Displaying comments 1 to 50 of 894
MeFi post:
Welding Plastic
Welding is merely the joining of pieces by merging them together (which differs from soldering, gluing, or brazing, which use a 3rd material to stick bits together). Lots of things you might not think of can be welded, included paper (the usual term for this is papier-mâché), or even glass.
It's using heat to merge them together. Glass can indeed be welded, but paper mâché would be a composite. The Wikipedia... [more]
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at 7:22 PM on July 19, 2008
For those that maintain that a solvent-adhered joint is "welded", I beg you to take a careful look at this useful page.
Note the following passage:
The AWS definition for a welding process is "a materials joining process which produces coalescence of materials by heating them to suitable temperatures with or without the application of pressure or by the application of pressure alone and with or without the use of filler... [more]
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at 9:09 AM on July 20, 2008
Due to the sage advice given by various individuals in the comments here, I have reimagined my thoughts on what welding is. I have discovered that a bag of brown sugar in my cabinet has SPONTAINOUSLY WELDED ITSELF!!!
Tomorrow I shall be submitting this sucrose sample via FedEx to the AWS. Obviously they are DEAD WRONG when they say coalescence of materials by heating them to suitable temperatures... I expect to be duly revered... [more]
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at 10:11 PM on July 20, 2008
MeFi post:
"It was beautiful, kind of like abstract art"
Robert Hooke encoded his principle of elasticity:
This idea was first stated[1] by Robert Hooke in 1675 as a Latin anagram[2] "ceiiinosssttuv", whose solution he published in 1678 as "Ut tensio, sic vis" which means "As the extension, so the force."
This interesting page has more material on scientific codes.... [more]
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at 11:31 PM on July 16, 2008
MeFi post:
Nothing to see here.
In the late 1980's I subscribed to both the Journal of Forensic Science and the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology. This was largely as a result of my interest in autoerotic asphyxia, and pre-dated by a number of years the current popularity of forensic science. Soon I learned that there was a hipster element to this, as I gleaned from reading the Re-Search book on J.G. Ballard. Later I met and befriended Stuart Sweezy of Amok Books, who... [more]
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at 10:58 PM on July 16, 2008
MeFi post:
Should This Feat With No Feet Be Defeated?
Once again I find myself at odds with the zeitgeist of Metafilter participants, as the most surprising thing I found in this story was that something made out of carbon fiber could be so elastic.
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at 7:25 PM on July 16, 2008
MeFi post:
Wankel all day long
I've built models of Chebyshev's four bar linkage and the Peaucellier cell. All these animated models you see on the Internet are a little deceptive, as when you go to build them in the real world you have to factor in depth. With the Peaucellier cell I used flat plastic slats as links and rivets for revolute joints. It went together fairly easily, but I still had to work out what went on top of what.
Chebyshev's linkage was more... [more]
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at 10:38 PM on July 12, 2008
Flickr video of Chebyshev's four bar linkage.
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at 11:07 PM on July 12, 2008
Flickr video of a Peaucellier Cell Model.
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at 11:49 PM on July 14, 2008
MeFi post:
The Greatest Sideshow Video Ever Made.
I have prayed and genuflected to my heathen god for this day to come, and lo; it has!
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at 6:55 PM on July 13, 2008
No, I left in early 1994, and so didn't tour with NIN. The Enigma took over the tube act. I had built my own absurdly large clear plastic pump using my drill press, as I had no access to a lathe. I used no adhesives, screws, or pins, just old school cooperage to hold the end cap in. The Enigma had his pump-building farmed out to Steve Haworth of body-mod fame.
Recently I learned that my pal George the Giant was on TV, performing a variant of the tube act. The extra bit... [more]
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at 10:54 PM on July 13, 2008
MeFi post:
Don’t put it in your mouth!
This is good! The dark haired puppet in the first video has a strangely prognathic face, and so moves like the apes in Planet of the Apes. Why would they make a puppet like that?
Years ago I was over at Kim Thayil's house with a bunch of guys watching TV. Kim tells me about this new show called "Teletubbies" which he claims is impressively cool. I remember watching a scene of a dark haired male guitarist playing a tune for some kids. No... [more]
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at 11:53 AM on July 13, 2008
MeFi post:
We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.
