have any hero's then and I don't now. I think the concept is silly. I do have role models though that I respect greatly and Don Herbert is one of the greatest of my life. I never gave it much thought but I'm sure he was one of the people responsible for making me the hands-on teacher I am today.

He will be sorely missed but he his influence will never be gone.

~Kirk

Abandoning Google

I'm pretty much ready to abandon Google at this point. Their search functionality is almost gone as advertisers and spammers are getting better at figuring out how to get higher and higher ranking. Search results are littered with junk sites that have no relevance to your search. They are simply generic sites with your keyword thrown in and then links to junk articles.

Same story over a yahoo. Are there any actual search engines that work out there anymore?

~Kirk

A Lunchtime Word Rant

Please allow me to get my writers geek on for a moment.

Chelsey pointed out to me today that the abomination of a word, disorientate, is in the dictionary. Here's some links.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/disorientate
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/disorientate
http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/disorientate

I assume it is in the OED as well but I don't have a 20 volume copy handy and I don't have an online subscription.

Coming from a line of teachers and writers, I learned some time after finishing Dick and Jane that if Spot is lost he is disoriented not disorientated. Disorientate is a vulgar, pointless word.

The Columbia Guide to Standard American English says they are synonyms and both valid words but also says that those, "who seek conciseness and dislike polysyllables prefer disorient and argue that disorientate is both ugly and unnecessary."

Well, I have news for the Columbia Guide folks, disorient is polysyllabic too but, yes, disorientate is both ugly and unnecessary.

Look people, irregardless is in the dictionary too and so is ain't. Just because a word is in the dictionary doesn't mean you don't sound like and idiot when you use it.

~Kirk

My 2nd shot at Saturn

Finally warm weather has returned to Minnesota. Yesterday I got home from work to clear skies and I set up my telescope. Predictably, the sky clouded over. I held out hope and a half hour after dark I could see a small break in the clouds on the horizon. In between clouds I locked in on Saturn and started to capture quicktime videos as the clouds broke here and there. The conditions were awful. Seeing was a joke and saturn danced around on my screen from the turbulence. It is still a lot better than my first try!

My best video captured 389 frames of which I could only use about 125.
The picture above is a jpeg since blogger does not support an uncompressed format such as pict.

Here's the info.

4/16/07
Phillips spc900nc webcam
5 fps
Celestron 8 SCT
Orion 2x shorty barlow
image capture with Macam
Stacking in Keith's Image Stacker
Processing in KIS and Photoshop on a Macintosh

My Glowing Hands

A few years ago I went "caving" in a lava tube in Hawaii. It was a fun experience and I usually enjoy getting underground. Our guide showed us something strange. We all turned off our lights and it was truly pitch black. We'd all had this experience before. I remember it best while on a tour of a gold mine in California but I'm sure we did the same thing when I went caving with my mom as a much younger kid. On to the weirdness.

The guide had us hold up our hand in front of our faces. What's weird? We could see them. Keep in mind this should be impossible. There was no light source in the cave whatsoever. The walls were black lava.



In the immortal words of Nigel Tufnel "It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.




Still though, we could all see our hands. The guide had no explanation though he did note that you can only see your own hand. He thought it had something to do with each person being in tune with their own electrical system which sounded like a bunch of bunk to me, More likely, I thought, it is all your imagination. Sort of a visual hallucination ala phantom limb syndrome. Wait though, my brother and I experimented and sure enough, we could see each others hands. Our guide had never seen this before though he admitted he had never had brothers try. Weird.

Since that time I've gone into caves with other folks and we always do the pitch black bit. When I tried this recently with some kids in my Youth Adventure Corp, sure enough, the kids could see their hands.

Eyes work by picking up photons so it seems that there has to be photons bouncing off your hands somehow. I thought about your eyes being sensitive to a little infrared but I couldn't find any research on that. According to this article, "Retinal sensitivity sometimes extends (with very low sensitivity) to 1000 to 1050 nm. Note that if your eyes were sensitive to much longer wavelengths you would look through a sort of "infrared fog", since you would see heat energy everywhere."

Sources vary but the lower limit of what is considered infrared is generally between 700 and 800 nm. So, in theory, very sensitive dark adapted eyes could pick up some sort of infrared. I believe this is called "near infrared" though there aren't hard and fast rules. The human hand emits infrared at 8,000 to 14,000 nm. That is well outside what humans can possibly detect. Back to square one.

The other day I was searching for something completely different online and I came across a new study. Dr Mitsuo Hiramatsu, a scientist at the Central Research Laboratory at Hamamatsu Photonics in Japan announced that human hands emit photons.

An article in Discovery News suggests that, "Fingernails release 60 photons, fingers release 40 and the palms are the dimmest of all, with 20 photons measured." Unfortunately the article doesn't say what kind of rate that is. 40 photons per what unit of time? I know from my Astronomy work that the dark adapted eye can detect very few photons but without rate information I can't tell if this is the answer to my glowing cave hand mystery. The full research article on the glowing hands is here but I'm too cheap to pay for it.

~Kirk

Sticky Spawn

I love the new Mac OS but it isn't perfect. Case in point. The dashboard based sticky notes. Sticky notes were really nice in OS 9 and the Mac team made them pretty much useless in OS X. If you want a new note you have to open your widget manager and load a new copy of the widget for every stupid sticky you want. Couldn't apple make a widget with multiple windows? Maybe not. It could be an inherent limitation in the dashboard architecture. Anyhow, the least they could have done is put a little (new note) button in the corner of each note that spawns a new copy of the widget.

Well, this widget called Sticky Spawn does almost that. It puts a mini sticky note on your dashboard. When you click it you get a new full size sticky note.

Nice easy solution. Now if only Apple had been smart enough to include a "trash me" button on each note. Do we have to think of everything?

~Kirk

Click-Hold contextual Menus in Firefox 2.0

Here's a little geek trick for all my Macintosh buddies. I just downloaded Firefox 2.0 (my browser of choice) and I was frustrated beyond belief that I could no longer click and hold on a hyperlink to make the menu pop up where I select "Open link in new Tab."

I have to hold down the control key when I click. I know most PC users can use a right click (or is it left?) for this but most Mac users do not have a multiple key mouse so this new "feature" drove me crazy.

Here's the solution.

Type the following into your browser address field:
about:config

A large list of variables will appear. Scroll down to ui.click_hold_context_menus

By default it will say this variable is set to false. Click on the word false to change it to true and now your beautful hold click contextual menus are back where they belong.

Geek on.

~Kirk

What Serenity Character am I?

Your results:
You are Zoe Washburne (Second-in-command)
Dependable and trustworthy.
You love your significant other and
you are a tough cookie when in a conflict.



Zoe Washburn (2nd in Command) 90%
Malcolm Reynolds (Captain) 80%
Kaylee Frye (Ship Mechanic) 80%
Wash (Ship Pilot) 75%
Dr. Simon Tam (Ship Medic) 55%
Inara Serra (Companion) 45%
River Tam(Stowaway) 40%
Derrial Book (Shepherd) 20%
Jayne Cobb (Mercenary) 15%
A Reaver (Cannibal) 5%
Alliance 5%

Click here to take the Serenity Firefly Personality Test