Archive for the 'Video' Category

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YouTube works. Google Video does not. Hmmm. I can live with that.

Edit:  Umm…hopefully this fixes the broken RSS feed?

Some people are real attention whores, like this girl who hijacked her chemistry class at Carleton University to sing her stupid original song about the elements.  It is really, really poor.  I especially despise how she annoyingly interrupts her terrible singing with pointless commentary.  I can’t believe she earned ”an extra mark” for this piece of garbage:

Of course, for a top-notch elements song, look no farther than Harvard’s Tom Lehrer:

In the course of running experiments today, one of my labmates happened across a small mercury spill in our instrument room. Well, we’re not 100% sure it was mercury, but the material was both liquid and metallic. Our lab just finished a massive clean up and it has taken only a week for someone to soil a common area with a nasty chemical THEN SIMPLY WALK AWAY. I really hate some of the people here—I just wish I knew who.

This being our first venture into using the handy-dandy mercury spill kit, we decided to film the event and preserve it for the historical record. Enjoy: Part I, Part II.

Director’s Note: These videos are long and not particularly instructive or entertaining.

As a grad student, most of the time you’re a chemist, but sometimes you’re a teacher, a secretary, a copy editor, a graphics artist, or even a repairman. Our group has some pretty old lab space—and it shows. Over the last 25 years, work areas have been abused, storage areas have been neglected, and machines have deteriorated due to wear and tear. You can stumble into some pretty gross situations, as I did two weeks ago when I needed to cool down a flask. I opened the lid to our ice machine and was greeted by an arctic sea instead of the usual pillowy mounds of crushed ice:

There’s a drain at the bottom of the ice chest so that the water won’t build up as the ice melts. Obviously, something was clogged. The first order of business was to bail out all of the ice. This took a while and was no fun (read: brrrrrr). Once the ice was gone, we were left with 30 gallons or so of water with nasty gobs of slimy, black mold. It was at this point that I unearthed the following items:

• 1 bottle of Poland Spring water
• 1 can of Sierra Mist
• 2 bottles of fruit-flavored Snapple Iced Tea (1 half-consumed)
• 1 collapsed box of horchata (sweetened rice beverage)

You can click that picture to enlarge it. Be sure to notice the floaters. Gross. To my dismay, it turned out that the drain grating was clear, meaning the obstruction was in the drain line.  I enlisted the help of the building’s plumber, who conveniently, was busy installing the successor to the DG3000. After some handy wet-vac work followed by a thorough cleaning and bleaching, we were back in business. And since I was already in a tidying mood, I decided to conduct a little preventative maintenance by backflushing the air filter. It was a good thing, too. Just look at the number of grody dirt balls that came out of there:

After popping the filter back into place and starting the compressor, the machine was churning out ice within ten minutes. Instant gratification. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, you can check out the action on video.

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I was waiting for some HPLC runs to finish and decided to continue to plow through the first season of Felicity.  There are quite a few references to chemistry in the series, as Felicity was pre-med.  She ran afoul of her inorganic chemistry professor in an early episode for being a teacher’s pet, and in her lab section, poor Felicity dropped an Erlenmeyer flask and had to recover her product from the floor.

The series takes place at the fictional “University of New York” since NYU would not grant permission to use its name.  Still, a lot of the scenes were shot on NYU’s Greenwich Village campus. You can even see the location of my old lab:

Oh, the memories.  In other news, one of the urinals in a nearby bathroom has developed a serious water hammer condition.  The water hammer is a cool scientific phenonmenon where a sudden change in velocity of a stream of fluid causes shock waves to develop that reverberate though the plumbing.  I’ve never heard a water hammer as mighty as the one in the Myers’ lab bathroom, so I filmed it for your viewing pleasure.  If you’re interested, Wikipedia has a good summary of the science at play.