Dang
Lately, when I’ve taken my birds out or while I’ve relaxed after guitar practice, I’ve watched a show called Rocket City Rednecks, on the National Geographic Channel. I’ve also watched a show called Mad Scientists, which follows it.
Rocket City Rednecks is about five guys in Huntsville, Alabama. Some of them come out of the space program. For political reasons, NASA was divided up among various states, which is why rockets go up from Florida and receive support from Texas. Huntsville is one of the places NASA invaded.
One of the guys has degrees in physics and various types of engineering. Another is a physics Ph.D. The rest are less educated, although two are machinists, and the oldest one was a machinist for NASA, which presumably means he knows a few things.
The idea is that the main guy, Travis Taylor, gets crazy ideas involving scientific and engineering projects, and he gets the other guys to help him turn them into reality. Generally, they get one weekend per project. They have day jobs, after all.
I thought this was a pretty cool show, because it demonstrated that Southerners are not all morons. Some of NASA’s talent came from places like Princeton and Nazi Germany, but some came from the South.
I don’t like the word “redneck.” My mother taught me that it was a slur. There are a lot of bizarre etymologies out there, but the most likely story is the one she told me: a redneck is someone who works in the sun and has a red neck. When you say “redneck,” you’re making fun of people who work at menial jobs. Still, a lot of people are trying to turn it into a positive, like “queer.” Maybe they’re right.
Let me see if I can recall some of the projects. Once they tried to create an electronically-fired rifle array to shoot frozen watermelons out of the sky, to show how we might prevent asteroids from hitting the earth. They also turned an old RV into a Mars vehicle and even created a pee recycling device from 2-liter bottles. They made their own bulletproof Iron Man suit, and they also created a submarine and took it down 15 feet in a quarry.
It’s pretty neat, but now that I’ve seen a lot of the episodes, I’m a little disappointed. You would think that with two physicists, plenty of engineering training, and two machinists, they’d be able to do anything. But sometimes they make mistakes that should have been obvious, and the projects generally don’t look too good, even for weekend jobs.
Here’s an example. When they made the submarine, they decided to use a plastic fertilizer tank. This is an HDPE (I assume) tank that holds 300 gallons. It has thin walls. It’s a cube.
Here are the problems that surprised them. 1. The tank walls had to be reinforced against water pressure. 2. The original design, which involved two tanks, required over a ton of ballast. 3. CO2 scrubbers made from ordinary paint pails failed and leaked when submerged and subjected to external pressure.
I realize these guys were just fooling around, but I think they should have done better than that. Water pressure and buoyancy are two very simple concepts. Two physicists should have seen those problems coming, and it’s amazing that they thought a plastic tank was the way to go.
I thought about this for a few minutes, and right away, I realized plywood and propane tanks would have worked better. Plywood is cheap, and it’s very rigid. You can build a box in any shape you want, and you can waterproof it easily with resin and fiberglass, or even tar, in all likelihood. If you check around the web, you’ll see that this works. It’s already been done. Propane tanks are very easy to cut up and weld–much easier than plastic–they’re rigid, they have weight to offset buoyancy, and they’re inherently waterproof. And again, ten seconds of Googling will confirm that they make decent submarines. Someone beat me to the idea a very long time ago.
The pail-scrubbers never should have existed in the first place. They could have made scrubbers from short sections of 10″ PVC pipe, sealed with pipe dope and cement. Problem solved. And figuring that out does not make me a genius.
I’ve also noticed that they don’t use tools the way professionals do. A pro will use serious tools like mills, lathes, various air tools, plasma cutters, hydraulic presses, and so on. These dudes seem to rely a lot on stuff you can get at Home Depot. That’s fine. Unless you’re holding yourself out to be the real thing.
They also built a radio telescope built from a heavy fiberglass satellite dish (eleven feet in diameter) held up over a pit. They used three ropes to hold it up. The ropes were attached to wooden poles. To lift the dish, they pulled outward on the ropes. They were surprised the dish wouldn’t rise very high, and that one pole bent. I wasn’t surprised. If you know first-semester physics, you know how much tension it takes to raise something that rests on a rope. It’s huge, and it goes to infinity as the rope approaches horizontal. That should have been obvious. It’s amazing that they thought ropes were a safe choice. I would have used cables. No, I would have used much taller poles. That would have obviated the whole problem.
It seems to me that they should either admit they’re not that hot at practical applications, or they should go a little easier on listing their credentials.
The problem, I suppose, is that the show requires one type of skill set, and the cast offers another. A physicist can do all sorts of amazing things on paper, but a nut who works out of his garage for ten years is likely to put him in the shade when it comes time to throw down. Paper and reality are very different.
When I was a physics TA, I helped administer the department’s lab test, which was a real horror. It was one of those sadistic tests nerds put together, thinking it’s fine to give an A to someone who gets 17%. Never mind the needless frustration they put people through.
One of the questions involved an iceberg shaped like a traffic cone with no base. A long, skinny cone, in other words. If you have any common sense at all, you’ll think this is funny. The idea was to calculate how much of the skinny end would float above the water.
Yes, a whole troop of grad students thought a cone of ice would float in a vertical orientation, with the skinny end up. I immediately realized that would not happen. I am sorry to admit that I thought the fat end would go up, and that IS one possible stable configuration, but the truth is, it would float on its side unless the water was completely calm, and the integral determining the volume of the exposed slice would be pretty hard for an undergrad in a hurry.
Why point this out? To show that physicists are stupid? Yes. No, of course not. It shows that you can know a whole lot about equations and laws and still have no clue about the world those abstract constructs depict.
I used to see this all the time when I helped students with their homework. They’d calculate the speed of a dropped ball, and it would come out to the speed of light, and I would have to ask them if that seemed reasonable to them.
When I was at the University of Miami, one of my fellow undergrads pointed out that the grad students were using lead sinkers to anchor the lids of their lunches when they heated them in the department microwave. You can imagine how much the microwave liked that. It said a lot about the huge gap between earth and their education.
To prove my point further, I will refer back to what I said about nuts who work in their garages.
Mad Scientists is about a guy who builds stuff for fun. A garage nut if ever I saw one. He has done this for a long time, and now he travels around meeting other amateur inventors with neat inventions. He looks at what they build, and he challenges them to use their skills to do things that are a little different. For example, he had an autogyro builder turn a plane into an airboat. He had an ultralight builder create an electric plane which would actually leave the ground.
Here’s the important thing. The Mad Scientist guys do a better job than the physicists and machinists. They build stuff that works, and it doesn’t look too bad. They use real tools. They know how to use them properly. They use good materials and components. Their projects are less ambitious, but common sense is part of aptitude. And I think they’d do a better job even if they were building subs and Mars vehicles.
I’m sad to admit it, but when it comes to National Geographic novelty gadget shows, the yankees are beating us, even without degrees.
I guess people in Huntsville are going to have to get creative as NASA retracts, and maybe that’s why the show exists. I hope they do well with it. I think they need to bring in some people with practical experience, and they ought to go back and fix the projects that failed.
Anyway, never assume an expert knows what he’s doing. Maybe that’s my theme here. If experts knew anything, the Fanny Mae mess would never have happened, and we would have known how sad Saddam Hussein’s WMD program was.