Let's go shopping at NIST!
October 15, 2022 8:21 AM Subscribe
Sure, $381 for a three small jars seems like a lot but does your peanut butter come with an MSDS? I thought so. NIST is the US National Institute of Standards and Technology and they offer a vast array of standard substances for your reference use. Their reference peanut butter includes a Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) and full datasheet but that's just the beginning. (A Twitter thread).
Damn it! They are all out of Non-Newtonian Polymer Solution for Rheological Measurements!
Non-Newtonian?
posted by Saxon Kane at 9:14 AM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
Non-Newtonian?
posted by Saxon Kane at 9:14 AM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
Some of these products are absolutely wild, at least from a regular consumer's perspective. On the other hand, it's actually kind of comforting to know that the US government actively works to provide standardized reference materials for all manner of consumable products...because (I think) it ultimately means that products that ARE intended for regular consumers are more likely to be correctly labeled and safe from contaminants.
In short, yay for science! Yay for food safety!
posted by Doleful Creature at 9:16 AM on October 15, 2022 [12 favorites]
In short, yay for science! Yay for food safety!
posted by Doleful Creature at 9:16 AM on October 15, 2022 [12 favorites]
choosy mothers choose NIST
posted by logicpunk at 9:18 AM on October 15, 2022 [46 favorites]
posted by logicpunk at 9:18 AM on October 15, 2022 [46 favorites]
corn starch & water exhibits non-Newtonian behaviors
and cats
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 9:22 AM on October 15, 2022 [8 favorites]
and cats
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 9:22 AM on October 15, 2022 [8 favorites]
Related: Tom Scott tries an ISO 3103 cup of green tea, which requires the purchase of a special steeping and tasting cup. It's ... it's tea, all right.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:29 AM on October 15, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by Countess Elena at 9:29 AM on October 15, 2022 [5 favorites]
My imagination is failing me on the Urban Dust. What is that for? Having spent time in several places, some more urban than others, and observed that the dust is very different depending on whether there are trees, what kind of trees they are, what kinds and quantities of vehicles are on nearby roads etc, it's hard for me to imagine a single "Urban Dust" prototype that could stand in for others in a meaningful way. Am I overthinking this? What is in it?? What is it for???
I mean probably the answer is "mages purchase this Urban Dust to perform their dark rites" I guess but I'd like others' thoughts on this matter
posted by potrzebie at 9:29 AM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]
I mean probably the answer is "mages purchase this Urban Dust to perform their dark rites" I guess but I'd like others' thoughts on this matter
posted by potrzebie at 9:29 AM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]
potrzebie: testing air filtration systems? face-masks? cleaning products for clothes? paint?
posted by Saxon Kane at 9:54 AM on October 15, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by Saxon Kane at 9:54 AM on October 15, 2022 [5 favorites]
I don't smoke, but I deeply desire a pack of NIST cigarettes.
posted by jellywerker at 10:03 AM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by jellywerker at 10:03 AM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
Non-Newtonian?
Even in small jars, there was only so much of him to go around.
posted by Etrigan at 10:09 AM on October 15, 2022 [13 favorites]
Even in small jars, there was only so much of him to go around.
posted by Etrigan at 10:09 AM on October 15, 2022 [13 favorites]
My last job was teaching in an Institute of Technology where the students had A Lot of contact hours a week and a big-arsed curriculum to get through. About half the hours were doing science in labs - which was mostly re-discovering Hooke's law about sproinnngs or titrating something till it turned pink. So much going through the motions that very little science actually stuck during the year. After a couple of years "Health & Safety" decided that, for every substance used in class, an MSDS form must be available. The lab tech was duly tasked to print out these MSDS forms from a list of chemicals provided by the teaching staff. It was a chunky folder for most of the labs. There: they're available now.
Each MSDS form runs to 8-10 pages in a formal order. And in a specific emergency [spill, splash, fire, broken bottle . . .power cut so Google fails you], you don't want to read the whole document to find the appropriate action to take. For my students, I devised a MSDS quiz, so that they had read through a few MSDS forms while calm and focused: which prep might win a few seconds when the shit hit the fan. My colleagues weren't impressed when I made them do the quiz at a faculty meeting.
