Well, the big reason early film is kind dangerous is that it was nitrocellulose, and so had plenty of nitro-groups just waiting to have a little fun...
393 karma · joined February 6, 2012
Amazon Supply is pretty useless, and Small parts was never really great either.
Sounds like he made a weird partially-shorted dipole antenna, and needs a good VNA to answer the rest of his questions.
However, the capacity for repairing and modifying glassware is going away. It used to be the case that your average chemist could go walk down the hall and talk to a glassblower about designing crazy custom apparatus - not so much anymore. Even when an institution does have a glassblower, they tend to be nearing retirement age, and hiring someone who has the broad talent required is very hard...
The rest of the knowledge seems to be passed person-to-person, mostly in informal settings. There's a decent program at Salem community college, but it's just too short to become a fully-capable scientific glassblower. That takes about 10 years of full time apprenticeship, which is why the field is dying out.
I've (briefly) studied with some extremely talented glassblowers (Sally Prasch, ...), and I found that helpful, but also most of the learning came from staying up to 1AM trying to replicate something that took them 5 minutes to demonstrate...
Avoiding celebrities/influencers/boring friends is key.
Wood Database is a godsend for getting quality information on interesting woods, but trying to verify a vendor's claims about the identity and source of any given wood is hard!
I don't actually study (3) particularly, nor am I a biologist. As far as I understand, the "how" question is pretty well studied, and is because it's pretty aggressive with DNA repair, and has lots of various tricks to facilitate that and minimize damage from occurring in the first place. The question of "why" is (in my mind) more interesting, and less understood - it may be due to evolving to deal with prolonged dehydration, which is a much more useful ability for life on earth. IDK.
R&D at a startup.
1) Ralstonia pickettii doesn't really need much to eat, and thus thrives in ultra-pure water systems. Like, you know, the ones used to make medical devices.
2) Stuff in the Burkholderia cepacia complex is naturally resistant to lots of antibiotics, but also tolerates chlorhexidine gluconate and various quaternary ammonium disinfectants. Well, ok, more than tolerates - they'll happily colonize the disinfectant solutions, and then infect whatever you're trying to "disinfect".
3) Deinococcus radiodurans seems almost engineered to survive interstellar travel, but that's probably just a coincidence. Anything that can survive 15,000 Gray is scary.
4) Bacillus altitudinis is pretty weird too - like the name says, it's been found up to 40ish-km, which is an odd place for things to grow.
For lower volume (or higher tolerance materials), the overflow downdraw method and updraw methods are used, mainly for display glass.
For such small batches of glass (500kgs is nothing!) with very tight tolerances across lots of variables, and considerable compositional diversity (Nikon isn't melting just one glass, it's melting quite a few, to do clever things with dispersion), there are so many variables that you can't really automate everything.
(As a glass melting nerd, I'd really love to see all of the proprietary information that they left out - but I guess that's why it isn't there.)
Did this have anything to do with a certain renovation?
(edit: also, there are plenty of materials that can deal with sustained molten steel content with acceptable service life.)
I once had a decent amount of fun splicing it with Lua, before deciding that I don't actually care about text editors...
Now, taking photos is inherently photon/E&M based.