Candle idea

 There was a funny but interesting email exchange between me and a chemistry professor.

<My question>  

Hello, I am a grad student in Dr. Sweedler lab. I came up with an interesting idea while I was resting, and I want to informally ask you a question.
My question is .. Are there chemicals that emit sound of specific wavelength as they burn ? I am wondering if I build a candle or firecracker that can play 'Happy Birthday' song as they burn through.

Let me know.. Thanks..
 

<Reply> 

 The pitch of sound is determined by the resonance of the surroundings NOT by any choice of chemicals.  I think you must be thinking of the “barking” or “whooping dogs” demo which places white phosphorus (P4) in CS2 on a piece of filter paper sitting on top of a large graduated cylinder. As the CS2 evaporates, the white phosphorus reacts with air and sets the filter paper on fire, which sucks O2 out of the cylinder and that generates the whooping noise as air then refills the partial vacuum in the cylinder.

https://books.google.com/books?id=0rx6Cjx_l-AC&pg=PA75&lpg=PA75&dq=%22white+phosphorus%22+cylinders+sound&source=bl&ots=tjniaxJQeX&sig=ACfU3U2GqAGbMyjaPE4Ooiv677rTrf4pTA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiK-viku6HnAhXCK80KHSmNAYEQ6AEwC3oECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22white%20phosphorus%22%20cylinders%20sound&f=false

 

https://www.chemicalforums.com/index.php?topic=212.0

 

This is a pretty hazardous demo and I would NOT recommend it for a birthday party.  Besides you’d need way too many different cylinders tuned to the right size to play a happy birthday tune.  Not to mention copyright issues ;^)

 

--Ken
 

Kenneth S. Suslick
Marvin T. Schmidt Research Professor of Chemistry
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 

<My reply> 

Thank you for the really great information. Actually, I saw the candles playing songs in my dream while I was taking a nap on Saturday, and I wondered if I could do something about the idea & reached out to the expert.. If so I will just record about the idea on my note and move on. Really appreciated. Have a good day. 

Internet of teaching things(IoTT) idea

Oftentimes, teaching involves showing what to do when at where. Basically, this is about a teacher showing a student how to navigate through four dimensional world (space+time). For example, 

• Pressing keys playing piano
• Navigating through a fret playing guitar
• Mixing the right chemicals during chemistry experiment 
• Surgery 
• Cooking

I propose one solution. It is an extension of my LED guided piano: 

Instead of LED strip like the one in the video, there are LED dots like below. Say we get internet controlled LED dots, and we control the lights to show what to do where. 

• Install LED dots on each piano key guiding playing piano
• Install LED dots on guitar guiding playing guitar 
• Install LED dots on food materials jar to show what to mix when for cooking
• Install them on chemical bottle to show what to mix for chemical experiment 
• Or use these for inventory control: show where things are 
• Do an entire orchestra by installing LED dots on multiple instruments guiding multiple people 

The same set of dots can be reused for all of above different cases, so you could make an android app that control the dots for limitless number of situations. This could be a business idea. 

World idea..

World of warcraft, starcraft, science fiction stories all have fictional world.

I have mine for game or novel. Mine is somewhat derived from Zerg of Starcraft lol.

The universe is a living organism. Meaning

The void in Space is filled with liquid cytoplasm
Cytoplasm is again filled with living organisms of endless variety.
All the astronphysical events are results of biological activities in celestial scale. For example,
Black hole forms by enormous pressures created by muscle tissues of celestial size
The bright stars form from giant masses of undistributed nutrients such as hydrogen.
Solid planet-like masses form a single organism that ate the most other organisms.

So these planets are results of competition, or survival of fittest. 

Planetary war is basically megascale biological warfare, and the loser planet gets physically eaten. 

As time goes by, wars evolve into Galactic scale, and into universal scale. 

And it turns out, these wars are all planned and managed by the Overmind
Why? The Overmind eats the winner to assimilate the winning features.
So the Universe is a farm field for winners to be eaten for the further evolution of the Overmind!  

the Overmind is the all-powerful organism that is the winner of the previously completed universal evolution.  

DIY GoTo system for dobsonian telescope

Hey people, hello from Illinois. (Edit 02162022: Below steps are described in youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVcJwujkwUs)

I have an 8 inch Apertura Dobsonian telescope well purchased from High Point Scientific. Then I made a really nice simple method for pointing Dobsonian telescope to astronomical objects like the GOTO system. Using the method I could see 7 objects in ~ 30 minutes (M3,M5,M13,M81,M92, Alcor binary stars, Cyg-61 binary stars) without automation/motorization. All you need to build the tool is a tape measure, a duct tape, digital angle meter, and your phone.  If your telescope points to the right altitude (Y-axis coordinate of your object) and azimuth (X-axis coordinate of your object), then you can see the object. So, method is made of tools for pointing the telescope to the right altitude/azimuth.

Altitude:

The method uses digital angle gauge meter for Altitude. Basically the gauge sits on the telescope reporting the altitude within +- 0.1degree which is really good. Added note: the device has an arch structure at the bottom which helps aligning the device to a pipe. Since telescope tube is basically large pipe, the arch also helps aligning the device to the telescope increasing accuracy. On the surface of the telescope tube, rotate the device back and forth (like rolling a screw cap) until you get a sense that this arch structure and the telescope tube is aligned well. You can feel it with some experience. This step is not a required step. It will work just fine without the step.

Azimuth:

Then I made a website to enable using tape measures on the base of telescope for pointing telescope to the right azimuth.

 I provide screenshots of PPT slides about the system. The mobile website mentioned in the slides is
https://astronomy-dobsonian.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/index.html

(source code)

With this tool, amateur astronomy became so much fun and easy hobby. I go out at weekend nights watching galaxies/clusters/whatever I want. Instead of the arduous work needed for star hopping, I watch them while listening to music, drinking my favorite soda ;)  

Also, stargazing became very social activity. Because the Push-To system finds objects very quickly, I can invite my friends. They can wait 1~2 minutes needed to find the object. I will be really hesitant to invite my friends, if I take more than 5 minutes to find objects using regular manual methods: too much pressure that I need to find it and I would get stress from the fact that my friends are waiting long time.  Due to this, I made more than 10 trips with my friends!