The post title is a famous William Gibson quote, referring to the tendency of high-tech gadgets to be put to uses the manufacturers never expected. By "the Street," he meant people in general, with maybe a slant toward the sort of underclass element he focusses on in his books, but he might well have been referring to bored grad students. Witness Dylan Stiles and the Man-o-Meter, which assigns a numerical value to machismo, based on your skill at, in the words of one commenter, fellating a digital manometer.
We didn't get up to that much of this sort of foolishness in my lab, in part because the vacuum gauges we had didn't give sensible readings above one torr, but mostly because the laser lab offered fewer opportunities for self-measurement ("How long can you shock yourself with the Tesla coil" is a little too sadistic). We did have a post-doc spend an afternoon running a psychology experiment with a dye laser and a wavemeter-- he would grab people, and ask them to tune the laser wavelength until they would call the color of the light "yellow" without qualification ("greenish yellow" or "yellow-orange"). He claimed to find that "yellow" was a surprisingly narrow wavelength range-- something like two nanometers, but I don't think that got published anywhere (the Journal of Cat Vacuuming remains sadly nonexistant).
We also spent the better part of an afternoon attempting to make liquid oxygen. Or, rather, to prove that the liquid accumulating in a test tube dunked in liquid nitrogen was liquid oxygen (as somebody had heard). Despite one guy's conviction that we were about to blow up the lab, we never did get any impressive pyrotechnics. We did, however, discover both the liquid oxygen grill lighting movies, and the infamous exploding whale, so I regard it as an afternoon well spent.
Of course, Dylan has missed a really big opportunity here. One of our other post-docs once took a certain litigious religion founded by a hack writer up on their offer of a free consultation, and claimed to recognize their fancy meter as a certain type of Keithly electrometer, and speculated that the needle twitches they were looking at were nothing more than minute electrical fluctuations as he fidgeted with the probes they asked him to hold. Given that example, just think of the tax-free millions-- billions, even-- you could make off the Church of Manometer Fellation...
OK, maybe the name needs a little work...
Comments
# 1 | John Novak | April 4, 2006 10:23 AM
Jesus Christ, you people need more work....
# 2 | Aaron Bergman | April 4, 2006 10:40 AM
Wouldn't the test tube liquid be only around 20% liquid oxygen?
# 3 | Thomas Winwood | April 4, 2006 11:37 AM
No harm can possibly come of a free consultation, even if it IS with the aforementioned litigious religion.
# 4 | Ichabod Ferguson | April 4, 2006 4:46 PM
An empty aluminum soda can works very well for turning liquid nitrogen into LOX. Fill the can with the LN. The condensation on the outside is almost pure oxygen. Suspend the can over a prechilled dewar and you can accumulate a modest amount pretty quickly. (Then it starts boiling off as fast as it accumulates.)
Back in my grad student days, indoor smoking was still legal. A fellow TA had a pack-a-day habit. A few tablespoons of LOX (made as above) dumped into the ashtray where he had put his smoldering cigarette made a nice little inferno. Not so spectacular as the grill lighting, but safer and plenty amusing.