NIST, and their like in other countries, does the boring stuff so that everyone is on the same page when it comes to comparison shopping. They "promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life."
posted by BobTheScientist at 10:15 AM on October 15, 2022 [12 favorites]
Each MSDS form runs to 8-10 pages in a formal order. And in a specific emergency [spill, splash, fire, broken bottle . . .power cut so Google fails you], you don't want to read the whole document to find the appropriate action to take. For my students, I devised a MSDS quiz, so that they had read through a few MSDS forms while calm and focused: which prep might win a few seconds when the shit hit the fan. My colleagues weren't impressed when I made them do the quiz at a faculty meeting.
NIST, and their like in other countries, does the boring stuff so that everyone is on the same page when it comes to comparison shopping. They "promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life."
posted by BobTheScientist at 10:15 AM on October 15, 2022 [12 favorites]
Another interesting NIST thing is their deer contraception project.
posted by sciencegeek at 10:22 AM on October 15, 2022
posted by sciencegeek at 10:22 AM on October 15, 2022
"We call this dish "street food." You'll note that is literally tastes of the street."
Talk about bringing out the terroir...
The chef is truly a man of the soil.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:15 AM on October 15, 2022 [2 favorites]
Talk about bringing out the terroir...
The chef is truly a man of the soil.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:15 AM on October 15, 2022 [2 favorites]
My dog will happily eat your $881 reference peanut butter. Money is no object here.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:23 AM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:23 AM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
"Standard Reference Material: Meat Homogenate" would make a great sock puppet name.
posted by mrgoat at 11:26 AM on October 15, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by mrgoat at 11:26 AM on October 15, 2022 [2 favorites]
I feel compelled to note that sludge isn’t sewage.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 11:31 AM on October 15, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 11:31 AM on October 15, 2022 [2 favorites]
It is of course genuinely amusing, but also NIST is pretty fucking important in a lot of fields. A whole lot of modern life ends up hinging upon "how do we know that this thing is what we say it is?". That's basically what NIST aims to solve, and as it turns out it's a hilariously complex topic.
You can buy a surface plate, or you can buy a surface plate with NIST traceability (that is to say, there is a proven chain of measurements that goes back to a NIST reference standard). The latter one costs more, because it's provably accurate and you know about variations & uncertainties, whereas the first one is may be just as accurate (maybe even same manufacturer) but it's up to you to prove it's accurate (or not) and even then you may have no idea if you're actually correct -- when you measured the plate, how do you know your flatness gage is calibrated correctly? If you did calibrate the gage, how do you know your calibration block was actually as flat as it's supposed to be? How can you tell? Can you prove you're right?
posted by aramaic at 11:45 AM on October 15, 2022 [6 favorites]
You can buy a surface plate, or you can buy a surface plate with NIST traceability (that is to say, there is a proven chain of measurements that goes back to a NIST reference standard). The latter one costs more, because it's provably accurate and you know about variations & uncertainties, whereas the first one is may be just as accurate (maybe even same manufacturer) but it's up to you to prove it's accurate (or not) and even then you may have no idea if you're actually correct -- when you measured the plate, how do you know your flatness gage is calibrated correctly? If you did calibrate the gage, how do you know your calibration block was actually as flat as it's supposed to be? How can you tell? Can you prove you're right?
posted by aramaic at 11:45 AM on October 15, 2022 [6 favorites]
Immaterials and Methods: Reagents for the Total Laboratory Synthesis of the Chocolate Chip Cookie
Scientists have long wondered what laboratory reagents they might consume and survive on in the event of entrapment in the laboratory (resulting from natural disaster or zombie apocalypse, not just being in academia).posted by zamboni at 12:11 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
Tragically, this is not a hypothetical scenario. This year, a PhD student starved to death when a delivery of solvent drums from 2020 was placed across the doorway to his lab. His corpse wasfound three weeks later, still clutching a flask of tryptophan. The coroner ruled that the student had died while attempting to construct a scotch fillet by peptide coupling.