Fuller was one of those interesting individuals who was half visionary genius and half crackpot. As far as crackpot goes he made outrageous statements as if they were fact, such as promoting a devolution theory of human development where we started out as aquatic animals and evolved into apes. He could drop egregious technical blunders, like claiming that gold was the most conductive metal. His Dymaxion car was a three wheeler, and so was intrinsically unstable. This is why we don't see... [more]
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at 2:41 PM on July 12, 2008
MeFi post:
chomp
Some people in this world set their clocks and watches 5 or 10 minutes ahead, and some set them "on time". I'm one of the latter types. Shortly before I discovered this website I purchased two battery powered clocks that received radio signals which synced them with "official" time. The price had come way down by the time I bought them; I think I got them at Target for about $30 each.
Shortly thereafter, I became discouraged, as I realized that my two... [more]
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at 5:51 PM on July 11, 2008
MeFi post:
Just the facts Ma'am
Once I got old enough to understand what "camp" or "kitsch" was, watching the late 60's Dragnet for those qualities simply became too easy. I started to focus on other things, like enjoying all the shots of late 1960's cars driving around in LA. I made it a game to identify them, and of course back in those days TV didn't pixelate or "fuzz out" the licence plates, a total distraction in today's TV.
I also enjoyed how Gannon and Friday would... [more]
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at 12:21 AM on July 10, 2008
MeFi post:
A new jug ships clean
This a simply a small step in the right direction, which is to begin packaging our precious foodstuffs in space filling solids. This new jug more closely approximates a parallelepiped than the old design, thus permitting vertical stacking. But a parallelepiped is not a regular solid. Currently, Toblerone chocolate is packaged in triangular prisms, and I've purchased Mexican chocolate packaged in a hexagonal prism. In the future, I hope to see milk... [more]
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at 4:22 PM on June 30, 2008
So I decided to find out for myself if this new jug was well designed or not. I bought two gallons of milk at Costco after reading this thread. I didn't spill any with my first gallon. I drank some from the second, then decided to record myself pouring.
I think the claim that this jug is poorly designed is greatly overstated.
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at 9:51 PM on July 6, 2008
MeFi post:
Real Danny Deckchairs
After spilling off some cherry-flavored Kool-Aid that served as ballast, Couch got a push from the ground crew so he could clear light poles and soared over a coffee cart and across U.S. Highway 20 into a bright blue sky.
How did he get all that Kool-Aid through security?
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at 10:12 PM on July 5, 2008
MeFi post:
JR Williams
Indeed, I couldn't find a Wikipedia page for this JR Williams...
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at 2:06 PM on July 5, 2008
MeFi post:
Freaky Face Paint
Outstanding!
It would be great to see a few seconds of Flickr video of his two-faced creations blinking.
Would favorite again.
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at 12:20 PM on July 5, 2008
MeFi post:
Regrets? I have a few, but then again...
There is an interesting side-effect in traveling with heavily modified people; they become a barometer of the cultural "backwardness-quotient" of a place.
My guess is that if this man walked into a diner in the middle of Saskatchewan, every single person would stop their conversation, turn around, and stare at him.
Furthermore, The main photograph in the article shows him with a cigarette in his hand. Is he making a wise choice about his future?
posted to MetaFilter by Tube
at 2:28 PM on July 4, 2008
People in Saskatchewan have TVs too.
I used to work with Mr. Lifto and The Enigma, so I speak from experience about walking into Saskatchewan restaurants.
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at 3:10 PM on July 4, 2008
MeFi post:
Body Mod 2.0
Yeah, I was there when the whole thing really took off. I remember attending the Seattle COCA Modern Primitives event that featured V. Vale and Andrea Juno of ReSearch. I was on tour with Mr. Lifto and The Enigma. I met Steve Haworth just as he was beginning to embark on his body mod thing. Back in the early 1990's I must have seen 10,000 tattoos. So please forgive me if I sound jaded when I say; what took so long with the laser thing?... [more]
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at 6:06 PM on July 3, 2008
MeFi post:
Follows next a period spannin'/ Four long years with James Buchanan...
Very well scripted.
This reminds me of an old episode of Dragnet. Gannon and Friday are in a room interrogating a suspect who refuses to cooperate. Instead, the suspect starts to recite states and their capitals. The two cops decide to let him sit in stir for a while. But Gannon gets the best of him, psychologically, as the suspect has given Las Vegas as the capital of Nevada. "The capitol of Nevada is Carson City", Gannon sagely replies.... [more]
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at 5:25 PM on July 3, 2008
MeFi post:
The Cock Mightier than the Dong
Yes, I found this outstandingly funny.
