Monthly Archives: December 2018

What’s up quark?: Eugene Khutoryansky’s physics videos

As time marches relentlessly on, it slowly erodes what you think you know – especially those things you never knew in the first place. Despite all of its cruft, marketeering, and self-promotion there’s still a small corner of the internet that hews to its educational roots. The structure of subatomic particles like protons and neutrons is not conceptually easy, the mathematics reserved for a few. Eugene Khutoryansky’s colorful and surreal videos do a great service in making abstract concepts concrete. The underlying classical music soundtrack is in subtle contrast to the extremely non-classical physics.

Youtube Channel: Physics Videos by Eugene Khutoryansky

All Up In Ya Grille: The Automobile Driving Museum

From back in the day when cars had teeth: An assortment of dental excellence from El Segundo’s marvelous Automobile Driving Museum. It looks like a showcase of lovingly restored and superbly maintained American cars and it is all that. And the side of fries? Machines are meant to be used and on Sundays, they take a rotating subset onto the roads and let the public ride along.

I went in not knowing that the museum was actually closed for a private party but no one said anything and I browsed the collection at leisure. When I go back – and I will – I look forward to opening doors, sitting in the seats, and enjoying the insides of these artefacts of a bygone era. That’s also allowed and encouraged.

See more about the ADM through the two videos following the gallery.

Vimeo Channel: Rupert Hitzig

Whiffleball: Bill Hammack on the IBM Selectric

Integrated electronics make us forget about them. Tiny packages with millions of transistors encapsulate so many functions so effectively that we don’t or can’t know what all they do. This is a boon to manufacturers since repairing anything is all but impossible. In the not-too-distant past, these functions or a small subset of them, had to be implemented in metal. Techmoan does a stellar job of rediscovering old technology. Prof. Bill Hammack of UIUC is also a master of this. Here he explains how the whiffletree mechanism enabled the IBM Selectric typewriter to work its magic. Beware – it is easy to lose a day watching his other videos and searching on the nuggets he finds.

Youtube Channel: Engineerguy