Expansion of Water as It Freezes

There are lots of demonstrations showing the expansion of water when it freezes (and demonstrating hydrogen bonding and molecular geometry), but the demos do not need to terribly sophisticated.  Here is what happened when I left a full water bottle in a cold car overnight.

Blackbody Radiation with an Incandescent Bulb on a Dimmer Switch

The camera does not show this as well as the eyes, but I thought this incandescent bulb was a good qualitative example of black body radiation.  As I turned the lamp switch from dimmer to brighter, the relative intensities of shorter wavelengths of light increased.  The net result is that the relatively cool dim bulb appeared reddish and the relatively hot bulb appeared yellow or white as more blue light was mixed into the glow.

Illinois Heartland Anniversary Celebration

Yesterday, the Illinois Heartland Local Section of the American Chemical Society celebrated its 75th anniversary with a poster session, dinner, and lecture.

Guess Who Game with Elements

I was watching my kids play Guess Who today and I was thinking about an upcoming lab that we need to develop involving the elements when it dawned on me that one could do the Guess Who game with the elements.  I got excited about the idea, and then a family member found a very impressive version published by Natalie Gillis online at: http://mizgillis.blogspot.com/2013/01/guess-who-periodic-table.html .  Looks pretty cool!

Real vs. fake thermal images

Yesterday, someone showed me the "thermal" setting on digital camera software on their laptop computer.  Although this setting somewhat emulates the colors of many infrared images, these are not truly infrared images.  I think all this setting does is take visible light intensity, like one would see in a grayscale image, and convert it to the colors commonly seen in infrared images.  Here are three pictures of me: in conventional color camera mode, in "thermal" mode on a laptop camera, and in an infrared image on an FLIR camera.  Two things to note in the FLIR camera picture is that my glasses appear dark because they are cooler than the skin of my face and the writing on my shirt is not visible because it is the same temperature as the rest of my shirt. Thanks to the Peoria Riverfront Museum for the loan of the FLIR camera.

Grand Valley State University Bifilar Pendulum

Today I gave a presentation at the 2014 Biennial Conference on Chemistry Education (BCCE) at Grand Valley State University.  Beforehand, I found this pendulum nearby which traces patterns in the sand below it. Though it is an excellent demonstration of pendulum motion, it is also known for its five minutes of infamy, as GVSU students tried to ride the ball in satire of the Miley Cyrus wrecking ball video.  Apparently students have done this before, but some of them were unclothed and someone almost got injured, so the ball got taken down while the installation was redesigned.  News about this can be found here: http://www.businessinsider.com/grand-valley-state-university-reinstalled-the-miley-cyrus-wrecking-ball-sculpture-2013-11

Sound Spectrum of a Pop Toob

Pop Toob (or Rapper Snapper) toys make sounds that readily show the relationship between the lengths of the Toobs and the frequencies of the noises that they make when they change shape. I used SpectrumView to acquire a waterfall spectrum of a Toob as it is stretched to full length and then squeezed back to its minimum length.  Reading the waterfall spectrum from the bottom upward, note the frequency maxima shift to lower frequency as the Toob is stretched, and then the maxima shift back toward higher frequency as the Toob is re-compressed.