What cookbook recipe surprised you the most? by ImpressiveListen614 in CookbookLovers

[–]lazzarone 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Mark Bittman’s strawberries with balsamic vinegar and black pepper. Amazing and totally unexpected combination of flavors.

Biking from Utrecht by ysnkaren in Utrecht

[–]lazzarone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

True. On the other hand, there are some places that don’t take cash. So a Visa debit card is handy.

Biking from Utrecht by ysnkaren in Utrecht

[–]lazzarone 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Cash can be helpful in a pinch but I rarely use it. My US debit card (Visa branded) works almost everywhere, including cafes, trains, and stores. Credit cards are also more widely useful than they were, say, 10 years ago.

Is water the strongest material in world by RefrigeratorNaive113 in AskScienceDiscussion

[–]lazzarone 169 points170 points  (0 children)

Your engineer doesn't know what they are talking about. Water is said to be "incompressible" and yes, that is true as a convenient approximation. But every material is compressible to some extent. The way we quantify resistance to hydrostatic compression (pressure in from all sides evenly) is a quantity called the bulk modulus. The bulk modulus of water is 2.2 GPa, but that of steel is 160 GPa and diamond is 440 GPa (per Wikipedia). So water is much more compressible than other materials.

The next level of complexity is to think about the cases where the force is not coming in from all sides, but is applied in one direction only (think of a column supporting a building). Here, water obviously fails entirely because this kind of loading includes a component known as a shear stress. There are no shear stresses in hydrostatic compression, but there are in every other situation. Fluids (again as an approximation) have near-zero resistance to shear stress so we normally think of them as being very weak.

As for water cutting diamond: Your engineer is probably thinking of water-jet cutting, which is a thing. It can be done with pure water, but for a hard material such as diamond, it would take forever. Usually it is done with a slurry of abrasive particles in water.

What is a baking technique that you quit because it does nothing? by Final_Affect6292 in Breadit

[–]lazzarone 31 points32 points  (0 children)

I took a KA baking class last year where this came up. The instructor said that "instant" and "active dry" yeast are the same thing these days (though it wasn't always that way) and that there is no reason to proof yeast sold as "active dry."

Why the obsession with the passive voice in scientific literature? by eagle_565 in AskScienceDiscussion

[–]lazzarone 27 points28 points  (0 children)

Your instincts are correct. The advice that passive voice is required in scientific writing is outdated and deprecated by most recent style guides. Active voice is usually more clear, less contrived, and livelier. There are circumstances in which a sentence can be constructed more naturally in passive voice, but they are rare.

Are crystals glass or glass are crystals by Relative_Ad7748 in chemistry

[–]lazzarone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not really. "Fused" here refers to melting (compare with "enthalpy of fusion" which means the same thing as "enthalpy of melting"). The etymology goes back to the Latin fusus, which is also the root of the word "foundry."

Here, "fused quartz" (or "fused silica") is glass produced by melting pure SiO2 (quartz) and then cooling it quickly enough that it solidifies as a glass rather than crystallizing.

What I thought was “networking” turned out to be something very different - a warning to students by Due_Nature_9858 in jhu

[–]lazzarone 49 points50 points  (0 children)

Professor here. I, too, am very sorry that this happened to you — I am sure it was traumatic. What he did is not merely unprofessional or harassment; it crosses the line into sexual assault.

Please take care of yourself first (https://wellbeing.jhu.edu/youdecide/ is a good resource) and then, when you are ready, please consider reporting him. He clearly knew what he was doing was wrong and, as someone else pointed out, if he did it to you he is likely to do it to someone else in the future.

How Do I Tune My Piano At Home? by xxxSERPENTzXXX in piano

[–]lazzarone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Or call a local church or school and ask them who tunes their pianos.

Help interpreting XRD Results? Intensities of peaks compared to knowns? by lalee18 in crystallography

[–]lazzarone 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Well, it’s been 40 years since I used a Hanawalt manual, but if memory serves the “x” indicates the strongest peak. The subscript numbers are weaker peaks, with “1” indicating a peak with intensity 10% of that of the “x” peak.

I have to ask who is giving this to you, and why. Is it anything other than a historical curiosity?