If asked “what would you eat first if you were trapped in here?” most scientists would choose the humble LB broth, and reagent- grade glucose and sodium chloride for seasoning. Traditionally, the holy trinity of disallowed lab consumables includes MilliPure water, 200 proof ethanol, and the aforementioned LB. Here, I propose a fourth member of the quadrinity, and present the following list of reagents necessary to perform the chocolate chip cookie reaction and discuss associated costs and benefits.
metafilter: how do you know your calibration block was actually as flat as it's supposed to be?
posted by joeyh at 12:19 PM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by joeyh at 12:19 PM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
I used to use some of these when I worked for the local faculty of Agriculture -- I worked in the departmental analytical lab -- though since I mostly analyzed agricultural products I tended to use the standard reference plant material (not the foods). We also had internal references, made up years previously by lab techs long forgotten, for different types of soil and also an entire cow rendered into a clear liquid. I always wondered about the mechanics of that.
Am I overthinking this? What is in it?? What is it for???
It's really just a sample of actual urban dust from some random city: somebody set up a filter system to filter the air and collect the particulates, and this is what they got. Very often what specifically is in the jar is somewhat irrelevant, what makes it special is that it was very rigorously tested, often by a whole bunch of labs (in a process called a round robin) and represents a real sample of something that people analyze. The first part is important because, if you are running a lab, you want to be sure your analysis is working right and this is a way of checking your work. The second part is important because different matrices impact analyses in ways that often very hard to predict, the best way of controlling for that is to make the references as close to the real samples as possible.
For the urban dust in particular it is used to test for PAHs, N-PAHs, PCBs, and other air pollutants that get stuck to the particulates in the air. I was a summer student once at a lab that did this sort of analysis for Environment Canada, so now I'm wondering if I actually used this reference at one point. This was 20 years ago, and I worked in the part of the lab that analyzed for N-PAHs after the samples had already been prepped (they arrived as vials of hexane, if I recall correctly).
posted by selenized at 1:00 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]
Am I overthinking this? What is in it?? What is it for???
It's really just a sample of actual urban dust from some random city: somebody set up a filter system to filter the air and collect the particulates, and this is what they got. Very often what specifically is in the jar is somewhat irrelevant, what makes it special is that it was very rigorously tested, often by a whole bunch of labs (in a process called a round robin) and represents a real sample of something that people analyze. The first part is important because, if you are running a lab, you want to be sure your analysis is working right and this is a way of checking your work. The second part is important because different matrices impact analyses in ways that often very hard to predict, the best way of controlling for that is to make the references as close to the real samples as possible.
For the urban dust in particular it is used to test for PAHs, N-PAHs, PCBs, and other air pollutants that get stuck to the particulates in the air. I was a summer student once at a lab that did this sort of analysis for Environment Canada, so now I'm wondering if I actually used this reference at one point. This was 20 years ago, and I worked in the part of the lab that analyzed for N-PAHs after the samples had already been prepped (they arrived as vials of hexane, if I recall correctly).
posted by selenized at 1:00 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]
I wish I knew what city Urban Dust was from! Seems like a lot of things would work just a little better there
posted by potrzebie at 1:14 PM on October 15, 2022
posted by potrzebie at 1:14 PM on October 15, 2022
Wow, just finished a job yday where we implemented NIST standards across our digital infrastructure. I had no idea how deep the NIST rabbithole went and am grateful for the post! Will be forwarding to former coworkers, see what else they can NISTify.
posted by riverlife at 1:18 PM on October 15, 2022
posted by riverlife at 1:18 PM on October 15, 2022
I wish I knew what city Urban Dust was from!
They actually say in the certificate: Washington DC, sampled from 1976 to 1977.
posted by selenized at 1:20 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
They actually say in the certificate: Washington DC, sampled from 1976 to 1977.
posted by selenized at 1:20 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
NIST is so wonderful. They also calibrate statistical software. A), wow, yes, think how subtly wrong things would go with bugs in our stats and B) that particular page is blithely 1999.
posted by clew at 2:03 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by clew at 2:03 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
MetaFilter: an entire cow rendered into a clear liquid
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:31 PM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:31 PM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
This is fascinating. It somehow has the aesthetics of the DHARMA Initiative, eXistenZ, and the Super Hero Supply Company but is actually... a useful and important thing in the real world.
posted by gwint at 3:10 PM on October 15, 2022
posted by gwint at 3:10 PM on October 15, 2022
I wish I knew what city Urban Dust was from!
They actually say in the certificate: Washington DC, sampled from 1976 to 1977.
