My dad worked for North American Aviaton/ Rockwell/rRocketdyne in the 50s and 60s. He worked on the X15, A5, XB70 and the space program until it went kablooey after Appllo. He also worked on ICBMs. They had some exotic alloys, naturally, as well as some surprising non metal shields, nose cones and the like. ICBM warheads have to endure extreme temperatures and pressures on reentry
Rocketdyne made all the head men and their wives simple, shiny alloy rings. The metal, whatever it was, had to be sized at the plant. Only a diamond can cut it and darned slowly at that. Engraving their names on the ring took a week per ring and costs one diamond bit per ring. Mom and Dad both were buried with them
Dad once said it was a tungsten-carballoy-titanium-beryllium alloy with some other exotic metals added in. It had been through a launch, orbit and reentry cycle which really toughened it. Before launch it had been cryo-treated, too. I wish I still had them but they were buried with my parents. They never had a scratch and looked like polished silver or stainless steel. They were also amazingly light.
When I was working for a design engineering firm, we often looked at exotic metals and alloys as solutions to chemical reactor material for highly corrosive compounds. Nickel, chromium and cobalt alloys such as the Hastelloy B and C metals were extremely attractive for their corrosion resistance and strength properties. Of course, they were difficult to work with because their hardness made them difficult to cut and mill.
Now research is coming out that alloys consisting of equal quantities of those three metals have extremely high strength and ductility.
“The toughness of this material near liquid helium temperatures (20 kelvin, -424 °Fahrenheit) is as high as 500 megapascals square root meters. In the same units, the toughness of a piece of silicon is one, the aluminum airframe in passenger airplanes is about 35, and the toughness of some of the best steels is around 100. So, 500, it’s a staggering number,” said research co-leader Robert Ritchie, a senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and the Chua Professor of Engineering at UC Berkeley.”
If you notice this extreme toughness measure is recorded at -424 °F. This implies that the toughness number is not as high at normal temperatures. Now this is unusual. Most materials become brittle at cryogenic temperatures not more ductile. But I assume the toughness they’re measuring is still at very high levels for ambient conditions. A material that’s five times stronger than the strongest steels is remarkable. Even double or triple is unheard of.
These alloys are very expensive and would start out being used in the most critical applications such as space flight. But over the course of time these new materials will find other applications. Maybe one day this material might end up in the beams of a mile high building or an enormous bridge. And before you know it they’ll make golf clubs and tennis rackets out of it.
It’s gratifying to see that not all the physical sciences and engineering fields have completely ground to a halt during the Age of Biden. Possibly there is still hope of our civilization escaping another dark age.
The 1984 version of A Christmas Carol has I think the best portrayal of Marley’s Ghost
“But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.
“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing his hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
Mankind is the business of us all. And today the priority is to preserve what makes us human. Protecting the young from the lies and perversions of the nihilists must be our focus.
Christmas Cooking, Sony A7 III, Sony 90mm f\2.8 macro lens
The last week before Christmas. Now Camera Girl must marshal all her powers to coordinate the schedule of buying and cooking the feast. Today she came home with a ham, chopped meat, escarole and some of the other ingredients of the various courses. The roast beast won’t arrive until the end of the week. And the pies and cakes won’t be baked or bought for a few days more. I was explicit that there must be a good quality vanilla ice cream in copious quantity to complement the pies. And very good coffee to wash it down.
The mashed potatoes, corn, crescent rolls and the stuffed mushrooms are all last-minute items that won’t be started until Christmas Eve but they’ll add their dimension to the meal. And finally, I demanded chestnuts and that rope of dried figs that no one ever eats. Camera Girl, being the frugal woman that she is, complained bitterly that chestnuts now cost $8 a pound. But I was adamant. I never liked them as a kid but my father-in-law always had some out at Christmas and after trying them a few times I actually developed a taste for them. As for the dried figs, they’re so hard that they’re almost inedible but somehow it wouldn’t be Christmas without them lying around on the table so I demanded them too.
And this year I’ll show my little granddaughter the trick with the mandarin orange skin and a lighted match. The oils in the skin are flammable and she’ll be amazed to see it ignite around the match when I squeeze the skin near it. And this year I think I’ll try to get the kids to join in a penny ante poker game with me. Camera Girl has an old bucket of pennies. There must be a thousand of them and we can play for hours without any serious money changing hands.
I’ve got my favorite Christmas DVDs at the ready and several albums of Christmas music on tap. And no one should be sick this year because everyone has already been stricken with the Chinese Bioweapon recently. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a sugar plum but I’m pretty sure there’ll be all kinds of chocolates and mints on the table.
Sure, everything is about twice as expensive as normal and that old dimwit Biden keeps gassing off every few days about Ukraine or gay marriage or trans-something-or-other but I’m satisfied that this will be a good Christmas despite him and the rest of the grifters who run the crime family that fleeces us.
It’s still Christmas, friends, family and food and that’s a pretty good combination. I can no longer feel any community with the degenerates that surround us and plot bigger and uglier ways to degrade the good things in the world. But I feel kinship with the normal people that work hard and raise their kids and try to make the world go round. With them I can hope for a Merry Christmas and we’ll worry about the New Year later. Where’s that sweet potato pie?
Alright, admittedly no one knew that Olbermann was still alive. It’s like Dan Rather. Once these guys fall off the front page they become like lint that gets trapped behind the dryer. They’re still there but no one really notices them unless there’s a fire or something.
How could you not love this? Elon is fast becoming one of my favorite people. Sure it could be better. He could have shut down Dementia Joe, Obama and the Pope too. But there’s definitely good stuff in this Musk guy. This is kind of like a Christmas present to the normal world.
It makes me feel like Tiny Tim saying “God bless us, every one.”
There are reports he’s also banning anyone who doxxes people’s locations. Apparently some Antifa types have been stalking Musk’s family. And I’ve read he’s shutting down Antifa accounts in general.
We need more good billionaires. Or maybe we need fewer evil billionaires. Maybe when Soros finally kicks the bucket the balance will finally begin to return to the universe and the portal to hell that he maintains will collapse and Biden will be forced to revert to his true form as a giant armadillo with aviator glasses. Well, that’s what I’ve heard anyway.
Today I was part of the long chain of knowledge that begins with the “the master of those who know” and extends all the way to my four year old granddaughter. In the spirit of Aristotle we recreated the dialectic on the various animal classes. I tried to explain the reason why a grasshopper was different from a mouse. We talked about the higher animals and the lower animals and I even got around to explaining why dinosaurs are related to lizards and birds. After about a half hour she’d had enough and we went back to a match game for dinosaurs. And after that back to Candy Land. Well I’d still give Princess Sack of Potatoes the intellectual edge over Plato but I think I need to get some high quality color phtots of different animals to make the discussion more compelling for her.
Once Camera Girl led her granddaughter into the kitchen to bake some pumpkin bread I decided this was a good day for some macrophotography fun.
So I took some focus stacks. I had a tiny old Roman coin and a long dead beetle lying around so they were my subjects.
15DEC2022 beetle stack15DEC2022 coin face 2 stack15DEC2022 coin tail stack
The focus intervals don’t seem to have been sufficient to give a perfect stack. But i’m using a Sony Remote Commander and it doesn’t have any calibration for the focus change. I have a little program I can use while tethered to my laptop but the A7 IV requires a USB 3 cable and I only have USB 1 or 2. So I’ll have to go out and get one. But still a nice exercise.