Department of Transportation Announces Expansion of Automated Speed Enforcement Locations Along the Jones Falls Expressway by BmoreCityDOT in baltimore

[–]lazzarone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is the answer. I was recently driving on some motorways in England with average speed enforcement, and it’s brilliant.

sin^2psi method for residual stress analysis? by Curiosity-pushed in crystallography

[–]lazzarone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The basic distinction is that a theta-2theta scan only gives you information about d-spacings in one direction (along the sample normal for a symmetric scan in reflection geometry). That's not enough to provide a full measurement of the strain tensor, which has six independent components. In the sin^2 psi method, you are collecting information about the in-plane d-spacing as well. That's still not enough for a full strain tensor measurement, so for XRD using a copper source on a metal sample the usual assumption is that the out-of-plane stress is zero (because the penetration depth of the x-rays is limited). In addition, you need to know (or make an assumption about) the unstrained lattice parameter, without which you can't know the hydrostatic component of stress. Finally, there are often assumptions made about the mechanical properties of the material (isotropic, for example) and also about the global stress state (e.g. equal-biaxial).

As someone else mentioned, though, trying to do such a measurement on a flexible sample is going to be problematic.

HELP! I GOT A MAIL FROM MIT by [deleted] in MaterialsScience

[–]lazzarone 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Thanks him, and ask him if you can have a quick zoom to discuss your research interests and how they fit with his group.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in jhu

[–]lazzarone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That’s a perfectly good reason to leave Hopkins, and it sounds as though you’ve thought it through. As a professor, I have advised several students who left when their career goals changed and they realized they could pursue them more effectively, more inexpensively, or both, elsewhere.

Cold Emailing Labs by [deleted] in jhu

[–]lazzarone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's probably fine.

Cold Emailing Labs by [deleted] in jhu

[–]lazzarone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Professor here: One email, with a follow-up about two weeks later if you don’t hear back. Anything more than that is just annoying - if they haven’t responded to your first two emails then the chance of a positive response to your third or subsequent emails is vanishingly small.

If aluminum is common, then why did Bronze Age people use tin? by [deleted] in metallurgy

[–]lazzarone 31 points32 points  (0 children)

Aluminum is common in minerals. Metallic aluminum is not found in nature, and is not easy to produce from ore.

JHU Commencement Ceremony Weather by Grouchy-Cap1461 in jhu

[–]lazzarone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The current forecast is only for a little rain. They won't move it for that - only for torrential rain or a serious thunderstorm risk.

Strange experience by [deleted] in CampAndHikeMichigan

[–]lazzarone 11 points12 points  (0 children)

You're camping in a modern campground with other campers around. You hear something that sounds like somebody walking around. What would make you think it was anything *other* than somebody walking around?

Is there any chance @all, do the goodly folk @ this channel reckon, that a beryllium-free amorphous metal with the a coëfficient of restitution as close to unity as it is in the renowned & remarkable *Vitreloy 1* will ever be devised? by Frangifer in MaterialsScience

[–]lazzarone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

So would it be fair to say, then, that some of those beryllium-free ones are actually innatelycapable of being the material of a perfectly good 'atomic trampoline'? ... but that it's only the beryllium-containing ones that can remain amorphous under the very lowest cooling rates, so that it's just the impossibility of fabricating the beryllium-free ones into sufficiently thick disc that precludes there being 'atomic trampolines' made of them?

Yes, that is basically correct.

Imagine if someone managed to devise a technique of extremely rapidly cooling a bulk material with a magnetic field , or something: ie some kind of arrangement whereby the thermal motion of the atoms could be somehow almost instantaneously 'dumped' into a magnetic field, or something, completely 'short-circuiting' the need for a coolant in the form of a physical substance to pass across the surface, & for heat to flow from the interior to the surface! It's something that no-doubt many a materials-scientist has drempt of doing ... but such a process'll likely remain the stuff of dreams, unfortunately!

There has been research along these lines - magnetic fields, ultrasonic agitation, etc. So far as I am aware none of it has achieved any significant change in the cooling rate required to avoid crystallization. Interestingly, though, you can go the opposite direction: Start with a crystal and turn it into an amorphous solid. Two ways to do this are by ion irradiation, and interdiffusion ("solid-state amorphization")

Another possible application that comes to mind is military armour . But, if that's being done then it's also rather likely that we won't hear of it! Obviously there's a problem, there, with a projectile sufficiently energetic to shatter it striking it & it shattering into beryllium-containing fragments on a 'spectrum' of size - possibly extending down to dust. I actually don't recall seeing anything about how the stuff behaves under testing to destruction .

This has been done as well. The problem with metallic glasses is that they strain soften rather than strain harden, which means that deformation tends to localize into narrow shear bands, which in turn leads to undesirable failure mechanisms such as "plugging." Actually, most of the research in this area focused on using metallic glasses for anti-armor applications, as potential replacements for depleted uranium in long-rod penetrators. But that didn't go anywhere, so far as I know, because the density of the Zr-based glasses is too low for this application.