But if you think about it, it's really an old meme, which is "machine takes over task formerly done by humans and makes hilarious error".
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at 4:56 PM on June 30, 2008
MeFi post:
"All he ever talked about was building that vestibule for his maw"
Outstanding!
I think the beer steins in the saloon were made from cartridge cases of handgun rounds. I don't recognize the brand of "action figure" he used, but then again the last time I played with them was about 35 years ago...
I had a "Tom Maddox" doll, er, action figure, but I used it for an entirely different purpose.... [more]
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at 5:01 PM on June 29, 2008
MeFi post:
History, crudely drawn
I read The Chip a while back, and I highly recommend it. A great deal of the book is devoted to the long running legal battle that ensued. If I remember correctly, Kilby regretted that he didn't do a better job of soldering on his prototype, as it was a centerpiece of the controversy and as such was subjected to a great deal of scrutiny.
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at 10:57 PM on June 28, 2008
MeFi post:
RIP Ayveq
His masturbation was adept because he had crazy flipper fingers.
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at 10:24 PM on June 28, 2008
MeFi post:
SNAFU
Previously.
posted to MetaFilter by Tube
at 9:29 AM on June 28, 2008
I posted "previously", because I'm a big Snafu fan myself, and wanted to put together a FFP about some time back.
Way back in about 1990, in the Dark Ages before the World Wide Web, I received a military video catalog that contained a Snafu compilation. It was one of my most prized VHS tapes. I either loaned it out and it was never returned, or it was stolen. I was glad to find that this films had been uploaded to YouTube.
I went... [more]
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at 9:55 AM on June 28, 2008
MeFi post:
You get the Leary you deserve.
If my memory is correct, www.leary.com was the main site for all things Tim Leary, at least in the late 1990's. I seem to remember they had an unmoderated board for a while, but things quickly got out of hand. The site now seems to be nothing but a single text quotation and sound clip.
I met Leary shortly before he died; he had blue shag carpeting on his ceiling. My encounter was fairly profound, but I don't feel comfortable talking about it on the Internet.... [more]
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at 11:13 PM on June 26, 2008
MeFi post:
ICANN has been under pressure
Like George Carlin, I lament the loss of Upper Volta, ignominiously changed to Burkina Faso in 1984. The redeeming virtue of this change is the resulting Internet domain, which is .bf. This allows the possibility of a porn site dedicated to, erm, sodomy, whose address could be bf.bf...
Furthermore, I'm now praying to a graven image that ICANN will create a .tube domain.
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at 10:58 PM on June 26, 2008
MeFi post:
National Geographic Flashback
Like many magazine photos of scantily clad women, the surfboard shot in the 2001 set appears to be printed backwards.
The caption on the chimp photo in the 2007 set is, um, yeah something wrong there...
Otherwise, great stuff!
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at 11:21 PM on June 24, 2008
MeFi post:
Phonographantasmascope
Very cool! I remember once years ago my friend Dave and I playing with his strobe light and turntable. I think we were able to sync the flash rate of the strobe to the rotation of the LP so that we could more or less read the record label. Then we decided to "take it to the next level" and see if we could get one of the then-new "laser etched" LPs to do the the same thing. I think it was an early Split Enz album.
We slowly increased the flash rate of... [more]
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at 1:06 AM on June 23, 2008
MeFi post:
George Carlin Dead at 71
Hearing Carlin for the first time was certainly one of those rite-of-passage moments, equivalent to buying your first Led Zeppelin album or getting your driver's license. I remember my first exposure to Carlin through an early HBO broadcast in the late 1970's.
This is a sad, sad loss.
One way to look at his humor was that he discovered that deep analysis of concepts is often funny. "If people climb Mt. Everest because it's so hard, why do... [more]
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at 11:24 PM on June 22, 2008
MeFi post:
Military tattoos in the age of Iraq
When I was in high school in the late 1970's I used to hang around with an older guy named Randy. He had a unique tattoo on the edge of his right hand. As with all tattoos, it had a story behind it.
When he got his draft notice for Vietnam he decided to try to beat his induction, as many did, in a unique and clever way. He went over the rule book with a fine tooth comb, and found a passage to this effect; "No inductee will be admitted to the US Army who bears... [more]
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at 9:08 PM on June 22, 2008
