This cereal is great.  I keep a box at my desk and eat some out of a Styrofoam cup at my desk almost every day.  I strongly recommend this cereal to anyone who enjoys granola.  Now some of you may be granola snobs.  You should know that I’m fully aware that there is hardcore granola out there.  This is the stuff you buy in union-made burlap sacks, where you wait in line behind people in bike shorts with their recumbent bikes parked out front, listening to the This American Life podcast on their iphones…  I don’t need that.  I need a working man’s granola.  Proletariat Granola… eh eh?

Anyway, this isn’t really a post about cereal.  This is a post about physics, and a brief betrayal of my particular brand of nerdiness, which continues to boggle my coworkers.  You see, granola chunks come in all sorts of different sizes.  The big chunks are the best, and the worst are the isolated oats that end up darting away from your spoon, severely damaging mouthful efficiency towards the end of each bowl.  Something I’ve always noticed with this cereal is that the big chunks are always at the very top of the box.  You open a box, peer inside, and just see a healthy layer of big chunks, and you’re all like FUCK YEAH, this is going to rule!  The thing is, that layer is every single big chunk in the whole box!  You get one or two bowls of incredible big chunk goodness, and then have to suffer through a whole box of spoon-avoiding isolated oats.  I decided to get to the bottom of this.

Turns out, there is an entire science devoted to studying this phenomenon and others involving granular physics. The effect I noticed in my cereal is actually known as the Brazil Nut Effect, based on the tendency of the larger brazil nuts to rise to the top in cans of mixed nuts (See’s nuts baby!) when they are shaken.  Basically, in granular mixtures, large particles rise to the top when the mixture is vibrated.  This phenomenon is apparently of great interest to some industries, especially in medicine.  Different sizes of particles in a mixture of a certain medication will cause the Brazil Nut Effect, and create a non-uniform mixture.  Bad news for manufacturing medicine.  The causes of this effect are still not fully understood, but the two main explanations appear in the wiki article I linked to above.  Fascinating stuff.

So, as an engineer, I don’t necessarily need to know why this happens, (though its super interesting), just that it does happen, and I need to account for it.  I now know that during shipping, the boxes of granola are vibrated enough to separate the chunks and raise the big ones to the top.  So from now on, when I get a new box of granola, I will flip the box upside down and shake it for a while, allowing the big chunks to start to rise up towards the bottom of the box…  Yeah, that should do nicely.

ps:  shaking a box of cereal is also useful for getting the toy out of your kid’s cereal!

MikroKopter – HexaKopter from Holger Buss on Vimeo.

You can order the parts & plans to build one yourself, but it’s going to run you about 1200 Euros.

MikroKopter Website: http://www.mikrokopter.de/ucwiki/en/MikroKopter/

I saw an article on aquaponics in the NY Times.  Aquaponics, says Wikipedia, “is the symbiotic cultivation of plants and aquatic animals in a recirculating environment.”  And while the water requirements are significantly lower than in a traditional garden, the article makes it sound like the yields are pretty impressive.  One of the guys they interviewed has engineered himself a very badass greenhouse… some videos from his YouTube channel after the jump.

From the NY Times:

Mr. Torcellini’s greenhouse wouldn’t look out of place on a wayward space station where pioneers have gone to escape the cannibal gangs back on Earth. But then, in a literal sense, Mr. Torcellini, a 41-year-old I.T. director for an industrial manufacturer, has left earth — that is, dirt — behind.

What feeds his winter crop of lettuce is recirculating water from the 150-gallon fish tank and the waste generated by his 20 jumbo goldfish. Wastewater is what fertilizes the 27 strawberry plants from last summer, too. They occupy little cubbies in a seven-foot-tall PVC pipe.

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Fellow Juicers,

I had an interesting Google experience the other day, and you guys are the only ones who will care.

The other day at work I was trying to find a reasonable approach for calculating the forces generated in a “bump” as a wheel of a vehicle rolls over it.  It was a cute little problem, and I delight in researching little things during the day.  I had been having success with Google Books lately, looking up what filler alloy to use when welding 6061-T6 aluminum with the intent of post-weld artificial aging.  More on that later.  Anyway I decided to look up verhicle dynamics for trains, because the first thing I thought of about my bump problem was a train wheel driving over the discontinuity between different rails.  The frustrating thing about Google Books is that you’ll find what you’re looking for, and you’ll be reading along, and then the page that has what you really want is intentionally left out.  Bullshit!  Luckily that just makes the game of finding the information more fun.  I should note here that one’s definition of the word “game” changes drastically at work.

A solution to my bump problem came in the form of a letter to the editor by a what appears to be a particularly thorough, and mildly douche-y, professor at MIT in a 1912 issue of “Railway Age Gazette.” My resulting awe and excitement- about the internet and information and the kind of cool things that Google is scanning into searchable text- was mostly lost on my colleagues.  I have thusly been compelled to blog.

This is absolutely fascinating.  To think that every day more and more printed information is being transcribed to searchable text and made universally availablet has the capacity to double the effectiveness of the internet.  I love it.  How cool is it to get to skim through a journal about railroad engineering from the industrial revolution?  Badass!  I have also been teased by enough books about welding aluminum lately that I would buy them in digital form if I could!  I want a digital engineering library!

The first few pages of my issue of Railway Age Gazette kind of show the machinery that the book is being fed into.  Also cool.  I picture a machine that looks something like a combination between a big copy machine and a wood chipper, with an intern on a stepladder dumping books in a funnel at the top.  Its yellow, and google-looking.  Its probably something more like this:

I am glad that Mr. MIT from 1912 with a waxed mustache was able to help me out, or at least point me in the right direction.  I am also glad that I know to use 4643 Filler Allow for welding 6061-T6 if I’m planning on artificially aging it after (if you want to know why, I can tell you that too).  I am even more glad that I have access to such an interesting array of knowledge on Google Books.  Thank you intern on the stepladder!  I am reading!