Bicentennial dust!
posted by smelendez at 3:44 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
They actually say in the certificate: Washington DC, sampled from 1976 to 1977.
Bicentennial dust!
posted by smelendez at 3:44 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
"Non-Newtonian?" Possibly:
Non-Newtonian
A non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid that does not follow Newton's law of viscosity, i.e., constant viscosity independent of stress. In non-Newtonian fluids, viscosity can change when under force to either more liquid or more solid. Ketchup, for example, becomes runnier when shaken and is thus a non-Newtonian fluid. Many salt solutions and molten polymers are non-Newtonian fluids, as are many commonly found substances such as custard,[1] toothpaste, starch suspensions, corn starch, paint, blood, melted butter, and shampoo.
posted by aleph at 3:45 PM on October 15, 2022
Non-Newtonian
A non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid that does not follow Newton's law of viscosity, i.e., constant viscosity independent of stress. In non-Newtonian fluids, viscosity can change when under force to either more liquid or more solid. Ketchup, for example, becomes runnier when shaken and is thus a non-Newtonian fluid. Many salt solutions and molten polymers are non-Newtonian fluids, as are many commonly found substances such as custard,[1] toothpaste, starch suspensions, corn starch, paint, blood, melted butter, and shampoo.
posted by aleph at 3:45 PM on October 15, 2022
I would be interested to know how these products are manufactured, especially compared to their everyday non-reference equivalents. Is the 1976-77 Washington DC dust taken from a large but gradually dwindling stockpile of bicentennial-vintage dust, or from new batches, made from new ingredients to the exact proportions sampled in 1976-77? Are the peanut butter, breakfast cereal and such sourced from commercial manufacturers of the same products, or does NIST or some specialist supplier (who's not in the grocery business) maintain a production line to make very precise peanut butter in small quantities? To say nothing of the human milk.
posted by acb at 4:01 PM on October 15, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by acb at 4:01 PM on October 15, 2022 [2 favorites]
NIST is so wonderful.
Agreed! They also run radio stations WWV and WWVH to broadcast the free nationwide time reference. Peanut butter AND a radio station? Even more awesome. Thank goodness Trump didn't kill it.
And then just the other day while helping a Mefite over on an AskMe thread I found their free tool FaTIMA (Fate and Transport of Indoor Microbiological Aerosols), used to model the indoor airborne spread of COVID.
posted by JoeZydeco at 4:23 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
Agreed! They also run radio stations WWV and WWVH to broadcast the free nationwide time reference. Peanut butter AND a radio station? Even more awesome. Thank goodness Trump didn't kill it.
And then just the other day while helping a Mefite over on an AskMe thread I found their free tool FaTIMA (Fate and Transport of Indoor Microbiological Aerosols), used to model the indoor airborne spread of COVID.
posted by JoeZydeco at 4:23 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
Every time we drive by our local NIST facility, I yell, "Nerds!" Because, I mean, really, can you imagine a non-Nerd working there?! And I say this with full respect to Nerds.
posted by atomicstone at 5:44 PM on October 15, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by atomicstone at 5:44 PM on October 15, 2022 [7 favorites]
Fortunately they're protected from your taunts by a non-Nerdtonian fluid.
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:54 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:54 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]
MetaFilter: an entire cow rendered into a clear liquid
Assume a spherical cow liquid
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:32 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
Assume a spherical cow liquid
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:32 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
If you allow the cow liquid to float freely within a spacecraft in orbit, the magic of surface tension will be summoned, and the great prophecy of our age will be fulfilled: finally, we will have a spherical cow.
(Until you notice it's not quite spherical since different parts are in slightly different orbits. Orbital dynamics are weird)
posted by automatronic at 3:14 AM on October 16, 2022 [4 favorites]
(Until you notice it's not quite spherical since different parts are in slightly different orbits. Orbital dynamics are weird)
posted by automatronic at 3:14 AM on October 16, 2022 [4 favorites]
Finally a rigorous evidence-based interpretation of the charts
posted by migurski at 8:05 AM on October 16, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by migurski at 8:05 AM on October 16, 2022 [4 favorites]
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there's other urban waste products too, like this Urban Dust.
"We call this dish "street food." You'll note that is literally tastes of the street."
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:41 AM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]